1923

None-Go-By by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick

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In Mrs Alfred Sidgwick’s 1923 novel, None-Go-By is the fanciful title of the Cornish cottage that Mary and Thomas decide to move to, to escape the hustle and bustle of relatives, friends and neighbours and their lives in London. Mary is our narrator, and describes how their lives have been taken over by the demands made by others – and this is intended to be something of an escape.

The cottage was so small that Thomas and I never quite got over the impression of living in a doll’s house; but, if Thomas was careful, he could stand upright in the rooms. He is a thin, tallish man with a saint-like expression that he thinks must have come on him gradually through being married to me; and even when he is out at elbows he has a way of looking presentable. What he ought to have done was entertain Mrs Lomax while I escaped upstairs and made myself tidy; but on the wrong occasion Thomas will often act with disconcerting suddenness. In this case he threw open the door of the room that contained our visitor, and there we were confronting each other. My first thought was that the room could hardly contain anything else. However, we squeezed in.

Thomas writes books with titles like The Physiological Correlate of the Instinctive Process. Mary doesn’t pretend to understand his work, but has her own interests – including less niche books and gardening. The novel opens amusingly, and the tone reminded me rather of Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield – justifiably a classic, and perhaps a touchstone for a certain sort of middle-class, middlebrow humour that I love from the period.

As is perhaps inevitable in a comic novel where a couple are trying to avoid demanding relatives and neighbours, they are continually inundated with both. There is a succession of nephews, nieces, and the like who come with their all-important personal problems or a need to be distracted. A niece has left her husband, or so she believes; a young nephew floods the garden while supposedly convalescing after illness. Each comes with their own trials that Mary, as narrator, relates as comedies rather than tragedies. There is no genuine pathos in None-Go-By, nor is there intended to be.

Mary and Thomas get to know the neighbours, of whom or two are not objectionable. A snobbish character tries to hector them into keeping certain company; another unpleasant character thinks they aren’t artistic enough to remain where they are. The stakes remain low because Mary doesn’t take anything too seriously – the reader can’t really feel genuine emotions when the characters don’t seem to.

I quite enjoyed reading None-Go-By, but I did have a couple of pretty big reservations that stopped me loving the book – as I’d thought I might, when I started it. The first is hinted above – relatives and friends come and go, neighbours are introduced and sidelined, and it gives the novel a really episodic feel. We don’t really get to know a visitor until their little crisis is resolved and they’re on their way. It all emphasises the fact that Mary and Thomas can’t truly escape the maelstrom of their lives, but I found it meant the novel lost something in the way of momentum.

The other thing was Thomas. Jane wrote a very enthusiastic review of None-Go-By seven years ago, and in it she writes ‘I had to smile at gentle marital bickering between Thomas and Mary; for all that each tried to have the last word it was clear that they were two very different people who loved each other and accepted each others little foibles.’ They certainly bicker, but I have to say I found Thomas too infuriating to smile at it. Where the Provincial Lady’s husband Robert is oblivious, Thomas is astonishingly selfish and thoughtless. He often blames Mary for the chaos he causes, disregards her expressed wishes, and never thinks of anything except his own contentedness. Mary does rather roll her eyes and move on, but I think Sidgwick overplayed the card of ‘aren’t husbands absent-minded?’. It was hard to see why Mary would even want to remain married to him.

So – I started off really loving this novel, and thought it could be a real winner. And I ended up a little disappointed.

This is my second novel by Mrs Alfred Sidgwick, and I enjoyed Cynthia’s Way – and there is enough that I liked in the tone of this novel that I’m keen to read more by her. There was just some elements to this one that jarred, while also feeling a little drab. But I feel curiously confident that there will be a book waiting for me among her output that will hit the sweet spot and become a cherished favourite. Now I just have to keep exploring…

Riceyman Steps by Arnold Bennett

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Arnold Bennett is perhaps one of those names who is more remembered than read nowadays, though I know there is a very active Arnold Bennett Society that always seems to notice when I review one of his books. Hello! And I have read a small number of them now – Buried Alive, The Old Wives’ Tale, A Great Man. Now I can add Riceyman Steps (1923) which was given to me by my friend Simon when he was sorting out his late mother’s library.

