1930s

More Women Than Men – Ivy Compton-Burnett

StuckinaBook All , , 17 Comments

When I wrote about Pamela Hansford Johnson’s pamphlet on Ivy Compton-Burnett, I mentioned that it had made me keen to read more of my beloved Dame Ivy’s work soon.  It didn’t take me long – at Easter I delved through my collection of Ivy Compton-Burnett novels to find one to fill a gap in A Century of Books, and opted (because I love its dryly prosaic title) for More Women Than Men (1933).

If I dared, I would try an Ivy Compton-Burnett Reading Week, but I don’t think it work – partly because people often seem intimidated by her, but also because it’s no secret that Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels are all similar in tone and title.  It’s difficult to differentiate Mother and Son from Daughters and Sons; Parents and Children from Elders and Betters; A Family and a Fortune from A Father and his Fate, etc. etc.  The previous owner of my copy of More Women Than Men obviously had the same issues, for she has noted down a little list on the first page:

1933
Girls’ school
Mrs Napier
Felix Bacon.

Well, anonymous (and probably deceased) owner of my book, you have organised my thoughts for me.  More Women Than Men does, indeed, take place in a girls’ school – which is unusual for Ivy Compton-Burnett, who usually sets her novels in sprawling families with nine or so children.  I initially thought that she would just transfer this dynamic to the hierarchies and alliances of pupils and teachers, but in actual fact none of the girls say anything at all in the novel.  Rather, we watch the headmistress, Josephine Napier, rule over family and staff with a firmness which doesn’t repress the verbal dalliances of those around her, but which does render them powerless in the face of her unflappable logic.  People love to chop logic in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels – and I love reading them do it.  Truisms are interrogated; the polite shorthand tricks of conversation are exposed as evasions, and analysed to death.  None of it is very natural, it is definitely stylised – but deliciously so.

“I feel a little conscious of my appearance,” said Felix, coming up to the group.  “Perhaps it is being one of the few people who can wear formal clothes.”

His speech was met by incredulous mirth, his hearers keeping their eyes on his face, in case of further entertainment.

“Well, I hope that no one will be conscious of mine,” said Josephine.  “It is not my habit to be aware of it; but when I am oblivious, it may be hitting other people in the eye.  I got into the garment in time, but I admit it does not add to the occasion.”

“People always seem to think admission alter things,” said Helen, “when it really rather helps to establish them.”I’m running ahead of myself, as usual, since I haven’t explained who these people are.  

Apologies if the following run-through is confusing – there are always a lot of characters in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, often with complex interrelations.  More Women Than Men starts with Josephine greeting her all-female staff back after the school holidays.  Helen is a new staff member, and the others are returning – none of these are pivotal to the plot, for the majority of the novel, but each is rather wonderful to read about.  Miss Munday is large, vapid, and doleful; Miss Luke is grateful and ignored; Mrs. Chattaway is one of the few who has been married (now widowed):

Mrs. Chattaway seldom referred to her wedded life, and her companions, in spite of their sincere deprecation of the married state, assigned her reticence to her sense of loss; whereas the truth was, as they might consistently have guessed, that the memory was uncongenial.

Josephine herself is married to Simon, who fades into the background – not so much browbeaten as so wholly in her shadow as to be rendered free of personality.  They have an adopted son, Gabriel, who is in fact Josephine’s nephew – he is in his early twenties, but still living at home, rather uselessly.  Josephine’s brother Jonathan (Gabriel’s father) taught pupils independently, until the last one stayed with him for 22 years.  This last one is Felix Bacon, who (joining together disparate groups) becomes the drawing master at Josephine’s school.  There are plenty of amusing conversations where Felix defends the idea of a man teaching girls to pupils’ fathers who think the job beneath him.  (I should add that More Women Than Men, like maybe of Dame Ivy’s novels, is set in a vaguely Edwardian period.)  And then there is the change of dynamic when a man is introduced to the all-female staff…

“You will find that not much gossip is done here,” said Josephine, smiling as if in spite of herself.

“I suppose it hardly could be in a common room.”

“Either there or elsewhere.”

“And in a community of women!  I am glad I am seeing life for myself, as all the theories about it are untrue.  Now I see that you are dismissing me with a look.  Of course you are one of those people whose glance is obeyed.”

Josephine initially appears to be the paragon of diligence and kindness – a rather dominant and detached paragon, one whose glance is indeed obeyed, but a paragon nonetheless.  It becomes apparent, however, that she is ruthlessly manipulative – and yet she is far more complex than those words suggest.  Her love for husband and adopted son is deeply genuine, but it is coupled with her immovable sense of justice, and the love she demands in return.  She puts up a great deal of resistance when Gabriel becomes engaged to Ruth, the daughter of Elizabeth, an old acquaintance of Josephine and Simon Napier whose reappearance causes quite a stir earlier in the novel.

“In that case you will be grateful to Ruth, Josephine,” said Gabriel, coming nearer with a stumble, to avoid lifting his head.  “She is giving me a happiness greater than I had conceived.”

“Then it must be on a generous scale indeed, indulged boy,” said Josephine, her tone out of accordance with the change in her eyes.  “Let us hear about it before I resume my labours.  Come to the point, and enunciate some demand of youth.”

“It is the demand that I was bound to make one day.  It is naturally often a demand of youth.  This breaking up of our life seemed to the best time to make it.  The lesser change must count less at the time of the greater.  I make the demand with confidence, having been taught, as you will say, to make demands.  I have said enough for you to understand me?”

“No,” said Josephine, in a quiet, conversational tone; “I don’t think so.  You have not said anything definite, have you?”

There are almost never histrionics in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel.  Whatever their emotions may be, characters are far more likely to react by calmly picking apart their antagonist’s sentence than hysterically screaming in their face.  These verbal gymnastics are not true to life, but they raise tension far more effectively (and originally) than a few outbursts could achieve.
did you really think that Sherpa wouldn’t find her way into this post?

