1930s

Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons – #1936club

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Lots of Stella Gibbons’ novels have come back into print in recent years – from Vintage and from Dean Street Press – but Miss Linsey and Pa (1936) has been notably missing from their lists. Having read it for the 1936 Club, I can sadly see why it wouldn’t fit into 21st-century publishing. And yet it’s my favourite of her non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels that I’ve read so far.

Miss Bertie Linsey and her Pa move to London to be near Bertie’s uncle – Mr Petley – and his son Len, realising that they need family connections now that they are falling on harder times. They leave behind an idyllic countryside home that comes with plenty of beautiful trees and green spaces, but no source of income. They are emphatically not invited to live with Mr Petley and Len above their tobacconist’s shop, but Mr Petley goes as far as to find them accommodation at the nearby home of the Fells. Mr Petley doesn’t trust any accommodation outside of Radford Street, and thinks that Miss Linsey and Pa will manage to make do with the dingy, beetle-infested home run by Mrs Fell. Mr Fell, meanwhile, keeps birds in the upper rooms and seldom communicates with anybody at all.

Gibbons has given us a wonderful cast here, even if we got no more (and we get some great other people). Miss Linsey is resilient, managing to be both enthusiastic and rather sad. Pa is happier than she to get to know the Fells, but is also drawn to know the local pub. Mr Petley is quite hardened and wants little to do with his in-laws, and is affectionately controlling of his son – whose life, and love, was left in France in the First World War two decades earlier.

There is quite an emotional core to this novel, particularly in Len’s storyline of the woman he loves in France – I found a lot of it very moving. But there are also plenty of opportunities for Gibbons’ satirical streak, that I haven’t seen have such a delightful outing in any of the other non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels. In Miss Linsey and Pa, she has her sights on spearing Bloomsbury – because Miss Linsey finds work first as a cook-housekeeper at the home of Dorothy Hoad and E.V. Lassiter, and later as a sort of governess for a household with very strict rules on not telling the child stories and always calling everything by its proper name. These were my favourite sections – here’s how we first meet Miss Hoad, coming into the tobacconist and meeting Miss Linsey:

She nodded and, turning her back, stared out into the street with her dark unhappy eyes. What would E.V. be doing? She looked down at her platinum watch, of so fiercely modernist a design that it suggested a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Half-past three. E.V. might be trying to write, with the wave of hair falling into her eyes.

She turned round again as the drab man came back into the shop with a smaller and even drabber woman. G*d, how awful it must be to be that kind of person and live that kind of life!

And here is one of the many very funny snapshots of Bloomsbury life:

The women friends of Dorothy and herself used frequently to announce that they must have a child.

They would plomp themselves on the sofa, fling up their feet and put their elbows behind their heads and stare at the ceiling. Then they would say abruptly ‘I must have a child.’

‘You ought to have a child,’ they would say bluntly, when one of their number complained of a headache or an inability to finish writing a novel. Sometimes they had the child (they never called it a baby), sometimes they got no further than plomping on the sofa and announcing that they ought to have one.

For quite a short novel, an awful lot goes on – perhaps because there are four central characters who get our attention and sympathy, and plenty of secondary ones who are equally interesting. The combination of satire and pathos works because we aren’t asked to combine those feelings for any particular individual – rather our laughter at Bloomsbury, say, is part of what makes Miss Linsey’s difficult life so moving. And the climactic moment of the novel succeeds in being dramatic and poignant in a way that feels honest to everything that has preceded – including layers to Mr Fell, who could easily have been a one-note character experiencing unspecified mental illness.

And why wouldn’t it be published now? Well, sadly Gibbons includes portraits of a Black character, a Jewish character, and a lesbian that are all inappropriate to differing degrees. Some in that well-intentioned ‘You won’t believe this character is from X minority and yet isn’t Y’ way that is hardly any more palatable than out and out racism. These elements are very much not the main thrust of the novel, though it would also be hard to neatly excise them.