Riceyman Steps is, I discovered, a real flight of steps in London – though without that name, I believe. George has done a lovely blog post, retracing the different places that are featured in the novel – but what I can’t quite understand, either from contemporary or contemporaneous photos, is the ‘tiny open space (not open to vehicular traffic) which was officially included in the title Riceyman Steps’. In the novel, this space is home to various domestic residences and, more importantly to the plot, a second-hand bookshop and a confectioner’s.

The bookseller is a man with extraordinary name Henry Earlforward, a man heading towards middle age whose abiding passions are running his bookshop and economy. His every move is motivated by saving pennies, whether that be underpaying the maid who comes to clean or in ensuring fires are only lit in rooms which absolutely cannot do without them. At the same time, he is not avaricious. He is content to make a profit on a book – to sell for two shillings something that cost him one, even if he suspects it is worth ten times as much. His miserliness is combined with a sense of decency.

His thoughts, as the novel opens, are also occupied with the woman who runs the confectioner’s. As Bennett’s witty narrative mentions, it is only some rather unloved chocolates in a display case that make the shop warrant the name ‘confectioner’s’; it is otherwise rather a standard corner shop, though I don’t think the term would have been used then. Mrs Arb is a widow of about Earlforward’s age, and they have in common the services of the maid Elsie.

For much of Riceyman Steps, this is a rather sweet novel of middle-aged love. Neither is demonstrative, and you get the sense that either of them would have managed quite well if romance had never knocked at their door – but, together, their straightforward competence finds something quite lovely kindling. Their admiration for each other begins with a recognition of the other’s good sense of economy. It never gets to any great belting passion – but it does lead to one of the more touching marriages that I’ve read in fiction. Mrs Arb moves into the bookshop – as does Elsie, now that she can be the live-in maid for a married couple – and life continues.

I love any descriptions of bookshops, perhaps particularly from this period. Much like the opening pages of Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, I enjoy the shorthand of early 20th-century authors telling you who customers are. And I also love Bennett’s affectionately wry glances at the house of a bookseller who, in his bachelor days, had allowed the stock to run rather wild. Even his bath is filled with books.

Mrs Arb had to step over hummocks of books in order to reach the foot of the stairs. The left-hand half of every step of the stairs was stacked with books – cheap editions of novels in paper jackets, under titles such as ‘Just a Girl’, ‘Not Like Other Girls’, ‘A Girl Alone’. Weak but righteous and victorious girls crowded the stairs from top to bottom, so that Mrs Arb could scarcely get up. The landing also was full of girls. The front-room on the first floor was, from the evidence of its furniture, a dining-room, though not used as such. The massive mahogany table was piled up with books, as also the big sideboard, the mantelpiece, various chairs. The floor was carpeted with books. Less dust in the den below, but still a great deal. The Victorian furniture was ‘good’; it was furniture meant to survive revolutions and conflagrations and generations; it was everlasting furniture; it would command respect through any thickness of dust.

Bennett is out of fashion, but I think his prose is wonderful – he gives all those details that Woolf mocked him for in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, but he also has a dry sense of humour, and a genuine affection for the people he’s created. I enjoy him most when he sees their foibles but wishes them well, and as a god he dispenses small joys and small agonies equally.

The agonies get greater as the novel progresses, and I would have preferred something that didn’t veer quite so dramatic. But it is a drama that stems from his characters’ weaknesses – specifically their pecunious natures. The good sense that brought them together also threatens to pull them apart when it is taken to extremes. It’s a shame – for me, at least – that Riceyman Steps couldn’t just have been a sweet novel about a couple finding compatibility later in life than they might have imagined. Perhaps that wouldn’t have been as popular at the time. But there is enough of that in the novel, and of a depiction of a corner of London at a specific time, to relish and enjoy before hearts start beating faster and trouble enters this particular version of unshowy paradise.