 

The interconnections, misalliances, grievances, dependencies and loyalties between characters in More Women Than Men would be impossible to explain in a mere blog post.  Although the dialogue is undeniably stylised, there are complex and believable relationships throughout the novel – an aspect of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s writing which is seldom applauded.  A discussion of whether or not her novels are realistic would be fascinating – because ‘realistic’ has so many facets and definitions.  Would people talk like this?  No, definitely not.  Would people act like this?  Probably no.   But would people feel like these characters feel?  Yes – absolutely – and it is Ivy Compton-Burnett’s genius that she can interweave the genuine and the bizarre.
It is not true, either, that nothing happens in Ivy Compton-Burnett novels.  In fact, More Women Than Men contains one of the most ingenious murders ever – done by exposing a ill person to a draught.  A spoiler, yes, but the reason that Compton-Burnett’s novels have the reputation of nothing happening is that the plot, as such, doesn’t really matter.  It’s the way things happen, and the way she writes.  Oh! the way she writes!  I adore it.  Settling down to her aphorisms and linguistic somersaults is a joy – because they are not simply clever, but hilarious.

 

Of the six Ivy Compton-Burnett novels I’ve now read, this is perhaps my favourite.  Others have had sections where they dragged, but this one never did.  It’s not the easiest of her novels to find, but definitely worth hunting down – I’m hoping that my enthusiasm will lead to one or two Ivy Compton-Burnett converts, or at least encourage some more readers to give her a go.  You’ll love or loathe – and, if you love, you’ll never look back.

Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner

StuckinaBook All , , , 14 Comments

Yes, the excerpt yesterday was from Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1936 novel Summer Will Show.  STW has had quite a few mentions at Stuck-in-a-Book this year, since I’ve been researching a chapter of my thesis on her novel Lolly Willowes, and I read Summer Will Show for the same reason.  Well, it’s very different.  Warner is renowned, in fact, for the disparity of her topics – which include a missionary on a desert island, a medieval convent, a woman becoming a witch, and, in this instance, the French Revolution.  The only tie between her novels is her striking prose and observational eye.

Our heroine is Sophia Willoughby, who begins Summer Will Show as a rich, aristocratic wife and mother in 1840s Dorset.  Her marriage is not an especially companionable one, but she doesn’t seem particularly upset about it.  Indeed, it seems to be par for the course.  Warner expertly encapsulates the change in temperament between an engaged woman and a married woman of the period:

Sophia might refuse her food, pine, burst into unexpected tears, copy poetry into albums and keep pet doves, while her marriage was being arranged and her trousseau ordered; but once married it was understood that she would put away these extravagancies and settle down into the realities of life once more.
Sophia seems rather unfeeling at the outset – strict, rather than motherly, and without any noticeably emotional attachments.  Warner often summarises people’s essential characters through seemingly incidental – and here is Sophia’s sentence: ‘She disliked sitting down in the middle of a walk, she disliked any kind of dawdling.  A slow and rigid thinker, to sit still and contemplate was an anguish to her.’

She is contented, if anything, when her husband absconds to Paris – but even her delight in the freedom afforded by her unassailable singleness is tainted when she learns about her husband’s Parisian mistress, Minna Lemuel:

For even to Dorset the name of Minna Lemuel had made its way.  Had the husband of Mrs. Willoughby chosen with no other end than to be scandalous, he could not have chosen better.  A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly; and old; as old as Frederick or older – this was the woman who Frederick had elected to fall in love with, joining in the tag-rag procession, and not even king in that outrageous court, not even able to dismiss the mongrels, and take the creature into keeping.

Ouch.  But doesn’t Warner arrange an image well?

Something tragic happens, which sets Sophia off to find her husband – even with the obstacle of Minna.  She arrives in Paris, and first encounters Minna while the latter is telling a story about her past to an assembled group of eager listeners.  The difficulty about having a great raconteur as a character is that the novelist must be one themselves (it’s one of the things which makes Angela Young’s accounts of storytellers so wonderful in Speaking of Love, incidentally) – Warner is pretty impressive, but her strength lies in unusual metaphors and striking images (which only occasionally go too far and become too self-conscious), rather than compelling anecdotes, per se.  Here’s another of those curious little verbal pictures I love so much:

And with dusters tied on her feet she [Minna] made another glide across the polished floor, moving with the rounded nonchalant swoop of some heavy water bird.  Her sleeves were rolled up, she wore a large check apron, she had all the majestic convincingness of a gifted tragedy actress playing the part of a servant – a part which would flare into splendour in the last act.
Indeed, Minna’s personality is captured most effectively when we are told that ‘she was always pitching herself to an imaginary gallery’.  Her dramatic nature captures Sophia’s interest, and the burning resentment with which she arrives turns into affection, and then devotion…  The excerpt I posted yesterday comes into play here.

I enjoyed the first half of Summer Will Show.  Warner’s prose is certainly dense here, not to be read speedily, but the dignity and spark of Sophia still came through strongly.  Her concerns about reputation in a judgemental aristocratic world were interesting and subtle; her relationship and re-encounter with her husband were vibrant and never slipped into the sort of unrealistic emotionalism seen in a lot of novels from the 1930s.  But… the second half dragged and dragged.

First edition (can be bought here)

Perhaps my main problem was that I’m not especially interested in the French Revolution – and I’m certainly not coming from the impassioned left-wing perspective with which Warner wrote this novel (although she later grew rather less zealous in later life.)  Understandably a lot of the action of revolutionary France takes centre stage later in the novel, and as the narrative wandered a little away from relationships, hurt, and pride – themes Warner explores rather masterfully – I lost interest.  And yet even in the first part of the novel, I admired more than I loved.  It was enjoyable, but I couldn’t respond with the fervour with which I greeted Lolly Willowes.  The writing was so thick, so relentlessly beautiful, even, that I felt exhausted reading it.  That can hardly be labelled a criticism of Warner, but it prevented me loving the novel deeply.