There’s a conversation to be had about the moral responsibility of reprint publishing, and perhaps that’s a topic for another day – but no author is ‘owed’ reprinting, and any publisher is likely to decide this isn’t worth the fight. And it’s a shame that these parts pull Miss Linsey and Pa back, because it is otherwise a wonderful triumph of a novel – and, with those caveats, perhaps my favourite read of the year so far.

Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

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The body-swap comedy is one of those tropes that is often talked about as if there were millions of them about, but in truth I can only think of a handful. In the world of literature, I’m down to Vice Verse by F Anstey, Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers, Turnabout by Thorne Smith, and, if you read it somewhat elastically, Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Do let me know if there are others I’m missing. But I can now add to that number Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes.

If you’ve heard of it, it’ll be because of Brad’s review at the excellent Neglected Books blog, where he wrote about it in June. Brad is up there with Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow for his extraordinary knowledge of books nobody else on the internet has mentioned. And he certainly knows how to wipe the internet clean of the books he mentions – as soon as the reviews are out, the secondhand market is drained. The first copy of Strange Journey I ordered got me a ‘sorry, this book has gone’ reply – the second, thankfully, came to my house. And with such a fab cover!

Given my love of the period (it was published in 1935) and my interest in fantastic novels, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. When I say ‘fantastic’, I mean elements of fantasy happening in the real world. It had such a vogue in the ’20s and ’30s and so often commented on issues of the day. And in Strange Journey, the issue appears to be class.

Polly is a housewife in a middle-class (leaning towards lower-middle-class) household. Her family certainly aren’t poor, but they don’t have money to spare for luxuries. Even the basics can be a little bit of a struggle, and Polly feels rather run ragged. In 1935, it was still a novelty for some households to deal with only an occasional help, rather than a more regular maid or two. She is looking at from her front gate when she spots a woman in a Rolls Royce, clearly well-to-do.

Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.

I’ve quoted the same bit Brad did, but it is the key moment. Polly’s longing to exchange lives with this woman doesn’t happen instantly, but the seed is sown. A few days later, remembering that idle daydream, Polly suddenly feels dizzy – and discovers she is no longer in her own home.

Her dream seems to have come true. She is in a beautiful and enormous country house, with a team of servants and with no labour required of her. One of the first things she notices is her immaculate hands, which clearly have never had to be plunged into a bucket of soapy water.

Novels which use a fantastic device have to deal with the surprise of the protagonist. It’s the main difference between a fantastic novel and magic realism – this bizarre turn of events, and the character’s reactions, must be taken into account. Cairnes handles Polly’s disorientation very well. Her attempts to work out who the people around her are, and how they relate to her. Her frequent faux pas, as she tries to take on the tone of Lady Elizabeth (for such she is). And perhaps chiefly, trying to behave in a convincing manner to her new husband, Gerald (Major Forrester), without betraying her real husband, Tom. As it is, any affection from her seems to baffle Gerald.

Polly doesn’t stay there. Before too long, she is whisked back to her normal life – and it becomes clear that Lady Elizabeth has been there in her guise, telling Scottish folklore stories to Polly’s two children.

One of the less convincing elements of the book, albeit essential for the plot, is that Polly decides not to confide in her husband, or anyone. As the months go by, she keeps finding herself having dizzy spells that land her in Lady Elizabeth’s world. Cairnes has good fun with the humorous side of things, as Polly reveals Lady Elizabeth to be a secret bridge player, or as she gets confused with titles of nobles. At the heart of it is a lovable and empathetic character, making the most of the strange world she has found herself in, throwing in some matchmaking on the side. As the reader, I longed for Polly and Lady Elizabeth to meet… and, thankfully, they eventually do.

I loved Strange Journey. The novel sustains the initial idea wonderfully, and Cairnes is obviously an adept, if fairly light, writer. She appears to have only written one other novel, The Disappearing Duchess, and this costs $300 online…

Brad’s detective work add another fun twist to the tale. Maud Cairnes was a pseudonym – for Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick (!!), known as Lady Kathleen. Head over to his piece for a bit about her extraordinary milieu; it’s safe to safe she was more familiar with Lady Elizabeth’s world than with Polly’s, so it is to her credit that she makes both equally believable.

