1930s

Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham – #1937Club

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My first stop for the 1937 Club is Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham. I bought my copy in 2011, drawn (as ever) to any novel about the theatre. And what could be more about the theatre than a novel which is boldly given that one-word title? Incidentally, it was a title that was jettisoned for the 2004 movie adaptation, called Being Julia.

The adaptation’s title is a clue to the star of the novel: Julia Lambert. She is also a star of the stage, beloved by everyone from starry-eyed servants to the great and the good of London society. It is an era where film stars have begun to take ascendancy, but her dabbling in that arena has proved unsatisfactory and quickly forgotten – instead, she retains her dominance of London theatrical scene. And W. Somerset Maugham makes clear it is deserved. Julia is attractive (though not as attractive as her matinee idol husband, Michael), but more than that she is magnetic. She is extremely talented, loved as much by critics as by the public. She is also that most difficult of things for a female actress: middle-aged.

In the opening scene, Julia and Michael meet a young man called Tom Fennell. He is an articled clerk, working on audits for Michael’s accounts – and the encounter shows him to be a little bashful, a little in awe of the celebrities he is meeting.

“Poor lamb,” she thought. “I suppose this is the most wonderful moment in his whole life. What fun it’ll be for him when he tells his people. I expect he’ll be a blasted little hero in his office.”

Julia talked very differently to herself and to other people: when she talked to herself her language was racy. It was really rather wonderful, when you came to think of it, that just to have lunch with her for three quarters of an hour, perhaps, could make a man quite important in his own scrubby little circle.

Julia is, as you can see, a snob. But she is not merely a snob about class – she is a snob about significance. She is deeply conscious about her own fame and importance, and years of success have taught her to have a kindly benevolence to people who aren’t as successful as she is. It should be a deeply unappealing trait, but Maugham somehow makes her sympathetic throughout. Perhaps it is because she is no longer in her heyday. The fragility of her period of power makes her confidence in it feel a little sad, rather than unkind.

After this set up scene, Maugham takes us back to Julia and Michael meeting as young actors in a theatre company. He is very good at the different types of actor you will find in a theatre, and the varying types of performance that are needed of them. Michael is beautiful but not especially talented, and there’s certainly a place for that sort of actor, then as now.

He was well suited to drawing-room comedy. His light voice gave a peculiar effect to a flippant line, and though he never managed to make love convincingly he could carry off a chaffing love sane, making a proposal as if it were rather a joke, or a declaration as though he were laughing at himself, in a manner that the audience found engaging. He never attempted to play anyone but himself. He specialized in men about town, gentlemanly gamblers, guardsmen and young scamps with a good side to them. 

Maugham goes steadily through their courtship, the interruption of Michel experimenting (without success) in America and the bigger interruption of the First World War. They decide to set up in theatre management, with Michael as manager and occasional actor and Julia as the star. I found all this section of the novel a little tedious. I’m never a fan of an author starting with a significant scene and then labouring through a whole lot of ‘and here’s how we got here’. It always diffuses the narrative tension, and I found that Theatre lost a lot of momentum as we went through the years of Julia and Michael’s relationship. It was well written and quite interesting, but didn’t pull the novel forward.

The main thing to know, though, is that – by the time of the novel’s first ‘present day’ scene – Julia is no longer in love with Michael. She has no intention of disrupting their marriage, and is quite fond of him and admires him, but the passion has gone. From her side, at least.

Julia was surprised to discover in herself a strange feeling of pity for him because she no longer loved him. She was a kindly woman, and he realized that it would be a bitter blow to his pride if he ever had an inkling how little he meant to her. She continued to flatter him. She noticed that for long now he had come to listen complacently to her praise of his exquisite nose and beautiful eyes. She got a little private amusement by seeing how much he could swallow. She laid it on with a trowel. But now she looked more often at his straight thin-lipped mouth. It grew meaner as he grew older, and by the time he was an old man it would be no more than a cold hard line.

I’m putting in lots of quotes, but I also wanted to share this very contemporary-feeling section about Michael’s good looks. He has built his career on being handsome, and is desperate to preserve it. In an era before plastic surgery, airbrushing and the like, he has a regime that is nevertheless still recognisable. I thought it was quite novel that Maugham gives this vanity to the man, rather than the woman – and that it is an understandable vanity, since his continuing career depends on it.

Nor was he only vain of his business acumen; with advancing years he had become outrageously vain of his person. As a youth he had taken his beauty for granted; now he began to pay more attention to it and spared no pains to keep what was left of it. It became an obsession. He devoted anxious care to his figure. He never ate a fattening thing and never forgot his exercises. He consulted hair specialists when he thought his hair was thinning, and Julia was convinced that had it been possible to get the operation done secretly he would have had his face lifted. He had got into the way of sitting with his chin slightly thrust out so that the wrinkles in his neck should not show and he held himself with an arched back to keep his belly from sagging. He could not pass a mirror without looking into it. He hankered for compliments and beamed with delight when he had managed to extract one.

Theatre picked up a lot more when the main plot of the novel takes off. Julia embarks on an affair with Tom, the auditor who is visiting them in the first scene. It starts when he is something of a fanboy. He sends her flowers after a performance, and invites her to go for a cup of tea. In some ways, it has much in common with the dozens of invitations sent to her by starstruck young men and women – which Julia has always accepted as a touching recognition of her celebrity, but never considered taking up. Even on this occasion, she thinks to herself that it is an absurdly naïve request. But… she goes. And Tom shows himself to have more wherewithal than Julia had imagined. Suddenly, slightly to the surprise of both of them, they sleep together. And they keep sleeping together. 

Julia maintains her aura of superiority with Tom – or at least her appearance of having her act together. But she is overwhelmed by the emotions of it all – and here we see her with the only person she is mostly honest with, her maid Evie:

She had been as excited all the evening as a girl going to her first ball. She could not help thinking how absurd she was. But when she had taken off her theatrical make-up and made up again for supper she could not satisfy herself. She put blue on her eyelids and took it off again, she rouged her cheeks, rubbed them clean and tried another colour.

“What are you trying to do?” said Evie.

“I’m trying to look twenty, you fool.”

“If you try much longer you’ll look your age.”

