1930s

Personal Pleasures

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

I’m currently, and slowly, reading Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay, one of the books I bought under Project 24. It’s a collection of paeans to the m
any and various delights Macaulay encounters in life – from believing to disbelieving, from doves in the chimney to improving the dictionary. It’s a hodge-podge, or perhaps a hotch-potch, and certainly good fun. It does feel a little over-written compared to Macaulay’s novels, with elaborate expressions and fanciful imagery. You can imagine Philip Sidney penning it, whilst not musing on Astrophel and Stella. Having said that, Macaulay delights in pulling the rug from under your feet, and each section has a little turning-point where she considers the flip-side.

This isn’t really a review of the book – that would be foolish, since I’m not even halfway yet – but I thought I’d treat you to one of the sections which tickled me. AND this prepares you for some Macaulay news coming later in the week…

‘Departure of Visitors’

An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors, like trodden herbs. A peace for gods, a divine emptiness.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy Sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy Companies of Men. . . .
Society is all but rude
To this delicious Solitude.

The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books of gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the hairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand. “I am afraid the room is rather littered….” The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.

What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.

To-night we shall sleep deep. We need no more hope that you “have everything you want”; we know that you have, for you are safely home, and can get it from your kitchen if you haven’t. We send you blessing and God speed, and sink into our idle peace as into floods of down.

But you have unfortunately left behind you, besides peace, a fountain pen, a toothbrush, and a bottle of eye lotion with eye bath.

Pass the Buck

StuckinaBook All , , 16 Comments

33. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck
I still have three birthday books to mention – my bounty is seemingly unending! – but I’ve just finished a library book, and wanted to write about that before returning it. This is quite unusual, and it seems I currently wait until all memory of a book has faded before attempting to blog about it… those who can spot a flaw in this plan, you’re not alone. This one is going straight into my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.

I am usually wary of that common book group phrase: “Well, that’s the point of book groups, isn’t it – to make us read things we wouldn’t normally read.” This is almost invariably said when people have hated a book… and, to be honest, there’s usually a reason I don’t read the books that I ‘wouldn’t normally read’. BUT I was forced to use this very expression at book group on Wednesday, concerning Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth.

I don’t know why I’d heard of Buck – possibly because she won the Nobel Prize, and this 1931 novel was a huge bestseller – but there was nothing about this novel which appealed, aside from publication date. Not realising that Buck was brought up in China, I thought this would be akin to a travel guide; the mentions of poverty, peasants, heartbreak, and deception in the blurb made this sound like a tiresome specimen of misery lit; bestselling books, let’s be honest, tend not to equate with great books. But it all just goes to show that all the signs can point in one direction, and yet the novel turn out to be completely unexpected. In the case of The Good Earth, it turned out to be unexpectedly brilliant.

The novels tells the story of a Chinese farmer, Wang Lung. The land is everything to him; it provides or withholds; it is a sign of wealth and status; it is his livelihood. This is the strongest theme of the novel, and one that survives all the human interaction. In bare bones, The Good Earth documents the descent into poverty, and raise into riches, of Wang Lung and his expanding family. They travel south to avoid starvation, begging to survive – always with the intention to return to the land they own. When they do, and when they become rich, there are other intrusions and temptations which mar their good fortune. Across 350 or so pages, the narrative eye does not wander from this family’s experience – Buck decides, wisely in my opinion, to show the state of China in the 1920s and ’30s through the world of a few individuals, rather than great political swathes.

Wang Lung lives with his father, and early in the novel he has decided to get himself a wife. This is no Austenesque tale of courtship: it has been decided before the narrative begins that Wang Lung will be married to a slave from the house of the area’s great family – meekly, uncertainly he enters these courts to collect O-lan, who is described thus by the Great and Ancient Lady of the house:

“This woman came into our house when she was a child of ten and here she has lived until now, when she is twenty years old. I bought her in a year of famine when her parents came south because they had nothing to eat. They were from the north in Shantung and there they returned, and I know nothing further of them. You see she has the strong body and the square cheeks of her kind. She will work well for you in the field and drawing water and all else that you wish. She is not beautiful but that you do not need. Only men of leisure have the need for beautiful women to divert them. Neither is she clever. But she does well what she is told to do and she has a good temper. So far as I know she is a virgin. She has not beauty enough to tempt my sons and grandsons even if she had not been in the kitchen.”
The blurb of my borrowed copy tries valiantly to turn The Good Earth into a feminist text, but it is not that. It is true that O-lan is ultimately the means of raising the family’s fortunes; it is true that she sacrifices much for her family, and is one of few in her family to remain steadfastly loyal, wise, and unselfish. But Buck doesn’t paint O-lan as a paragon, or hold Wang Lung up to disapprobation. It is the brilliance of The Good Earth, and Buck as a writer, that there is almost no sense of the author at all. Sometimes an author is evident in every word of a novel, through style or voice – and this can be either wonderful or dreadful. But I think it takes an even greater talent for the author to fade behind the characters and events, so they do not intrude at all. And this certainly isn’t because the characters’ minds take centre stage – Buck resists giving any sort of psychological insight, and instead allows events and dynamics between family members to have the most impact. Even the dialogue rarely wanders from the surface of characters’ thoughts and feelings – and while Wang Lung, sometime into marriage, ‘had learned now from that impassive square countenance to detect small changes at first invisible to him’, O-lan remains a closed book to the reader for much of the novel. A closed book psychologically, that is – it would yet be impossible not to be moved by O-lan’s life, including one moment where I gasped aloud.