I have heard Summer Will Show praised to the heights, and thus part of me thinks a re-read in a decade or so would be a good idea.  I don’t thrill to the thought.  Harriet Devine has also recently struggled to love this novel, so at least I’m not aloe in my assessment.  For those more interested in historical fiction than I am (and it would hard to be less) maybe you’d get more from this than I did.  For the reader new to Warner, I would certainly suggest Lolly Willowes as the first novel – but I have grown increasingly to think that her greatest triumph is her letters.  I’ve heard people say the same thing of Virginia Woolf, about her letters and diaries, and thought the assessment rather silly – but, for Warner, the chief qualities of her fiction-writing (adeptness at unusual imagery; an eye for original perspectives) appear in her correspondences, without the flaws which creep into her novels.  The Element of Lavishness is still the best thing I’ve read by Warner, and Summer Will Show didn’t come close to challenging the throne.

Opus 7 – Sylvia Townsend Warner

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

I’m reading around my next DPhil chapter, on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, and thus there might well be a little spate of Warner related posts coming up here over the next few weeks.  I have an inkling that this might be one of those reviews which is very specialist, and might not attract much interest (1930s narrative poem, anyone?) but I shall plough ahead and see what happens!

I read Opus 7 (1931) by Warner mostly as a counterpoint to Lolly Willowes, but it is also interesting on its own account.  It’s a narrative poem, about fifty pages long, about Rebecca Random – an unsociable woman who lives in an idyllic cottage, ‘lives on bread and lives for gin’, and has an almost uncanny ability to grow flowers:

Some skill she had, and, more than skill, a touch
that prospered all she set, as though there were
a chemical affinity ‘twixt her
stuff and the stuff of plants.

Indeed, the most obvious connections between Opus 7 and Lolly Willowes are the countryside, and this almost witchlike ability that Rebecca has.  Flowers spring up almost overnight, and make Rebecca and her garden something of a spectacle for the villagers.
But the topic is really just a way of exploring the dynamics of village life, especially the darker side.  Rebecca starts to sell her flowers – but only because she needs money for drink.  The villagers buy her flowers for their mantelpieces, parties, and funerals – but do not accept her; she engages in these exchanges, but does not talk to the people next to her in the pub, nor buy them the drinks they anticipate.  In a really interesting aside, Warner leaves the stance of anecdote-reteller and dips into the author’s voice – comparing her addiction to writing and rewriting with Rebecca’s reliance on alcohol:

And down what leagues of darkness must I yet
trudge, stumble, reel, in the wrought mind’s retreat ;
then wake, remember, doubt, and with the day
that work which in the darkness shone survey,
and find it neither better nor much worse
than any other twentieth-century verse.
Oh, must I needs be disillusioned, there’s
no need to wait for spring!  Each day declares
yesterday’s currency a few dead leaves ;
and through all the sly nets poor technique weaves
the wind blows on, whilst I – new nets design,
a sister-soul to my slut heroine,
she to her dram enslaved, and I to mine.
I rarely read poetry, as you know, so perhaps I am not the best judge of quality.  I recently wrote a little bit about Warner’s collection Time Importuned, which I didn’t really like or dislike.  I felt I got a lot more out of Opus 7 – perhaps because it had a sustained narrative, and everything which comes along with that, particularly the foregrounding of character.  Once I had that all set in my mind, I could sit back and enjoy Warner’s writing.  It was occasionally a little forced, and I didn’t approve of all her attempts to create end-rhymes.  This was rather inexcusable:

But now Rebecca, wont to chatter ding-
dong with the merriest, and when drunk to sing

But in general I found it rather beautiful – her use of metaphor is quite striking, for instance.  This excerpt isn’t to do with Rebecca, but concerns the aftermath of village life after the first world war – looking back to the war with quite a chilling, effective image.  Even with all the writing about the trenches which I have read (which we have all read, I imagine) this made an impact on me:

I knew a time when Europe feasted well :
bodies were munched in thousands, vintage blood
so blithely flowed that even the dull mud
grew greedy, and ate men ; and lest the gust
should flag, quick flesh no daintier taste than dust,
spirit was ransacked for whatever might
sharpen a sauce to drive on appetite.
I can’t imagine any publisher willing to publish Opus 7 now, simply because of its form and length.  It’s not long enough to be considered a novel in verse, but it is obviously too long to be merely a poem.  However I am glad that Chatto and Windus decided it was worth issuing back in 1931, in their lovely Dolphin Books series (which I collect when I stumble across them) – it’s not my favourite book by Warner, but it is rather powerful and striking.  And, for a poetry ignoramus, rather an accessible way to enjoy the form, without forfeiting the qualities which make me primarily a lover of prose.

Dear Octopus – Dodie Smith

StuckinaBook All , , , 2 Comments

When I was reading Dodie Smith’s first volume of autobiography, Look Back With Love, the title which cropped up most (and most intrigued me) was her play Dear Octopus (1938).  She didn’t write much about its creation or production, since obviously she didn’t write the play during her first eleven years, but she makes allusions now and then.  My attention was grabbed by the mention of family reunions, John Gielguid, and that curious title.  Actually, I’ll instantly put you out of your misery, lest you think this is a play set in an aquarium.  The title derives from the speech Nicholas gives at his parents’ Golden Wedding Anniversary:

“To the family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.”

Despite being an only child, Dodie Smith seems very able at portraying sibling relationships within large families.  (Indeed, one character claims to be ‘crazy about large families’, and their husband caustically remarks ‘That’s because you’re an only child.’)  Rose and Cassandra always seemed very believable in I Capture the Castle (albeit Thomas rather less so) and Dear Octopus is no different.  The size of the cast, and the various familial and marital relationships, was rather dizzying – but, of course, it would have been rather easier to identify everyone when seeing it on the stage, rather than reading the play.  We discussed reading plays a couple of years ago, and it seems that I am in a minority – although it has to be said that I do prefer reading plays with small casts, rather than the mammoth ensemble of Dear Octopus.