Strange Journey is not at all easy to find – but I am certainly mulling it over as British Library choice at some point…

The Nutmeg Tree by Margery Sharp

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Gosh, I love Margery Sharp. The more I read by her, the more I think she is one of the great underrated novelists of the twentieth century.

I first read her fifteen or sixteen years ago, buying The Foolish Gentlewoman because P.G. Wodehouse mentioned it as a book he loved in a letter somewhere. It wasn’t for a good number of years that I read more by her, but I’ve yet to read a dud – with Cluny Brown and The Gipsy in the Parlour being my favourite. She does funny, she does serious, she sometimes combines them. And we can add The Nutmeg Tree (1937) to the funny shelf, though it’s not without its moments of poignancy.

I don’t really understand why she chose this title. There is a nutmeg tree but it’s not particularly dominant, and I think the title of the film is much better: Julia Misbehaves. I haven’t seen the film, but am told that it is a very loose adaptation.

Julia is misbehaving in the first scene we see her – a glorious opening, where she is in the bath, surrounded by her few possessions. How’s this for an opening line:

Julia, by marriage Mrs Packett, by courtesy Mrs Macdermot, lay in her bath singing the Marseillaise.

We can already guess a little about her character from that ‘by courtesy’. But it takes a few more lines before we realise why her bathroom is filled with a table, a clock, and other potentially valuable items: it’s because the bailiffs are in, and she’s pretty sure they won’t intrude on a lady in the bath.

Julia is a chancer, and has had to be. As we see throughout the novel, she has had to spend much of her life seeking the next source of income – and that has involved a bit of deceit, a bit of flirtation, and a crowd of friends who wouldn’t be received in polite society and, though loyal, are sometimes necessarily fleeting. As she describes herself, she is ‘the sort of woman any one talks to about anything’. Which has its ups and downs.

And, yes, the reader loves her. This one did, anyway.

She is Mrs Packett by name, but the marriage lasted rather less than a year – a war bride, her husband was killed not long after their hasty wedding. Hasty because of war, but also because of Susan: the daughter they had. Her parents-in-law are affluent and kind, if not accustomed to women like Julia, and housed both daughter-in-law and granddaughter. But ultimately Julia decided she would be better off away from them, and that Susan would be better off – financially and otherwise – being raised by her paternal grandparents.

As The Nutmeg Tree opens, she has received an unexpected letter from Susan, now on the cusp of adulthood. She wants to get married, and her grandparents don’t approve of the speed with which she and Bryan wish to wed. Can Julia come and persuade them otherwise? And, with one eye on the bailiffs, Julia decides to go. She hasn’t seen her daughter for sixteen years.

It may be that ‘someone goes on a journey’ and ‘a stranger comes to town’ are the only plots in the world, but I think Sharp is very good at putting a cuckoo in the nest – with either comic or unsettling results. In The Nutmeg Tree, there is a lot of comedy to be got from Julia trying to behave, while not being completely able to keep her true nature hidden. She is the sort of person, for instance, who accidentally joins a circus on the way. But there is always an undercurrent of poignancy here too. Julia is trying to improve herself. She is not an unkind or dishonest person. She has simply had to do what she has to do. And she’s tired.

Once she arrives, she gets tangled in all the relationships there, and a handful of others yet to emerge. It’s just wonderful. Julia is drawn so consistently and with impressive nuance for a character that could have been simply bombast and delight. If the glorious initial scene isn’t matched by a series of equally delicious set pieces, the novel becomes more thoughtful than that opening might leave one to infer – without losing the humour.

Basically, Sharp is brilliant. She should be a household name, in my opinion, and it’s rare to find an author who is so varied and so good at different things. Julia, I’ll miss you, and it was a joy.

Keep The Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

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I’ve been reading D.J. Taylor’s enormous overview of 20th-century English literature on and off for four or five years. It’s called The Prose Factory, which isn’t a great title for a book that also covers poetry, but it’s certainly been interesting. Like anybody with a private interest, some things loom larger than perhaps they ought – and with Taylor it is George Orwell. He’s obviously a significant figure of the 30s and 40s, but it’s astonishing how often Taylor manages to mention him.

