If your reading tastes are anything like mine, then you’ve doubtless read a lot of books about the Second World War. But how often has that Second World War been in the 1980s?
That is the premise to the 1920 novel The City of Endless Night, which takes place in 2151. Despite my aversion to sci-fi, I found this book really interesting and good – and so unexpected for 1920. My full review is over at Shiny New Books…
When Claire recommended Letters from England (1924, translated by Paul Selver 1925) by Karel Čapek it was one of those very welcome recommendations – being for a book that I already had on my shelves. Usually I note when and where I buy books, but this time I didn’t – I can only assume it was because the name rang a bell, the physical book is quintessentially 1920s, and I have a soft spot for books about England. And, oh, how fun this book is.
It doesn’t that Čapek shares my feelings about the relative merits of London and the rest of the country. It is amusing, in the 1920s, to hear him complaining about grim housing and traffic (goodness knows what he’d think if he visited it today), but I entirely agree with him about the ferocious busyness of the place. It is rather easier to be funny when one is criticising than when one is praising, of course, and Čapek is very amusing in these early chapters.
These houses look rather like family vaults; I tried to make a drawing of them, but do what I would, I was unable to obtain a sufficiently hopeless appearance; besides, I have no grey paint to smear over them.
Oh, yes, he includes plenty of pen and ink illustrations, of the variety that are deceptively simplistic. He is particularly good at animals, despite what he says in the text.
But – thankfully for the self esteem of the nation – he doesn’t just stay in London and criticise it. Instead, he travels around the countryside and (belying his title) pays visits to Scotland and Wales, and writes about Ireland without actually going there.
Where are you to pick words fine enough to portray the quiet and verdant charms of the English countryside? I have been down in Surrey, and up in Essex; I have wandered along roads lined with quickset hedges, sheer quickset hedges which make England the real England, for they enclose, but do not oppress; half-opened gates lead you to ancient avenues of a park deeper than a forest; and here is a red house with high chimneys, a church-tower among the trees, a meadow with flocks of cows, a flock of horses which turn their beautiful and solemn eyes upon you; a pathway that seems to be swept as clean as a new pin, velvety pools with nenuphars and sword-lilies, parks, mansions, meadows, and meadows, no fields, nothing that might be a shrill reminder of human drudgery; a paradise where the Lord God Himself made paths of asphalt and sand, planted old trees and entwined ivy coverlets for the red houses.
You see his way with words, and his fondness for the long sentence. We will forgive him referring to any group of animals as a flock, and believeing Essex to be ‘up’, because he is so expressive and enthusiastic an appreciator of the English countryside – which means so much to me too, in a way which transcends expression. The countryside is the only place where I feel properly alive, and I would love to have accompanied Čapek on his travels, gasping at the beauty of the Lake District, admiring the simple aesthetic pleasure of a thatched cottage, and (for we are not perfect human beings) sharing eye-rolls at the sort of person who bustles hither and thither in a city all year, and never ventures out to visit a sheep.
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| Can we talk about how pleasingly this bookmark goes? |
I started reading The Suburban Young Man (1928) when Tanya was giving a paper on it at a conference we both attended – that link will take you to her great review of it, which includes interesting research into Delafield’s writing of the novel. Well, I didn’t manage to finish it then, and it went back on the shelf for 18 months or so… and recently I picked it up and swiftly read through to the end.
It’s definitely not one of EMD’s best books, but it’s EMD – so it’s still definitely worth a read.
The main characters are aristocratic Antoinette and the eponymous young man – Peter – who is married to the saintly housewife Hope. They begin an extramarital affair which is entirely a meeting of minds – Delafield, as with her better-known The Way Things Are, never takes things as far as the bedroom door, let alone further.
Much of the novel is taken up Antoinette and Peter telling each other how well they are suited, even though their backgrounds are so different. One of the assumptions the novelist makes (and all the characters make) is that the suburbs – here represented by ‘Richford’ – are entirely beyond the pale, and culturally mired in the commonplace. That view is essential to many interwar novels, but it falls rather flat for the modern reader. Still flatter, for this modern reader, is all the earnest discussion of romance. Delafield is at her weakest when she tries to be earnest – she is so, so much better at lifting the veil on self-delusion, or the comedy of everyday life, and not with paragraphs like this:
He was unable now to view himself as disloyal to his wife with any sense of conviction, and this not because technically he had remained faithful to her. Merely he could not feel that he had taken from Hope anything that she had ever possessed, or would ever have wished to possess. They had married one another neither by reason of passion nor from any strong sense of affinity, and the liking and admiration that he felt for many aspects of her personality had increased, rather than diminished, of late; nor did he think that she liked him less.