The situation is a tried and tested catalyst for all manner of action: a family reunion.  I don’t think there’s much point in me going into specifics, but it involves all the expected angles.  A daughter returns after a seven year absence, holding a secret; a sister-in-law holds resentment about a long-ago rejection; siblings compete and misunderstand each other; children try to understand the adult world; the gathering draws further attention to one family member who has recently died.  And, naturally, there is a romance plot threaded through – which culminates rather too neatly, perhaps, but everyone likes a bit of feel-good theatre.

There is plenty in Dear Octopus which does remind one of the insouciance of much of I Capture the Castle – and, indeed, Cassandra’s faux-sophistication.  Like this, for example:

MARGERY: Ken’ll carry on with anyone who crooks their little finger at him.
HILDA: Don’t you mind?
MARGERY: Not in the least.  It’s a safety valve.

Young love and young marriages are treated quite flippantly at times, although elsewhere the oncoming war (they must have known it was oncoming?) does crash through this flippancy:

LAUREL: Your father’s picture.  He was exactly your age when he was killed. (Suddenly.)  Oh, darling, darling–
HUGH: What?
LAUREL: Sometimes I wish we were quite middle-aged.
HUGH: Good lord, why?
LAUREL: So that you wouldn’t have to go if there’s another war.
HUGH: It’ll take a damn good cause to get me to war.
LAUREL: Oh, you all say that.

But the focal point is not budding romance – it is the security and trust of a fifty-year long marriage.  There is a lovely sense through that the anniversary couple in question (Charles and Dora) can cope with the antics of their family because of the depth of their bond.  For a young(ish) unmarried woman, Smith conveys this very well, and very calmly.

Dear Octopus doesn’t reinvent the wheel.  There are a lot of plays in a similar mould, and even with a similar tone, but Smith’s construction and balance throughout is so well done that this seems like an exemplar within its crowded genre.  Perhaps it won’t overly excite the reader, or transform any lives, but it does its job rather well.  I don’t know how often the play is revived now, but you do get a chance to see it, grab the opportunity.  Otherwise, I recommend you track down a copy, and have an entertaining afternoon…

Right Ho, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

StuckinaBook All , , 37 Comments

I found this post in my drafts, but it was originally published in 2012 – I put it in drafts because it got a lot of spam comments, but hopefully it is back to normal now. I didn’t mean to email it out :D

My book group recently read Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) by P.G. Wodehouse.  I always like an excuse to read some Wodehouse.  A diet of nothing else would be like living on ice cream, but as an occasional snack, there is nothing better.  And it would be a mistake to think that, since PGW makes for such easy reading, that it is easy writing.  I think Wodehouse is one of the best wordsmiths (or should that be wordpsmiths?) I have read, and it is far more difficult to write a funny book than it is to write a poignant or melancholy book.

But perhaps there are people out there who have yet to read any Wodehouse?  Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the way he writes (since, let’s face it, there is minimal variety within his output.)  In the typical Wodehouse novel you will have comic misunderstandings, elaborate disguises, accidental engagements, wrathful aunts, and everybody ending up happy in the end.  This formula is more certain than ever in a Jeeves and Wooster novel, where rich, foolish young Wooster gets himself entangled in a comedy of errors, and wise butler Jeeves demurely extracts him from them.

But the sheer joy, the genius, of Wodehouse is his wordplay.  It’s the kind of thing which will either appeal or not, and is impossible to explain into funniness (which is true of all humour, probably) – Wodehouse uses language like an acrobat, dashing from hyperbole to understatement in a moment; finding the longest way to express the shortest phrase; finding the most unexpected metaphors and similes, and twisting them all together alongside absurd slang and abbreviation.  Who but Wodehouse could have written this line?

Girls are rummy.  Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m.
Or have conceived of this image, when serving an aunt with alcohol?

“Give me a drink, Bertie.”

“What sort?”

“Any sort, so long as it’s strong.”

Approach Bertram Wooster along these lines, and you catch him at his best.  St. Bernard dogs doing the square thing by Alpine travellers could not have bustled about more assiduously.

Like Richmal Crompton’s William Brown, Bertram ‘Bertie’ Wooster is nothing if not blessed with aunts – most of whom view him with an unwavering, and understandable, loathing and distrust.  But, like William Brown, Wooster is endlessly well-meaning.  This is what makes him such an attractive hero – more or less all the messes in which he finds himself are caused by trying to help others, often in the romantic department.  Although Wooster himself sees engagement as a misery beyond all others, he often attempts to help others reach this state (invariably finding himself engaged to the soppiest female present.)

But so far I have not been specific.  I should mention Right Ho, Jeeves.  Aunt Dahlia – the only aunt who can tolerate Wooster, although she demonstrates the sort of affection which is shown through terse telegrams and much use of the term ‘fathead’ – summons Wooster to her mansion in Market Snodsbury, Worcestershire.  (Not many novels feature Worcestershire, the county in which I was raised, so it’s nice to see it get a mention – and Pershore, no less, which was the nearest town to my house.  If you’re thinking the village name is ridiculous, I should mention that Upton Snodsbury is in the area, and presumably inspired Wodehouse.)  He is being summoned to distribute prizes at a school, a fate which Wooster would rather avoid, to put it mildly.  So he ropes in newt-fanatic Gussie Fink-Nottle, who had been looking for an excuse to go there.  For why, you ask?  Well, with the coincidental air which characterises so many of Wodehouse’s convoluted plots, the girl with whom Fink-Nottle is besotted happens to be staying there.  She, ‘the Bassett disaster’ as Wooster terms her, comes across pretty clearly in his first description of her:

I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

The romantic entanglements do not end there, of course.  Wooster’s cousin Angela and her beau Tuppy also have something of a rollercoaster relationship, just to add to festivities.  Then there is Wooster’s white jacket, which Jeeves is determined shall not be worn…

My favourite scene from this, and one which often appears in anthologies etc., is Gussie at the prize-giving.  All I’ll say is that he’s been drinking, for the first time in his life.  It’s supposed to stiffen the sinews and summon the blood, but it’s a little more chaotic than that.