If I had to choose one word to describe The Good Earth, it would indisputably be the word ‘authentic’. Presumably because Buck lived many years in China, she knew the culture inside out. Even reading it as an outsider, I felt enveloped by the culture – details I didn’t know (for example, wearing white for mourning) were mentioned, but subtly, not drawing attention to the reader’s ignorance. Somebody at book group commented that it occasionally felt as though it had been translated from Chinese – that’s how accurate the language and insights felt. Where a modern writer might feel they had to explain their own views, or condemn the sexism inherent to 1930s rural China, Buck bravely allows the characters simply to exist – without approval or disapproval. Instead there is simply the most involving and, yes, authentic narrative I have read for some time. Not a novel I would have imagined responding to thus, but I am very grateful to Yoanna for suggesting we read it – and hope to have encouraged you to do the same.

There is Nothing Like A Dame

StuckinaBook All , 20 Comments

Hello there, I’m back from my trips! I’ll have a rummage through my photographs at some point, and put some up for you to enjoy. Colin did *quite* well at preventing me from reading all the time, but I still managed to read quite a few books, including a mammoth one. And, being the contrary type, the first two I read weren’t even on the list I made. The first was The Seraphim Room by Edith Olivier, which I finished on the train down to Somerset, but the second was a definite read-it-on-a-whim book – usually the most fun. The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) by Agatha Christie somehow leaped to the top of the tbr pile, despite not being anywhere in sight beforehand.

Although my reading is quite diverse now – well, quite diverse – it used to go in very focused swathes. Enid Blyton – Goosebumps – Point Horror – Sweet Valley High (ahem) – Agatha Christie – AA Milne – everything else. When I was on the trail of an author or series, I read very little else for a long time. And, as you can see, Agatha Christie was one of them – and back in about 1999-2001 I read lots and lots by the Mistress of Mystery, the Empress of Enigmas, the Doyenne of Detectives… feel free to come up with your own.

Somehow it had been five and a half years since I last read a Christie novel (that one being At Bertram’s Hotel) and I had a sudden hankering for another. And it seemed quite ridiculous that, having grown up in a vicarage, that I hadn’t read The Murder in the Vicarage. So that was the one I pulled off the shelf and took on holiday.

I must add, before I go further, that I was spurred on by recent enthusiasm in Agatha’s direction from Harriet and Simon S – so thank you both for helping me revisit the Dame!

The Murder at the Vicarage is the first novel featuring Miss Marple (although she had previously popped up in a short story, my resident Christie-expert [Colin] tells me) and is narrated by the vicar whose home is unfortunately the scene of said murder. I won’t go through all the various characters and connections, because they’re much the same as any Christie novel. I don’t mean they’re stereotypes, but rather that they have complex relationships; secrets and lies; affinities and enmities – all the usual, delicious ingredients for a proper murder mystery.

All of that I was expecting. What I wasn’t expecting, what I had somehow either forgotten or never noticed, was how funny Christie is. The problems the vicar and his wife have with their servant are written so amusingly, I laughed out loud a few times. She also has the drifting ‘oh gosh how we simply shrieked’ type down pat too. Annoyingly I’ve left the book at home, so I can’t quote sections to you… so you’ll have to take my word for it.

I only had two problems with The Murder at the Vicarage. Firstly, I wasn’t bowled over by the solution – Dame A can sometimes write such brilliant denouements, that this one didn’t quite live up to her genius for plot. Secondly, although Miss Marple’s first novel, she didn’t feature very much, and I mourned her absence because I love Jane Marple. Her character hadn’t quite settled down to the Miss M we know and love, but her interest in ‘human nature’, and her catalogue of seemingly unrelated anecdotes to help her deduce – they were present and correct. I just wanted more of her in the novel.

But I imagine there are quite a few of us in the same boat – we watch Christie adaptations on TV, and have read a fair few of her novels over the years, but maybe not for a while – and don’t quite rate her as a good prose stylist or delineater of character, etc. I think it’s worth looking again, and reinvestigating the Dame. I’m definitely glad I did.

Books to get Stuck into:

To be honest, I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by some of the other Golden Age and pre-Golden Age detective fiction writers. In comparison to Christie’s plots, they just seem a bit poor – Christie never springs surprises on you at the last minute; the clues are always there if you look closely enough. So I’ve picked a couple of my favourite Christies:

And Then There Were None – my favourite, and Colin’s favourite, even without Poirot or Marple or any detective at all – it’s probably her cleverest story. Ten people are mysteriously invited to an island, and are even more mysteriously killed off one by one…

The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side – a Miss Marple, with a simply brilliant plot, and a good one to get a feel for AC if – goodness me – you’ve not read one before.