I was surprised by how casually open some of the descriptions of sex were. Maugham doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty, but he also writes things like this:

For Julia was shrewd, and she knew very well that Tom was not in love with her. To have an affair with her flattered his vanity. He was a highly-sexed young man and enjoyed sexual exercise. From hints, from stories that she had dragged out of him, she discovered that since he was seventeen he had had a great many women. He loved the act rather than the person. He looked upon it as the greatest lark in the world.

Theatre isn’t simply some romantic tale of people meeting across a class and age barrier, though. Maugham takes this premise and has fun with it, and there are certainly some scenes of Tom and Julia enjoying themselves as they deceive the people around them – but it is relatively short-lived. Instead, Julia discovers the pains of jealousy for about the first time in her life. Tom continues working for Michael but, being much closer to the age of Tom and Julia’s 17-year-old son Roger, starts spending time with him instead of Julia. There’s even talk that gets back to Julia of him taking Roger on a double-date to lose the latter’s virginity. Things become even more tangled when Tom meets a beautiful young actress who hopes for a role in Michael’s latest production.

Maugham is so good at jealousy and pride and the things people won’t say to each other. Tom is too proud to acknowledge the big wealth disparity between him and Julia; Julia is too scared about her own disappearing youth and beauty, and turns this fragility into cruelty. There are some masterful scenes that play on these emotions and vulnerabilities, and Maugham is brilliant at taking his main characters’ hubris to their logical limits.

I’m not surely we fully get under the skin of Tom, beyond his vigour, his stubbornness and the charm he can turn on and off. But this is undoubtedly Julia’s book. Maugham writes a layered, fully convincing portrait of a woman who is not particularly likeable but is extremely sympathetic – in the sense that, when she does self-defeating or cruel things, you desperately wish she’d stop, for her own sake.

I think Theatre would be a more successful book if it had been streamlined a bit – cutting down all of the backstory about Julia and Michael, for instance, which could have been a few paragraphs rather than 70 pages. But overall it is a real success of a character portrait, as well as offering a glimpse behind the curtain at the theatrical world of the 1930s.

The Spring Begins by Katherine Dunning

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Ad for electronics, 1930s

When Scott (aka Furrowed Middlebrow) raves about a novel, you take notice. Katherine Dunning’s little-known 1934 novel was his favourite read of last year and he wrote extremely enthusiastically about it on his blog – and, even better, he made sure a copy was in my hands. Naturally, he was right. The Spring Begins is an exceptionally well-written and engaging novel. (There aren’t any dustjacket images around, so the above image from Flickr isn’t very relevant but amused me.)

There are three heroines to the novel, whose lives sometimes overlap but are largely kept secret. We go between their three narratives in turn – first is Lottie, a nurse-maid for the Kellaway family and their young children. Lottie is a child herself, and manages to retain some carefreeness while having few childlike freedoms. She is naïve and kind and keen, learning about the world while almost preternaturally aware of her place in its rigid hierarchies. Coming from an orphanage and intimidated by anybody in power (and men particularly), she is privileged to have raised even to her lowly position.

“Now, then…” Isobel clung to her, trying to suit her steps to Lottie’s. Out in the corridor Mr Kellaway was passing down. Lottie flattened herself against he wall. She must never be disrespectful, she must always stand still and make herself as small as possible when the master of the house went by.

But Isobel was his own flesh and blood. She could stand before him balancing herself with delicately sturdy legs right in his way.

“Hello, Daddy!”

He put out his hand and ruffled her head. “Hullo, Monkey!”

Next is Maggie, the scullery maid, a little older than Lottie. Scott describes her as ‘racy, sensual’ in his review and that is perfect. Where Lottie is scared of men, Maggie is intrigued and impetuous. She seems unperturbed by others’ opinions – if Lottie’s carefreeness comes from a love of nature and a spiritual alertness, Maggie’s comes from an unabashed earthiness. I will confess, of the three main characters, I found her the least interesting. I enjoyed her company, but Dunning is a very psychologically astute writer and I think Maggie gave her less material than the others.

Thirdly – how appropriate that she is last in my list, as in so many things – is Hessie. She is of the impoverished gentlewoman type, at an age where marriage is not impossible but is increasingly unlikely. She works as a sort of governess, emphatically not the servant class but also not fitting in anywhere else. Her only equals are her mother and sister Hilda (all live together) and she is desperate for an escape. Lottie’s sections are the most enjoyable to read, but I think the Hessie sections are the best. The early-20th-century spinster is a well-worn type, but Dunning mines her desperation, her frustration, her hopeless hopes with a brilliance that makes it feel fresh. Here she is, talking to her mother:

“I’ve got to go out, too. I promised Rosie Bates I’d call at her house this evening. She’s got a book…”

“What book, Hessie?”

“Oh, just a book.”

“Don’t read anything that isn’t nice, Hessie,” Mother said.

“Rosie said it was good.”

“Where did she get it – from the Young Women’s Library? Can you remember its title?”

Supposing she screamed now. Just dropped the plates and opened her mouth and screamed. Hessie bit her under lip as she ran out into the kitchen. She laid the plates with a clatter onto the draining-board by the sink, and pressed her hands to her head. How could she live through Hilda’s wedding, and afterwards, too? Evenings alone with Mother, while Hilda sat with her husband, and afterwards Hilda and Albert went upstairs together. Hilda would be a wife, a married woman. Hilda would come back to see them, and she’d talk about ‘my husband’ and Mother and she would exchange meaning glances, leaving Hessie outside the fraternity of married women.

I’ve spent a long time telling you about the main characters, because there isn’t really a lot of plot. The Spring Begins is really a portrait of these three lives – what drives them, what holds them back; what they understand and don’t yet understand. It is rare for novels of this period to consider the lower-classes in any depth, yet in this novel it is the upper-classes who pass by in the background. Dunning treats all three women as deeply realised people, worthy of novelistic respect even if they don’t get it from everyone around them.

Exquisitely drawn characters is one of the reasons that The Spring Begins is a masterpiece. The other is Dunning’s writing. Throughout the novel she writes about the world with sensitivity and beauty, perfectly judging the balance between poetic writing and readability. The reader is never tripped up by over-extended imagery or self-indulgent prose – it is striking in a way that makes us more appreciative of the possibilities of observation. Of course, I have to give an example:

The blue in the sky was deepening a little. It was a clear soft blue that started high up and went on and on, up and up until the sky looked like a lake of crystal blue air. There were no clouds anywhere. The fields and hedges had a young, refreshed appearance about them, still cloaked with the coolness of dew and protected by the softness of the early sunshine.