Hope is an absurdly tolerant character, who invites Antoinette to tea and has rational discussions about the possibility of her husband running off. Their marriage is pretty emotionless, but she is almost violently rational, and it’s not terribly convincing. More interesting (to me) are the scenes of Antoinette as a worker in an office, and discussions of what it was like for the newly-poor(ish) upper-classes to need employment.
Tanya wasn’t a fan of Norah (Peter’s sister-in-law) but I have to say that, along with Antoinette’s vague but surprisingly wise mother, Norah was my favourite character. Mostly because it gave a chance for Delafield to show her claws, which I delight in. Here’s a couple of examples.
Norah burst out laughing, as she invariably did at any opprobrious epithet, however applied.
Norah made a grimace that might have suggested a spoilt child in a prettier woman.
So, although I wasn’t hugely impressed when I put it back on the shelf in 2012, I rushed through the second half in 2014. Delafield’s writing is dependably engaging, and I certainly enjoyed reading The Suburban Young Man. But I’ve now read 23 books by Delafield, and this one is probably towards the lower end of the list, and I wouldn’t avidly encourage you to seek out the (extremely scarce) copies of this one.
Since Delafield came out of copyright recently, I’m hoping that more of her books will be reprinted – and not just endless copies of the (admittedly exceptionally good) Provincial Lady series. But I shan’t shed too many tears if The Suburban Young Man is left to languish a bit longer.
Back when I discovered Edith Olivier’s brilliant novel The Love-Child in a charity shop, I started raving about it to my friends in the dovegreybooks online book email list. Little did I know that The Love-Child would go on to play an important role in my DPhil thesis, and that I’d present a few papers on it, but I did know that it was a really special book. And so I very gratefully accepted the kind offer of a lady called Jane to send me a copy of The Underground River (1929) by Olivier. That was in 2007 – and I finally got around to reading it in spring this year, while doing extra bits and pieces of research for my Olivier chapter. And here’s a quick little post about it…
It’s a children’s book, about Tony and Dinda who escape from their terrifying great-aunt by going underground and (you guessed it) finding a river. Many are the adventures they find there… Surprisingly large numbers of people live alongside the river, lit only by candles in the gloom – and some of them are pretty terrifying. Along the way are men who ask young ladies to dance… who can then never leave them (Dinda manages to avoid this fate). There are smugglers, kindly magical folk, adventure, peril… it’s the standard fare that I’ve come to expect from a childhood reared on Enid Blyton. And some self-aware humour at times, maybe?
After a time they felt hungry, but they found it was very difficult to eat their meal in the dark. They each had a knife and fork, but they had never guessed how hard it would be to cut slices for themselves off a sirloin of beef, with no butler to carve, no carving-knife and fork to carve with, and no light to carve by.
My favourite passage, of course, had to be the following – it’s nice to know that we twins are up there with magical creatures in terms of wonderment.
Tony and Dinda were really delighted. They had never seen twins before, and they had always longed to know some. In vain had they begged their mother to give them twin brothers or sisters. She had always refused, and now here was a family entirely consisting of twins. It seemed too amusing to be true.
There are nice illustrations by Margaret Forbes throughout, and the edition itself is rather charming – part of ‘The Enchantment Series’, whatever that was, and it is indeed enchanting.
I’ve read quite a few of Olivier’s novels (as always, you can see them all by selecting her from the author drop-down menu in the left-hand column) and none have lived up to the wonder of The Love-Child, but that is hardly surprising. Whilst Googling The Underground River, though, I stumbled across someone else who has read her obscure books – Scott, of The Furrowed Middlebrow (that link will take you to all his Edith Olivier posts). There is a coda to this gift-giving; I spotted that The Underground River was one of the few Olivier books Scott hadn’t managed to get hold of, so thought I’d ‘pay it forward’ (if you will) – and now this little book is on its way across the Atlantic…
One of the shameful things about this year is realising how many books my dear friend Clare has given me over the years which I have yet to read. Her name has appeared a few times already in my Reading Presently project (as the bestower of Four Hedges, Cullum, and possibly How The Heather Looks) and is likely to appear at least a couple of times more – but, for today, she is the provider of Pink Sugar (1924) by O. Douglas, the pseudonym of John Buchan’s sister Anna. I’ll call her O. Douglas in this review, to make things simple. It’s the only Greyladies edition I’ve read so far, although I’m thrilled that they have reprinted a couple of Richmal Crompton books, including the wonderful Matty and the Dearingroydes. And, guess what, Pink Sugar is rather fab too.