The Green Child

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

I was flicking through the titles printed by Capuchin Classics the other day – and by ‘flicking through’ I mean ‘scrolling down their website’; and by ‘the other day’ I mean ‘a couple of months ago’ – and spotted The Green Child (1935) by Herbert Read. My only encounter with him had been a book called Prose Style, or something like that, which I’d flicked through – unaware that he’d written novels. Or, in fact, one novel – for this is it. This part of the blurb had me hooked: Widely debated when it came out more than a generation ago, The Green Child is truly a masterpiece, a rare blend of fantasy and reality.And so I emailed off to see if the had a review copy to spare – which they did…

I said that Read had only written one novel, and in a way that’s true – but he certainly made up for it with The Green Child. Although under 200 pages in length, the three parts of the book are essentially three different novels. The same story runs through them, and the same central character of Olivero, but the feel and style differs so dramatically that it’s unlikely you’ll react the same way to each section.

We learn on the first page that Olivero, the President of a South American country, has faked his own death by assassination. As you do. His yearning to return to his roots, a little English village, has overcome his political ambitions (wise man) and he makes his way back to the countryside of his youth. As he wanders around, seeing what has changed and what has remained, he is struck by a change which seems unlikely: It was then that he noticed, or thought he noticed, an extraordinary fact. The stream as he remembered it – and he could remember the pressure of its current against his bare legs as he waded among its smooth, flat pebbles – ran in the direction of the station from which he had just come. But now, indubitably, it was flowing in the opposite direction, towards the church. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might say. And he follows the stream until he arrives at a mill… wherein he sees a ‘frail and pallid’ woman being kept captive by a man he had once been schoolmaster to; Kneeshaw. Yes, the perspicacious amongst you will have guessed correctly: this is the Green Child of the title. No sooner has Kneeshaw been vanquished, and the silent Green Child headed off with Olivero, but: With a cry of happiness, as if a secret joy had suddenly been revealed to him, he raced forward, and hand in hand they sank below the surface of the pool.
And that’s the last we hear of them for a bit, because Part Two is all the back story of Olivero’s life. I’d wondered why they bothered making him an ex-President, and now I see why – we follow him through his political ascension and… well, to be honest, I skim-read quite a lot of this section. To be frank, I found it really dull. I don’t think novels should include huge chunks of ‘and this is what had happened beforehand’ (analepsis, is that?) because it’s difficult to be interested. And combine that with political stuff… well, if you’re interested in political novels, then this section might work for you – but I’d just got really interested in the first section, so was frustrated when we were diverted off track. It’s the diary section of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall all over again.

Fast forward ninety pages or so, and we’re onto Part Three: they’re in the underground world from whence the Green Child came, and they’re exploring. This section has most in common with utopia literature like Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis and, indeed, Thomas More’s Utopia. It would make really interesting reading alongside, especially the former. We’ve moved from fantasy-in-the-real-world to fantasy-in-a-fantasy-world where, for instance, there is no concept of time. I wonder what J.W. Dunne would have to say about that?

So there you go. One short novel; three genres. The first of them was my favourite, and I did rather wish that The Green Child had continued entirely in that vein. While the third section was interesting, it felt more like the set-up to a different novel. And, as mentioned before, the second section was very much not my cup of tea. And perhaps that’s the problem with the novel – I can’t imagine anybody loving each ‘genre’ equally? Surely you’ll want more politics and less fantasy, or vice versa, and so forth?

But someone who did approve is Mr. Graham Greene, who wrote the 1946 introduction included in this edition. The Green Child is definitely intriguing, and a very unusual novel, but I can’t agree with Greene in his unqualified enthusiasm – whilst I am not wholly unenthusiastic, there are a lot of qualifications.

Ssshhhh…

StuckinaBook All , , 6 Comments

Let’s start the week as we mean to go on – with a review of a rather good book. The book in question is Secret Lives (1932) by Mr. E.F. Benson. Thanks to Nancy for bringing this to my attention absolutely AGES ago, I was finally able to get around to it just before I was struck down with illness.

It’s no secret that I love, love, and love the Mapp and Lucia series, as do many of you, but I hadn’t read any other EFB novels – despite having quite a few on my shelves. Secret Lives is reportedly the closest to that series and, although it isn’t as good as them, it certainly has the same spirit.

Think Lucia in London for the setting – i.e., we’re not in a Tillingesque village, we’re instead on the exclusive Durham Square in London. Exclusive, indeed, because Mrs. Mantrip’s father had systematically whittled his tenants down to the respectable and well-to-do, making sure Durham Square became the residency of choice for the highest society in London. And, for all that, it is incredibly provincial in its in-fighting, and the fact that everybody knows everybody else’s business. For a start, there is the matter of dogs in the garden. Mrs. Mantrip’s father (whom she reveres, and whose Life she is gradually writing – or, indeed, thinking about writing) expressly forbade it. But Elizabeth Conklin and her ten Pekinese – all circling her on leads – are keen to oppose. Cue all the wonderful cattiness and polite venom which fans of Mapp and Lucia have come to expect.