Ahead of them Mr Kellaway’s big car rolled along, very smoothly and silently. The children watched it eagerly, calling to Mr Andrew to hurry-hurry when it disappeared around a corner. It was agonising when they came to double bends in the road and the big car slid round the second bend before they were properly around the first.

By eleven o’clock the sun was shining strongly. They were travelling no main roads now, and the hedges looked dark beneath their covering of white dust, the fields parched and tired, the woods aloof as if hoarding their shade and silence and dignity for themselves alone. 

Illustration of a 1930 car

I’m so grateful to Scott to have had the chance to read this novel. I’m confident it will be among my favourite books of 2024. Sadly, it is currently extremely hard to find. I’ve already recommended it to the British Library Women Writers series – of course they’ll have to agree, and get the rights, but I have everything crossed that it’ll appear in the series one day. It’s a crime – an often-repeated crime, of course – that a writer as good as Dunning has been so neglected.

The Jasmine Farm by Elizabeth von Arnim

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The Jasmine Farm (1934) isn’t one of Elizabeth von Arnim’s novels that I see discussed very often. It was her penultimate novel, and I will say at the outset that it is far from her best – but even in the worst von Arnims there is a lot to love, isn’t there?

The novel opens with a dinner party in which there are enormous number of characters. I had to start making notes in the front of the book, trying to work out how everyone related. It doesn’t help that she often gives us a stray surname or first name, then later tells us how they relate to other people there. It’s almost wilfully confusing, and quite a lot of them never appear again – but we quickly learn that the most significant character is Lady Daisy Midhurst.

Lady Midhurst is that classic von Arnim creation – a combination of the forceful and the absent. She has been a widow for a long time and her marriage doesn’t appear to have been at all enjoyable. Widowhood suits her much more, despite the opinions of some of the male characters, whom von Arnim spears:

Mr Torrens was certain that only by Midhurst had the poor dear woman ever been kissed, and seeing that fifteen solid years had passed since his death, and that of the eleven years of his marriage ten and three quarters were spent by him in steady unfaithfulness, he considered such a state of things a pity.

She has social cache and money, and is very fond of her daughter (bizarrely called Terence, or Terry) and seemingly satisfied with where she has now ended up. Some people are envious are her, and she seems divinely unaware of it. Certainly she isn’t desperate for a man, as so many single women are in novels of the period, and could perhaps have survived into her dotage without anything upsetting happening.

But… Terry has other plans. We learn fairly early in the novel that she has been having an adulterous affair with a Mr Andrew Leigh, who seems rather too dull to have inspired one woman to want to be with him, let alone two. But such things are – and Mrs Andrew Leigh, Rosie, discovers the fact. Rosie has married ‘above her’, and sees this as an opportunity to unsettle the dignified, unkind, subtly sneering world into which marriage has brought her. (One brilliant moment describing her antagonism to Terry is: ‘she would have told her, too, if she hadn’t been so high and mighty, with her nails like reproaches and her clothes so many sermons’.)

Lady Midhurst is disbelieving – until she quizzes Terry, who is unrepentant. Terry is a flighty ‘free love’ sort of woman, seemingly conjured from the worst anxieties of late-Victorian male columnists. She doesn’t really see the problem, and it’s hard to know exactly what the reader is meant to make of her. Is she meant to be refreshingly amoral? If so, she comes across instead as extremely selfish and rather stupid. I don’t think she’s the most successful character in The Jasmine Farm.

But Lady Midhurst is a triumphantly drawn figure – and meets her match in the novel’s other brilliant creation. Enter: Mumsie. Mumsie, or Mrs de Lacy, is Rosie’s mother – and the background of which she is slightly ashamed. Mumsie speaks her mind with admirable candour and occasional incomprehension. The two, when they meet, are perfect foils for one another. Mumsie is affectionate and impulsive to Lady Midhurst’s reserve. I loved every scene of them together.

And she was reaching out to the bowl when her hand was intercepted, and grasped firmly in a warm grip.

At once her divided attention was startled into an extreme concentration. She turned and looked at her visitor with the rebuke of surprise. At no time did Daisy like being touched, and to be touched by strangers, other than in the formality of arrival or departure, had not yet come within her experience. Fortunately the hand grasping hers was gloved. She didn’t like skins.

“We must be friends, Lady Midhurst,” Mumsie said, holding on hard. “Real, true friends.”

“It is exceedingly kind of you,” said Daisy, slightly raising her eyebrows. They wouldn’t rise much, because of technical difficulties; but, as far as they would go, they went.

But what, you will be asking, about the jasmine farm of the title?

Well, that’s where we go in the second half of the novel.

In the hills that ripple between Grasse and Draguignan, hills only a few miles away from the animations of the Riviera, but as dead quiet and unvisited as if the few miles were hundreds, is a little Provencal house, pale-faced and pale-shuttered among pale olive trees, with one immense cypress slashing the sky apart at the top of its steps.

This house Midhurst, on his honeymoon, had bought Daisy, simply because she admired it, and he was in love. As easily as if it had been a trinket out of a shop window the rich young man bought it for her, and almost with as little personal exertion. All he had to do, and did, was to mention it to their hotel proprietor in Cannes, and for what seemed to him a small sum, and to the owner and go-betweens a big one, the tiny farm because Daisy’s.

Yes, we have disappeared to an idyll in a European country – a theme that von Arnim returns to surprisingly often. While Lady Midhurst hasn’t thought about the jasmine farm for a long time, it is still hers and one lucky Frenchman has been tending to it through all the years of her marriage and widowhood. He harvests and sells the jasmine, and he keeps the house safe and tidy, and his is paid and nothing else is needed from him.

Until… Lady Midhurst escapes the confusion and scandal of her daughter’s affair, and turns to this place where she was, briefly, happy. For while widowhood has been contented, and her marriage bearable, this was the only place where she truly knew joy.

And I knew joy in the second half of The Jasmine Farm! If the first half was a little over-stuffed and over-complicated, with any number of extraneous characters, the second half is a delight. Because yes, of course, Mumsie follows Lady M to this farm. And I shan’t spoil the other people who turn up, but there is a lightness and openness to the second half of the novel that gives it space to breathe. It means Elizabeth von Arnim can use her customary witty sentences, and the brilliant way that she can give characters depth even while everything is frothy.

