1920s

The Little World by Stella Benson – #1925Club

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Little world (Caravan library) : Stella Benson : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

My final review for the 1925 Club is Stella Benson’s The Little World. I found it in Hay-on-Wye seven years ago, exploring the pocket editions section where, it turns out, it’s not all uniform editions of Kipling, Trollope, Galsworthy etc. I was excited to add to my Benson collection, but hadn’t realised until I picked it off the shelf for the 1925 Club that it wasn’t a novel. It wasn’t even (as I wondered next) short stories. It is, in fact, travel essays.

Having said that, it starts with a couple of sections – ‘Trippers’ and ‘Oldest Inhabitants’ – which are more short stories than essays, since Benson is not involved and the first one involves the premeditated murders of tourists. There may be some living in places like Cornwall that would have empathy, but it’s hardly travel writing proper.

After that, most of the book is about the places Benson goes, often five or six sections in a row in the same place. The ‘essays’ vary from a couple of pages to over 50, and the places she goes are the US, Japan, the Philippines, Hong Kong, China, India, and Vietnam – perhaps surprising for woman in the 1920s, particularly one who seems to travel mostly alone or with a female companion.

If you’ve read Benson’s fiction, you’ll know what marks her out as a novelist. Her writing style is eccentric, dry, and totally unpredictable. I love it, and her ways of framing a sentence are extraordinary. Once I knew what The Little World was, I wondered how similar the tone would be.

On occasion, you could see the novelist in evidence. The opening of an essay on the US is ‘Being alive at all is an incessant shock and, I think, all the best lives are melodramas.’ That could be lifted from any of novels, whether the narrative or a line from one of her joyfully unhinged, determined heroines. Similarly, this paragraph from a section on teaching in Hong Kong could have one of her heroines’ self-deprecating humour (of the variety that isn’t really humble, because she doesn’t expect you to think any the worse of her):

I lacked not only degrees, diplomas and all necessary knowledge, but also the voice and address of the teacher. I had a very noisy and robust-spirited class, but to its credit let me say that no boy ever actually defied me. If any boy had defied me on a hot day I should have cried; I don’t mind confessing that now. The boys, in spite of a penchant for pea-shooters and cribs, were in the main extremely kind to me, and I think that was because my teaching did not tax their brains, and my discipline was so erratic that it demanded an almost paternal tolerance on their part.

But, for the most part, it didn’t have the same sparkle as her novels. It felt like a subdued version of Benson. For whatever reason – respect, perhaps, a genuine intention of informing her audience – she is much more restrained. The greatest exhuberance seems to come out in the sections on the United States, but otherwise she could be dry, not to say worthy.

In her novels, particularly I Pose, Benson has a powerful feminist voice. And that is threaded in occasionally – curiously, not really about the role of women in the countries she visits, but as asides that help contextualise a country. I noted down this section, which I don’t think would offend a Hindu, but apologies if it does:

Cows in India occupy the same position in society as women did in England before they got the vote. Woman was revered but not encouraged. Her life was one long obstacle-race owing to the anxiety of man to put pedestals at her feet. While she was falling over the pedestals she was soothingly told, that she must occupy a Place Apart—and indeed, so far Apart did her Place prove to be, that it was practically out of earshot. The cow in India finds her position equally lofty and tiresome. 

Of course, I should admit that travel literature is not really my cup of tea. I love learning about other countries, but I want to do that through the eyes of somebody from that country – not from a British person who happened to pass through. That is true of writing today, and it’s true of writing from 1925. And, of course, the countries that Benson sees will have transformed enormously. I was most engaged by the section on India, because it is the country covered that I am most interested in, but in 1925 it was under British rule. Benson has more sympathy than many of her compatriots for the Indian men and women who are living as colonised people, but I would still rather read about it from an Indian point of view. And there is something distasteful about the ease with which she visits and travels around, compared to the everyday lives of people being oppressed within their own country.

All in all, I think The Little World is for Stella Benson completists only. Or perhaps travel literature aficiandos. I did like the final words of the book, though, so that is where I’ll leave the review:

Having at last boarded the dirty little ship, we sleep and sleep and sleep. And so we lose the end of a journey, we lose the transition from one life to another, from the known to the unknown, from a life of seven-headed snakes and ghosts and gods under a red sinking moon to a life in which the cook wants seventy cents to buy a chicken for supper.

Love by Elizabeth von Arnim – #1925Club

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Love

I have let my Audible subscription expire now, since I have such a backlog of downloaded titles I haven’t listened to yet (and since I discovered the free audiobooks from the library) – but, earlier in the year when I still have a sub, I listened to Love by Elizabeth von Arnim as part of their free Audible Plus catalogue.

I was pretty sure I owned Love as a print book, but I couldn’t find it on my shelves – did I lend it to someone? – but I’m delighted to have listened to it now, as it is now up there with my favourite Elizabeth von Arnims.

It’s incredibly bold to give a novel such a broad title, particularly when that title is the theme of more than half of books out there, so – what sort of love is von Arnim talking about? Well, it’s a May/December romance between an older woman and a younger man – but the man doesn’t realise that for a while.

Catherine and Christopher meet while in the audience for a play, The Immortal Hour, that they both love and have gone to see repeatedly. She is widowed with an adult daughter – by some complexities of her late husband’s will, she has been left with very little money so that she shouldn’t be targeted by fortune hunters. (What to make of this husband’s ‘thoughtfulness’ is left to the reader.) Going to the theatre is one of her outlays, but she does not expect to be intercepted by a young man – let alone one as boyishly enthusiastic as Christopher.