Kirsty Gilmour is 30 and has made a home for herself in the Borders (so the blurb says for me), taking in an old aunt who fusses and worries, but is rather lovely, and three children Barbara, Specky, and Bad Bill. The novel opens in conversation between Kirsty and her livelier friend Blance Cunningham – Blanche was quite a witty character, and I was sad that she almost immediately departed the scene (she also said wise things like “People who knit are never dull”) but we are not at a loss for characters after her departure.
Kirsty is rather gosh-isn’t-the-world-wonderful at times, thankfully offset with some quick-wittedness; like Lyn I sympathised more with the minister’s unhappy sister Rebecca, and found the characterful novelist Merren Strang more amusing – but Pink Sugar needs someone like Kirsty at its heart, because it is neither an unhappy novel nor a caustic one. It is emphatically gentle and life-affirming, where a cup of tea and a dose of self-knowledge are the inevitable accompaniments to evening.
The children veer a little towards Enid Blyton territory, but that’s no bad thing (especially compared to modern literature, where happy children seem such a rarity), and there is a wildly unconvincing love plot thrown in to tie things up, but Douglas’s good writing and refusal to bathe too deeply in sentiment made me able to love relaxing and reading this.
One aspect of the style I couldn’t get on board with was Douglas’s frequent recourse to Scottish dialect, for the maids, cook, etc. It was so impenetrable that I ended up skipping forward a few pages every time it appeared, so fingers crossed that I didn’t miss anything of moment there…
And in case you’re wondering what ‘pink sugar’ has got to do with anything, as I was for quite a long while, thankfully it is explained by Kirsty in the narrative. Excuse the rather long quotation, but I couldn’t find a neater way to cut it off…:
“I was allowed to ride on a merry-go-round and gaze at all the wonders – fat women, giants, and dwarfs. But what I wanted most of all I wasn’t allowed to have. At the stalls they were selling large pink sugar hearts, and I never wanted anything so much in my life, but when I begged for one I was told they weren’t wholesome and I couldn’t have one. I didn’t want to eat it – as a matter of fact I was allowed to buy sweets called Market Mixtures, and there were fragments of the pink hearts among the curly-doddies and round white bools, and delicious they tasted. I wanted to keep it and adore it because of its pinkness and sweetness. Ever since that day when I was taken home begrimed with weeping for a ‘heart’, I have had a weakness for pink sugar. And good gracious!” she turned to her companion, swept away by one of the sudden and short-lived rages which sometimes seized her, “surely we want every crumb of pink sugar that we can get in this world. I do hate people who sneer at sentiment. What is sentiment after all? It’s only a word, for all that is decent and kind and loving in these warped little lives of ours…”
So ‘pink sugar’ is essentially akin to seeing the joy in life – and is, perhaps, a codified reference to any reader or critic who would sneer at Pink Sugar itself, as a novel. Admittedly, it isn’t Great Literature, nor is it trying to be, but I think Douglas is doing herself an injustice with this sort of self-defence. Pink Sugar isn’t a lightweight romance with no thought given to the style or characterisation. It doesn’t stand on sentiment alone.
Others who got Stuck into this Book:
“The strength of the book is the atmosphere of village life.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading
“Pink Sugar is a lovely, sweet, frothy concoction of a novel” – Christine, The Book Trunk
“I am so very happy to have made the acquaintance of O. Douglas.” – Nan, Letters From a Hill Farm
Recently, over at Vulpes Libris, my friend Kate wrote a post comparing Arnold Bennett’s The Card and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, with a decided lack of reading love for the former. Well, I had to stand up for our Ginny, so I have written a response today! Read why I think Jacob’s Room is fabs here.
I’ve been meaning to read something by E. Arnot Robertson for years, and as part of Reading Presently I picked up Cullum (1928), which my lovely friend Clare gave to me, it being one of her favourite books. Being a tale of a young woman’s first doomed love affair (we are told in the first line that it is doomed) and featuring my bête noire, fox-hunting, I was a little nervous… but needn’t have been. Cullum is really good – moving, engaging, and – most importantly – witty. A novel about love and hunting without humour would have been unbearable.
