1930s

The Middle Window by Elizabeth Goudge

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The Middle WindowIf you had told me at the beginning of 2015 that I’d have read two reincarnation romances before the year was over, my response would probably have been along the lines of doubt that two such books existed. But, yes, they do. The first one I read was Ferney by James Long – but over fifty years earlier, Elizabeth Goudge had written The Middle Window (1935) which had a similar idea at its heart.

This is actually the first Goudge book I’ve read, which is probably a rather unusual place to start. It came as part of a postal book group, otherwise this cover wouldn’t have inspired me to pick it up (nor yet would the tagline ‘a lively story set in the majestic Scottish Highlands’), though I ended up really enjoying it – particularly the first half.

The Middle Window is very definitely divided into halves. The first – set in the 1930s – concerns Judy, a London-dweller, whose life is changed when she looks into the three windows of an art gallery. Each displays a painting: one is a cityscape; one is a country cottage. In the middle window is a painting of the wilds of the Scottish highlands. For some reason, Judy believes that her life must follow the path indicated by one of those paintings. This isn’t the last time that the title of the novel will be significant, but Judy (as you may have guessed) opts for the middle window and the Scottish highlands.

Being in the happy position to be able to afford to take a ten week holiday, she advertises to rent a house there, and goes with her parents and her fiancée Charles to Glen Suilag. It’s a beautiful but neglected mansion in the middle of nowhere. There is no running water (which horrifies Judy’s mother, Lady Cameron) and little by way of local amusements. The only company seems to be a grumpy old servant, Angus – who greets Judy by saying “Mistress Judith, ye’ve coom back”.

I loved this section of the novel. The descriptions of being released from the city into the countryside rang true with me, and in fact the scene with the painting inspiring Judy’s decision – coming alive, so she can feel the breeze and see the mountains – is strikingly similar to scenes in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Elizabeth von Arnim’s Father. But how would I cope when the reincarnation bit kicks in? Well, the hint is there in Angus’ welcome, and grows apace as Judy feels like she already knows the area. She also feels like she already knows Ian, the Laird of the Manor, who is staying in the village. He is a passionate, amusing, and educated man; a contrast to her nice-but-dim Charles. Ian works as an unpaid doctor in the little village, treating things which aren’t serious enough for the local hospital which, in those days before the NHS, was beyond the means of the poor locals. (Curiously, these minor ailments include a boy who has cut two fingers off; I’m wondering if that denotes an injury less appalling than it sounds.) Oh, and they take a trip to Skye that reinforces how much I really must visit it one day.

Judy and Ian gradually fall in love, and also gradually realise that it is not the first time they’ve met – but the first time was in another life…

“A man living a life is like a man writing a book. He may break off after a few chapters but he comes back to his work again and again until the book is finished.”

“And will you and I come back again and again through the centuries until we have built paradise in our glen? Faith, but Glen Suilag will grow mightily tired of us.”

“No! We are as much a part of it as the bog myrtle and the heather. It does not tire of its children.”

That conversation actually takes place in the second half of the novel, which takes place in 1745. Here they are Judith and Ramand, who fall in love and marry only a day before Ramand is called away to fight in the Jacobite rising for Bonnie Prince Charlie. This is period of history I know very little about, so The Middle Window was surprisingly instructive, helping put in context lots of terms I’d heard but without knowledge.

I had to fight my natural aversion to historical fiction, but that actually didn’t end up being my problem with the second half. It’s just as well drawn, character-wise, as the first half (for they are essentially the same characters), but the end of the first half essentially tells us what will happen at the end of the second half. I shan’t spoil it now, but the link is a flashback Judy has – which gives away the end. Of course, plot is not the only thing to read for, but it removes some of the tension – though there is a bit of a twist which goes some way to atone for it.

Despite, on paper, being a book that shouldn’t interest me, I actually really liked The Middle Window. And what I mostly liked about it was the style and humour of the writing. The humour is more evident in the first half, and it’s great; it’s centred around how insufferable the rest of the family find Judy. She’s rather a great heroine to read it, but must be endlessly frustrating to live with – as this indicates:

Lady Cameron sighed. Judy’s recent saintly mood of meditation and withdrawal had been distinctly trying, leading her as it did to leave her galoshes about in awkward places and take not the slightest notice of anything said to her, but it had at least been harmless. The same thing, she felt, could not be said of this new phase. She knew quite well, from painful past experience, that when Judy drew her belt in tightly like that she was about to be tiresome.