The Shoreless Sea by Mollie Panter-Downes

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There’s a corner of the blogosphere that is very familiar with Mollie Panter-Downes’ brilliant novel One Fine Day – about a woman experiencing her life and village on one day just after the Second World War. And this corner (yes, it’s the one I’m in, of course) has probably also read some of the Panter-Downes short stories that Persephone have reprinted – and hopefully London War Notes too, non-fiction reporting on WW2. We might even have read some of her later non-fiction. But it’s not often that her earlier fiction is mentioned.

One good reason for that is that it’s nigh-on impossible to get hold of. One of her novels wasn’t even mentioned in her bibliography on Wikipedia until I added it recently – but, yes, she wrote four novels before One Fine Day. They are My Husband Simon, The Chase, Storm Bird – and this one, The Shoreless Sea (1923), published when she was only 17. It was apparently a bestseller, and certainly seems to have gone into many editions quite quickly. So why are there no copies around? What happened to them all?

Well, what happened to mine, mysteriously, is that somebody tore the board cover off. Even more mysterious, the dustjacket survived. Unless it was taken from one copy and put on another? Who knows. But it’s rather lovely to have this pretty dustjacket intact – and The Shoreless Sea has been waiting on my shelves since 2004. It was about time I read it, if only because there are so few copies about that it shouldn’t be left languishing on mine.

The novel is about Deirdre. As the novel opens she is a teenager, and the chief passions in her life are a fondness for all things romantic and a distaste for her mother. Her mother certainly seems quite selfish, and views her children only as a constant reminder of her age. Her escape is into romanticism – including wandering through the woods at the end of their grounds. It’s here that she meets Guy.

This is a real meeting of minds. They are breathlessly poetic with each other, while also realising that they are kindred spirits. It’s essentially love at first sight, though one propelled by not having met a sympathetic mind before. They agree to meet again – but, when Deirdre returns, Guy is not there…

We fast forward a bit, and Deirdre has agreed to marry a jolly sort called Terence. He is kind, fun, a little stupid, and not at all her kindred spirit. But circumstances have led her to this marriage, and she wishes to make the most of it. A couple of years into their marriage (while she is still about 20), and Guy turns up again…

Deirdre laughed a little.

“Wasn’t it Swinburne who wrote ‘Fate is a sea without shore’? That;s exactly what I feel – as if I’m battling all alone in a stormy sea, and that any minute I may sink. Dahlia, if Guy doesn’t go away soon I – I, the last wave of all will swamp me.

That’s where the title comes from if, like me, you aren’t up to speed with your Swinburne. I thought it might be a misquotation from Coleridge, fool that I am.

It was fun to see what Panter-Downes was like as a teenager – and she certainly has the gift for compelling storytelling right from the start. There is a lot less subtlety in this book than in her later work, and it’s very evidently written by somebody whose only experience of romantic love came from reading about it – but, at the same time, there are plenty of novels published in the 1920s by older authors which have much the same feeling. I suppose each period has its variety of dialogue that sounds right in a book but not in real life, and the 1920s lent towards stoical hysteria. An oxymoron of sorts, perhaps, but one that sums up the 1920s for me.

Is this her best book? No – but it’s great fun, not completely predictable, and with some moments of beauty that peek through the heightened saga and give promise of what was to come.

Madame Claire by Susan Ertz

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I first heard about Susan Ertz from one of the Persephone Quarterlies, when they put a list of titles they were vaguely considering publishing. (I should dig out that PQ for further reading suggestions, thinking about it.) I can’t remember which book they recommended, but the name was distinctive enough that I’ve kept an eye out for her over the years – and have three on my shelves. Madame Claire (1923) is the first one I’ve read.

Who is Madame Claire, you ask? She is the matriarch of a several-generation family, 78 years old and living in a hotel. As the novel opens, she has reconnected with a close friend – Stephen – whom she has not seen for nearly two decades, as he disappeared from her life when she (as a recent widow) turned down his proposal for marriage. They have begun writing again. And it is an elegant conceit for her to bring him up to speed on her extended family…

These cover some favoured tropes of 1920s domestic novels. One of her children, Eric, is in a loveless marriage (or, rather, one where the love has become buried beneath resentment and bitterness); another, Connie, has abandoned her husband and is living with a man who doesn’t truly care for her. Her grandchildren (from yet another children) are young and feckless – and the granddaughter Judy is in danger (!) of settling into a spinster lifestyle. Luckily, she hits an affable young man with her car, and they can get to know each other over his sickbed. And Claire and Stephen continue to write back and forth; her letters are a delight.