He is 25; she is about 20 years older. In the low lighting of the theatre, Christopher assumes they are about the same age – and, while she doesn’t intentionally lie, Catherine says a few things that mean he doesn’t put the pieces together at first. And then she runs with it (even though, as soon as he sees her in daylight, he is forever asking her why she looks so tired).

Catherine is flattered and amused, and rather bowled over by his enthusiastic romancing. And then… she falls for him too (although not until he has essentially kidnapped her against her will, which was a scene that thankfully would not be construed as impetuously romantic in 2025):

Vanity had been the beginning of it, the irresistibleness of the delicious flattery of being mistaken for young, and before she knew what she was doing she had fallen in love – fallen flop in love, like any schoolgirl.

Adding to the dynamics, Catherine’s daughter Virginia has also recently married, and has a young baby. Her husband is a clergyman who has long been a friend of Catherine’s – staid and wise, though himself silly and lovey-dovey when with Virginia. There is no disputing that Virginia and Stephen’s marriage is also a loving one – but von Arnim is drawing our attention very clearly to which age-gap relationships are acceptable and which are deemed beyond the pale. Quick clue: the men can get away with being decades older, and the women can’t.

Elizabeth von Arnim takes the story beyond an amusing premise, though. She asks: what happens if such a couple actually get married? Love perhaps isn’t as much a cautionary tale as Introduction to Sally is, and at least both partners are initially keen for the marriage to happen, but it becomes a much more sombre, serious novel as it goes on.

I certainly preferred the first half to the second. Von Arnim’s endlessly deft, light, sharp humour is on full display. She is very, very witty at the expense of pretty much any of her characters, while also holding up society’s foibles to ridicule – and, at the same time, recognising the very real impact they have on people’s lives, particularly women’s. As Ali points out in her review, von Arnim had recently been in a relationship with a man several decades younger than her, when she wrote Love, so she is being unsparing to herself too.

I prefer von Arnim on flippant form, and love her most when she manages to be ironically witty while still having a serious point (Father is the best example), and I found the melancholy rather overtook the irony in the second half. But I still think Love is up there with her best novels, and I’ll have to make sure I do have a print copy, if nobody returns mine. Did she earn the ambitious title? Perhaps that would be impossible, but she certainly makes you wonder about the limits that love can protect you and your relationship – particularly in 1925.

The Chase by Mollie Panter-Downes – #1925Club

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One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes is one of the worst-kept secrets of the mid-20th century, isn’t it? She isn’t a household name, and you might not even find that book in the average bookshop, but it’s well-known that One Fine Day is an absolutely extraordinary novel of life immediately after World War Two. Some of her stories are in print with Persephone, and her novel My Husband Simon was one of the first titles in the British Library Women Writers series – but, for such a well-regarded author, some of her books still remain a mystery.

For years, I’ve been tracking down her books at reasonable prices. The Chase will currently set you back at least £200 online, though my patience paid off with a much cheaper copy a few years ago. I’ve now read all of her novels, and unquestionably One Fine Day is the best – but I enjoyed The Chase a lot more than I expected to when it started.

The novel opens in East London, and I’m sorry to say that the first line of dialogue is “Blimey! ‘Ere’s the Standish kid!” – though the actual first line of the novel is rather more beautiful than that: ‘The kindly winter dusk was just falling over Perk’s Alley, softening its grime and squalor, making the gaunt, sordid houses shadow blurred, like a Post-Impressionist painting.’ We are thrust into the dynamics of a group of Cockney boys having a fight, and it has absolutely no authenticity. As I wrote in my review of her novel Storm Bird, it is clear that Panter-Downes was, at this stage of her career, drawing her characters and stories from what she had read in books, rather than what she had experienced. What did she know about life in poverty, with an alcoholic father, for a young boy? Had she ever met a Cockney? I suspect not.

There are elements that are clearly borrowed from melodrama, or cinema, and our young hero – Charles Standish – is given to vocalising his thoughts in the way that a silent film hero of the period might have had appear onscreen. It means that there isn’t a huge amount of subtlety in this early section. For instance, Charles says this out loud, to nobody:

“Some folks have too much, an’ others too little. It ain’t fair. Every one ought ter ‘elp every one else wot ain’t got enough – not that we want their blarsted charity.”

I wasn’t sure how much of this I was going to be able to take, if I’m honest. What kept me going was Panter-Downes’ wit, sprinkled in alongside:

One of Charles’ mottoes was: “Always look as nice as you can – you never know who you’re going to meet on the way.”

The only person he met on the way to High Derwent was on futuristically spotted cow looking over a hedge, but I am sure she was very much impressed by the angle of Charles’ hat.

Things got a lot more enjoyable when Charles comes across Nick. Dominic – known as Nick – is eight or nine years older and considerably posher. He is an affable, witty, silly man who speaks pleasant nonsense at him and welcomes him into a set of young men and women wealthy enough to be bohemian. Nick is very like a P.G. Wodehouse character, and Panter-Downes carries him off well – a total pleasure to be around. For Charles, he is the first person to be kind to him without expecting anything back. Their acquiantance is short-lived, but it gives him confidence to be aspirational. He carries Nick’s name (and a tie) with him, idolising him as a lesser god.

We jump forward a bit and Charles has got a job as a steward on a ship going to America. There, he beguiles a financial tycoon who gives him a job in his office. You see what I mean about Panter-Downes borrowing from Hollywood? Given the realism of One Fine Day, you certainly have to adjust yourself to the sort of writer she was a couple of decades earlier – and then enjoy it on its own terms. It’s why the novel is more successful after it detaches from the Cockney working-class background – because Panter-Downes’ attempts to merge realism and fantasy don’t work, until we are loosened to enjoy the fantasy. As someone says of him later in the novel (explaining the title of the novel, too):

“He is a solitary sort of chap really. I mean, he’s worked like hell for years to get where he is to-day. His chase, he called it once to me. I bet it was some chase. It was sheer luck that Porter got interested in him, of course – I dare say you know the story – but if he hadn’t followed up the advantage with sheer hard work it wouldn’t have done him a scrap of good. As it is, he sweated up from the bottom, always alone, and – well, a millionaire at thirty isn’t bad.”