This isn’t my favourite Wodehouse novel.  I think I prefer the stand-alone books to the series, perhaps because they’re all the more unexpected and strange.  But Wodehouse’s exceptionally brilliant use of language is on fine form in Right Ho, Jeeves and I certainly loved reading this.  There are many imitators, but nobody can equal Wodehouse for his strand of comic writing – and a dose of it, in between other books, is always, always welcome.

Appius and Virginia – G.E. Trevelyan

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

Keep the titles coming on yesterday’s post, folks – I’m really enjoying them.  And well done for spotting my oh-so-subtle allusion to one in my post title (but nobody spotted the deliberate mistake!)

Onto other matters.  One of the best things about blogging is, as we all know, collecting recommendations from other people’s blogs and comments – so many wonderful reads we wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, and I love to do my bit in recommending, since my reading tends away from the popular and well-known.  But I also love to hear recommendations from you lot, the more obscure the better, and was delighted when Virginia told me about Appius and Virginia (1932) by G.E. Trevelyan, because she thought it might be useful for my thesis (which it is) and added that the book is interesting but not brilliant.  I agree with her assessment – but I think it is still interesting enough to warrant blogging about.  Also, someone pointed out a while ago, in a comment here, that unless readers of obscure books blog about them, there will be no online record of a book.  Currently there are quite a few copies for sale online, but no synopsis or opinion on it (unless you count the ebay seller who assures the reading public that it is a ‘very good book’ and – coincidentally! – one he is selling.)

Appius and Virginia concerns a youngish woman, but confirmed spinster, who decides to experiment by raising an ape as a human.  I’m not a scientist and I’m not especially interested in whether or not the events of the novel could take place (I’m fairly sure they couldn’t – Appius learns a lot of spoken language very quickly; I’ve read about apes using a form of sign language, but not verbal communication) but I’m very happy to take these things on sight, disbelief suspended.  If you would find that too tricky, this definitely isn’t the novel for you!

(Incidentally, I can’t see any similarities to Webster’s play Appius and Virginia, nor the real-life Appius, but I am garnering my info on them from Wikipedia – step forward if you’re better qualified than me to comment on the topic, and you really couldn’t be less able than me.)

Virginia is rather an unsociable woman, earnest and persistent and not especially likeable.  Nor, however, is she dislikeable – her whole being seems occupied with the raising of Appius, and the reader sees very little of her character outside of this experiment.  Although I never really notice description of people’s appearances, and thus cannot swear to this, to my mind Virginia looks rather like the photo I later found of Trevelyan herself (below).

In many ways, Trevelyan’s novel relates to Edith Olivier’s wonderful little book The Love-Child – a spinster longs for the child she cannot have through traditional avenues, and so finds a creative way to fill this void.  For it becomes clear that Virginia, although interested in the pragmatics of an experiment, is motivated chiefly by loneliness – as she explains herself, to Appius:

“I was so lonely.  I wanted you to grow up as my child.  I wanted you to be human.  I wanted you to be something even more than a child, something I’d made with my own brain out of nothing, and shaped as I wanted it, and watched grow.”
Which makes it sound as though Appius becomes capable of understanding complex sentences.  I shan’t spoil the direction the experiment eventually takes, although I will hint that it takes somewhat disturbing steps, but most of the novel follows his increasing understanding of language and communication – but slower than Virginia hopes.  He follows some of what she says, but not all – the progression from concrete thoughts to the abstract, for instance, takes time.  Some of Trevelyan’s more experimental (and, to my mind, least successful) passages attempt to reflect the internal workings of Appius’ mind:

Hand on white line above him.  Fingers won’t go over it.  Why not?  Something there; the pale blue stuff.  Hard and cold.  Try white wisps.  Hard too.  Can’t be held.  Funny.

That, by the way, is the sky seen through a window.  I can see where she is going with these sections, which flit between the primitive and the avant-garde, but ultimately I don’t think Trevelyan is a good enough writer to get away with this approach.  And it is an approach which requires a very able writer – the dismantling of sentences and experimentation with language can so easily irritate, and even people like James Joyce irk rather than impress me.

While Trevelyan treats her topic in an interesting manner, she obviously has difficulty keeping the momentum going.  Each chapter adds a couple of years to the experiment, but very little changes – all the scenes take place in the house or the garden, and that gives
the novel a claustrophobic atmosphere.  Some of the scenes are done very well – when Appius first sees a mirror, for example, or his inability to distinguish between sentient and insentient objects leading to a battle with the fire – but what Appius and Virginia really lacks is humour.  Earnestness can kill a novel for me, and although Trevelyan’s novel didn’t die, it was a little bit wounded.

So – if this were available on shelves easily, I would probably recommend it as an interesting and unusual read.  There are the rudiments for a fascinating novel, although sadly Trevelyan doesn’t have the charm or poignancy of Edith Olivier and The Love-Child.  But since it’s so difficult to track down in the UK, I could only really recommend US readers hunt this out.

But I will end with possibly the most accomplished paragraph from the novel, or at least the section which met most with my approval.  Virginia imagines what her life will be like if she fails in her attempt to humanise Appius, and what follows is as striking a portrait of the lonely spinster as I have encountered.  If only the rest of the novel had been at this level.

She would go back to Earl’s Court and her bed-sitting-room – gas fire and griller, separate meters; to her consumption of novels from the lending library; her bus rides to the confectioner’s; her nightly sipping of conversation and coffee in the lounge: to middle-age in a ladies’ residential club.  Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus – “Come along there, please, come along,” and the struggle with umbrella and parcels through the ranks of inside passengers, and the half compassionate, half contemptuous hand of the conductor, grimy and none too gentle as she clambers down the swaying steps on to the sliding pavement. – Each year a little less bright in the after-dinner conversation; a little less able to remember the novels she has read; a little less able to find a listener; a little less able to live, yet no more ready for death.

Thanks for telling me about this, Virginia!