Little turns of phrase throughout demonstrate Goudge’s skill as a writer, even as early as her second book. Some might be too put off the theme, but – having spent years immersed in 1920s and ’30s fantastic fiction – I was willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy it. My only wish is that she’d spent the whole time in the 1930s, with perhaps flashbacks to 1745, rather than giving equal space to both halves when there couldn’t really be equal tension or reader engagement.

 

Others who got Stuck into it (and generally hated it!):

“Gar. What a tiresome story this was. I feel all bilious; I think I need to read something crisp and witty to cleanse my emotional palate.” – Barb, Leaves and Pages

“This, unfortunately, is the first book by Elizabeth Goudge I have ever wished I hadn’t read. I disliked Judy Cameron heartily.” – Jenny, Shelf Love

 

 

Father by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Eliz von A

As I mentioned recently, I spent last weekend in Cambridge at a conference about Elizabeth von Arnim. It was really enjoyable; the people there were divided between those who knew everything about E von A and those (like me) who really like her, but haven’t read them all (I’ve only read about eight). The panel I spoke on had three people (including the chair) who’d published books about von Arnim… and me. But they made me feel very welcome, and I spoke about one of her lesser-known novels, Father (1931).

Rather than replicate my paper, I’ll do something more akin to my usual book reviews – though stealing some of the same research! Father is a novel that reminded me an awful lot of Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. In both, an unmarried woman is desperate for her independence, and not to be subservient in her relative’s home. For Laura Willowes, it’s her brother’s home; in Father it’s – you guessed it! – the father’s. Jennifer is 31 and a slave to her widowed father, a writer; she laments ‘the years shut up in the back diningroom at a typewriter, with no hope that anything would ever be different’. Only things are different. Father is getting married again, to Netta, who is younger than Jennifer. She sees her opportunity for escape: she can move to the countryside.

Through and beyond father she saw doors flying open, walls falling flat, and herself running unhindered down the steps, along Gower Street, away through London, across suburbs, out, out into great sun-lit spaces where the wind, fresh and scented, rushed to meet her […] Jen, her wide-open eyes shining with the reflection of what she saw through and beyond father. She could feel the wind – she could feel it, the scented fresh wind, blowing up her hair as she ran and ran…

And, like Laura Willowes, she does move to the countryside. Only things aren’t quite as uncomplicated as she’d hoped. Waiting for her, in that village, are James and Alice – the vicar and his tyrannical sister – who make an interesting parallel to Jennifer and her father. Alice is also a spinster, but holds all the power in her brother’s house – and is keen to dissuade any possible sisters-in-law who might oust her from the vicarage.

Among Elizabeth von Arnim fans, I don’t think Father is particularly well-regarded, but I thought it was excellent. Most of her novels seem to concern marriage, whether happy or unhappy, so to see her tackle the much-discussed issue of ‘surplus women’ in the interwar years was very interesting – and Jennifer is a great character. With her love of nature, her unconventionality (she sleeps outside on a mattress when she first arrives), and her naive but firm belief that she can escape her father’s domain, she is an attractive and engaging heroine.

Though dealing with some slightly sombre issues at times, von Arnim can never leave her humorous tone completely to one side. There are some very funny scenes – particularly, perhaps, one where James and Alice are both trying to abandon the other one in Switzerland (it makes sense in context), though Jennifer’s quirky world-view makes many otherwise mundane sentiments wryly amusing to read.

I’m always intrigued about the effect a choice of title has on a novel. If this one had been called (say) Jennifer, it would feel very different. Though her father isn’t on the scene all that often, calling the novel Father makes him feel curiously omnipresent; it seeps throughout the narrative. A clever decision on Elizabeth von Arnim’s part.

Not the easiest of her books to track down (unless you have a Kindle, where it’s probably free [EDIT: maybe it’s not…]) – and also not up there with her best novels – but definitely an entertaining and interesting one which I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. And a perfect companion to the excellent Lolly Willowes!