I’m actually thirty years further forward in The Prose Factory, but picking it up reminded me of its Orwell-dominance, which in turn reminded me that I wanted to read more Orwell. I’ve read the big-hitters – Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm – and I’ve read Homage to Catalonia. I thought all of them were brilliant, and have had several others for many years. Simply because it’s been on my shelves the longest, seventeen years, I took down Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) recently.

I think Orwell might fall in that category of author you don’t see mentioned that much in the blogosphere, simply because we all read him long before we started book blogs. I don’t remember seeing a review of this one, or any of the lesser-known novels, and it’s a pity because it’s rather brilliant. I’d love it for the opening scene alone.

Gordon Comstock is the ‘hero’ of the novel, and as it opens he is working in a secondhand bookshop that also functions as a library for twopenny books. He is working on his own poetry, and has had a volume published that the Times Literary Supplement said showed promise. The extended scene in the bookshop/library is effectively to set up Gordon’s position on a scale of intellectual snobbery. I’m glad I read it now rather than seventeen years ago, because I think most of the names in the passage below would have meant nothing to me then – whereas now I can understand them as Orwell intended the reader to: as a barometer of the reading taste Gordon is setting himself against.

Eight hundred strong, the novels lined the room on three sides ceiling-high, row upon row of gaudy oblong backs, as though the walls had been built of many-coloured bricks laid upright. They were ranged alphabetically. Arlen, Burroughs, Deeping, Dell, Frankau, Galsworthy, Gibbs, Priestley, Sapper, Walpole. Gordon eyes them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place. Pudding, suet pudding.

Some of these names might only be familiar if you’ve studied popular culture of the period – does anybody read Warwick Deeping now? – but others have lingered. It’s a mix of the middle-class and the lower-middle-class, all with pretensions above their stations. Those who read Galsworthy thought themselves intellectuals; those who read Ethel M. Dell probably thought themselves above those who read westerns. All of it makes bitter Comstock feel angry and repelled – and bitterness is the keynote of his personality.

He lives in poverty – or, at least, poverty for someone of his education and intelligence. The only people he sees are a rich friend called Ravenstock, who tries to help get his poetry published and offers (and is refused) to lend him money, his girlfriend Rosemary, and an aunt Julia who is ever poorer than him, but from whom he still borrows money. It fits his code of pride that he cannot borrow from a rich friend, but will from a poor relative.

Pride is the other keynote, alongside bitterness. His stubbornness is infuriating. He won’t let Rosemary pay for dinner when they go out, because the man must pay for the woman – even if it means he can’t pay his rent or can’t afford to eat for the rest of the week. Rosemary puts up with an awful lot, and sticks with him despite all his moroseness.

Iterated through the novel, either in Gordon’s dialogue or in his internal dialogue, is that everything comes down to money. He can’t marry Rosemary because he doesn’t have money. She won’t sleep with him – so Gordon argues – because he doesn’t have money. He can’t work as a poet because he doesn’t have money. And he doesn’t have money because he left a relatively well-paying job in advertising in order to get out of the capitalist machine.

What’s so impressive about Keep the Aspidistra Flying is that Orwell has a mouthpiece for a point of view with which he evidently has substantial sympathy – and bravely chooses to make that mouthpiece objectionable. As well as bitter and proud, Gordon is stubborn, selfish, and often unkind to the long-suffering Rosemary. But there is also enough good in him to make the reader (this reader, at least) not hate him. He loves the beautiful and noble. He partly cares so much what people think of him because of his own low self-esteem, and his recognition that others have achieved much more. On the whole, he falls down on the side of being unpleasant. But it is so well-judged a portrait that he does not become a villain – rather, he is a friend that we are frustrated by and beginning to be sick of, even if we agree with him in essentials.

Orwell apparently thought little of the novel, and didn’t want it reprinted. I don’t agree with him. It doesn’t have the sophistication of Nineteen Eighty-Four but it does have the same brilliant prose. He is the best writer I’ve read for writing that is entirely unshowy and is yet superlatively good. The plot is simple but perfectly judged, and I’m all the keener to read those other Orwells I’ve got on the shelves. In some ways, it’s a shame that his dystopian novels are the only ones that are widely remembered, because he so strikingly observed the real world too.