Which isn’t to say there isn’t emotional reality to the novel. As it progresses, Charles gets involved (fairly unknowingly) in a love triangle. As (of course!) he becomes extremely successful himself, and moves back to England, he and his lovable secretary (Clive) get into another love quadrangle with a pair of sisters, all of which is enjoyable to read and has genuine emotional weight, despite the unlikely paths we’ve taken to get there.

I’m racing through the novel as I describe it, and that is fitting: it is the sort of novel you race through. When we move onto a new stage in Charles’s life, a new group of characters take centre stage and we tend to forget the ones who have come before – though Panter-Downes is also very good at re-introducing them when the moment is right. Her settings of a New York boarding house and an English estate are both perfect for bringing together various interesting characters and dynamics between them, and if she doesn’t know much about the way one might become a financial whizzkid, then, well, neither do I. After the false start of the horrible attempts at Cockney dialect, I loved reading The Chase.

It is amazing to think that she was only 18 or 19 years old when she wrote The Chase. It definitely comes across as the work of an older writer, but perhaps less than ten years older. The author’s inexperience of the world is clear – but what is also clear is, under the froth of the genre she has stumbled into, the seed of her psychological wisdom and her moments of subtlety. It’s a curious concoction. As a novel, it is a fun romp without the brilliant nuance and insight of One Fine Day – but, at the same time, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the writer of The Chase grew into the writer of One Fine Day.

I don’t know if The Chase would ever get reprinted. Since the main character is a man, it falls down on one of the main criteria for the British Library Women Writers series. Persephone have said they won’t. But I don’t think it would do her any disservice if somebody did bring it out again, and I certainly had a lot of fun reading it.

A Saturday Life by Radclyffe Hall – #1925Club

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A Saturday Life

Radclyffe Hall’s name echoes through any history of early 20th century women’s writing, or queer writing. We all know that The Well of Loneliness was banned for its portrayal of a lesbian relationship (in the so so saucy words ‘that night they were not parted’) – but what is Hall actually like as a writer? While I’ve read some of her short stories, A Saturday Life is my first novel by Hall. And, wow, it is so much freer and funnier than I was expecting.

I’d sort of assumed Hall would be worthy and earnest, and the more I read the less time I have for earnestness in fiction. In A Saturday Life, though, she is neither of those things. And we might be able to grasp that from an opening scene, where young Sidonia is experimenting in naked dancing, and her absent-minded mother is called upon to look away from Egyptian research and do some parenting.

Sidonia is an extremely gifted child, given to whole-hearted creative expression – for a time. Over the course of the novel, she embraces dance, singing, the piano and sculpture with wild enthusiasm that fades almost as soon as the commitment to pursue them has been made. The slightly odd title is only explained when the novel is well past the halfway mark: a ‘Saturday life’ relates to ‘an Eastern tradition’, which suggests certain spirits have seven incarnations on earth – and, in the final stage, someone is ‘said to exhibit remarkable talent for a number of different things; but since they have many memories to revive, they can never concentrate for long on one’. I have no idea if such a theory exists, but it does feel rather like Hall read about it and wondered what a character like that would be in reality, in an upper-middle-class home, and what their impact might be on the people around them.

In the very good introduction to my Virago Modern Classics edition, Alison Hennegan describes Sidonia as ‘wilful, enchanting, exasperating and ultimately ambiguous’, and I think that is an excellent way of putting it. As a person, she is all those things – but as a character to read about, she is chiefly (at least at first) very funny to read about. I didn’t expect Hall to be so dry and funny, with such a deadpan tone. We see how ridiculous Sidonia can be, without losing the simultaneous sense of how tricky her life might be to live. And a lot of the humour comes from the ways in which her mother, Lady Shore, struggles to really pay attention to Sidonia’s development – even while caring. Here’s a conversation she has with Frances, an unmarried friend who is a go-between for mother and daughter, a confidante for both, and a source of reason and sense that both need and both often disregard.

A year slipped by, and another year. Lady Shore began a new book.

‘It’s so peaceful, I think I could work again.’

‘Sidonia’s seventeen,’ said Frances.

Lady Shore looked puzzled.

‘So she is, my dear. I shall write my hand-book on scarabs.’

‘Some people would think Sidonia quite lovely.’

‘Yes, of course. Have you seen my spectacles?’

‘Here they are. We don’t know many men, do we, Prudence?’

Lady Shore was trying hard to breathe a scratch off her glasses. ‘There’s Professor Wilson,’ she murmured abstractedly.

‘I said men, not ichthyosauri,’ snapped Frances.

‘But why do we want to know men, my dear?’

‘There’s safety in numbers,’ Frances remarked thoughtfully; ‘the thing to be dreaded and feared is one man. One man is usually the wrong one.’

Lady Shore put down her glasses.

‘Oh, dear!’ she complained, ‘I know, you want to discuss something tiresome.’

‘Sidonia’s seventeen,’ repeated Frances stubbornly. ‘Sidonia’s no longer a child.’

Lady Shore looked frightened.

The actual man arrives on the scene rather later, after Sidonia has had an ill-fated beginning to some sort of scholarship to sculp elsewhere. The man she meets wouldn’t be out of place in a made-for-Netflix romantic comedy:

He was tall, quite six-foot-two, thought Sidonia, and his shoulders were flat and broad. His waist and flanks were excessively slim, his close-cropped hair waved a little. His eyes were grey, not intelligent, but kind, his features blunt and regular. His clean-shaven face would have looked well in bronze. He had a deep cleft in his chin.