This sort of novel from this sort of time is so good at combining high emotion with high comedy, expecting the reader to feel sad on behalf of a tortured marriage while simultaneously laughing affectionately at witty, foolish young things falling in love. It is expected of the reader, and we deliver – or at least I did. A bit like soap operas today, we can adjust our emotions and responses to the scene in question. It helps, of course, that Ertz writes very well – only occasionally letting the melodrama get to her head with a few overwritten passages.

Above the fray, and helping everybody in the right direction, is Madame Claire herself. She is something of a benevolent dictator, loved by all and cloaking her dictatorship beneath good advice and expectant patience. Scott wrote an interesting blog post that is partly about manipulation in this novel, but I think I’m fine with it in a novel like this – which uses metonymy but never quite has the stakes of real life.

If you are a fan of Richmal Crompton, EM Delafield, or any number of Persephone authors – this will be up your street. Relaxing and fun, even when the characters are in high peril – but I think my favourite story was Judy and her hit-and-not-run victim. Maybe I’m a romantic at heart after all.

25 Books in 25 Days: #3 A Lost Lady

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I fancied a Virago Modern Classic, and didn’t have all that many that were slender. I wasn’t sure which to choose – but thankfully I pulled down A Lost Lady (1923) by Willa Cather. I bought it in Oxford in 2015, and it’s the second Cather novel I’ve read – and it’s really good.

It’s essentially a portrait of Mrs Forrester from the perspective of a younger man – who knew her when he was a boy and she was recently married to a man much older than her. The novella follows her over the years, as his admiration for her kindness and happiness becomes tempered when he realises that she has feet of clay. It’s beautifully, sparely written – and the drawing of the characters is expertly done. I suspect it might be one of my books of the year – perfect in what it is doing. (And a perfect meeting of book and bookmark!)

She had a fascinating gift of mimicry. When she mentioned the fat iceman, or Thad Grimes at his meat block, or the Blum boys with their dead rabbits, by a subtle suggestion of their manner she made them seem more individual and vivid than they were in their own person. She often caricatured people to their faces, and they were not offended, but greatly flattered. Nothing pleased one more than to provoke her laughter. Then you felt you were getting on with her. It was her form of commenting, of agreeing with you and appreciating you when you said something interesting, – and it often told you a great deal that was both too direct and too elusive for words.

Long, long afterward, when Niel did not know whether Mrs Forrester were living or dead, if her image flashed into his mind, it came with a brightness of dark eyes, her pale triangular cheeks with long earrings, and her many-coloured laugh. When he was dull, dull and tired of everything, he used to think that if he could hear that long-lost lady laugh again, he could be gay.

Sphinx by David Lindsay

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As I’ve probably already mentioned, part of my plans for A Century of Books was to go back to the books I’ve had waiting on my shelves for years and years – particularly the rarer ones. If I’ve been lucky enough to find copies of them, I should probably the next step and actually read them. And Sphinx (1923) by David Lindsay is certainly one of those books. I tracked down a copy after loving his novel The Haunted Woman (though I liked it a bit less on a re-read), and I’ve been intrigued to try it ever since.

Lindsay is best known now for A Voyage to Arcturus, which I have not read, but some of his other novels took place solidly in this universe – though always with the supernatural and metaphysical at play. In The Haunted Woman, it was a room at the top of a staircase that only occasionally appeared and revealed people’s innermost beings – but they forgot everything that happened whenever they left the room. In Sphinx, Nicholas Cabot rents a room in the village of Newleigh, intent on developing his machine that can record dreams – and translate them into a curious psychical experience.

It’s a very curious novel – in that Lindsay has essentially superimposed a strange psychical phenomenon over the top of a fairly paint-by-numbers novel of love affairs and thwarted love. The family he is staying with has three adult daughters – Audrey, Evelyn, and Katherine – while there is a composer nearby (Lore) and a vampish widow (Celia) also in the neighbourhood. A violent, temperamental rogue called Maurice Ferreira seems to be having, have had, or thinking of having love affairs with all of them – but he has something of a mechanical mind, so Cabot hires him to put together some of his dream machinery.