 

Other People’s Lives by A.A. Milne

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…or, what it’s like to read a book that almost nobody else will ever read.

You may remember, back in April, I posted about Other People’s Lives (1935) – or, at least, about finding it online and receiving my copy in the post.

Other-Peoples-Lives

It was never published as a book; the only copies that have ever existed were acting editions. By their nature, they’re not intended to be kept for very long, and it is rare to find a copy of this play. I was super lucky to do so – and, a few months later, completed the deal by reading it.

The play is quite a simple idea, but executed very well. Mr and Mrs Tilling, and their daughter Clare, are a very happy little family living in a little flat. Mrs Tilling is disabled, and Clare’s job is no grander than labelling envelopes, but neither thing stops them having a wonderful life – and listening to the novel that Mr Tilling has been writing for a while. If Milne’s portrait of a happy family could be accused of being patronising, then those (hypothetical) critics could also be accused of cynicism. It’s heart-warming and, what is more, believable.

In the flat below them congregate Arnold, Lola, Stephen, and Meg. They are Milne characters through and through in their light-hearted teasing and silliness, but with a darker edge than he usually portrays. They are mostly quite selfish and inconsiderate in their joviality; happy to joke and banter, but fairly uninterested in anything deeper. Lola is an exception, and is the driving force behind trying to help her upstairs neighbours.

The plot is a little more complicated than that, but it’s basically a cautionary tale for what happens when people interfere. It’s perhaps a little too bleak – too conveniently bleak, really, considering the series of events that come towards the end – but it’s still executed very movingly, and even made me cry a little.

But, can I really recommend it? I waited over a decade for an affordable copy to appear online, so I don’t imagine anybody will be running out to purchase a copy (nab one if you ever spot it!). It definitely added something to the experience, channelling my inner-hipster instincts; I knew that only a handful of people alive had ever had the chance to read Other People’s Lives, and somehow that made me feel more connected to the audiences of 1935 who’d have seen this on stage. Reading it was quite a different experience from reading Pride and Prejudice or Fingersmith or One Day or any novel that is likely to be recognised by most book-loving people I mention it to. Curious.

Have you had this experience? How do you feel when reading a novel or play or poetry collection so scarce that you’re almost reading it in a void? Let me know!

(And, on a completely unrelated note, episode 5 of Tea or Books? is going to be even later than it already is, because Rachel doesn’t currently have Internet access…)

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay

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I have been extremely pleased to see the success of the British Library Crime Classics, but although I’ve cheered them on from a distance, and bought one of the John Budes, it’s only now that I’ve actually read one of the series. And it isn’t the John Bude; it is one they kindly gave me: Death on the Cherwell (1935) by Mavis Doriel Hay.

This is extremely apt for me, since it is set in Oxford – the Cherwell (pronounced char-well, please) is part of the Thames – and I know the places Hay describes. The setting is largely the environs of the non-existent Persephone College, a women-only Oxford college. A handy map in the front shows where this college supposedly stands – a small park by the river that, incidentally, remains building-free, and would be a very foolish place to build anything you didn’t want to have annually flooded. But, according to Stephen Booth’s introduction, it’s based on St. Hilda’s – which Hay attended as a student, but before women were awarded degrees.

A group of undergraduates, or ‘undergraduettes’ as the papers apparently label them, are in the process of setting up the Lode League (‘the formation of esoteric societies is one of the favourite pastimes of undergraduates’), sat on the corrugated iron roof of a small boathouse, when a mysterious canoe floats by… In it is the body of the bursar, Miss Myra Denning, an unpopular woman whose unpopularity was, indeed, the very genesis of the Lode League.

This League is composed of Daphne, Gwyneth, Nina, and Sally. In truth, I found these young women more or less interchangeable – one was supposed to be wiser than the others, one more impetuous, and so forth, but any of them could fairly easily have said any of the dialogue. It didn’t much matter. What matters rather more is the fun that Hay throws us into.

As I wrote recently in my post on A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, detective novels that aren’t written by Agatha Christie inevitably suffer by comparison, when it comes to plot. (I’m not going to risk mentioning Dorothy L. Sayers again, even though there are striking similarities in scenario to Gaudy Night, published in the same year. I’d better not say what I thought of Gaudy Night.) And the plot of Death on the Cherwell isn’t filled with the sorts of twists, turns, and surprises that Christie would have found – it ends up being one of the people you suspected it would be all along, for fairly undisguised reasons – but, that acknowledged, this novel is great fun and very well told.