Live Alone and Like It

StuckinaBook All , 15 Comments

I don’t often talk that much about my DPhil research, because most of my time is spent reading books and articles that are either impossible to track down, or too prosaic to recommend. But after reading Marjorie Hillis’ Live Alone and Like It (1936) for my upcoming chapter on childlessness and fantastic creation (oh yes) I thought I’d like to blog about it. But surely it would be too difficult to find? (thought I) So I Googled it, and it turns out that Virago reissued it in 2005 – and there are plenty of copies around, so I feel I can blog about it guiltlessly.

The book is non-fiction, and does what it says on the tin – it’s a guide to the single girl. There were already rather more women than men in the UK before the First World War, but in the 1920s and ’30s there were around two million ‘surplus women’, as they were labelled. The whole history of these women is detailed in Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out, which I’ve been reading for a while and will talk further about soon. I’m rather annoyed by the tacit assumption in both Nicholson’s book and the contemporary guides that any single man could easily get married – I suspect life could be as difficult for bachelors as for spinsters – but certainly unmarried women proliferated at a rate higher than ever before in living memory.

I’ve read quite a few of these guides – some are maudlin, others are progressive, and everything in between. They agree on very little. The reason I wanted to write about Marjorie Hillis’ Live Alone and Like It is because it is the most accessible for a modern audience. You don’t need to be an unmarried woman in 1936 to find this a fascinating read, and what is more, a funny one. Hillis’ tone is not hectoring or patronising, but quite witty and sensible. Whether or not you’re on the look-out for a spouse, you might chuckle at this piece of advice:

But hobbies are anti-social now; modern men don’t like to be sewn and knitted at; and the mere whisper that a girl collects prints, stamps, tropical fish or African art is, alas, likely to increase her solitude.or this:

Clutter is now as out-of-date as modesty, and for just as good reasons.or, without intending to cast aspersions against any bloggers (and glossing over my uninformed references to Gissing and Braddon yesterday), this:

Most people’s minds are like ponds and need a constantly fresh stream of ideas in order not to get stagnant. The simplest way to accomplish this to is [sic] exchange your ideas (if any), with your friends and acquaintances, cribbing as many as possible from books, plays, and newspaper columns and passing them off as your own. Anyone who does this well is considered a brilliant conversationalist. If you do it extra well, you are a Wit.

There are sections on how to save money, how to furnish a home on a budget, and even what term to use to describe the unmarried woman (the term spinster is ‘becoming rapidly extinct’, apparently). Hillis also cheerfully lists the advantages of living alone, including this rather unlikely one, demonstrating how the times, they have a-changed:

You will be able to eat what, when, and where you please, even dinner served on a tray on the living-room couch – one of the higher forms of enjoyment which the masculine mind has not learned to appreciate.

All in all, there is quite a lot that still comforts or helps the single person – but for the most part Live Alone and Like It is an involving piece of social history, and also amusing in that wry, 1930s, almost Provincial Ladyesque manner. I found it useful for my research too, so that’s a bonus. And I’ll leave Hillis to offer the last piece of advice, as true now as it was in 1936:

For the truth is that if you’re interesting, you’ll have plenty of friends, and if you’re not, you won’t – unless you’re very, very rich.

Illyrian Spring

StuckinaBook All , , 21 Comments

Early warning – there is a giveaway right at the bottom of this post!
That Rachel (Book Snob) is pretty scary, isn’t she? I knew she loved Ann Bridge’s Illryian Spring (1935), and so dropped her an email to let her know I’d found my own copy. Minutes later I found myself under house arrest, surrounded by armed policemen and ferocious guard dogs, and the recipient of dozens of death threats – if I didn’t immediately drop everything, read Illyrian Spring, and post a positive review of it. Right now I’m in a dungeon, blindfolded, typing away with a gun held against my temple…

Gosh, that took a macabre turn, didn’t it? What I MEANT to say was that Rachel thought I should definitely read Illyrian Spring before the end of April – which I duly did, it’s just taken me a while to get around to writing about it. In return, I told Rachel she should read the (much shorter) novel The Love Child by Edith Olivier by the end of April. How’s that going, Rach, hmm?

But I am only teasing, of course. I am very grateful that Rachel pointed me in the direction of Illyrian Spring (I gave you a copy of The Love Child – just sayin’) because it’s a beautiful novel.

Grace Kilmichael – known also as Lady K – feels unappreciated by her husband Walter, daughter Linnet and sons Nigel and Teddy. As the novel opens, she has escaped off on the Orient Express – hoping to evade discovery, it is perhaps foolish to choose this mode of transport, ‘but Lady Kilmichael was going to Venice, and she lived in a world which knew no other way of getting to Venice than to travel by the Simplon Orient Express.’ That sets the scene for Grace – one to whom custom and good fortune are equally good companions. In many novels this would be enough to dismiss her out of hand, but Ann Bridge is no inverted snob (in fact, she is often simply a snob) and Grace is undoubtedly the heroine of the novel from the outset. She is a talented painter whose family treat her paintings as an amusing hobby; she is intelligent, sensitive to others, and bewitched by the beauty of life and adventure. And she’s off on an adventure.

I’m not going to pretend to understand the geography of Europe. I hadn’t heard of most of the places she went, but I think they’re probably mostly Italian. To be honest, I didn’t really care. Seeing the sights through Grace’s eyes was enough for me – much of the novel simply documents her travels, and reflections upon her life and family. And her affection, maternal friendship with Nicholas (I’ll get on to him in a bit).

By rights, I shouldn’t have liked Illyrian Spring as much as I did. You know me and descriptions of landscapes – and Bridge’s novel is crammed full with descriptions of scenery, buildings, ruins, water, nature, everything. Grace even carries a travel guide around with her – a form of writing to which I am allergic. But how could I not be swept away by this?