But then the title comes into play. ‘Below the seeming tranquillity of the Square surprising passions and secret lives were seething in unsuspected cauldrons.’ Margaret Mantrip’s secret passion, despite her outward literary pretensions, is for the novels of Rudolf da Vinci. Think Marie Corelli – i.e. atrociously written, probably addictive, lots of swooning heroines and dashing heroes.

The only distinguished thing about it, from a literary point of view, was its unique lack of distinction. It was preposterous to the last degree, but there was a sumptuousness about it, and, though nauseatingly moral in its conclusion, there was also fierceness, a sadism running like a scarlet thread through its portentous pages.
Margaret keeps these titles on a bottom shelf, hidden by a curtain and surrounded by her father’s collection of theological titles… And then there is mysterious Susan Leg who has recently moved into the Square – very wealthy, but says ‘Pardon?’ and ‘serviette’ and serves caviar spread on scones. What’s going on?

It doesn’t take an overly-perceptive reader to realise quite quickly that Rudolph da Vinci and Susan Leg are one and the same. And, indeed, E.F. Benson doesn’t leave us in the dark for long. In the hands of a lesser novelist, Leg’s unveiling might have been the denouement – but Benson is more interested in the intrigue and humour to be found in deception and social superficiality. Throw in an anonymous society columnist and a scathing reviewer, and there is enough confusion and hypocrisy all round to make the most ardent Tillingite happy.

As I said at the beginning, Secret Lives doesn’t match the brilliance of the Mapp and Lucia series, where every character (even when a bit two-dimensional) is a delight – but, once you’ve exhausted that series, this is a wonderful place to look. And a middlebrow novelist being biting about lesser novelists – and, especially, about critics – is always good fun. Thank you, Nancy, for recommending this novel – I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

I forgot about the Books to get Stuck into feature on my Persephone reviews (N.B. the poll results, with all 163 votes, are up now – thanks for voting!) but here they are, back again. Obviously the best companion novels, if Secret Lives sounds intriguing, are the Mapp and Lucia series, and Tom Holt’s or Guy Fraser-Sampson’s sequels, but here are some other suggestions:

Books to get Stuck into:

Elizabeth Taylor: Angel – although not very similar in tone, the wonderfully awful and self-unaware Angel is also modelled on the Marie Corelli type.

Rose Macaulay: Keeping Up Appearances – funny and arch, this 1920s novel has a mediocre novelist, but also all sorts of secrets and secret lives tangled up together, and is definitely worth seeking out.

“Experience doth take dreadfully high wages…”

StuckinaBook All , , 10 Comments

.
On the off chance that you’ll have me back, after Mel and Dark Puss have proved me completely dispensable over the past month, I’m going to turn my hand to another book review! And this time it’s a Persephone book, which always curries favour. I am getting a little ahead of myself, what with Persephone Reading Week coming up around the corner, but I thought it would cheating to review this then, since I actually finished it in the middle of March.

Dorothy Whipple’s High Wages (1930) is the latest Whipple novel to be published by Persephone and the third that I’ve read – the other two being the very wonderful Someone at a Distance and the pretty wonderful They Knew Mr. Knight. [edit: I forgot that I’ve also read Greenbanks, but don’t remember much about it…] High Wages focuses on Jane Carter, who takes a job working for Mr. Chadwick who runs a draper’s shop in Tidsley. She’s doing it on account of a stepmother, but we don’t think about her much after the first chapter, and she only really acts as a catalyst for what follows. Jane enters the politics of a small town and a small shop, dealing with the meanness of her employers, the lovesickness of her colleague Maggie, and the quiet friendship of poor-wife-made-good Mrs. Briggs.
Persephone’s write-up of the novel is very interesting, far more than just description of the book, and I recommend you give it a read by clicking here. They include this thought:She is not, of course, a ‘great’ writer. You could not take one of her sentences, as you can with, say, Mollie Panter-Downes, and hold it up to the light. But she is serviceable, perceptive and humane.I agree on all counts – while Whipple’s prose is a cut above a lot of her contemporaries (and almost everything I flick through in the bookshop now) she isn’t a notable stylist. She even veers towards the saccharine or predictable on occasion in this novel (though not in the other two I’ve read) – I definitely blame the romance plot, which High Wages could have done without, and would have been a better novel for it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Whipple’s publisher leant on her to include it… but it just got a little silly towards the end. (Query: is it possible to write the dialogue of people desperately and recklessly in love without sounding like a mediocre soap opera? Then again, I’m quite fond of mediocre soap operas…)


That aside, there is plenty to love. How could you not like a book with the following sentiment? :Oh, the comfort of that first cup of tea! The warmth and life it put into you! They held their hands round the cups to warm them and their eyes looked less heavily on the bleak kitchen.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Jane.

‘We have another cup of tea, said Maggie’The day-to-day runnings of the shop make excellent material for a novel, and that’s what I enjoyed most in High Wages – the hierarchies in the shop and those of the customers, and how Jane negotiates them. Such is the minutiae that Whipple does so well, and so perceptively.