The girl in question – possibly the one looking poignantly to her left on the cover of my Virago Modern Classic – is 19 year old Esther Sieveking, half-English, half-French, and entirely ready for a sexual awakening which will take her beyond her circle in Surrey.
Which of us could fail to empathise with this statement – one which probably brought most of us to the blogosphere in the first place?
I was desperately eager to find a companion who could enter into the intangible world of books and ideas, where I spent half my time.
Esther thinks she might have found a way out when she learns that a poet, one Mrs. Cole, is living nearby… My mean side emerges in my love of fictive character assassinations, particularly those given in measured, well-paced prose. If it helps, I share four out of five of Mrs. Cole’s listed traits:
I learnt in ten minutes that she was a vegetarian, a teetotaller, a non-smoker and an anti-vivisectionist, and that she had innumerable other fads. She was of the type that should have had many children, instead of only one son and many affectations.
She is a poet. Nobody likes mocking writers like writers, and here is a demolition of Mrs. Cole’s poetry:
I was shown a collection of worn cuttings that had become illegible at the folds through constant handling. They contained sad little pieces of verse which always referred vaguely to ‘you’ in the last line. ‘You’ had either jilted her of passed away; it was impossible to tell which, but they were all melancholy and had the most comprehensive titles; ‘Life,’ dealt with in eight of ten lines; ‘Love,’ inaptly, being a little longer.
Mrs. Cole isn’t herself a very important character, but she does provide the means by which Esther meets Cullum Hayes. I don’t seem to have bookmarked any paragraphs which describe him, but essentially he is perfect for Esther. Handsome, amusing, and persistent, he speaks romantically when needed and flippantly when needed. Considering the other potential suitors in her life have, to this point, been of the damp, somewhat pathetic variety, the arrival of Cullum is easily enough to sweep her off her feet, and (seemingly) she him his. (That ending of that sentence almost makes sense, and was too fun to write to ignore.) (So was the ending of that one.) And, boy, does it get passionate – particularly for 1928.
Did I want him! Many times, when I was with him and when I was alone, at nights, I had longed for him, almost faint for a second with the desire for his kisses, which I could only imagine. Love, feeding on itself, had grown greatly. Cullum obsessed me; all of me, mind and body.
So why did this not aggravate me, as pontifications on love are apt to do? It was the humour which surrounded them. Robertson is very amusing on the travails of working for a rubbish women’s magazine if one has any literary pretensions, and also quite biting of the huntin’ fraternity (Esther does hunt, but hates the idea of it at the same time.) Here’s a sample which made me smile…
I saw a great deal of him. He formed a habit of dropping in two or three evenings a week at my boarding-house. Sometimes we talked, or if I had brought back some work to finish from the office, he read or smoked in the arm-chair in my bedsitting-room, to the thrilled horror of several elderly boarders of both sexes, who were convinced that he was my lover, since he had been allowed into a room which undeniably held my bed, even though it might be disguised as a sofa during the day. That was conclusive. The old ladies believed the worst because they secretly hoped it was true; the dear old gentleman because, in the virile period of his youth, it would have been so.
And, of course, Cullum turns out to be a bad’un – a liar and delusional fraud, and repeat offender at that. I don’t know why Robertson chose to reveal that in the opening line – perhaps to avoid the trap of the novel being structured like a romantic penny dreadful? – but it gives Cullum a structure oddly akin to The End of the Affair – except we see the beginning, middle, and end, all the while knowing how it will end.
Having compared Cullum to The End of the Affair, I should point out the difference that tone makes. The structure and the emotions may have significant overlap, but Cullum – for all its passion and anguish – still felt like a fun, light book with dark moments. The End of the Affair, on the other hand – even with the comic detective – was a dark book with light moments. And here ends a spontaneous comparison of two books I doubt anybody has compared before!
Thanks, Clare, for another gem. I really should immediately read all the books you give me, shouldn’t I?
Sometimes classic books are a bit of a disappointment, sometimes they’re good but you can’t see why they’re considered better than others, and sometimes they play a real blinder, to use, er, sports terminology. All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque (see my hilarious post title pun?) is in the final category. Of course I had heard of it, but it took Folio sending me a beautiful review copy, and my book group choosing to read it, for me to actually get down to it. And I’m so glad I did.