Hay is great at crafting an engaging narrative. Whenever it palls a bit, we get a new character – a vivacious and witty couple who apparently appeared in Hay’s Murder Underground make a reappearance, driving madly around Oxford and staying at the Mitre (which was apparently once rather classy; how things have changed). Then there is Draga, the ‘Yugo-Slavian’ student who lives in constant surprise at the English and equally constant poor grammar. She is in every way a stereotype of the Eastern European student, but perhaps we should expect no better from the 1930s – and she is certainly not intended as an offensive portrait. She is vibrant and amusing, and certainly stands out from the other student characters.

Although sold as an amateur detectives premise, there are a couple of police officers involved. Both, luckily, are extremely willing to share details of their investigations with the central characters, and they more or less work in tandem.

I wasn’t quite fair when I said there weren’t twists and turns. There are, just not particularly in the denouement – along the way, we get curses and secrets and all that sort of thing. There isn’t a dull moment, and it’s all (I keep coming back to this) very fun. Like The Red House Mystery, it’s definitely cosy crime – with the added bonus of offering a window into a women’s college in the 1930s. It’s a delight, and if the rest of the British Library Crime Classics are of an equal tone and standard, then I can’t wait to dive in and explore.

My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes

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I was very excited to get an abebooks alert about an affordable copy of My Husband Simon (1931) by Mollie Panter-Downes (which is usually either unavailable or extortionately expensive). Her novel One Fine Day is (bold claim) one of the best I’ve ever read, and her war diaries are exceptionally good, and naturally I wanted to read more. After I posted about buying it, I was inundated with (ahem) two requests that I read and review it quickly. So, dear readers, I have.

I’ll start by managing expectations – it’s not as good as One Fine Day, London War Notes, or her volumes of short stories published by Persephone. But I still rather loved reading it. The heroine (with the extraordinary name Nevis – is this a name?) is a young wife and novelist, and the novel does, indeed, largely concern her relationship with ‘my husband Simon’. Nevis is literary, intelligent, cultured, and quite the intellectual snob; Simon is none of these things, but is charismatic and jovial (as well as fond of horse-racing). They are not temperamentally suited, but they do have rather a physical attraction – more than I would have expected to find in a 1931 novel, until I remembered The Sheik – and the novel negotiates Nevis’ attempts to write her third novel and manage her marriage. Oh, and she’s 24.

From what I can gather on her Wikipedia page (which isn’t a lot), My Husband Simon is intensely autobiographical. Both Nevis and Mollie had had runaway bestsellers while still teenagers (Mollie was only 17 when The Shoreless Sea became a huge success); both married at 21; Mollie was 24 when writing My Husband Simon – which was her third novel. As far as I can tell, it was all very much drawn from life – and it is nice to know that her real-life marriage lasted for many decades beyond the three-year-anxieties.

As far as plot goes, it is all fairly simplistic. It’s not really the love triangle that the ‘about this novel’ section promises; it’s more introspective and undecided than that. While Nevis’s problems are fairly self-indulgent, and perhaps look a bit ridiculous to anybody older than 24 (which she obviously considers a couple of steps from the grave), the novel is still engaging and enjoyable.

Mollie P-D’s greatest quality – in her finest work – is that of a stylist, I would argue. Particularly in One Fine Day, where the prose is like the most unassuming poetry. There was a 16 year gap between My Husband Simon and One Fine Day (in terms of novels); her attention was transferred to short stories. And so there is only a hint of what her writing could become. It is certainly never bad, but there are only glimpses of beauty. I did like this moment of looking out from a tram, that has the same observational stance as much of One Fine Day:

We climbed on top of the tram and away it snorted. A queer constraint was on us. We hardly said a word, but in some way all my perceptions were tremendously acute so that I took in everything that was going on in the streets. A shopping crowd surged over the pavements. In the windows were gaping carcases of meat, books, piles of vegetable marrows, terrible straw hats marked 6/11d. I though vaguely: “Who buys all the terrible things in the world? Artificial flowers and nasty little brooches of Sealyhams in bad paste, and clothes-brushes, shaped like Micky the Mouse and scarves worked in raffia?” A lovely, anaemic-looking girl stood on the kerb, anxiously tapping an envelope against her front teeth. Should she? Shouldn’t she? And suddenly, having made her decision, all the interest went out of her face and she was just one of the cow-like millions who were trying to look like Greta Garbo.
So, be comforted to know that the best of Panter-Downes’ work is easily available – but this is a novel that certainly wouldn’t disgrace Persephone covers, if they ever decided to publish more by Mollie, and a really interesting example of how she developed into the writer she eventually became.

My Sister Eileen – Ruth McKenney

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There aren’t enough unashamedly lovely books around. Too many modern books (it seems) feel they have to be either trivial or miserable, as though the only way to be literary was to be grim. There is a market for uplifting books, but these tend to be insultingly light reads (pastel-coloured romances) or forgettable books you buy from the pile by the till. Comedy, meanwhile, is apparently represented by arch or melancholic writers whose novels strike me as either entirely unamusing (I’m looking at you, Howard Jacobson) or tragedy decorated with jokes.

This is a broadbrush and uninformed portrait of modern literature, of course, but my sense is that we are experiencing a good decade for literary and experimental fiction with its serious face on, but missing out on well written joie de vivre. The exception that comes to mind might be David Sedaris’ non-fiction, which is very funny, but even this is decidedly melancholic.

So, what am I suggesting as an antidote? It’s every bit as lovely as Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages and Herbert Jenkins’ Patricia Brent, Spinster – it’s Ruth McKenney’s My Sister Eileen (1938). You might have guessed that from the title of this blog post.

I bought it a little while ago, after seeing it fleetingly mentioned in a review of Joanna Rakoff’s excellent My Salinger Year, and I was excited when a beautiful copy arrived. Still, it felt like an indulgence to be saved, and I didn’t dive straight in. My recent holiday felt like a very good opportunity to treat myself. As I expected, it’s lovely and funny and good.

It’s non-fiction – of the elaborated and exaggerated variety, I imagine – and is mostly about Ruth and Eileen’s childhood, although there are also some chapters devoted to their time living in an extremely dingy New York basement (and it is this section, I believe, that is used in the film version – which I have bought but not yet watched).

Their childhood is certainly played for laughs – it is very amusing. I wasn’t especially sold on the first chapter, which is about crying at the cinema (and the sisters’ demand that a story should be entirely tragic, or it barely counted as a story at all). But from the second chapter onwards I was completely sold. The second chapter (‘Hun-gah’) details the sisters’ attempts at amateur performances.

Eileen’s only ‘bit’ was playing a 1920s song called ‘Chloe’ (Eileen is ‘absolutely tone-deaf and has never been able to carry a tune, even the simplest one, in her whole life. She solved the difficulty by simply pounding so hard in the bass that she drowned herself out.’) The infant Ruth, on the other hand, had a foray into acting – via an experimental drama teacher who allotted her the part of ‘Hunger’ (which, incidentally, was also her only line – to be repeated). There is a wonderful climax in a scene where the sisters have been asked to amalgamate their performances into one for their assembled relatives:

Eileen played and sang first. Just as the final notes of her bass monotone chant, “I GOT-TUH go wheah yew ARE,” and the final rumble of the piano died away, I burst dramatically through the door, shouting “Hun-gah! Hun-gah!” and shaking my matted and snarled locks at my assembled relatives. My grandmother Farrel, who always takes everything seriously, let out a piercing scream.

Glorious.  And so the tales go on. We hear how Ruth was almost drowned by a Red Cross Lifesaving Examiner, how the sisters’ father was obsessed with experimental washing machines, how they enlivened a camp bird-watching, etc. When they move to New York, these adventures turn to the complexities of a basement window that drunks would yell through, a cheating landlord, and (the story that inspires the cover), the time when Ruth – then a reporter – was followed for a day by the Brazilian Navy. It’s so wonderfully silly and delightfully told. If it were not true (or at least based in truth) it might be criticised for being all over the place – but truth is not neatly arranged in logical or probable order, of course.