As the novel progresses, Evelyn and Cabot experiment with the dream machine – but begin to see (or, rather, to experience) Lore being hunted through the woods – and they begin to worry for her safety, unsure whether the machine is showing truth or fabrication.

There are definite strengths to this novel. At the outset, Lindsay writes more naturally than I’ve seen elsewhere – the back-and-forth conversation of sisters and their uncertain guest is even quite amusing. And Lindsay is good at describing how fantastic phenomena can disrupt the everyday – fully immersive:

Suddenly Evelyn was in the middle of a nightmare!

The room streaming with sunlight, the open window with its blind only half lowered, the glorious green, blue, and golden world outside, the sweltering heat – all, without warning, had given place to a mad, fantastic dream, into which she had not even time to wonder how she had fallen. Se was not frightened, but it seemed to her as if her nature had parted from its moorings and that she had somehow become transported into chaos!

The world in which she now was bore much the same resemblance to the ordered world of reality as a cubist painting to an actual scene or group of persons. It was a kaleidoscope of colours and sounds, odours and skin sensations. Everything was accompanied in her by such a variety and rapidity of emotion that she had scarcely the ability to realise her internal feelings at all. She was just one big nerve!… All was hopelessly mixed together – darkness and brightness, heat and coolness, one landscape and another, triumph, gloom, laughter, exaltation, grief!… The things only came in vivid hints and momentary splashes, immediately to be lost again. It was no dream, but the dream of a dream. Supposing reality to be solid and dreaming fluid, this was gaseous. The elements of life were in a condition of disintegration. They still existed, but in combinations so impossible that she could not even understand their meaning…

I think that is rather brilliant, and shows us the world from an entirely new perspective. But the main problem with Sphinx is that all the women are essentially the same. I gave up trying to distinguish them after a while. The dialogue may be amusing, and Lindsay’s ideas are certainly unusual and (in their own way) brilliant – but he isn’t quite capable of encapsulating these within the confines of a novel. It is almost a truism, among those who write about Lindsay, that he was a first-rate novelist trapped with the prose of a third-rate novelist. Here, his prose is perfectly serviceable – but his characterisations and (to a lesser extent) use of structure are too weak to hold or sustain the ideas he has. A shame, but Sphinx remains fascinating – and I don’t doubt that Lindsay will retain the small but devoted following he has for at least another generation.

Over the Footlights and Other Fancies by Stephen Leacock

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It is for books such as this that I put off creating my Top Ten Books of the year until the last possible movement. I wanted to read something reliably enjoyable on Christmas Day (and, as it turned out, Boxing Day) and was mulling over what it would be – when Stephen Leacock leapt to mind.

Over the Footlights

I would probably cite Leacock as among my favourite writers, and have read a fair few of his books (and amassed more), but I haven’t actually read one of his since I was 18, around 13 years ago. Which is fairly absurd, given how many I have unread, and how much I enjoy him. Indeed, along with A.A. Milne, E.M. Delafield, and Richmal Crompton, he was in the first tranche of authors I collected – and those who helped form my taste. Would I still like him after all this time, with at least a thousand more books read since I last read one of his?

What’s the opposite of burying the lede? Obviously you’ll have gathered by now that I did, very much, enjoy Over The Footlights and Other Fancies (1923). Like other Leacock books, it is a collection of short pieces – in this case, they are mostly – as the title suggests – theatrically themed. The ‘other fancies’, at the end, are not; we will come onto those.

How to describe these pieces? They are not spoofs, because they are too kind and too subtle for that. Imagine, if you will, a genre being ever so slightly heightened, and presented while at the same time being affectionately observed – dialogue interspersed with the reason for it being thus phrased – and you’ll begin to grasp what Leacock is doing.