Ok, yes, it does feel rather like a queer writer being all, “Idk what makes men hot; I guess I’ll describe a statue” but with added flanks, which I have only encountered elsewhere in horses. But maybe she is making a point? Anyway, David (!!) is cut from the kind-but-stupid mould, and increasingly wants Sidonia to conform to his outlook on life. And she is pretty willing to do so. The comedy of the novel gets a little tempered as we see what a strong-minded, unartistic, determined man can do to a woman who is creative and clever but unsure of herself – particularly if she is in love with him.

But the real love story in the novel, in my opinion, is between Frances and both Sidonia and Lady Shore. There are moments in the novel where Sidonia is very clear in her love for Frances, even if it framed as friendship – “Frances, look at me! Don’t you love me? Frances, won’t you be my friend? All, all my friend? I don’t want to marry anyone, I tell you; I just want to work and have you, all of you.” I suspect these lines would have been more heavily censored if A Saturday Life had been published after The Well of Loneliness, rather than before. But even beyond these heightened moments (that are not really reciprocated), the relationship that Frances manages to sustain with both mother and daughter is fascinating, moving and sometimes beautiful. The three women are so different, and the three sides of the relationship triangle could scarcely differ more, and Hall does it all so well.

My 1925 Club read was a series of surprises. First, that Hall was so funny. Second, that the comic novel had such melancholy undertones. Third, that the real star of the novel would be Frances, who lives so much in the background.

Roofs Off! by Richmal Crompton

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Ten years ago, I wrote a blog post about my changing relationship with Richmal Crompton. She’d gone from being a favourite author I raced through in my late teens to being an author I felt a little less sure about – though a lot of that was probably connected with having read her best work so early. And yet I keep returning to her every few years, making my way through the collection of her adult novels that was compiled because I managed to get in there in the sweet spot – when secondhand booksellers online made her novels accessible, but before they became prohibitively expensive.

I’ve recently finished Roofs Off! (1928), which I bought back in 2010 and which seems now more or less impossible to source online. Which might make it annoying to say that it’s one of the best Cromptons I’ve read in a while – or, perhaps, simply that I was in the right mood for it. Because her writing is seldom nuanced or deep – but, at the right moment, it is compulsive and wonderful in a slightly soapy way.

That’s perhaps a bit unfair. Her characters are often interestingly constructed – she just reuses the same types over and over again. There are always posh people who aren’t happy; poor, honest folk with hearts of gold; stiff, loveless marriages; children who don’t understand the machinations of the adults around them – and, most specifically and most frequently, a pair of retired women in a toxic friendship with hidden lesbian undertones.

All are present in Roofs Off! but it takes a while to get to them. For a long stretch at the opening of the novel, we remain with one character: Martin Evesham. He is in his early 50s and recently widowed – mourning his wife, but also free for the first time in many years. Mary was clearly strict about rules, behaviour, and social climbing. Martin had to set aside his artistic ambitions for a respectable and lucrative career in business. I’m not sure Crompton ever convinces us that Mary had her up-sides (though she often tries to) – but she does convince us, on the other hand, that Martin is better off without her.

I always love house hunting scenes, and Martin starts looking at homes on a newish housing estate – not with any intention of buying, but swept along by an estate agent (who evidently knows Martin’s mind better than he does).

“Is this all the Estate?” he said; “Chestnut Drive and Woodlands Avenue?”

“There’s Fairview,” said the agent with a slightly pained expression. “Bungalows and cheapish houses. Quite distinct. No, you couldn’t do better than Woodlands Avenue. It’s between. It’s neither the one thing nor the other. It’s safe. It hasn’t the expenses of Chestnut Drive and it hasn’t the – I won’t say commonness – but you know what I mean – of Fairview.”

The British class system is thus rigorously delineated! Though when Martin moves to Woodlands Avenue – because of course he does – there is a wider range of class than you might expect from the estate agent’s description. At its pinnacle is a young woman engaged for years to a young man who will receive a title – but who strikes up a friendship with the working-class, shy man who lives next door. There are children who are dear friends but know they must hide it from their parents, because of their class difference. And Martin discovers (in a rather unrealistic coincidence) that the woman who lives at the manor, whose estate has been sold off for land to build these houses, is the woman whom he loved before he got married. Class runs like a seam through almost every dynamic in the novel.

When I was 17, I took Crompton’s enormous casts in my stride. Nowadays, I do struggle when we are suddenly introduced to 20+ people over a handful of pages. To be honest, I was quite enjoying the focus on Martin. And yet, in Roofs Off!, I did manage to work them all out and keep them in the correct places in my mind. The budding friendship/romance between the engaged woman and the working-class man was particularly lovely, and done better than such things often are.

The title is explained quite late in the novel, when Martin and other characters are discussing a child’s game with some cardboard dolls’ houses – where the roofs had to be remoed on the signal of ‘Roofs Off!’ to reveal the hidden and interesting lives of the dolls therein.

“I wonder,” said Martin dreamily, “which would be the most interesting life in Woodlands Avenue if someone said, ‘Roofs Off!'”

Mrs Glendower shot him her quick smile.

“They’d all be indescribably dull,” she said.

“I doubt it,” challenged the doctor. “I believe that there isn’t such a thing in the whole world and never has been such a thing as a dull life. What you see of it may be dull, but you only see a part of the pattern or a back side of the pattern. If you could see the whole you’d be amazed. You’d be thrilled. A life may be sad or even uneventful, but it can never be dull.”