I try not to give away too many spoilers, which means I haven’t said much about the jasmine farm section of The Jasmine Farm, but is what saved the novel for me. I wish she’d managed to set the entire book there. But we got there eventually, and it reminded me what a marvel von Arnim was.

A while ago, I ranked all of the von Arnim novels I’d read. I’d probably slot this one in about 10th or 11th on the list. But is it worth reading? It’s Elizabeth von Arnim: of course it’s worth reading.

William’s Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan

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William's Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan

I’m delighted that Recovered Books is making G.E. Trevelyan’s novels available again, because they have been so very difficult to get hold of. The next (after they published Two Thousand Million Man-Power) is William’s Wife (1938), a novel that is perhaps less ambitious, but I think even more successful.

As the novel opens, Jane has just married William Chirp. We don’t see any of their courtship or really get to understand what ended up with these two fairly unsuited people coming together in marriage. But perhaps we can guess – William is a widower who runs a grocer’s in the town and probably wants somebody at home to make his life comfortable again. Jane is a lady’s maid who is moving up in the world by marrying a man who owns a business and a home. No matter that they have little in common and even less to talk about.

Quickly, Jane learns the dominant characteristic of William: miserliness. He might call it prudence, or living within his means. But he begrudges every penny spent. And he is willing to live in almost any condition, so long as he avoids expenditure. The hints of this come steadily, though at first it’s minor matters about the home (I am borrowing some of the same quotes that Brad included in his review – Brad being the mastermind behind the Recovered Books series.)

“How about that window cord,” she said in a low, Sunday voice, straight forward into her collar. “Did you tell someone about it?”

“Cord? Eh?” He shut the gate behind them and they went on around the drive, still talking in low voices in case one of the neighbours should hear, or someone in the road.

“Yes,” she said. “What I told you. It’s gone in the lower sash.”

“Don’t want to open the lower sash.” He fitted his key in the door. “That don’t matter.”

William is not a violent person by any means, but he has a certainty and a determination that Jane seems unequal to combat. Nor does she try especially hard – any attempts to get money from him, beyond the meagre housekeeping allowance, are met with his rigid logic or by references to the angelic, unquestioning nature of his first wife. Jane, meanwhile, is ashamed of her wearing-out clothes or what people from the town would think if they knew how poorly they lived.

And he wasn’t even looking round. Pointing with his pipe. “Waste not, want not.”

“I know, William, but it’s the best part of two years and….”

“Save something for a rainy day.”

He drew at his pipe for some minutes, then he looked round at her. “My poor wife….” He cleared his throat. “My first wife didn’t go spending on new gowns, not once in ten, no, fifteen years.” He put the pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire.

Eventually, the worm turns. Jane begins to find ways to save a little money herself. She buys slightly cheaper products and keeps the difference. She drops less in the church collection than William gives her, and keeps the change. Slowly but surely she amasses enough to buy a new dress – relying on his masculine ignorance of women’s clothing to pass it off as a mere adjustment to her previous dress. And then saving begins again. She moves her stash every day, fearful that it be unearthed and her whole scheme tumble to the ground. The reader doesn’t think that William would be violent or throw her out or anything – but somehow Trevelyan builds up the tension so that we are equally afraid of its discovery.

Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know something that happens midway through the novel – but I think it’s important to an understanding of the novel to mention it (and it’s on the back of the book, so I don’t feel too bad about mentioning it). Eventually William dies. Jane, you would think, is free from his oppression. And yet… somehow she has become too mired in his worldview. The second half of the novel is even more powerful than the first. Her miserliness gets worse and worse – her cutting corners and making savings leaves in a terrible, haunting way to her losing everything that gives her status and dignity. She has truly, in every sense, become ‘William’s wife’. It is horrifying but ineluctable, and masterfully done by Trevelyan.

What makes William’s Wife such a success is Trevelyan’s ingenious pacing. The reader isn’t spared anything. Day by day, month by month, we follow Jane’s decline. There is little that is dramatic or surprising – instead, she sets up her premise and follows it steadily to its natural climax. The blurb calls it ‘the most normal horror story ever written’, and while blurbs that call their book the ‘most’ anything are to be distrusted, it’s not an inaccurate description. It isn’t scary, in the usual sense of scary. But it is haunting. It is a horror story in the sense that it is horribly believable – perhaps the sort of miserable world behind any number of closed doors. Interestingly, it really reminded me of an ostensibly very different Recovered Books novel – Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. Both take an awful situation and play it out slowly, painstakingly to its end.

It’s not the most fun book to read, but there is an awful lot to admire here. Trevelyan chooses different canvases and subjects for the three novels of hers I’ve read so far – this one has the narrowest subject in mind, and perhaps that is why it is the most successful novel. It does what she sets out to do with terrible brilliance. It certainly deserves its republication, and I recommend getting a copy – when you can stomach the experience. (Incidentally, at the time of writing it is on sale from the publisher.)

Cactus by Ethel Mannin

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After reading Rolling in the Dew, I was keen to read more of Ethel Mannin’s fiction  – particularly something in a non-satirical mode. I wondered if something she wrote could be suitable for the British Library Women Writers series, so hunted down one that was clearly about a woman’s life: Cactus (1935). Sadly my Penguin copy more or less fell apart as I read it, so I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to re-read it, but it was certainly an interesting experience.

Elspeth is the heroine of Cactus. The novel opens when she is a young girl, with family in the north of England and in Scotland – she doesn’t really fit in with her family and their expectations of her, and she doesn’t have friends her own age. They don’t understand her and she doesn’t understand them. Her greatest friend is her Uncle Andrew – an eccentric man who chooses to live alone rather than with the rest of the family. They tolerate him with bemused affection.

In these early sections of Cactus, he teaches Elspeth to be an independent thinker. He quietly reveals the dangers of group-think, whether that be jingoistic nationalism or the meek place of a woman in Edwardian middle-class life. They are lessons that she takes very much to heart. And, on a more tangible level, he introduces her to the beauty of cacti. Others wonder why she is train to something spikey and plain, but…

When a cactus came into flower, said Uncle Andy, it was the most wonderful flower you ever saw, and it lived on long after other flowers, which bloomed more readily, had died and been forgotten. It was worth waiting for, said Uncle Andy.