All the Dogs of My Life by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Elizabeth von Arnim didn’t write a proper autobiography and All the Dogs of My Life (1936) is not – as she repeatedly states – an autobiography. But it’s the nearest she wrote, and I found it an interesting insight into her life. Perhaps most usefully if you already know the outline of her life.

The book is structured exactly as the title would have you imagine – she traces her life through the fourteen dogs she has had during her life, two of which were still with her at the time of publishing. She almost lost me in the first few pages, where she badmouths cats and says they’re not up to much because they won’t come when you call. I’ve always put that in the ‘pro’ column for pets that feel like friends – I don’t expect my friends to obey me. Anyway. Later on she does mention a cat had, but called her/him ‘it’ and doesn’t give his/her name. I guess not everybody can be right about cats.

I am not particularly fussed one way or the other about dogs, but I did enjoy reading the way von Arnim wrote about them. The ones she has loved most are written about with an affection and poignancy that few romances could equal, and I will admit to crying at the death of one particularly special one.

On the other hand, von Arnim does seem to have been a shockingly bad dog owner – by today’s standards, at least. She has one that chases deer and another that kills sheep, and doesn’t seem to have done much to deter them. She has another dog put down, aged three, because he is fat and lazy. She is forever moving country and leaving dogs behind. Maybe all these things were more acceptable a hundred years ago…

But the real reason All the Dogs of My Life is such an interesting books isn’t the dogs – though the photographs of them are a welcome addition. It’s what we learn about von Arnim’s life – particularly her marriages. She doesn’t say much about the husbands, except that ‘perhaps husbands have never agreed with me very much’, and she draws a veil over her miserable second marriage, purportedly because there were no dogs present and thus is doesn’t fit into the schema of the book. But we can see enough in her dry wit throughout to understand what motivated and hurt her.

Don’t expect much information about her life as a writer. Only one of her books gets a brief mention – Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther, which is very good – but otherwise she could equally have had any other profession. Only the quality of her writing in All the Dogs of My Life would clue a reader into her successes elsewhere.

It’s a short, intriguing book, filled with the range of emotions from joy to melancholy. As a window on her life, it is the most glazed sort of glass – but if you stand close and peer carefully, you can find whatever von Arnim was willing to let on.

For Adults Only by Beverley Nichols

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Sorry to go absent after #1920Club – my internet died! I was still able to use my phone data, but it wasn’t great for writing blog posts. And goodness knows the internet is vital at the moment. Thanks so much to everyone who joined in the 1920 Club – there were loads of reviews I haven’t managed to read properly yet, what with the internet giving up, but I will at some point. (And my comments were getting spammed on WordPress blogs for a while, so maybe check your spam comments folder too…)

Karen and I have come up with the next club year for October, and I’m already excited about it. We’ll be sharing it soon – watch this space!

We’ve all been reading what works best in this challenging time – and I have turned to quite a lot of Beverley Nichols, and will no doubt indulge in some more. One of the books I’ve read is the inauspiciously titled For Adults Only, from 1932. It’s nowhere near as salacious as it sounds – rather, it is a series of dialogues between parent and child, intended to satirise parenting manuals of the time, but also rather like a catechism. For example – this, from ‘A Child’s Guide to the Customs’:

Q. (In tones of piercing clarity.) Mother, what is that lovely smell?

A. Smell?

Q. Yes. Coming out of your fur coat?

A. Heavens! It’s broken.

Q. (With even more piercing clarity.) What’s broken?

A. Ssh! People will hear you.

Q. Why shouldn’t they hear me, mummy?

A. It was a bottle of scent.

Q. Why shouldn’t they hear that you’d broken a bottle of scent?

A. Be quiet, or I shall take away your lemon.

(There is a moment’s pause, during which the unfortunate parent disposes of the glass, and sponges her coat with a handkerchief, which she eventually throws overboard. Then she returns to the cross-examination.)