Crompton’s characters are not dull – and nor are they especially memorable, particularly in the early- to mid-career. Her best novels do seem to have come in a run at the end of her writing. I think what makes many of her novels enjoyable romps rather than particularly nuanced works is that no characters ever act ‘out of character’. Once they are established as a type, you know they will behave precisely in that manner on every single page. I think the best writers of character are those who can make somebody act inconsistently, and make it both believable and significant.

I’ve also realised what marks out my least favourite Crompton novels: overuse of ellipses. So many of her earlier novels put ‘…’ at the end of almost every sentence, I suppose with the intention of adding airy poignancy. It quickly becomes too much. In Roofs Off!, she uses it sparingly – and that alone is enough to elevate it.

The cast of Roofs Off! has no real external reality to the novel, but sometimes that’s fine. Crompton is clearly very interested in her characters, even when they are strikingly similar to people in many of her other novels. There is enough entertaining stuff about houses and housing estates to mark this one out for me, and certainly plenty of plot to race through. In the right mood, in the right place, I think Roofs Off! can head up towards the upper half of Crompton’s prolific output – and it might even be one I return to when and if I finally get to the end of her many novels. But if you can’t find it for sale, you’ll find very similar things in almost any of her novels – and have a lovely, inconsequential time doing so.

The Torrents of Spring by Ernest Hemingway – #ABookADayInMay Day 9

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Ernest Hemingway is one of those big-name authors that I’ve never previously read. Truth be told, I’ve always assumed that I wouldn’t like his books, and that’s only partly because he seems so unlikeable as a person. When I think toxic masculinity, I think Hemingway.

BUT at some point I must have bought The Torrents of Spring (1926) – and, according to the pencil mark inside, it cost me 30p, so potentially I’ve had it a long time. And look at that Penguin cover I had – which takes various themes of the novella and puts them together in quite an unsettling still life.

I should say from the outset that I probably didn’t pick a very good starting point for Hemingway. Having finished the novella and doing a little bit of reading around it, apparently The Torrents of Spring was written speedily as a parody of Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter. I – like, I imagine, everyone alive today – haven’t read Dark Laughter. I know the name ‘Sherwood Anderson’ but wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about him or his work. So if The Torrents of Spring is a parody of a style, genre, and author that I am very unfamiliar with… I’m not sure I got out of it all that Hemingway put in.

So, what is the book about? Scripps O’Neil and Yogi Johnson are two men who work at a pump factory (I never truly worked out what a pump factory was). Scripps has a wife back home that he is estranged from, and rather suddenly has a bigamous marriage with a woman who is introduced and repeatedly referred to as an ‘elderly waitress’.

Along the way, the men (separately and together) muse on the ideal women, on fulfilment, on baked beans. Sometimes a simple narrative exposes unexpected psychological depth. Sometimes it’s just shallow. I’m afraid I didn’t get much depth from The Torrents of Spring but, as a satire, that may well have been deliberate.

For some periods, the prose reminded me of Truman Capote’s famous barb about Jack Kerouac: ‘This isn’t writing; it’s typing’. I was aware that Hemingway wrote sparse prose in short sentences, but then there’s something like this…

Inside the door of the beanery Scripps O’Neil looked around him. There was a long counter. There was a clock. There was a door that led into the kitchen. There were a couple of tables. There were a pile of doughnuts under a glass cover. There were signs put about on the wall advertising things one might eat. Was this, after all, Brown’s Beanery?

Writing that sparse and repetitive must be deliberate, and I daresay it is satirising something that Sherwood Anderson does. It doesn’t make for the most enjoyable reading, though I suppose it’s better than being very overwritten. Indeed, in the hands of another writer perhaps I’d have admired it. Here (again, perhaps because it’s a satire) it felt insincere.

Something more openly insincere, but which I did somehow enjoy, were the times that Hemingway broke the fourth wall. Quite often he addresses the reader, checking what they thought about the previous chapter and explaining various techniques and authorial choices:

I would like the reader to particularly remark the way the complicated threads of the lives of the various characters in the book are gathered together, and then held there in that memorable scene in the beanery. It was when I read this chapter aloud to him that Mr Dos Passos exclaimed, ‘Hemingway, you have wrought a masterpiece’.

It’s all a very bold choice for an author who had previously only published one volume of short stories. In that same year he would publish The Sun Also Rises which, of course, has had a more significant impact on literary history. I honestly have no idea if The Torrents of Spring succeeds on its aims, because I have no real sense of what its aims were.

So I hoped I had ticked off a major author with my choice today, but reading this particular book by Ernest Hemingway has really only raised more questions than it answers. Can any Hemingway aficiando tell me how similar this is to the rest of his oeuvre?

Pipers and a Dancer by Stella Benson

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February is drawing to an end, but I’ve managed to get in with a Read Indies post – #ReadIndies being an annual event run by Karen and Lizzy, encouraging us all to read books from independent publishers. In this case, I’ve picked Pipers and a Dancer (1924) by Stella Benson, published by the one-man publishing house Michael Walmer. He has steadily been republishing Benson’s novels, which is just one of many ways in which his excellent taste is helping a new generation of readers discover lost gems.

Stella Benson is probably best known for Living Alone, her novel about a boarding house of witches, and I’ve really enjoyed discovering I Pose, This Is The End, and The Poor Man. I love the eccentric, witty way she writes, often upending expectations and occasionally breaking the fourth wall. Her characters are always odd, and some of that oddness comes in the stark, ironical way they are presented to us. Here, in the first paragraph, we are introduced to Ipsie:

Ipsie suddenly stopped speaking and heard with horror the echo of her own voice saying, “You see, I lost my three brothers in the War.” “How damn pathetic,” she thought, and she reminded herself for the thousandth time that she had determined to be reserved. No man ever told her half as much about himself as she told nearly all men about herself. This was why men were so seldom in love with her. Indeed, she thought, no one who knew her very well ever loved her much. Rodd, with whom she was sitting now on the starlit boat-deck, was not attracted by her. For the first two or three days out of San Francisco he had energetically sought her company, but now he did not seem much interested to learn that she was bereaved and lonely.