And if you’re thinking ‘hmm, I wonder if this will be a metaphor for Elspeth herself’ then, yes indeed, you are right. Throughout the novel, Mannin returns to this metaphor – it becomes a little unsubtle at times, and perhaps didn’t need to be quite so foregrounded, but it’s an interesting enough idea.

Elspeth grows older and moves to Germany in the late 1930s. She falls in love with a slightly tempestuous young man called Karl, defying convention on the one hand while remaining quite bound by it on the other. For instance, she is shocked when he wants to have sex before marriage – shocked a little, in fact, that this friendship has developed into love almost unawares. Mannin isn’t condemning her for this element of conventionality. Elspeth is no more an obedient disciple to modern, bohemian thinking than she is to old-fashioned morality. She forges her own path, with her own decisions and standards.

But even the most independent thinker cannot avoid being affected by war. As it becomes clear that Germany will soon be at war – and possible (though still, to the characters, unlikely) that Britain will also enter the war – Elspeth decides to leave Germany and return to her family home. It is, she hopes, a temporary absence. But she has also been chilled by the bellicosity she had never anticipated in Karl. It is equalled by the ‘Hun-hate’ (a common word in the novel) that she finds back home. In vain does she try to explain that she may disagree with Germany’s authorities while still liking, even loving, individual Germans. I was so impressed that Mannin would write about this in the mid-1930s, when anti-German rhetoric was clearly on the rise again in Britain. Her nuance in resisting mindless nationalism and hatred of other countries is done perfectly.

These tensions become more palpable when two German prisoners of war are left at Elspeth’s family’s farm. One is a bit of a brute, but Elspeth instantly feels a connection with the other – Kurt. The similarity of his name to Karl’s is not a coincidence. While the two men are quite different, Elspeth explains that Kurt reminds her a lot of her lost love – a man she has to accept may well be dead now, given his keenness to fight. Her family won’t let the men in the house, and initially only give them food fit for the pigs – but Elspeth wears them down a little, and forges a connection with Kurt that is central to the second half of Cactus.

Mannin really doesn’t hold back in her visceral writing about war. Elspeth’s brother is working in an army hospital, but Kurt says he cannot really understand what front-line war is like. (Skip this quote if you are sensitive to graphic descriptions.)

“He doesn’t know what war is. No man who hasn’t been in the trenches does.”

“He sees every day what war does to men.”

“It’s not the same as having it happen to yourself. you can know all about building a trench parapet of human bodies and walking on human faces, and such things, but it doesn’t do anything to you unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. It’s not a case of being physically shocked compared with being intellectually shocked, it’s a case of knowing something in your bowels. In English you talk about having guts. Mind is an abstraction, but guts are damnably real. They get twisted round your bayonet. Round your pick when you’re digging. That’s the kind of knowing, when your own guts writhe with it.”

It’s hard to believe something like this is in a 1930s novel by a woman better known, I believe, for light-hearted comedies and romances. While Cactus never takes us to the front-line, the brutality of war seeps through its pages. She doesn’t address the impending war, which was becoming inevitable in many people’s eyes by the time Cactus was published, but it is a silent subtext to the reading experience.

Cactus isn’t a perfect novel. There are times when it loses a little of its subtlety and gets too close to melodrama. It is very earnest, and I would have appreciated more of the wit that played through its first chapter or two. But, for the most part, I found it an involving, passionate cry against unthinking conflict and herd mentality. I’m certainly keen to keep exploring Mannin’s fiction.

Gerald: A Portrait by Daphne du Maurier #ABookADayInMay No.12

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I usually try to join in Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, though I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it work with finishing a book a day in May, since none of the candidates on my shelves were very short. Then I had a brainwave – I could finish an audiobook one day in the car, and spread reading a Daphne du Maurier out over two days.

So, which to choose? Eventually I alighted upon Gerald, Daphne du Maurier’s biography of her father – published in 1934, the year that Gerald du Maurier died. Daphne du Maurier was only 27 – she’d published three novels, but none of them are the ones that would make her name as a writer of fiction. According to the not-too-subtle cover of my 1950 reprint, it was apparently Gerald that initially brought her fame as a writer.

And it really is a marvellous book. It has been sitting on my shelves for a very long time and I had never been particularly tempted by it, but it is an exceptionally good read. It is not a biography in any traditional sense of the word – certainly she does not treat Gerald du Maurier with any criticism, which is unsurprising from a grieving daughter. But this is not even a hagiography – it is a novel, based heavily on fact, in which Gerald is the flawless hero. And because it is a fantasy of a person, it doesn’t matter that we only see one side. There is something in the tone that goes even past novel. It is a fairy tale of a person’s life, and enveloping in that way that only a fairy tale can be.

Daphne du Maurier starts even before Gerald is born, and we see scenes of their childhood – anecdotes that were clearly passed down through the generations are turned into stories told by an omniscient narrator. This continues as Gerald gets older – his unsuccessful engagements and his eventual courtship with Muriel (‘Mo’) are shown with a novelist’s detail. Woven into the narrative are letters that may well have been preserved, but they sit alongside full conversations that du Maurier must have made up. Here, she pictures her only parents in their early days of romance (where ‘Mummie’ is Daphne du Maurier’s grandmother):

Up to the present they had been in rooms, and during the early part of the summer had taken a cottage at Walton-on-Thames, which was a happy refuge from the from the hot weather. “When I’m not picking green-fly off rose heads, I’m picking the black fly off dwarf beans,” Gerald gravely wrote to Mummie. “Everything is doing very well except Japanese iris and parsley. I haven’t been outside the estate yet, but Muriel manages both indoor and outdoor servants with marvellous tact, and even the stable-boys worship here.” (The cottage really had about three rooms, and a tiny square of garden.) Mummie nodded her head an smiled. Darling Gerald was so funny. And it was a wonderful thing to see him happy like this.

Dear Muriel was obviously taking great care of him. She had not seen him looking so well for years. He had got quite brown, too, not that horrid washed-out colour she was used to. Her never took his eyes off Muriel.

The bulk of Gerald, though, is about his acting and theatre producing career. I had always thought of him as primarily a theatre manager, and hadn’t realised how much he had acted – and how influential he had been in this world. But Daphne du Maurier takes us through his ascent to fame, and then his triumphs and failures, each considered as though she had seen the play in question – even when that would be impossible. His big break-through was playing a villain in Raffles in 1906.