The Eileen of the title, incidentally, has another claim to notoriety – she married Nathanael West, and also died in the car crash that ended his life. This was actually two years after My Sister Eileen was published, so naturally it is not mentioned – but it lends a certain poignancy to the collection (and may influence the two sequels – one of which I now have, the other of which seems ungettable in the UK).

That moment of pathos aside, I think any lover of the Provincial Lady et al would also delight in this book – I certainly did, and was very glad to have found it.

Muddling Through

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One of the types of books I most love are those incidental, silly-humour books from between the world wars. The sort that is achingly middle-class and frivolous, neither lewd nor politically astute, but something that folk in the 1930s would have laughed through and put on their coffee tables. Sometimes those books are collections of essays, but occasionally they come in the shape of Muddling Through by Theodora Benson and Betty Askwith (illustrated by Nicolas Bentley).

The subtitle is ‘Britain in a Nutshell’, and such is what it purports to be. It considers England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland in turn, pointing out the national characteristics of each, and the distinctive traits of various regions. All is done in staccato sentences, which are supposedly comprehensive but, of course, are nothing of the kind. (‘Cambridge always wins the boat race. Cambridge has sausages.’)

Yes, the joke is rather one-note, and utterly silly, but it rather beguiled me – as a snapshot of a period, as much as anything else.

The other thing which made this a snapshot of its publication year (1936) was how generous the publisher is with space. It’s an above-average-height hardback, and a lot of the pages are almost empty.  It adds to the humour (because it becomes all the clearer that they are dismissing places and people in a handful of words) but, to those of us familiar with the ‘wartime restrictions’ notes in the wafer-thin-paper hardbacks which were soon to follow, it feels anachronistic.

So, a silly book, but just the sort of silly I love.

Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

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Another month, another cold… and I still haven’t written properly about the book that got me through the last cold.  I did tell you that Swallows and Amazons (1930) by Arthur Ransome was being my solace – battling out with another 1930 book, actually, Diary of a Provincial Lady – and what a perfect solace it was too.  Thank you Vintage for sending me this stunning copy a year or so ago.  Not a word of it came as a surprise, devotee as I was of the film (watched when ill as a child), but that wasn’t really the point.

If anybody doesn’t know the book at all (can this be?) it is the first of a series about John, Susan, Titty, Roger, and various others (in this novel, the Blackett sisters) who join them or war with them in their boating adventures.  It kicks off with that famous message of parental care, telegrammed by their father: BETTER DROWNED THAN DUFFERS IF NOT DUFFERS WONT DROWN.  There are those namby-pamby types among us who will argue that children are not better drowned than duffers, but I suspect we aren’t supposed to take his words entirely seriously.  The father knows whose side the novel is on, and that no calamity will befall the children – even if they are sent off as young as seven to fend for themselves (albeit in striking distance of home).

One advantage the film has over the book is that you can just watch them doing things to boats, and all is clear – I ended Swallows and Amazons as ignorant as I began, despite Ransome’s valiant effort to immerse the reader in the minutiae of sailing. Tacking this and gunwale that.  It didn’t matter that I hadn’t a clue what was happening.  It was all such fun.

But… I think Swallows and Amazons is probably best enjoyed as a child, or in a sickly state such as I was.  Something I’ve noticed while reading or re-reading classic children’s books as an adult – be it E. Nesbit, A.A. Milne, Richmal Crompton, or whoever – is that they are often funny in a way that is intended for the adult.  The child will still love the story, but something more sophisticated is going on too.  Well, unless I missed it completely, there is nothing at all sophisticated in Swallows and Amazons.  Ransome tells the story in tones of breathless excitement; the narrator is every bit as childlike as the children.  There isn’t really any humour (besides a good ‘ruthless’ pun), and there certainly isn’t any wryness or winking to the reader.  Everything is ingenuous and cheerful.  I don’t think I could have a reading diet which consisted just of this boys’/girls’ own variety of adventure, but, my goodness, it was perfect for my sickbed.

Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood

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This is another one where I’m sending you off to Vulpes Libris!  We’ve inaugurated Shelf of Shame week, where five of us pick an author or book we’ve been meaning to read for ages, and see how we find them.  (I’ll pre-empt anybody saying that there’s no need to be ashamed of having left something unread by saying… it’s a fun idea for a themed week, enjoy!)