I suspect it’ll come as a surprise to nobody to learn that the novel is about the life in the trenches during the First World War. It is written from the German perspective, but (for most of the novel, at any rate) it could be German, English, French, or any of the nations fighting on the front line. The same fear, bravado, camaraderie, philosophy, violence, and death happened whichever way you look at it, and Remarque beautifully, movingly depicts the everyman soldier experiencing this mad, unbelievable world. (My edition has a translation by Brian Murdoch, which seems excellent to me.) There is some justifiable resentment about the way the older generation sent his generation (the main character, Paul, is 19) out to face unfathomable horrors, and the rhetoric they used:
While they went on writing and making speeches, we saw field hospitals and men dying: while they preached the service of the state as the greatest thing, we already knew that the fear of death is even greater. This didn’t make us into rebels or deserters, or turn us into cowards – and they were more than ready to use all of those words – because we loved our country just as much as they did, and so we went bravely into every attack. But now we were able to distinguish things clearly, all at once our eyes had been opened. And we saw that there was nothing left of their world. Suddenly we found ourselves horribly alone – and we had to come to terms with it alone as well.
I’ve read very few war novels – that is, novels involving front line fighting. I tend to choose novels set back in England during the wars, perhaps because it is possible – with a stretch of the imagination – for me to comprehend what that was like. But trench warfare is so alien to anything I can imagine experiencing that it is like reading about another planet.
And yet All Quiet on the Western Front is quite matter-of-fact about the day-to-day experiences of the soldiers. The novel opens with them being given double food portions, and being joyful about it – the reason being that half their comrades have been gunned down. The comic and the tragic constantly intertwine in the narrative, and that was one of several things that reminded me of the final Blackadder TV series (although, of course, any influence would have been in the other direction). So, Remarque tells of army jokes, a ridiculous naked trip to some French women happy, ahem, to help the war effort, a fellow soldier who always seems able to procure smart clothes and exotic foods wherever they are…. but, on the flip side, murder and death are never far away. Remarque’s images are striking and effective:
There in the bed is our pal Kemmerich, who was frying horsemeat with us not long ago, and squatting with us in a shell hole – it’s still him, but it isn’t really him any more; his image has faded, become blurred, like a photographic plate that’s had too many copies made from it.
There is a curious conflict in reading the novel, of sympathy with a hero who does not feel sympathy for the enemy. Paul is intelligent and kind, and even discusses the futility of war – but Remarque shows the veil of dark violence that is second-nature to him in moments of attack. And yet, when this attack is at close-quarters, things change. There is an astonishing scene where Paul kills another man in a hole created by a shell in no-man’s-land. He stabs the Frenchman, to stop him alerting anybody to his presence – but, as the man slowly dies, Paul is filled with regret – and speaks movingly to the dead body:
“I didn’t mean to kill you, mate. If you were to jump in here again, I wouldn’t do it, not so long as you were sensible too. But earlier on you were just an idea to me, a concept in my mind that called up an automatic response – it was that concept that I stabbed. It is only now that I can see that you are a human being like me. I just thought about your hand-grenades, your bayonet and your weapons – now I can see your wife, and your face, and what we have in common. Forgive me, camarade! We always realise too late. Why don’t they keep on reminding us that you are all miserable wretches just like us, that your mothers worry themselves just as much as ours and that we’re all just as scared of death and that we die the same way and feel the same pain.”
But minutes later, Paul dismisses these words as being the emotions of the moment, and survival is once more his only consideration. The battle scenes often felt a bit like boys playing at soldiers – only, of course, it was real lives at stake, and real, horrible deaths. The introduction in the Folio edition mentions that British reviewers in the 1920s (for it was translated almost immediately, and sold over a million copies in English within a year) complained about the indecency of describing soldiers using the toilet. But slaughter and depictions of lingering death were acceptable. Go figure, as our American cousins would say. (I should add, descriptions of death and pain, though naturally upsetting, are never gratuitous in this novel – leaving them out would be a huge disservice to the soldiers who experienced them.)
Above all, All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel which shows the futility, anguish, and unfairness of war. Although never didactic, it is impossible to read about these experiences (which, I assume, reflect many of Remarque’s own) without loathing war and what it does to the everyman. Well, I say that. Ten years later, of course, much of the world was involved in another.
Towards the end of the novel, Paul thinks:
We are soldiers, and only as an afterthought and in a strange and shamefaced way are we still individual human beings.