Q. You still smell lovely, mummy.

A. It will wear off.

Q. You smell like the lady who comes to supper with daddy when you go away for week-ends.

And so on and so forth. We get similar child’s guides to theatre, opera, sun bathing, packing, women motorists, bridge, and all sorts. It’s all good fun. The downside is that they are basically all the same – the child tends to have been party to secrets, while also being very literal and rather clueless. They are insistent in the search for truth, and generally the parent seems to loathe them. I don’t know where they appeared originally, but I imagine it was in a weekly magazine or something – and it would be a delight like that. Like a reliable sketch comedy character, appearing to do their bit. Read all in one go, it is rather repetitive.

What is an endless delight, though, is the illustrations – done by Joyce Dennys, of Henrietta’s War fame. I always love seeing her illustrations – they have a vitality and comedy that felt fresh even when Nichols’ bit was beginning to wear a little.

So, highly recommend – but maybe just read one a week! And it’s interesting to see Nichols doing something a little different from the other books I’ve read by him.

Business as Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford

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When I read Business As Usual (1933) in January, it was difficult not to write about it immediately. But there are few things more irritating than reading about a delightful book and then finding that it’s not yet available to buy – and while there are doubtless 1933 editions of Business As Usual out there somewhere, you can now buy the lovely Handheld Press reprint of it. At https://taxfyle.com/blog/can-i-deduct-my-medical-expenses/ you will find purposes of the medical expenses deduction. And if Handheld Press never achieve or achieved anything else, the rediscovery of this novel would secure my eternal gratitude.

I was pretty sure I’d love it when I heard the barest outlines: it is a novel in letters from the 1930s about working in the book department of a department store. I might as well stop my review there, and some of you are probably ordering a copy as we speak. But it’s even better than it sounds.

All the letters are by Hilary Fane, and we must imagine the replies (and are easily able to do so from her replies). She has just finished university and is engaged to a pleasant young man called Basil. Being the 1930s, she is preparing to prioritise the doctor’s role of wife once she is married, and Edinburgh society is ready to receive her in this role. It (and her parents) are rather more surprised when she decides she wants to wait a year, get a job, and see something of the world. Off she goes to London.

Here, she manages to find an overpriced, unlovely flat (plus ca change!), and begins to realise that life alone and on the job market isn’t quite as simple as she’d hoped. But she takes it in good part. Hilary is such a delightful character – it’s so hard to create an optimist who isn’t annoying, but Oliver and Stafford have done it. She refuses to be crushed down, but does allow the odd acerbic moment to sneak into her letters – not least when she begins to prove people wrong:

Basil Dear

I meant to write to you last night, but I waited, because I thought there might be a letter. And there was – a very sweet one. Bless you! But I don’t think one enjoys: ‘I told you so’ however beautifully it’s put. It isn’t true either I’VE GOT A JOB. So I won’t be coming to heel just yet.

It’s always fun to read about people being out of their depth, and Hilary’s first job in Everyman’s (a department store clearly based on Selfridges) is as a typist in the books department. If you’ve enjoyed Monica Dickens’ hilarious One Pair of Hands or Betty Macdonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything, then you’ll know what to expect. She is initially enthusiastic and confused and inept – and later just confused and inept. This clearly isn’t her forte. Oliver and Stafford don’t diminish those who are good at this sort of routine-work, and Hilary admires them with an open heart – but it is not where she should be.

As she comes to the attention of the manager, Mr Grant, when dealing with a difficult situation, she is given the more responsible task of improving the organisation of the department. Her rise through the ranks is a trifle unrealistic, but we’ll forgive it because it gives such a fascinating insight behind the scenes of this lending library feature of a bookshop that has long disappeared.

Her life begins to shift in interesting ways, and not always the ways I anticipated when I started reading it. What remains consistent is how funny, joyous, and addictive Business As Usual is.

I often write here that I’m looking forward to rereading a book, and it’s relatively seldom that I actually do end up rereading. But I’m going to say with confidence that Business As Usual will join the pantheon of those books I return to when I want to read something that will put a broad smile on my face.