An interesting sideplot is the maid Lily and her abusive husband. That sounds very gritty, but Whipple has a way of taking gritty plots and making them pretty cosy… And I do have a weakness for dialect-driven, unselfconscious servants in interwar novels – the best being Nellie in another Persephone, Cheerful Weather For The Wedding. For a taste of Nellie, click here – otherwise, back to Lily:

Lily arrived. She whimpered as she lit the fire, and as Jane reappeared at intervals in the kitchen, she told her Bob wasn’t like a husband at all.

‘Aren’t you going to love me a bit I says to ‘im this morning, and ‘e says with such a nasty look, “To ‘ell with you and your love.” Just like that.’

And when she tried to kiss him good-bye, he’d thrown a plate at her.

‘Whatever do you want to kiss him for?’ asked Jane, squeezing out the wash-leather for the shop-door glass. ‘Throw a plate back at him, my goodness.’

She thought she herself would make short work of such a husband.

‘No…’ Lily shook her head as she dipped the bald brush into the blacklead. ‘I couldn’t do that. Bad as ‘e is, I love ‘im. Besides, it’s me as ‘as to pay for the plate.’
Well, quite.

Throughout High Wages there is fairly strong divide between rich-bad-people and the ‘onest-‘umble-poor. Mrs. Briggs bridges the divide – in that she’s rich, but always harks back to the simpler times before her husband (whose name I forgot, but which I presume is Alfred or Albert; this sort of man is always called one of the two) got rich. I did find that all a little tedious… but that’s a small quibble. And is really mentioned as way of bringing up rich-bad-Sylvia, and this amusing description of her:
Sylvia, poor child, hadn’t a grain of humour in her composition. Not what he called humour. She didn’t like Punch. That was his test. She laughed at hats sometimes, but he couldn’t remember that she ever laughed at anything else.
All in all, High Wages is an enjoyable novel, though not one I think Persephone would have reprinted had it been Whipple’s only novel. I recommend you start with Someone at a Distance, if you’ve never read a Whipple novel before – but High Wages doesn’t do any damage to the credentials of Persephone’s most popular discovery.

Miss Mole

StuckinaBook All , 25 Comments

It is nice to have someone in my book group who has very similar reading tastes to me. It means I needn’t harp on about my choices all the time, I can sit back and let Miss Mole (1930) by EH Young be selected, without even having to suggest it myself. Thanks Ruth! This was my first EH Young (of the three or four which have found their way to my bookshelves) but it definitely won’t be my last. AND Miss Mole won the James Tait Black Award, which is generally a better guide for good books than any of the other major book awards.

Miss Mole is a fairly mischievous forty-something who seeks work as a housekeeper. She embarrasses her cousin Lilla, who is from the ‘better’ side of the family, into finding her a position with a nonconformist minister Robert Corder, his daughters Ethel and Ruth, and their cousin Wilfred. Miss Mole’s defence against the potential boredom of her life is concealing her lively and humorous character behind a facade of the dutiful, unintelligent housekeeper which is expected of her.

She could see herself clearly enough with other people’s eyes: she was drab, she was nearing, if she had not reached, middle-age, she bore the stamp of a woman who had always worked against the grain[…] Who would suspect her of a sense of fun and irony, of a passionate love for beauty and the power to drag it from its hidden places?
This is the sort of family-orientated novel which Richmal Crompton sometimes does better, and sometimes rather worse. Young never falls into the pitfalls to which Crompton is occasionally prone – preciousness or being ever so slightly saccharine. Miss Mole is a fairy-tale, but without sentimentality. That is not to say the novel is remotely cynical or disillusioned – but rather that there is nothing which would be more appropriate in a book called Tales For Disconcerted Infants. But it is definitely in the fairy-tale mold – Miss Mole deals with the various dilemmas and quandaries facing the members of the Corder family, who all grow to depend upon her. And she has a few problems of her own, which are gradually revealed, though the family around her remains oblivious.

They were all too young or too self-absorbed to understand that her life was as important to her as theirs to them and had the same possibilities of adventure and romance; that, with her, to accept the present as the pattern of the future would have been to die.
But it is as impossible to pity her as it is to envy her position, because she is so irrepressible. Though she teases everyone, especially her cousin Lilla (and all while pretending to be respectful, and subtle enough to evade retaliation) there is no malice in Miss Mole. There were a few bits which made me laugh out loud, and plenty which made me smile:
“This is a fine old city, Miss Mole,” he said, “full of historic associations, and we have one of the finest parish churches in the country – if you are interested in architecture,” he added, with a subtle suggestion that this was not likely.

Hannah longed to ask what effect her indifference would have on the building, but Mr. Corder did not wait for reassurance about its safety.

EH Young’s strength is in dialogue – when Miss Mole is wittily dissecting other people’s words, but in the guise of guileless innocence, Young crafts the exchanges so finely. The prose narrative is good, but sometimes drags a bit, and doesn’t have the liveliness which Miss Mole injects into the dialogue. Perhaps this is why EH Young is a very good, but not a great, novelist – however, when it comes to drawing characters, she is really rather brilliant. Miss Mole is a creation of whom Jane Austen would be proud, and I think I’ll remember her for some time.

As I said – my first EH Young, but not my last. Thank you, books, for being sturdy enough to last 80 years and allow me the enjoyment of all the wonderful novelists who are neglected by most of the publishing world today! EH Young is surely due a reprint from someone…

 

Hurrah for Mrs. Tim!