That may have been true for the brutalities of war and ‘those who died as cattle’, but one of the greatest things about this great novel is the way in which Remarque humanises the soldiers. Paul is, essentially, every hapless WW1 soldier – German, English, wherever – and All Quiet on the Western Front should, in my opinion, be on every high school history syllabus across Europe.
Out of all the books I’m reading for Reading Presently, this is the one I should have read before now… Tanya very kindly sent me The Flying Draper (1924) by Ronald Fraser, as she correctly thought it would be useful for my research (I’d actually requested a copy to the Bodleian library, and hadn’t had time to read it there) – but somehow I have only just read it. So it’s going in the footnotes of my thesis…
Before I get any further – compiling my list of sketches from year six made me keen to include more in future. Often I just can’t think of anything to draw, so I came up with the idea of drawing punning cover illustrations, for how the book might look if the title were a little different… So, instead of The Flying Draper…
Ahahahaha… ;) As for the novel itself, the title does indeed give the game away. For my research into middlebrow fantastic novels, Ronald Fraser provided a useful example which I hadn’t found elsewhere: the flying man. My only previous experience with Fraser had been a novel I did use in a chapter on metamorphosis, called Flower Phantoms – it wasn’t hugely encouraging (which might account for the delay in reading The Flying Draper) since, although the idea of a woman turning into a flower was interesting, the novel itself was written in an equally flowery way. Lots of swirling, whirling metaphors that ended up being so convoluted that they meant nothing at all, and all rather wearying to read.
The Flying Draper is much better; I thought maybe Fraser had developed his craft, until I discovered that it was actually written a few years before Flower Phantoms. The narrator is aristocratic Sir Philip, who is rather a thin character of British decency, observing his energetic fiancée Lydia become absorbed in the life of another man – that man being Arthur Codling, the eponymous draper. His flying happens rather matter-of-factly – the narrator and Lydia are a little surprised, but he doesn’t seem to be, when he flies off a cliff and into the sea, where he bobs around for a bit until he comes out.
The draper is a great character. He is rather detached from everyday life and manners, observing the world around him wryly, being wittily offhand while selling fabrics, and having the potential to be a brilliant eccentric in the same mould as Miss Hargreaves. But he never becomes quite developed. His flying takes over from the establishment of a promising character, and oddly diminishes him as a force on the page. Similarly, Fraser never seems quite sure how to develop the story, once he has thought about it. There is an intriguing plotline about politics being disrupted and disturbed by Codling flying, and a branch of parliament and a branch of the church wanting to have him expelled or locked up or killed. But then Fraser suddenly introduces a heap of young, bohemian characters who don’t seem to add much at all to the book.
It all gets a bit lost and winding at that point, which is a real shame – the flying draper was an interesting idea, and Fraser had lots of other ideas to follow it up – but he just shoved them all in, in any order, and hoped for the best.
And the style? Well, some of it is still rather over the top, mistaking exotic and curious imagery for fine writing – such as the following…
“Codling has just published a book,” he said. “I read all I could of it last night. A sort of account of his doings during the three years of his absence from England. The finest book, I think, that was ever written; so cold, so calm, so clear, like an April evening; and, pervading it, hints of a passion, huge and heedless and flowering, like the passion of our earth, Philip, in spring. He has felt passion, that man. When he writes of love you smell blossom and you see daisies spring up in the carpet. He knows more of love than is in the brains and hearts of most men to understand. And that is just the trouble. He handles his themes, and especially that theme, so primitively and so coldly, Philip, that it will be death and perdition to the sentimental, who preponderate. For most people his philosophy will be like a lump of ice in the small of the back.”
…but Fraser shows a talent for amusing secondary characters, such as Codling’s landlady, which I’d have liked to see much more of:
“What I call a near-actress,” she answered. “Dances a lot and doesn’t say much. And a very pleasant young woman she is, and I don’t think I ever saw anyone so pretty in my life, Sir Philip. Blue-eyed and babyish, though very grown-up, hif you know what I mean. Hair like tow with a shine on it, and every bit her own, believe me or not. And a stink of powder like a Turkish harem. I did her up one night, Sir Philip, and the smell of powder and scent nearly knocked me down. But what she wore underneath! You never saw anything so flimsy. It’s my believe you could undress her with one motion of the ‘and, which no doubt she finds convenient, though I will say that she strikes me as being quiet for a hactress.”