And yet there were those who believed that because Gerald did not hump his back, cover his face with hair, wear tights, and speak blank verse, he was therefore no actor. How many times, then and afterwards, did people exclaim, “But du Maurier, he does not act; he is always himself.” To act is to portray an emotion; to show the feelings aroused by some sensation, whether joyous or traffic; to make the man in the audience feel, either uncomfortably or happily, “That might have been me.” This is what Gerald, who started the so-called naturalistic school of acting, tried to do.

There are some famous names in du Maurier’s milieu, and it’s entertaining to read about how J.M. Barrie’s plays went over – and, indeed, how the adaptation of Trilby by George du Maurier (Gerald’s father) became such a sensation. Other of the plays mentioned were already fading from popularity by 1934, and have disappeared altogether now. Similarly, some actors mentioned would still ring bells – Gracie Fields, Gladys Cooper, Irene Vanbrugh, Celia Johnson – while others are no loner discussed. But to be still well-known a century and more later is quite the feat!

I love anything about the theatre, fact or fiction, so lapped up all of this. The brief interlude when Gerald becomes a soldier in the First World War is, indeed, brief. Partly because he didn’t enlist until 1918 and never left England, but also because it doesn’t seem like part of the life that Daphne du Maurier wants to focus on. For her, and for her implied reader, Gerald is a brilliant theatre impresario – and she also wants to show the great man at home. This does mean we get slightly curious, but still delightful, sections where Daphne du Maurier refers to herself in the third person:

As they grew from babies into children, and occasionally the little nursery storms came to his ears, he would settle disputes in strange, amusing ways, turning a scolding into a game. There was the famous time when Daphne pulled Angela’s hair and trod on her face, Angela replying with her peculiar death-grip like a bear’s hug. The joint shrieks of rage reaching Gerald in the drawing-room, he had them brought downstairs, and, dressing up as a judge, staged a court of law with the children as prisoners at the bar and witnesses in one. It lasted until past bedtime, and, when the nurse came to fetch them, the original quarrel had been long forgotten.

These sweet stories are enjoyable fluff – but there is a definite poignancy as she writes about her father when she is a bit older. A tell-all memoir wouldn’t reach the same level of emotion as this:

There is, alas, a world of difference between the girl of eighteen and the man of fifty, especially when they are father and daughter. The one is resentful of the other. The girl mocks at experience and detests the voice of authority; the man yearns for companionship and does not know how to attain it. They stand side by side, with the barrier of years between them, and both are too shy to break it down; both are too diffident, too self-conscious. They chant about superficialities, and avoid each other’s eyes, while all the time they are aware that the moments are passing, and the years will not bring them nearer to one another. Gerald was hungry for companionship; he longed for Angela and Daphne to tell him everything, to discuss their friends, to solve their problems, to share their troubles; but the very quality of his emotion made them shy/ They could not admit him into their confidence, and they drew back like snails into their shells.

It was not only Gerald’s tragedy. It is the tragedy of every father and every daughter since the world began.

What really sets the book apart, alongside Daphne du Maurier’s unique perspective, is her exceptional writing. That’s one of many things that make it feel more like novel than biography. From an objective biographer, these sorts of passages might be struck out as purple prose – in the world that Daphne du Maurier has created for us to enter, they are beautiful:

Gerald belonged to Wyndham’s; he was as much a part of it as the boards, the curtain, the heavy swing door, the row of stalls shrouded in their white and grimy covers, the cat in the dress circle, the backcloth and the false movable walls that were not walls, the dust in the passages, the intimate, indescribable, musty, fusty smell that was the back of the stage and the dressing-rooms and the front of the house in one.

Much of his personality is embedded in those walls. His laughter is still in the passage, his footstep on the stairs, and his voice calling for Tommy Lovell when the curtain falls. For all their passing away and the coming of other sounds – new voices, new laughter, other men and other memories – something of himself remains for ever amidst the dust and silence of that theatre; a breath, a whisper, the echo of a song.

I don’t know if anybody else has written a biography of Gerald du Maurier. There was definitely a vogue for a while of writing enormous biographies that didn’t spare the subject, and the more invasive and unpleasant the more they were considered to be authentic. The tide, thankfully, seems to have turned a bit. Since it is impossible to entirely know a person through a book anyway, I would rather we get this subjective, overly generous, loving portrait than anything more callous. Gerald is a wonderful book by a sublime storyteller.

 

 

Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham #ABookADayInMay No.7

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Today was a lovely sunny day, and I spent quite a lot of it sat in the garden reading Margery Allingham’s 1931 detective novel Police at the Funeral. Something I discovered in previous book-a-day challenges is that reading a murder mystery in a day is really fun and rewarding – because you don’t have to wait very long to discover whodunnit.

Police at the Funeral is a curious title for a novel that doesn’t include any funerals, though it does have more than one death. At the outset, though, series detective Albert Campion is prevailed upon to look for a friend’s fiancée’s missing uncle. Campion thinks the thing is likely to be a case of someone getting het up over nothing, but when he meets the fiancée, Joyce, he recognises that she is not given to hysteria. Her uncle is missing, and it rather looks like he could be dead.

We soon get to know about her family. While she is looked on kindly by most of the relatives she has grown up with, the same cannot be said between the rest of them. Her great-aunt rules a household with a rod of iron, despising and pitying her various adult offspring who still live with her, and still feud and squabble as though they were in the nursery. Great-Aunt Caroline thinks ill of the modern era and the household still behaves as though Queen Victoria is on the throne. It’s a very Ivy Compton-Burnett set up, though of course the style of the novel isn’t remotely like one she’d have written.

“There they are, a family forty years out of date, all vigorous energetic people by temperament, all, save for the old lady, without their fair share of brain, and herded together in that mausoleum of a house, tyrannised over by one of the most astounding personalities I’ve ever encountered. […] There’s no vent to the suppressed hatreds, petty jealousies, desires and impulses of any living soul under that roof. The old lady holds the purse strings and is the first and final court of appeal. Not one of her dependants can get away without having to face starvation, since not one of them is remotely qualified to earn a sixpence.”

Before long – and not remotely to the reader’s surprise – it turns out that the uncle is dead. His body is found in the river – hands and feet having been tied together, with a shotgun wound through the head. Nobody truly mourns him, since none of the family likes or respects each other, but they still want the truth to come out.

But… this death is quickly followed by another. (Unlike the blurb to my edition, I shan’t spoil more than that!)