Ipsie has a ‘Showman’, which is something of a variation on the ‘I pose’ of her first novel – i.e. a self that she presents to the world, overdramatised for the response she is likely to get. That might be laughter, shock, sympathy or anything really. It is self-conscious but not deceptive. It is a version of Ipsie, even if not the most natural one. And she realised, when talking about moments of grief – she has, truly, lost three much-loved brothers – that the Showman is the one doing the talking.

Her superimposed self may be needed in the future. Ipsie is on a boat to China, where she will meet with her fiance, later to return home. It’s not entirely clear why she makes this arduous journey when he’ll be coming back home almost immediately, but it certainly isn’t for mutually romantic reasons. Even before we meet Jacob, we know that he isn’t going to inspire any warmth in our hearts. Ipsie has hopes that, getting to know each other better, they will have some version of passion between them. Jacob, meanwhile, considers her with ‘indulgent contempt’, hoping ‘she would, when properly trained, make a good little wife’. Marriage is a matter of good sense to him, and nothing more. We, naturally, loathe him.

On the other hand, Rodd is a much more appealing Benson hero. He will be taking on Jacob’s position in China (as a customs official) and becomes bewitched by Ipsie, and keen to change her mind about her forthcoming marriage – and if he happens to be a substitute, so much the better. Like all likeable young heros in this sort of book, he is spontaneous, enthusiastic and passionate. Ipsie is kind and friendly towards him, but her vision of Jacob has yet to splinter. He, in turn, considers her as ‘little Mary’, rather than Ipsie. They will both find their expectations of the other to be thwarted.

The blurb of this edition mentions that it is Benson’s first novel set in China (is there another?), but it could equally well have been set anywhere else. All the principle characters are British or American, and Benson’s sparse, pacey style doesn’t leave any space for dwelling on local colour. There is a major incident that I won’t spoil, which perhaps had to happen in China – but a slight variant of it could have happened in rural America, or somewhere like that.

While a fair amount of this novel has Benson’s characteristic oddness, there is rather less than I expected. Sentences, paragraphs, pages go by without any of her clever wordplay or iconic detachment. People don’t say as enjoyably unnatural things as they often do in her oeuvre. For a lot of the time, this is a heart-on-its-sleeve about a love triangle.

As such, I enjoyed it, but I did miss Benson’s unique style. She can still deliver, of course – I noted down this cultural exchange, as relevant now as then:

Mrs Hinds beamed at Ipsie through pince-nez and bubbled her joy through thin lips, but Ipsie made no reply. Americans see English people always reduced to dumbness on a first introduction; they must think us an oddly inarticulate race. However, I suppose they remember William Shakespeare and Ethel M. Dell and hope for the best.

– and, for any other novelist, this could be a curio. But it is Benson in ‘normal mode’. There isn’t much breaking of the fourth wall, certainly compared to some of her earlier novels, but this was a fun moment:

Sometimes Ipsie would check herself in full pose with a devastating confession. “I was lying when I said that, though I didn’t think so at the moment…” “Make me stop talking – I am only copying the heroine of one of Stella Benson’s novels…”

Ipsie is, indeed, a very Benson heroine – and I enjoy the idea that this is particularly because she has, also, been reading I Pose or This Is The End. Her spirited naivety is great fun, and I enjoyed the novel a lot. I have no idea why it’s called Pipers and a Dancer, on reflection. If it’s my least favourite Benson so far, that’s only because her quality is so high and her style so perfectly and unusually honed. If you already love her, do track it down. If you’ve never read her, maybe this isn’t the place to start.

The Chip and the Block by E.M. Delafield – #ABookADayInMay Day 22

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E.M. Delafield was a very prolific novelist, and even though I’ve been reading her steadily for more than 20 years, there is still a handful of her books I’ve not read. I am pretty sure I’ve owned The Chip and the Block (1925) for the best part of those 20 years, and I finally got it down from my special Delafield shelf yesterday – and it’s lovely to spend more time in her company. (I will note that she needlessly uses the n-word in the first line, which was not an auspicious beginning, and I’m glad didn’t continue beyond that.)

If you’ve only read The Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels, you might think of E.M. Delafield primarily as a comic writer. And, yes, she is brilliant at comedy – often weaving dry humour into most of her more serious novels. I think The Chip and the Block is one of the least overtly funny – though there is dark humour, and the comedy that comes from somebody being totally lacking in self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge (and, yes, its lack) is the dominant theme in E.M. Delafield’s oeuvre, taken as a whole. In The Chip and the Block, it is seen chiefly in Charles Ellery, also known as Chas. He is the patriarch of a small family, with his tired, good wife Mary and his three children – Paul, Jeannie, and Victor. As the novel opens, the children are young – Victor, the youngest, is only recently engaging in conversations. The whole family has been recovering from influenza, and the most affected are Victor and Charles. Victor has been seriously ill. Charles has declared himself so. This telling scene happens during the recuperation period:

“Come along!” Father shouted gaily, catching Jeannie by the hand.

“You’re forgetting your stick, Father,” said Victor’s baby voice.

He pointed to the stick that had fallen unnoticed to the ground.

Father looked at Victor, and Victor looked back at his father. Paul could not help noticing them.

Although he was so unobservant about things and places, he always noticed people, and he often felt curious certainties as to what they were thinking and feeling.