Some people have a hatred of comic working-class characters in novels (I remember reading that Angela Carter hated them), but I love affectionate spoofs of middle-class and upper-class characters, and it would be silly of me to make an exception for Cockney landladies.
So, all in all, The Flying Draper certainly has its moments, and is an enjoyable enough read (and useful for my thesis, thanks Tanya!) – but, like so many second-rate writers (for Fraser, sadly, is that) the narrative lacks coherence and the promise of ideas is ultimately not matched by their execution. The Drying Flapper, on the other hand, I would love to read.
I usually run a mile from Irish novels of a certain period – memories of The Last September make me shiver at the thought of Irish Troubles novels – but I was attracted by Molly Keane’s Young Entry (1928), very kindly given to me by Karyn when we met up in Oxford last year. Any sort of political upheaval seemed a distant irrelevance to the carefree heroines of Keane’s first novel (written at the sickeningly young age of 20) – a dollop of romance, high-spirited teasing, and countryside dalliances seemed a fitting antidote to the more serious or tragic end of Irish literature (for which there is, of course, a place – but that place is not on my bookshelf.)
Well, the heroines did not disappoint – except perhaps in an unexpected name. Prudence and Peter (yes, they are both women) are described thus – first Prudence:
Her demeanour in public places was totally perfect. Had she been a boy one would have looked at her and at once said – Eton. As it was, those who knew her, if they saw the back of her head and shoulders across a crowded room, said: “Prudence Turrett – couldn’t be anyone else.” And those who did not know her asked immediately who she was.
And lest you think she’s a totally passionless society great, I rather loved this description earlier in the novel:
A ladder in a favourite silk stocking could reduce her to tears, just as a phrase of wild poetry made her drunk with ecstasy, or a witty story moved her to agonies of mirth. She did things to distraction – always.
And then, more level-headed, there is Peter (it is so strange thinking that Peter is a woman, given it is Our Vicar’s name – I’ve known a Peta or two, but are any women called Peter?):
Having long ago come to the conclusion that young men did not sparkle in her company, she very wisely restrained all impulse in herself to sparkle in theirs; and left matters at a satisfactorily comfortable companionship.
These companionships were many. Brilliant young men liked Peter, because she gave them time to make their cleverest remarks. Lazy men liked her because she never attempted to stir them to energy.
I’m usually one to value character over plot, and Keane’s characters were a joy – showing all the signs of a young writer, in both a positive and negative way. Good, that they were lively and enthusiastically drawn, and bad, that they were emotionally rather immature and over the top. And yet, above and beyond this, the plot defeated me.
Much of Young Entry I enjoyed, particularly when it concerned the friendship of Prudence and Peter, and even their budding (and unlikely) romances – but, as Diana Petre points out in her introduction to the Virago reprint, a 20 year old Molly Keane could only write about the limited world she knew, and that was the society hunting set.
And so there is a lot about hunting. I’m not just ignorant about the ins and outs and mores of hunting, I actively loathe it. I have no problem with culling foxes humanely – I am a country boy at heart, and I know that country life is not all fluffy bunnies; I trust farmers to know what needs doing on their land. What makes me shocked and angry and everything within me recoil is the idea that killing should be turned into a game or a sport. It’s not often that I demonstrate such strong feelings on this blog, and I don’t want the comment section to become and to-and-fro on the topic of hunting, but I wanted to explain why there were reams of Young Entry that I could not enjoy. Extracts like this one…
Peter was different. More of a purist than Prudence; the hounds and their work was her joy, her interest and delight. It supplied for her the poetry of existence. She rode a fast hunt well enough; but in a slow one, with hounds working out each yard of a stale and twisting line, almost walking after their fox, she was nearly as happy. While Prudence fretted and chafed, longing to get on, Peter – her eyes alight, alert for every whimper, watching, always watching – was content to see hound-work at its prettiest and most difficult. Her soul blasphemed in chorus with that of the huntsman, when his hounds were pressed upon; and was with him also in ecstasy when the line was hit off afresh after a successful cast.
There are many scenes of hunting, and many which require knowledge of hunting. They didn’t simply bore me, in the way that depictions of sporting matches would do, they upset and ired me. So when major plot points and character movements concern the social correctness (or otherwise) of hunting in certain areas, and Keane seems to think we will both know and agree with these principles, I was left rather lost.
I’m still very grateful to Karyn for giving me this novel, as it was fascinating to see where Keane’s writing career began and spot the seeds of what was to come – but, let’s just say I’m glad that she didn’t stop here.