But nature in Dalmatia is singularly open-handed, and distributes beauties as well as wonders with lavish impartiality. Within a few hundred paces of the source of Ombla they came on a thing which Grace was to remember all her life, as much for its beauty as its incredibility. The road here swung round to the right, pushed out towards the valley by a spur of the mountainside; some distance above the road the slopes of this spur rose steeply, broken by ledges and shallow gullies, the rocks of the usual tone of silver pear-colour. And all over the ledges of these pearly rocks, as thick as they could stand, grew big pale-blue irises, a foot or more high, sumptuous as those in an English border, their leaves almost as silver as the rocks, their unopened buds standing up like violet spears among the delicate pallor of the fully-opened flowers – Iris pallida dalmatica, familiar to every gardener, growing in unimaginable profusion in its natural habitat. Now to see an English garden-flower smothering a rocky mountain-side is a sufficient wonder, especially if the rocks are of silver-colour and the flowers a silvery-blue; and Nature, feeling that she had done enough, might well be content to leave it at that. But she had a last wonder, a final beauty to add. In the cracks and fissures another flower grew, blue also, spreading out over the steep slabs between the ledges in flat cushions as much as a yard across – a low-growing woody plant, smothered in small close flower-heads of a deep chalky blue, the shade beloved of the painter Nattier. Anything more lovely than these low compact masses of just the same tone of colour, but a deeper shade, flattened on the white rocks as a foil and companion to the flaunting splendour of the irises, cannot be conceived.

There are a few, a very few, authors who manage to write about the visual in ways which focus upon characters’ emotions and their responses, even if this isn’t stated explicitly, and that works for me. I’m thinking the moment when Jude looks out over Christminster in Jude the Obscure, and more or less every moment of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April. Ann Bridge joins that select few, for me. Those of you without my natural-description-qualms will adore this novel all the more.


And I promised you Nicholas, didn’t I? A less likely hero you’ll be hard-pressed to find. Blustery, fairly rude, a victim to indigestion, self-pleased – and with a very red complexion, to boot – Nicholas meets Grace when she is trying to copy down an intricate engraving for her son. Nicholas doesn’t think she’s doing it right, and eventually insists upon doing it himself – and he does it very accurately. Somehow this is the beginning of their travels together – and I wouldn’t know how to describe their relationship and discussions. I know some people (*cough*, Rachel) love Nicholas, and while I never wholly warmed to him, I did love Grace and Nicholas together. Not romantically, you understand, but as companions who discuss everything under the sun, and appreciate the beauty they discover together. Grace becomes something of a mentor to Nicholas, as he seeks to develop his own artistic talent, and prove to his parents that he can pursue a career as a painter, rather than an architect. Some of the novel’s most interesting sections come, though, when Grace begins to tire of Nicholas, but is far too caring and kind to tell him so. That’s when Bridge’s writing is at its subtlest, and most perceptive – inching through changes in their relationship in a very believable manner. Bridge’s style of narrative is the sort which does not lend itself to plot synopses, and is incredibly difficult to do justice – everything and nothing happens. Like many – maybe even all – great novels, the story does not matter so much as the way in which it is told.

At heart, Illyrian Spring could be considered a deeply feminist novel. Grace’s emancipation happens so quietly and with so few signs of open rebellion that it would might seem understated – but there is incredible strength in passages like this:
Married women so often become more an institution than a person – to their families a wife or a mother, to other people the wife or the mother of somebody else. Apart from her painting, Grace Kilmichael had been an institution for years. She didn’t mind it; she hadn’t really noticed it; but when Nicholas Humphries started treating her as a person, being interested in her as herself, ‘Lady K.’, and not as Nigel’s or Teddy’s or Linnet’s mother, or as the brilliant Sir Walter Kilmichael’s nice wife, she did notice it. She found it something quite new and rather delightful. And entirely without conscious intention, without being aware of it, the presentation of herself which she was making up to Nicholas was, in some subtle way, more personal and less ‘institutional’ than it would have been if she had met him in her London house, as a friend of Linnet’s or Nigel’s.

Illyrian Spring is not without its faults. There is a persistent intellectual snobbery which has a stranglehold on the novel – people must always have the best, and be the best, and there is apparently no sense in doing things simply for enjoyment. The novel seems to suggest that only those with genius at painting should ever wield a paintbrush. Nicholas himself decides he’ll only help people looking for directions because ‘these people were intelligent, much more so than most – he might as well go down with them.’ This constant thread of snobbery felt a bit like poison dropping steadily upon bowers of beautiful flowers, damaging what the novel could have been. If Bridge could have dialled this down, Illyrian Spring would be as charming as The Enchanted April, and even more substantial.

As it is, even with this fault (which some may not perceive as a fault, maybe) Illyrian Spring is a delicious gem of a novel. Grace Kilmichael and Nicholas are unlikely companions whose companionship would be impossible to doubt – and both are utterly genuine and believable characters, far more complex than I could delineate in this review. I am very indebted to Rachel for the joy of this novel – and if I found it joyful, I am certain that those of you who like their books to be like travel guides will fall so deeply in love with Bridge’s novel that you will frame copies of it around the house, and name your first child after it.

So, Rachel, there you go – many thanks. Now, The Love Child…

* * *

I have a spare copy of this to give away – I spotted a nice edition in a bookshop, and swooped upon it, which means I’m now giving away my tatty old Penguin edition. I do warn you, it is very tatty – the cover is taped on, and the spine is so tightly bound that reading the far side of each page requires effort. It’s a reading copy only – but Illyrian Spring is difficult to track down, so anybody who can cope with the poor condition and would like to read it, just pop your name in the comments – along with your favourite season, in honour of the novel’s title. Mine, suitably enough, is spring.

Echo

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

One of the novellas I read during Novella Reading Weekend was Echo (1931) by Violet Trefusis (translated from French by Sian Miles) and I thought it was rather brilliant. If I hadn’t read Paul Gallico’s exceptionally good Love of Seven Dolls at the same time, I’d probably have dashed off an enthused review of Echo right away. As it is, prepare yourself for some enthusiasm now. (I should add, I’ve since read Broderie Anglaise – I’ll probably write a blog post on it at some point, but I was severely disappointed – it was nowhere near as good as Echo.)