Albert Campion is a fun detective. I’ve read a couple of other books in which he appears – I have to admit the schtick of him looking vacantly stupid is a bit unnecessary, and I’ve not read the books where he is apparently most openly a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but once you get those things out the way, there’s a lot to like. He has a funny way with words, and a rather sweetly teasing relationship with the inspector on the case – Inspector Stanislaus Oates, whose son is Campion’s godson. His actual detection is all rather hurried at the end, but that’s fine.

And it’s a very satisfying solution, with enough clues along the way that we don’t feel cheated. I loved the set up with the horrendous family, and Great-Aunt Caroline is just the right amount of terrifying and formidable for the reader to actually quite admire her dominance. Joyce is a very likeable character to have along the way too, and both insider and outsider to the family, so we don’t feel too buried with a group of appalling adult-children. I don’t remember finding Allingham’s writing so enjoyably funny and dramatic before, so this was a goody.

I think this is my favourite of the Allinghams I’ve read – which is your favourite Allingham?

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck #ABookADayInMay No.6

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My friend Matt recommended Cannery Row (1939) by John Steinbeck back in 2009, and I ordered a copy which has sat on my shelves for 15 years. Now it is neglected no longer! And I really enjoyed the atmosphere and tone of Steinbeck’s tribute to a small Californian town.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries or corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.

Cannery Row is quite a leisurely tour of the different inhabitants of the street – a mix of vignettes of their lives and something of an ongoing plot, though it is really more of an ongoing set of characters. Chief among them are Lee Chong the grocer, Dora Flood the brothel madam, ‘Doc’ the research scientist, and Mack and his gang of men who are something between gangsters and disciples. It is a close-knit individuals that don’t seem much to need the outside world, and Steinbeck portrays a cocktail of mistrust and reliance.

I think that’s one of the things I most liked about Cannery Row. It’s a tone I haven’t really come across before. Certainly this is not an idyll of human goodwill – but everybody knows when anybody else is lying or cheating them, and it is accepted as a necessary part of being neighbourly. At the outset, Lee Chong becomes the owner of a warehouse, and Mack suggests it could be a place where he and the other men live – to stop it having windows smashed, or burned down, by children. Lee Chong knows that there is an implied threat – that Mack himself will smash windows and commit arson if his offer isn’t accepted. Lee Chong also knows that he won’t receive any of the proposed rent.

And if it be thought that Lee Chong suffered a total loss, at leas! his mind did not work that way. The windows were not broken. Fire did not break out. and while no rent was ever paid, if the tenants ever had any money, and quite often they did have, it never occurred to them to spend it any place except at Lee Chong’s grocery. What he has was a little group of active and potential customers under wraps. But it went further than that. If a drunk caused trouble in the grocery, if the kids swarmed down from New Monterey intent on plunder, Lee Chong had only to call and his tenants rushed to his aid. One further bond is established – you cannot steal from your benefactor. The saving to Lee Chong in cans of beans and tomatoes and milk and watermelons more than paid the rent.

Steinbeck depicts a curious kind of contentment in this ecosystem. And nobody seems above or below anyone else. Even the brothel madam is accepted with the unspoken rule that she will be the largest donator when public funds are needed. The man who might seem the most of an outsider is Doc – he is cleverer, wealthier, more cultured than the other inhabitants of Cannery Row. His work is with snakes, rats and frogs and it’s unclear who he is working for, or why he is living in this place, but he too builds a relationship with all the others. There is a base understanding that, when push comes to shove, people on Cannery Row will help one another – and then go back to cheating each other the next day.

The main action that happens away from the row is when Mack, for convoluted reasons, decides to take his gang away to secure hundreds of frogs for Doc. Mack often wants to do Doc a good turn, and it invariably turns out to make Doc’s life much harder. There is a seam of farce in the plotting of Cannery Row, though in reading it feels gently comic and rooted in the earthy relationships between all the characters, rather than silly.

I’ve not read huge amounts of Steinbeck, but I know some of his books can be very sombre, dealing with great injustices. But Cannery Row, even while showing limited lives of people pretty close to poverty, seems to be filled with hope. Not hope for big changes, but hope that there is goodwill and respect somewhere beneath the surface of even the most brazenly selfish and opportunistic communities. It’s an unusual mix of grim reality and optimism, and I really enjoyed spending time in this short book.

Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan

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Two Thousand Million Man-Power eBook by Gertrude Trevelyan - EPUB | Rakuten Kobo United Kingdom

One of the questions asked about Gertrude Trevelyan (the artist formerly known as G.E. Trevelyan) is why she has disappeared, when her writing is so good and her early reviews were glowing. One answer, of course, is that any number of brilliant writers disappear – and that’s why we should be grateful for reprint series like Recovered Books (edited by Brad Bigelow aka Neglected Books). Another reason, with this book at least, is that Trevelyan chose one of the worst titles imaginable. Please don’t let it put you off. Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937) is so much better than the title suggests.

It comes from a quote about machine power in the US, and essentially how it will put an awful lot of people out of work. One of the men in danger of losing work is Richard Thomas – a research chemist whose work has largely been concerned with cosmetics, face creams etc. He is definitely at the commercial end of the research scientist world, which might be thought to help him in an era of increasing capitalism. And you’d be wrong.

The other main character in Two Thousand Million Man-Power is a schoolteacher called Katherine. The early sections of the novel chart their coming together and falling for each other, against a backdrop of youthful idealism and radicalism. While both have jobs, and are thus perhaps part of the machine of capitalism, they rail against it. They have hope for changes in the future, while also still enjoying any trappings of middle-class life that do come their way. Impressively, Trevelyan makes both Robert and Katherine deeply empathetic. They may have aspects of hypocrisy from the beginning, and they may be more earnest than is usual for a lovable fictional character, but we are invited into their lives in such detailed ways that it’s impossible not to care about them.