This time he did not feel any certainties at all, but only a little uneasiness that he could not possibly have explained even to himself.

It is emblematic of many personalities. Paul is also watching, bewildering by the world even while he can perceive things that others miss. He is often close to tears, and fears his father’s ready wrath – which irritates him even more. Jeannie is content, happy to dismiss any sad feelings, and amiably unintelligent. And Victor? If Charles is the block, he is the chip. He sees through his father’s masquerades – while also being given to many of the same foibles as he grows older.

Delafield’s portrait of Charles is so frustratingly accurate. We all know people who have at least some echo of his personality. Charles is a fairly unsuccessful writer, totally given to self-mythologising. He is ruthlessly selfish but presents himself as angelically selfless, always berating his children for not considering anybody except themselves. He tells stories of finding Beethoven so beautiful as a four-year-old that he bursts into tears of artistic joy (his sharp elderly mother says he was seven years old, and cried because he’d eaten too many plums). He claims to have slaved night and day to write books while the children played and cried around his feet – while they distinctly remember being kept far from his study, and shouted out if they made any noise.

Charles doesn’t develop or grow as a character, it is fair to say, but Delafield has drawn him so well that it doesn’t matter. His arguments and self-presentation are so eloquently twisted that it is hard to disagree with him – and he certainly wouldn’t brook any contradiction, given his self-proclaimed artistic and sensitive temperament. But he is a nightmare to be near, poisoning the family around him.

The novel progresses until the children are grown up, and the second half of the novel looks more at the legacies of this upbringing – including careers, romances, and the inescapable expectations of their father. Again, they develop entirely in line with the personalities they showed as infants. Is that true? Perhaps, though I imagine there is more scope in reality for people to be distinct from their past selves. I hope I’m not very like my eight-year-old self, though maybe that is wishful thinking.

Anyway, I think this is a strong, convincing and engaging contribution to E.M. Delafield’s wide output. I did miss the wit that characterises most of her books, and she clearly wanted to do something more sombre and serious. On its own merits, it’s very good indeed.

The Camomile by Catherine Carswell #ABookADayInMay – Day 3

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Off to 1920s Scotland for the latest in my A Book A Day In May journey – and The Camomile by Catherine Carswell. The narrator is Ellen Carstairs, a clever, slightly cynical woman in her early 20s. She is a gifted musician – though currently using this talent to teach reluctant children – and lives in a slightly bleak flat in order to escape the oppressive attentions of her religious aunt. Deep down, and growing steadily less deep, is her ambition to write professionally rather than play the piano.

I say she is the narrator – this is sort of an epistolary novel, though Ellen seldom seems to pay any attention to any letters she might get from her correspondent, long-term friend Ruby. We learn very little about Ruby, and I do wish she was less of a shadowy construct. The letters that Ellen sends her are intentionally in the style of a detailed journal – so it’s really just a conceit for Ellen to share her reflections on the people and events she encounters, not quite at the openness that a diary would reveal, though not far off. (And, indeed, the latter part of the novel becomes a diary instead of these letters.)

The novel gets off to a slightly slow start. Well, a very slow one initially, with a reminiscence of a long-ago music lesson – it’s a bizarrely anticlimactic way to open a novel. Luckily it’s tidied away quickly, and we get into the novel proper. Ellen is clearly very naive and immature in some ways, still in the hinterland between childhood and adulthood, but it is impossible not to warm to her. Carswell has created a heroine with tried-and-true traits that will endear her to most readers: Ellen is bookish, more familiar with life from literature than experience; she is slightly stubborn and judgemental but quick to repent and try to do better; she has high standards and expectations, and we want her to achieve them. I suppose it is a coming-of-age novel, even though she is older than the usual age for such heroines.

I am for ever straining after Reality with a capital R, and life seems to fob me off continually […] I don’t of course know what reality is, but I do hope some day I shall. I suppose getting married and having children would bring one face to face with it. But then that may never happen to me. Anyhow not for years and years.

As the novel progresses, this reality comes closer to home. What starts as wry observations and gradually emerging ambitions becomes more about the genuine prospect of marriage – and whether or not it is possible to pursue her hopes of being an author with the particular man who has proposed.

The title of the novel comes from Shakespeare – ‘The camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows’ (1 Henry IV). Carswell makes it overt that the camomile in question is Ellen’s aim to become a successful, published writer. But it is also broader than that: Ellen is herself the camomile. The way she responds to being trodden on by repressive relatives and acquaintances is treated comically – but the prospect that she will be more permanently trodden down by marriage, and whether or not she will have the resilience to grow despite this, becomes a more serious theme in the novel.

I think The Camomile gets better and better as it keeps going. For a while it’s not clear what the point of the book is, but once that becomes clear, the fine writing and perceptive character study have something firm to cling to. And, throughout, it is funny in the slightly barbed way that an Austen heroine can be. For example:

My other new pupil is Sheila Dudgeon, who wants a course of ‘finishing lessons’. The only difficulty about her ‘finishing’ is that she has omitted the formality of beginning.

This was a re-read for me, and I’ll leave you to guess why I might be re-reading a 1920s novel. It’s an interesting, deceptively deep read, and I’d love to hear more people’s opinions on it.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“No surprise that this novel was chosen by feminist press Virago for republication in the 1980s, for it is all about female self-determination in the face of almost universal societal disapproval.” – Leaves and Pages

“Sometimes I read a book and think ‘How dare the author assume that I want to know what is going on in her head in such detail?’ – and I can think this while simultaneously enjoying the book.” – Clothes in Books

“I wasn’t really able to whip up any sympathy for her and was glad when this book was finished.” – Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home

Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Vera

For years I’d heard three things about Vera (1921) – that it was Elizabeth von Arnim’s darkest novel, that it was autobiographical, and that it was possibly the inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. For some reason that made me think that it might be a bit of an outlier in von Arnim’s output – but Vera is very clearly from the same pen of Father, The Caravaners and many of von Arnim’s other novels that feature a terrible man to a greater or lesser extent.