StuckinaBook All , , 17 Comments

You know how it is – you start a book in October, and… you finish it in January. I don’t quite know how that happened, but there it is, Mrs. Tim of the Regiment by DE Stevenson has been on my bedside table for at least three months, dipped in and out of, and yesterday evening I read the last page. It certainly wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy it, but perhaps because I wanted something light, enjoyable, and reliable on the bedside table. All the books I’ve read in the Bloomsbury Group series have been gems, and this was no different.

The first thing to say, which Elaine and others have noted in their reviews, is that Mrs. Tim of the Regiment is very much a book of two halves. Though not signposted, this novel is actually Mrs. Tim of the Regiment and Golden Days put together, but they have been that way since 1940 odd – it wasn’t Bloomsbury’s decision. The two books are very different in style – both are about Hester Christie (aka Mrs. Tim) an army wife, looking after her husband and two children, and being witty and self-effacing and coping with everything that’s thrown her way. But, though it all takes diary format, only the first half really feels like a diary – the second half is far more narrative driven.

And the second thing to say is – how very like the Provincial Lady this is! Well, the first half especially. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I wasn’t reading an unknown fifth PL book. Take, for instance, this sizeable quotation:

Suddenly the spell is broken, the door of our compartment is pushed ajar, and through the aperture appears the fat white face of Mrs. McTurk. Of all the people in the world Mrs. McTurk is, perhaps, the one I least want to see. I can’t help wondering what she is doing in the train, and how she found me. She must be – I suppose – one of those peculiar people who walk about in trains. Why couldn’t she have remained peacefully where she was put by the porter amidst her own belongings in (I have no doubt) a comfortable first-class compartment?

“Is this really you?” she says

I reply that it is. The woman has the knack of saying things which invite a fatuous answer.

“Well I never!” she says.

I fix a false smile upon my countenance, whereupon she insinuates her cumbrous body through the door, and sits down beside Betty.

“So you are going north for a holiday,” she says.

Betty bounces up and down on the seat. “Do you know Mummie?” she cries excitedly. “Fancy you knowing Mummie! I thought Mummie didn’t know anybody in Kiltwinkle. Of course I knew lots of children at school, but it was awfully dull for Mummy. Mrs. Watt said there would be lots of parties, and Mummie bought a new dress, and then nobody asked her.”

I plunge wildly into the conversation, wishing, not for the first time, that Betty were shy with strangers.
I suspect the Provincial Lady’s Vicky and Mrs. Tim’s Betty never met – but what good friends they would have been, had they done so. I also suspect that DE Stevenson had read the Provincial Lady books (the first of which was published just a couple of years before she started her Mrs. Tim books) and I don’t blame her at all for wanting to emulate them.

Mrs. Tim, especially these early sections, is deliciously moreish. Not a great deal happens, not in the way of linear plot – the attempts to find a house were hilarious, looking round increasingly unsuitable properties – this is mostly the quotidian, finding humour and pathos in the everyday. As the second half of the book arrives, Mrs. Tim heads up to Scotland sans husband, and becomes embroiled in the confusing love lives of various young folk. She even becomes an unwitting object of attraction herself (Stevenson rather cleverly using the diary format to show Hester’s oblivious innocence even while letting the reader know what is going on.) But, of course, Hester has eyes only for her husband.

Mr. Tim himself is rather more likable than his Provincial Lady counterpart – you feel that the Christie marriage has more laughs in it than the PL’s. At the same time, he is as bad as Robert when it comes to recognising quotations from Jane Austen…

Like all the rest of the Bloomsbury Group series, Mrs. Tim of the Regiment is a delight to read, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Being honest, it doesn’t maintain the high level throughout – I much preferred the first half to the second, as has probably become clear – but it’s just the sort of book you’ll want to read once you’ve exhausted EM Delafield’s superlative Provincial Lady series. And if, somehow, you’ve not read the PL books yet – hie thee to a library!

Apparently there’s a whole series of Mrs. Tim books – and I’m told they’re also more narrative-driven. Though I don’t think I’ll be using up my Project 24 allowance on them, they’re certainly going into my Amazon Marketplace Basket to be pondered over for 2011… (edit: no they won’t! I’ve just seen the prices!)

Oh – and if you’ve got this far, do pop in tomorrow for a giveaway of… a mystery title! All will be revealed tomorrow….

Try Anything Twice

StuckinaBook All , , , 3 Comments

[N.B. this post migrated from my old site and, like all of them, it messed up the quotations a bit – this one has turned into one huge paragraph and I no longer know where the gaps should be!]

Good things come to those who wait, we are told, and that’s generally how I treat books which come to my shelves. A few leap immediately to hand, read within minutes of arriving, but most are left – like fine wines – to mature. And so it is that Try Anything Twice by Jan Struther, which arrived in October 2007 from lovely Ruth (aka Crafty Person), has finally been read. And it’s like a hot cup of tea on a wintery afternoon.