I picked Christopher Isherwood, as I felt I ought to know more about such an important interwar writer. And I own this copy because it’s got a beautiful cover!  It’s a Folio edition, but had lost its slipcover before it found its way to my hands.

Follow the link to find out what I thought…

The last Sherpa/book combo, I’m afraid…

Together and Apart – Margaret Kennedy

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I think Together and Apart (1936) by Margaret Kennedy might just be the most 1930s novel I have ever read.  Not that it is the best (though it is very good) but that it is somehow quintessentially 1930s, stuffed with all the ingredients I have come to expect – marital politics; sensuality tempered by an intrinsic conservatism; a sense of change which is both progressive and nostalgic; fraught family gatherings; women discovering their voices, but torn between the roles of wife, mother, and independent woman; people explaining their feelings to each other at elaborate length.  Of course, none of these themes are unique to the 1930s, but they recur so often in novels of that decade that, together, they evoke the 1930s for me.  (Before I go any further – thank you Rob, who gave this to me in the Virago Secret Santa back in 2011, making Together and Apart possibly my only black Virago Modern Classic.)

It all starts off with that touchy-for-the-1930s topic of divorce, with Betsy writing to her mother about her proposed separation from her husband, the celebrated librettist Alec, and it’s worth quoting at length…

Well now Mother, listen.  I have something to tell you that you won’t like at all.  In fact, I’m afraid that it will be a terrible shock and you will hate it at first.  But do try to get used to the idea and bring father round to it.

Alec and I are parting company.  We are going to get a divorce.

I know this will horrify: the more so because I have, perhaps mistakenly, tried very hard to conceal our unhappiness during these last years.  I didn’t, naturally, want anybody to know while there was still a chance of keeping things going.  But the fact is, we have been quite miserable, both of us.  We simply are unsuited to one another and unable to get on.  How much of this have you guessed?

Life is so different from what we expected when we first married.  Alec has quite changed, and he needs a different sort of wife.  I never wanted all this money and success.  I married a very nice but quite undistinguished civil servant.  With my money we had quite enough to live on in a comfortable and civilised way.  We had plenty of friends, our little circle, people like ourselves, amusing and well bred, not rich, but decently well off.  Alec says now that they bored him.  But he didn’t say so at the time.
Divorce was no longer the great unthinkable, but you don’t have to be cynical to detect a hint of false brio in Betsy’s assured tone.  The respective mothers leap into action – and they remind me rather of the mothers in Richmal Crompton’s Family Roundabout.  Betsy’s mother is weak and anxious; Alec’s mother is domineering and formidable.  Neither, it turns out, is particularly good at bringing the separated couple back together, and there is rather a sense that they might have inadvertently accelerated the split…

From here, Margaret Kennedy weaves a complex and evolving pattern.  I expected the novel to focus on the married couple, seeing whether or not they could mend their rift, but Kennedy’s world is far wider than that.  I might even criticise it for being a little too wide, in that it occasionally seems to lose focus a bit as she tries to encompass a school, four or five households, and the minds and opinions of a dozen or more principal players.

As with the G.B. Stern novel (and because I’m rushing up so many posts!) I don’t think it’s worth elaborating at length about the plot.  Kennedy shows us the consequences of actions, and movingly depicts the ways in which separation affects everyone – not just the ‘think of the children’ angle (although this is shown a fair bit, the children are all quite flawed of their own accord) but the married couple themselves.  The split between Betsy and Alec is never final and certain in their minds – both are plagued by regret or, more to the point, uncertainty about their decision (regret would be a form of certainty which neither can reach).  I have never been married, and of course never divorced, but I was still impressed by the nuances in Kennedy’s writing…

…with the caveat that this is the 1930s, and I often find that the dialogue in 1930s novels is never quite as nuanced as one might wish.  People do explain their emotions at length, and have oh-gosh-darling moments, but that all adds to the good fun of it all.  My first Margaret Kennedy book was her biography of Jane Austen, and it is interesting to see how her own fiction compares.  Well, of course Austen is better – but you can see where Kennedy learnt a bit about portraying human nature in its complexities, and I think Jane would rather have enjoyed reading this if she’d been around in 1936.