Throughout the novel, Trevelyan uses a conceit that must have been difficult to pull off, but is rather brilliant. After some pages of scenes of daily life for Katherine and Robert, she will give a list of significant world events happening – often hinting towards a war that was still a prediction rather than a reality when the novel was published in 1937. And she will then swoop from the broad to the specific, narrowing in on a simple action of Katherine’s or Robert’s. It’s like a camera panning in suddenly. Here’s an example from early in the novel:

The Protocol is coming. France rejects the notion that there is no such thing as a German air-force: air-ports springing up: Dutch, Danish, Italian and Russian establishments produce aeroplanes for the Reich. Powder and munition factories in Russia work full time under German engineers: ten thousand aeroplane programme. In Rome a great demonstration celebrates the sixth anniversary of the birth of Fascismo. Naval manoeuvres off Magdalena Bay – “greatest concentration of naval power ever assembled in the Pacific” – show America powerless to protect the Pacific coast against an attack of enemy air-force. The Government of Great Britain is unable to accept the Protocol. Katherine, with her paper spread out on the stuffy green cloth of the parlour table behind the ferns of 26 Verbena Road, feels terribly flat and wear, and all at once she knows that the one thing in the world she wants is to tell Robert Thomas all about it.

As the book spans from 1919 to 1936, these sections must have required a lot of research – or a lot of faith in her memory. I found them very effective, written with a Woolf-like rhythm and making the emotions of the two protagonists feel equally significant with huge world events. Because, of course, they are – in the eyes of Katherine and Robert. All of us still feel our everyday lives very deeply, whatever else is going on in the world. (The introduction and the afterword to this edition, which are remarkably similar in content, both mention that John Dos Passos had recently done something similar in his USA Trilogy – I haven’t read it, so can’t comment on how original Trevelyan was being – but, to my mind, it really sets the novel apart.) (Incidentally, the afterword also mentions a ‘near-complete absence of any mention of Trevelyan’s work in any sources I could locate online’, and I’m proud to say that I was one of the few exceptions – both on this blog and in my DPhil thesis, where I wrote about her novel Appius and Virginia.)

As the novel continues, and time passes, Katherine and Robert lose some of their idealism in the face of financial realities. Or, rather, everyday practicalities have replaced any fervour they had for effecting change. Their anxieties have moved from whether they’ll be seen together, unmarried, to whether or not they’ll be able to find work. There are sections of both going looking for jobs, and the reasons they are turned down. Their household objects are ranked by what can be sold. On the other hand, when anything looks up these objects are re-bought, and Katherine starts looking for nicer homes to move to. Their whole life seems to be guided by what they can or can’t afford, and the exact slot this puts them into.

They might always have been like that, he a coward and she not really caring about anything, but they hadn’t known it. That was what the machine had done to them, shown them one another. Each had seen the other as something the machine didn’t want. And now it had caught up Kath again and tired her out, so that she couldn’t think of anything but food and rent. It didn’t make much difference whether the machine caught you up or threw you out; it came to the same in the end.

Trevelyan is brilliant at taking the reader through these all-encompassing scenarios, so we feel the stakes as keenly as Robert and Katherine. Even the ‘newspaper headline’ style reminders that much else was going on in the world can’t compete. These two lives are the most significant things on the page. And while Two Thousand Million Man-Power certainly isn’t a happy book, it also didn’t feel too miserable. It helps that the writing is beautiful and the authorly control of the narrative is absolute, but ultimately the feeling I got from the book was that happiness and unhappiness aren’t the point. The novel ends up being about survival, and what the constant drive to keep head above water can do to a couple. And yet we get to know them too intimately to feel that this novel is about some abstract point. It’s about Katherine and Robert, and how they lost their identities.

Excuse It, Please! by Cornelia Otis Skinner

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A lot of people know and love Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, but fewer people have gone on to discover Cornelia Otis Skinner’s collections of humorous short sketches. When I was in America in 2015, I ordered a whole heap of them to my friend’s apartment – because they’re much easier to find in the US than in the UK. But I didn’t get Excuse It, Please! (1936) – and yet, here it is, and that is because Lisa May very, very kindly sent me a copy! That was also in 2015, but every book has its correct moment and, in 2022, Excuse It, Please! found its time had come.

(Sidenote: isn’t the cover wonderful?)

The title comes from the opening sketch – which seems a better term than ‘story’ or ‘essay’, though they could equally be called that. Each is a scene from Skinner’s life, probably rather exaggerated and fictionalised, usually telling a self-deprecating foible of mid-century middle-class life. And the first sketch is about trying to get through to a required company on a telephone call, back when all such calls had to go through a telephone operator. The connections go awry.

“Is this 51?” I asked.

“Hello,” came again.

“When’s the next ferry from New London?” I inquired.

“How the hell should I know?”

“Aren’t you the ferry?” I faltered.

“What d’ya mean am I a ferry? This is Billy’s Garage in Goodground.”

And the title comes from the hapless operator asking Skinner to ‘excuse it, please’ – rather than ‘excuse me’. It’s not the biggest punchline in the world, and perhaps might only make a passing anecdote in everyday life, but that is Skinner’s brilliance. She can take the mundane and delve into the hidden ridiculous. She is always the butt of the joke, but she laughs with the reader.

The topics in this book might be everyday, but perhaps only for a certain sort of class of person. She doesn’t talk about an office job or housework, but rather about learning to ride a horse, sitting for a portrait, and being asked to sit on the captain’s table when on a ship. It’s a glimpse into another time and another world, so she manages to combine a sense of the quotidian (for her) and the exotic (for us – or at least for me). It is a delightful mixture, and I suspect her life would have felt quite alien even for quite a few of her contemporary readers.

While she is ultimately always the one we are being encouraged to laugh at, that doesn’t mean that nobody else gets a dose of dry humour. The opening to ‘Seeing stars’ is a case in point:

Of the many varieties of bore one of the worst I know is the person who wants to point out the stars and constellations. This is a form of midsummer pest which, like the sand flea, tends to ruin beach parties.

I cannot help but keep quoting, forgive me… this is on the next page:

He singles me out from a group of ordinary picnickers with the infallibility of the compass pointing out the magnetic pole. Were this individual possessed of any particular allure, I should not at all mind; or were his intensions bordering on the carnal, there might be a little less ennui. But he is generally the kind of man who wears rubbers and belongs to drama societies, and his intentions are purely astronomical.

“Have you noticed how clear the stars are?” he begins.

I have been noticing this phenomenon with dread and secretly praying for fog ever since I have been aware of his approach. But I answer “Yes, aren’t they?” with a politeness that I hope is frigid.

At this point, you know this is either your sort of thing or not. It perfectly chimes with my sense of humour and I can’t get enough of it. If you’re the same, then you can seek out more or less anything by Skinner. I’m very grateful that Lisa May sent me this one, so that I can spend some happy hours immersed in it.