It is somewhat surprising that his theatrical topics remain recognisable to the 21st-century reader (or at least this one; and any with a working knowledge of turn of the century theatre). Things kick off with a wonderful melodrama, ‘Cast up by the Sea’ (‘Why didn’t he explain? Why didn’t he shout out, “Hiram, I’m not a villain at all; I’m your old friend!” Oh, pshaw! who ever did explain things in the second act of a melodrama? And where would the drama be if they did?’). There’s a parodic Ibsen, and exemplars (of a fashion) of Russian plays new and old. Even the cinema gets a look-in, with a desert bounty picture (‘Dear Man’s Gold’), as does Greek tragedy as performed by a university drama club. It’s all wonderful stuff, requiring only the smallest of acquaintances with the genre in question to amuse.

My favourite – though perhaps it is because I know this genre best – is ‘The Soul Call’. It’s Leacock’s version of the 1920s problem play – about knowing oneself and – well, I’ll let Leacock explain:

At the opposite pole of thought from the good old melodrama, full of wind and seaweed and danger, is the ultra-modern, up-to-date Piffle-Play.

It is named by such a name as The Soul Call, or The Heart Yearn, or The Stomach Trouble – always something terribly perplexed and with 60 per cent of sex in it. It always deals in one way or another with the “problem of marriage”. Let it be noted that marriage, which used to be a sacrament, became presently a contract and now a problem. In art and literature it used to constitute the happy ending. Now it’s just the bad beginning.

We all recognise this sort of play, I suspect, if we have any fondness for the 1920s. And if you’re reading my blog, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that you probably do.

This particular play is about Lionel and Helga, married (respectively) to Mabel and Charles, who have decided to poison their partners because they are holding them back from ‘following the higher call of their natures’. I hope my pronouns in that sentence were disentangleable. In between giving us their dialogue, and some amusing stage directions, Leacock also gives us the views of the sympathetic (albeit small) audience. After the first act, they are generally pro the poisoning plan, but have yet to see Mabel on stage. In the second act…

Mabel Derwent goes over to the Hindoo tray and picks up a big cream-candy out of a box and eats it, and says, “Yum! Yum!” with animal relish. All the audience look at Mabel. They see in her a dashing, good-looking woman, a blonde, all style, and with just a touch of loudness. All the women in the audience decide at once that she ought to be poisoned; but the man aren’t so sure.

Leacock has that knack of coming across as warm and likeable in his writing – how, I don’t know; whether or not it was true, I also have no idea. Somehow it is impossible for him to come across as cynical or malicious – so he can tease the genres of the day without seeming to dislike them, and without alienating the audiences who watch any of these sorts of plays and films. It’s whimsical – which became a dirty word around 1920, but shouldn’t be; whimsy requires the same keen observational power that powers poignant or reflective writing.

Once the ‘footlights’ section is over, we move to the ‘other fancies’, many and various. Here, Leacock gives freer reign to his more surreal humour. I suppose a parodic play requires restraint, to keep it amusing, while tales of daily life can take a step into the bizarre – such as the sketch about how and why Leacock purportedly shot his landlord, or how his neighbour’s daily updates on nature drive Leacock murderous with rage. (Not all his pieces are about feeling murderous, honest.) He writes amusingly about his exploits trying (not so hard) to catch black bass, about the indignities of Prohibition (which I hadn’t realised got as far as Canada), and about how a comet was going to destroy the earth and nobody much minded:

I find the same attitude everywhere. I heard a little boy last Sunday, on his way into church, say to his mother, “Mother, is it true that a comet is going to hit the world?” And she said, “Yes, dear, the newspapers say so.” “And where shall we be after it this us?” “I suppose, darling,” she answered, with a touch of reverence, I admit, in her voice, “that we shall be dissolved into nebular nucleus with an enveloping corona of incandescent hydrogen.” After that they passed into church, and I heard no more.

Look, you either love that or you don’t. If you do find it funny, you’re in luck – there is an awful lot of Leacock out there to read. I am castigating myself for leaving it so long before I went back to his books. This one was every bit as wonderful as I’d remembered.

Leacock’s star has rather faded, I think, certainly outside of his native Canada, and that’s a pity. I urge you to go out and find something by him, if you’ve enjoyed the quotations in this review; I imagine plenty of his books are available free for ereaders, and some (Literary Lapses, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town) are fairly easy to find as real books. I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading some more Leacock from my shelves this year – who fancies joining me?