I had a little stack of unread Violet Trefusis novellas (they do all seem to be short – Echo is 109pp.) on my shelf, mostly because I recognised her name from Virginia Woolf’s diaries and various Bloomsbury books. I hadn’t quite worked out where she fitted into everything (turns out she had a youthful affair with Vita Sackville-West, as you do) but the combined allure of Bloomsbury and brevity was enough for her to find her way to my shelves. And, eventually, to my hands – I’m very glad she did, because Echo is very funny, as well as well written and occasionally quite moving. Oh, and it has twins in it. That’s what sealed the deal.

As people seem to in novels of the period, the central characters live in a Scottish castle. To give you an image of its state, this describes the bedrooms: ‘They were all equally high-ceilinged, equally pale, equally damp, and entirely devoid of comfort or charm.’ The castle houses Lady Balquidder and her twin niece and nephew, Jean and Malcolm – Lady Balquidder is proper and restrained, always behaving exactly as polite society expects of her, and receiving her due from society in return. Here she is:
Her plump hands were covered with freckles which matched the colour of her hair, still auburn, despite her sixty-five years. From time to time, the ale-coloured eyes, beneath their reddened lids, darted a glance at the door. Her whole person flickered like a small but constant flame.
Jean and Malcolm are not built in the same mould as their aunt. They are hardy, rough, and unmannered youths – in their early 20s – whose behaviour is closer to savages than to Lady B’s. That is to say, they greatly prefer nature to the confines of rooms (‘each of the twins had a passionate love of their wild homeland and were constantly entranced by its beauty’), and possess no frailties nor qualms which generally afflict those of their supposed class. Jean, especially, is proud of not being unduly feminine – and is devoted to her twin brother.

Into the mix of this maelstrom comes another of Lady Balquidder’s nieces, the twins’ cousin, Sauge, from Paris.
“Yes,” agreed Jean, “I can’t wait to see her teetering about the moors in Louis Quinze heels. She’ll want to have snails every mealtime – when she’s not eating frogs, that is. She’ll have a little corncrakey voice, and she’ll keep saying ‘Ah mon Dieu!’ all the time. And, of course, she’ll be fat and dumpy, like her mother; you know, there’s a photo of her on Aunt Agnes’ desk.”

“Well we can certainly make her life a misery,” proclaimed Malcolm with relish.
Needless to say, Sauge is not in the least like this. Trefusis dashes us away from Scotland to Paris, and we get to glimpse Sauge first-hand:
Her searching curiosity was by now proverbial and she was strong and capable enough to act as a prop to someone who really interested her, as a trellis to the young tendrils of a plant slow to develop.

But whenever the eternally grateful ‘subject’ showed signs of wanting to stabilize a relationship regarded always by Sauge as temporary, she would quietly slip away, fearful lest a human heart bring her down from the Olympian heights of her disinterestedness.
The arrival of Sauge triggers off all manner of change at the castle, of course. Initially the twins treat her with the rudeness they intend – but Sauge’s unusual, beguiling nature begins to work its effect over the family. This is no Cinderella tale, or even a novel with the enchantment of The Enchanted April – Sauge brings tragedy alongside comedy; and I should reiterate, Echo remains very amusing throughout – Trefusis’ turn of phrase is a delight. But it is not unmitigated…

Through no fault of her own, Sauge is the catalyst for a change in Jean and Malcolm’s interaction with one another, as both become, in their clumsy ways, besotted with their cousin. Behind Jean’s refusal to be thought feminine lies a painful naivety; behind Malcolm’s bravado lies inexperience and immaturity. Running beneath the amusing encounter of the civilised and uncivilised is a much more dramatic, tautly told narrative of a crisis point in a relationship – albeit one between siblings. The early 20s can be an incredibly difficult time to be a twin, and Trefusis paints so perfectly the unspoken struggle that must take place when one is ready to loosen the close bond before the other. Trefusis moves from comic to farce to moving with brio – and all in just over a hundred pages.

Echo starts like a Saki short story, all dark mischief and childish menace, but develops and maintains the fablesque tragedy of the Brothers Grimm, alongside flashes of the vibrant, vulnerable 1920s heroine. It’s a heady, brilliant mixture – and, of course, a further addition to the pantheon of twin-lit.

Books to get Stuck into:

The Juniper Tree – Barbara Comyns: the same weaving of fable and pathos appears in this lesser-read Comyns novel

‘The End of the Party’ – Graham Greene: I haven’t written about this twin-based short story, but it is a perfect little accompanient, and can be read online if you click the link.

A bit of 1930s fun

StuckinaBook All , 10 Comments




Yesterday I mentioned The Perfect Pest by Adrian Porter, which I picked up in a charity shop and quickly read. It’s not the kind of book you normally find in a charity shop – a piece of 1930s whimsy and silliness.

The book is a collection of comic verse of the sort that appeared (as some of these did) in Punch and the Morning Post. The first half covers ‘The Perfect…’ example of various types – host, husband, child, dog – in a wry way. The second half does a similar thing, but with more varied topics. It’s all light and silly and amusing – and delightfully illustrated by Eileen McGrath, in a style similar to Joyce Dennys’ wonderful illustrations.

The best way to sell this sweet little book is to give you an example – I’ll pick the title poem, and a few images of the sketches. I think this would make a fun gift for anyone with a retro taste in books – or something to pop on the bedside table in your guest room. Fold down the pertinent pages if you want your guest to make an early exit…


The Perfect Pest

She merely sent a wire to say
That she was coming down to stay.
She brought a maid of minxsome look
Who promptly quarrelled with the cook.
She smoked, and dropped with ruthless hand,
Hot ashes on the Steinway grand.

She strode across the parquet floors
In hobnail boots from out of doors.
She said the water wasn’t hot, and Jane gave notice on the spot.
She snubbed the wealthy dull relations
From whom my wife had expectations.

She kept her bell in constant peals,
She never was in time for meals,
And when at last with joyful heart
We thrust her in the luggage cart,
In half an hour she came again
And said, “My dear, I’ve missed the train!”