Jan Struther is best known for Mrs. Miniver – which I wrote a bit about back here – the voice of quintessential middle-class Englishness leading up to World War Two. Though she altered dramatically for the film, there was still that kernel of being England’s everywoman (within the remit of those with servants and children at boarding school and jolly outings.) Though Try Anything Twice doesn’t feature Mrs. M, the voice is instantly recognisable. Published in 1938, the volume collects articles and essays that Jan Struther wrote for Spectator, New Statesman, Punch, and other journals. They’re all from that middle-class world, but what an observant world it can be – whether noting the vagaries of updating an address book (‘Zazoulian, the little Armenian painter. His pictures are not very good, nor his conversation amusing, and it is eighteen months since you saw him: but a “Z” is a “Z”‘) or going to a Registry Office to find a nanny (one who is neither a dragon nor a duchess) or the poetic potential of a builder’s plans.

As always with short stories or essays or poems – anything where there is no uniform whole – it is near impossible to write a convincing review of Try Anything Twice, especially since I read it over the course of some weeks. Verity’s review is worth seeing, by the way, but for now I think the best way to talk about the book is to give you a sample. It’s not necessarily the best in the book, but it’s fairly representative of the style of Try Anything Twice. All of the book is actually available online, but of course (!) it’s better to get hold of the book itself. If you like the following, as they say, you’ll like the book. Ladies and Gentlemen; ‘With Love From Aunt Hildegarde’

THERE are three ways of choosing presents for other people. The first is to choose something you think they would like; the second, something you would like yourself; the third, something you think they ought to have. Of these methods the first is the wisest but the least common; the second is less wise but more usually followed; while the third is wholly unforgivable and accounts for much of the post-Christmas bitterness from which we are apt to suffer. My great-aunt Hildegarde is an almost fanatical devotee of the third method. Many people would call her an ideal aunt; that is to say, she gives us presents not only at Christmas but for each of our birthdays and often in between times as well. But her gifts have, so to speak, a sting in the tail; they represent her unspoken criticisms on our habits, customs and whole mode of living. Whenever we see her firm capable handwriting on a parcel, or a box arrives from a shop with one of her cards enclosed, we pause before unpacking it any further, sit back on our haunches and wonder what we’ve done wrong now. “I know,” says T. “Last time she dined here the spout of the coffee-pot was chipped and it dribbled all down her frock.” “No,” I reply, “I know what it is. The menu-card was propped up against the candlestick, and she said how awkward it was the way it kept slipping down.” And when we open it, sure enough, if it isn’t a new china coffee-pot it is a pair of menu-holders–contrivances which we particularly dislike, even when they are not made from tooled gun-metal in the form of two hedge-sparrows rampant, regardant and proper. Once she came to tea with me on a pouring wet day and found nowhere to park her umbrella. The next day a large tubular object arrived. It had vaguely military associations, but it had been so converted and distorted that it was difficult to tell whether it had originally been a large German shell or part of a small field-gun used in the Russo-Japanese War. A third possibility is that it was once a moth-proof travelling container for a Balkan field-marshal’s top-boots. At any rate, it takes up a great deal of room in the hall. And another time, I remember, she wanted to write a note at my desk and was scandalised because there was no proper pen and ink–although, as I explained, I had three fountain-pens, any of which I was willing to lend her. Four days elapsed and I began to breathe more freely. But on the fifth there came a small square parcel containing a silver-mounted ink-pot with my initials irrevocably engraved upon it (which accounted, no doubt, for the delay). Like the umbrella stand, it was a convert; but in this case there was no difficulty in guessing its original function. To make matters quite clear, Aunt Hildegarde had attached a note saying: “I feel sure you will like to have this little memento of poor dear Blackie, on whose back you took your first ride. This is the very hoof which she used to lift so prettily to shake hands. May it bring you lots of inspiration for your little poems!!” I groaned, filled it with fountain-pen ink and set it fair and square in the middle of my writing-table, where it remains to this day, a constant reminder of the agonies and humiliations of childhood; for it was the self-same hoof with which Blackie once stood for a full five minutes on my toe, I having neither the strength nor the courage to remove her. I do not wish to look a gift-hoof in the mouth or to seem in any way ungrateful, but the thing is getting on our nerves. Not only are we developing an inferiority complex about our own home but we are becoming self-conscious about entertaining Aunt Hildegarde. We dare not give her grapes, lest she should think that we are hinting at grape-scissors; nor lobster, for fear of invoking a set of silver-plated picks. But however careful we are we cannot think of everything. We did not, for instance, foresee that she would give us an electric clock for Christmas. It is true that when she came to stay with us a month ago our drawing-room clock was not behaving quite as a good clock should. One day it was a few minutes slow and she missed the weather forecast on the wireless. And another day it ran down altogether and made her late for church. “Your Uncle Julian,” she said gently, “used to wind all the clocks in the house every Sunday morning.” But this mild fragment of reminiscence did not at all prepare us, though perhaps it should have, for the grey maple rhomboid which now adorns our mantelpiece. At least, it looks like maple, but it is actually (so the accompanying leaflet informs us) made of steel, which can neither shrink nor warp, neither rust nor tarnish. It runs off the electric mains; it needs no winding; it is guaranteed to keep absolutely perfect time; and ever since it came into the house we have felt acutely ill at ease. Our old happy-go-lucky days are over. No more can we think comfortingly as we start out rather late for a dinner-party: “Oh, well, perhaps our clock is fast,” nor, when we arrive there to find hostess champing and fellow-guests ravenous, can we murmur, “We are dreadfully sorry, but our clock was slow,” for our friends have already got to know about our new, our abominable possession. Gone too are sundry minor pleasures, such as listening for the radio Time Signal and leaping up to make a half-minute adjustment; and, better still, squandering pennies in a lordly way by dialling T.I.M. And gone–worst of all–is the small friendly sound which used to accompany our thoughts, the balanced alternation of tick and tock, like the footsteps of a little dog walking very quickly beside you on the pavement. Time now proceeds for us in a series of hard metallic clicks, one every minute, each identical with the last: it is a large, slow, hopping bird of prey which follows relentlessly behind us. For fifty-nine seconds it stands still; we escape it; we are immortal; and then with a sudden deft leap it catches us up again. Better never to escape; better to have our little trotting dog. But there is nothing to be done about it. If we did not use the clock, or if we banished it to the dining-room, Aunt Hildegarde would not only think us both mad and decadent–for what sane responsible citizen would not jump at the opportunity of being always certain of the time?–but she would also be terribly hurt. It was touching to see her when she came to tea yesterday, gazing up with reverent eyes at the angular, impersonal, implacable monster on the mantelpiece. “Your Uncle Julian,” she said, “would have found it such a boon.” The vulture took another hop forward.