Vulgarity in Literature by Aldous Huxley – #1930Club

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I’m sneaking into the final day of the 1930 Club with another 1930 read – albeit a very short one, at 59 pages. It’s one of the Dolphin Books series that I’ve written about before, and which I love. Beautiful little hardbacks covering a wide range of fiction and literary non-fiction. I haven’t been able to find out if they were specially commissioned or what, and I’m sure this essay of Huxley’s will have appeared in other forms, but it’s nice to read it in this original form.

I thought it might be about obscenity in literature, since that was such a raging battle of the period – not long after books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness had both been banned in the UK. But he quickly dispels this idea, and indeed stands up for writers being able to write about anything:

I myself have frequently been accused, by reviewers in public and by unprofessional readers in private correspondence, both of vulgarity and of wickedness—on the grounds, so far as I have ever been able to discover, that I reported my investigations into certain phenomena in plain English and in a novel. The fact that many people should be shocked by what he writes practically imposes it as a duty upon the writer to go on shocking them. For those who are shocked by truth are not only stupid, but morally reprehensible as well; the stupid should be educated, the wicked punished and reformed.

So, what does he mean by vulgarity? He dances around the topic but is never particularly clear on the point. It can be intellectual, emotional, or spiritual. It seems connected to insincerity or going too far, or misusing form, or… well, Huxley writes well and engagingly, and it is only when you get to the end that you realise it’s all been inconclusive. Fascinating, but inconclusive.

In terms of the ‘in literature’ bit of the title, he only talks in detail about Poe and Balzac, though with references to Dickens, Dostoevsky, and a handful of others. He doesn’t really consider contemporary literature at all, and thus can’t be said to comment on 1930 itself. But it was an enjoyable intellectual exercise, if not the sociological one that I was expecting when I picked it up.

The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton – #1930Club

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The 1930 Club seemed like a great opportunity to take a look at my British Library Crime Classics shelves, which are overflowing with books I’ve not yet read. When they started republishing these intriguing detective novels in beautiful editions, I wanted to get them all. I still want to, if I’m honest, but they stepped up how many they were publishing and I realised it wasn’t very realistic. Still. Plenty there.

And one of them was The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton, reprinted in 2016 and thus maybe one of the earlier reprints. Certainly Martin Edwards’ introduction makes it sound like one of the books he was keenest on getting out to a new public.

High Eldersham is a small and out-of-the-way village. The beautiful cover doesn’t strictly relate to any of the houses in the book, but there are a couple of larger ones – lived in respectively by a doctor and a landowner. Otherwise it’s mostly farm labourers and others that Burton doesn’t seem very interested in telling us about. And there’s a pub about a mile from the village proper, and not on the way to anywhere else. It hasn’t been very profitable for quite a while, because of its distance from anywhere, and the novel starts with the landlord Dunsford asking the brewery owner if he can be moved to a different pub nearby. Off Dunsford goes, with a warning that it might be difficult for the new landlord – not only because of the lack of profit, but because the villagers in High Eldersham are not very accepting of outsiders. Indeed, it almost seems as if ‘foreigners’ – those not born in the village – are cursed when they arrive…

Still, a retired policeman called Whitehead becomes the landlord, and we fast forward a few years. Turns out newbies aren’t very lucky, because he gets stabbed to death. The local policeman feels very ill-equipped to deal with any of this, since he usually just sorts out drunk and disorderlies, and others are brought in. I got a bit confused with who all the police who came are, but the important one is Desmond Merrion – an amateur detective, but with close ties to one of the detectives. And, in turns out, a coincidental relationship with a villager – and a prospective relationship with another…

I spent a while trying to decide whether to include spoilers in this post, and have chosen not to. The thing I was going to write about happens relatively early in the book, and you spend the rest of the novel trying to determine whether or not it actually happened… it plays on themes that were quite big at the time, but also atavistic.

That’s all I’ll say on that, but it is the dominant thread of the novel – and one that makes it an interesting and unusual book to read, but also which separates it from the more down-to-earth books of the Golden Age. Merrion went on to appear in dozens and dozens of other books, and I’d be interested to see how he fares as a detective in more traditional mysteries.