As it opens, Lucy is mourning her father. Or, rather, she is feeling numb in the first shock of his death – it has only been three hours. She cannot quite believe that it has happened, or imagine a world without him. Lucy has cared for him for years – not just this final illness, but a lifetime of delicacy. ‘She had had no thought since she grew up for anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so completely did he fill her heart.’ We never truly get to know her father objectively – only through the deeply affectionate memories of his devoted daughter. And she is barely grown up herself, just a few years into adulthood.

It is in the midst of this grief that she meets Everard Wemyss. He, too, is in mourning – officially, at least. His wife has recently fallen to her death from their home, The Willows – and she, like du Maurier’s Rebecca, gives her name to the title. She has only been dead a fortnight.

Lucy sees someone who can be a companion in grief. Perhaps they can support each other as they face life without somebody they held so dear? But it quickly becomes clear that Everard has something else in mind. He has fallen for naïve, gentle Lucy and is determined to make her his wife. Lucy receives a charm offensive – he is lovable, loving, entirely confident that it is not too soon after Vera’s death – quashing her doubts on the subject. Von Arnim is very clever in the way she presents Everard. We get enough hints of his character to see that Lucy should probably run a thousand miles away – but also enough of his ability to charm that we can understand how Lucy, rocked by her loss, assents to his proposal of marriage.

It irked him that their engagement — Lucy demurred at first to the word engagement, but Wemyss, holding her tight in his arms, said he would very much like to know, then, by what word she would describe her position at that moment – it irked him that it had to be a secret. He wanted instantly to shout out to the whole world his glory and his pride. But this under the tragic circumstances of their mourning was even to Wemyss clearly impossible. Generally he brushed aside the word impossible if it tried to come between him and the smallest of his wishes, but that inquest was still too vividly in his mind, and the faces of his so-called friends. What the faces of his so-called friends would look like if he, before Vera had been dead a fortnight, should approach them with the news of his engagement even Wemyss, a person not greatly imaginative, could picture.

Everard gets his way – we are learning that he will always get his way – and they are not only engaged but married at incredible haste. This does take most of the first half of the novel, but it covers a very short time – and as soon as the marriage is complete, the veil starts to be lifted from Lucy’s eyes. Here they are, on honeymoon:

Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn’t realised how completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none. 

Everard thinks only of his own happiness, and at the moment his happiness revolves around being with his lovely young wife. We don’t see much behind the bedroom door, as it were – being 1921, this is unlikely to be a big topic – but he monopolises her throughout every waking hour. Perhaps this is something that honeymooning couples would usually be very pleased about. But Lucy has previously seen Everard in courtship mode, and that was forceful but charming. Married Everard is forceful without the charm.

Von Arnim is very good at infantilising her ogres. From what I’d heard about Vera, I’d imagined that the husband would be brutal, perhaps violent. But he is like many of her terrible man: monstrously selfish. So many of her male figures are like toddlers, but toddlers with the power to live out their self-centredness, sulkiness, demand for attention. Everard is particularly childlike in his determination that his birthday be a hallowed day. He cannot believe that anybody would cross him or refuse him anything on his birthday, even if some of the ‘refused’ things are things he hasn’t mentioned.

And they go back to The Willows. Lucy doesn’t want to live there. If she has to live there, she doesn’t want Vera’s old sitting room. If she has to have Vera’s old sitting room, she wants it redecorated. None of these things happen. Everard dismisses all her concerns and anxieties. He twists them to be antagonistic to him. Her wishes and feelings clearly mean nothing to him – and von Arnim is brilliant (as ever) at the man who sounds logical even while he is being appalling. Like Father in Father, Otto in The Caravaners, Jocelyn in Introduction to Sally and probably others I’ve forgotten, Everard manipulates what other people say – retaining his cold sense of being hard done by, pouncing on any weakness so that he can seem calmly affronted. He does it with Lucy; he does it with the servants (who have long learned to put up with it, because he is in London most of the week); he does it with Lucy’s aunt Miss Entwhistle who is clear-eyed about what a disastrous marriage this is.

Oh, Everard is brilliantly infuriating to read! And Lucy has gone into the lion’s den without any defences. She is intimidated by the lingering presence of Vera in her possessions and her portrait – but the reader quickly realises that Vera is a fellow-victim of this monster. It’s an interesting choice for von Arnim to make Vera the title. I’m not quite sure she earns it. The reader feels sympathy for Vera from the outset, so despite Lucy’s fear around her, she doesn’t have the sort of narrative presence or power that du Maurier’s Rebecca does. If she did steal that idea, she does it better.

I was surprised by what a short time period it covers, particularly the time at The Willows – which is only a week, most of which Everard isn’t there. We only see Everard and Lucy at home together for a couple of days, which means von Arnim has to escalate the horror of marriage to him quite quickly. His brattiness, his selfishness, his cruelty – he locks Lucy out in the rain for petty reasons, then gets angry with her for being wet. I think it is meant to be all the more horrifying as a snapshot of what Lucy will have to endure for much longer, but I do wonder if it is sped up a little too much. This sort of horror might have worked even better as a gradual dawning.

But this is a quibble for a very good book. If someone came to this after only having read the charm of The Enchanted April, it must feel like a huge gearshift. But if you’ve read more widely in von Arnim’s oeuvre, this is very much in her wheelhouse. It’s bleak, though with trademark ironically funny moments and the amusingly detached narrator. Above all, it’s a brilliant character study.