Just what the doctor ordered

StuckinaBook All , 11 Comments

I’m am back in the land of the living! Sorry to abandon you for so long – I did mean to at least put up some photographs, but post-flu exhaustion left me feeling more or less dead in the evenings, which is when I usually do my blogging. But now I am fighting fit (relatively speaking) with only an annoying cough which seems disinclined to go away.


As I mentioned in the previous post, any sign of illness and I stop being able to read. Hugely irksome, as you can imagine. But I did manage to read one book last week – the font was sufficiently big, and the story adequately undemanding, while yet being rather wonderful – it was Joyce Dennys’ Repeated Doses. As the title suggests, it is not the first in the series. And, using my last months of spontaneous book-buying, I scurried away to buy Mrs. Dose the Doctor’s Wife and The Over-Dose. These are, respectively, the first and third books in the series, published between 1930 and 1933.


I say series. These books are divided into various sections – not really short stories, but more like episodes in various lives. Like Henrietta in Joyce Dennys’ now much-beloved Henrietta’s War (wrote about it here), and Dennys herself, all the heroines are doctors’ wives. Or rather, all the stories are about doctors and their families – usually with an instrumental wife. Though they all have different names, they have a shared characteristic running through (I believe) all three books – that of ‘false nosery’, in Dennys’ words. Let me explain, by quoting the first book:

All Doctors’ Wives wear False Noses. This fact is not generally known, except to Doctors and their Wives themselves. Even their children hardly ever realize, until they grow up and possibly become Doctors or Doctors’ Wives, that their mother went through her married life with a False Nose firmly fixed to her face. There have been cases when even the Doctor himself has forgotten that the Nose he sees as breakfast is not the Nose he wooed. But these are exceptional cases, for Doctors are, as a rule, discerning and disillusioned people.

A Doctor’s Wife must wear a False Nose to disguise herself, and thus persuade her husband’s patients, and even more, the people who are not her husband’s patients, but who might be, that she is like Caesar’s Wife, above suspicion.

She must, if possible, however dark her thoughts and evil her intentions, persuade people that she is a model of wifely devotion, motherly love and womanly yearnings.
If she meets the Vicar being carried in at her front door with his throat cut, as she goes out to a Bridge party, she must not divulge this spicy bit of gossip to her friends, and if during the afternoon somebody comes rushing in to say that the Vicar has been hanged, she is denied the exquisite pleasure of saying, and it is at such times that the False Nose hangs most heavy, “Excuse me, but his throat was cut, I saw it; your deal, I think.”

And so it goes. These are stories about the diplomacy of doctors’ wives, the peculiarities of the medical profession, and the length to which the wives will go to secure patients for their husbands. (That sounds more macabre than I intended…) In many ways, I think being in a doctor’s family must be quite similar to being in a vicar’s family – certainly in terms of diplomacy, presenting the Public Face of the Profession, and keeping schtum on all sorts of topics.

Dennys’ stories in Repeated Doses exaggerate a bit – a woman seeking treatment for a wart ends up in a Rest Home; a name mix up causes an international incident; baskets of fruit become the front line for deceit and intrigue. All great fun.


And, which is half the pleasure with Dennys’ books, they are illustrated by Dennys too. I’ve scattered some of those illustrations throughout this post, and they might prove irresistible to you… They make a lovely set of books – really thick, chunky books, with thick paper, and a feel of luxury quite unexpected for the early-thirties. Obviously they got printed just before printers started economising… I’m so grateful to have heard of Joyce Dennys, and these are real treats to enjoy, return to, and treasure.