As it is, this one relies heavily on coincidence, and the plotting and detection can be a bit clumsy – but I did read a review that said it was more like a thriller than a detective novel, and I think that’s a good point. What Burton lacks in terms of intricate plotting he makes up for in suspense and excitement – and some engaging distortion of a village idyll. It rattles along and is probably rather sillier than the author intended, but certainly good fun for this year’s club.

Turn Back The Leaves by E.M. Delafield – #1930Club

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I hope and suspect that most of us have read one of the books that E.M. Delafield published in 1930 – The Diary of a Provincial Lady. Rather less popular is the title that I picked off my well-stocked Delafield shelves: Turn Back The Leaves. I have quite a few unread Delafields among the many that I have read, and it was good to get one down.

Turn Back The Leaves is a very different novel from The Diary of a Provincial Lady. It is not at all funny, for starters. Often Delafield combines serious topics with some levity, but this is nearly absent in this tangled story of illegitimacy and secrets. And, above all, the tensions of a family maintaining Catholic mores.

The novel starts in 1890 and ends in 1929, though most of it takes place just before and after World War One. But that section needs a bit of back story, and that’s what Delafield starts us with. In brief, a woman with the extraordinary name Edmunda marries a man named Joseph, despite neither of them being enthused by the match. They are both ardent Catholics, and their families are keen for them to marry other upstanding Catholics. It is a loveless match, though neither of them have been and love and don’t particularly miss what they haven’t had. Except then, of course, Edmunda does fall in love with another man – and Stella is born illegitimately. Joseph forgives her; they have four other children; she dies. Stella is left alone in London with a paid governess and nurse, and the others grow up with Joseph and his second wife.

Fast forward a few years – and some rather unnecessarily detailed characterisation of characters we will never see again, along the way – and Stella moves back to live with her half-brother and half-sisters, though none of them know the connection. She is only there as a ‘family friend’. And has been taken in because Joseph and his new wife are keen to give her a ‘good Catholic upbringing’. Only… there are temptations in the way of her and one of her half-sisters. They both fall in love with Protestants. Marrying out of the Catholic church is not forbidden, but it is only allowed if the non-Catholic partner allows their children to be brought up as Catholics – ‘the promises’ – and the prospective husbands won’t allow this.

Delafield’s author’s foreword reads that ‘this book is in no way intended as propaganda either for or against the Roman Catholic faith. It purports only to hold up a mirror to the psychological and religious environment of a little-known section of English society as it has existed for many years, and still exists today’. This is pretty disingenuous. As with quite a lot of Delafield’s novels, particularly the early ones, this is clearly motivated by some distaste for her Catholic upbringing. It isn’t a bitter book, but you never get the sense that the author is ambivalent.

But the Catholic characters are not monsters by any means. Sir Joseph is rather domineering, but others are motivated by their love for their church and their eagerness to do right. And it’s a very engaging, well-written novel, with vivid characters who only slightly lose their vividness by the author’s attempt to have slightly too many focuses. Stella should really be front and centre, but disappears towards the end when Delafield wants us to empathise with the rest of the family too.

I don’t know much about Catholicism, and I don’t know if inter-marrying is still as big a deal, or if the official line is still that no other Christian denomination is properly following Christ. I do know that Protestants still follow the beliefs of the Protestants in this novel – that following Christ is the important bit, not the specific church. As Delafield writes in her foreword, the Catholic angle was a niche point even in 1930 – and many readers might be uncertain that their interest could be sustained in a novel which revolves around the Catholic/non-Catholic angle.

Which would be a pity, because I think Turn Back The Leaves is very good indeed. At her best, Delafield is great at giving a novel momentum as well as psychological complexity and empathetic characters. Her writing is not unduly fancy, nor does it have the hilarious phrasing of the Provincial Lady books, but she does use the quiet, unshowy prose to pull the rug from under our feet. We are suddenly hit by observations and emotional moments, in few and precise words, that we might not be expecting. I think this is the 25th novel I’ve read by Delafield, and it’s up there among the ones I’ve enjoyed most. It feels odd to read one in which she is almost never humorous at all – but perhaps she wanted to make her 1930 output as distinct as possible. And the Provincial Lady this ain’t!