1940s

Hush, Gabriel! by Veronica Parker Johns

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I wanted to add a second novel to my #SpinsterSeptember contribution, so went through my shelf of ‘would these make good British Library Women Writers suggestions?’, flicking through them until I saw any indication that they featured spinsters. Since most of the shelf are hardbacks without dustjackets by little-known authors, with minimal info about the titles online, it was mostly a case of keeping an eye out for ‘Miss’.

Well, Hush, Gabriel! (1940) by Veronica Parker Johns is narrated by a self-described ‘respectable spinster’, aged 52, and I was drawn in immediately by the opening paragraph:

I may as well state at the beginning that I am used to being surprised by Clotilda. I was surprised when she was born; somewhat more so than my mother, who had kept the secret from me until the last possible instant. I first became aware of it when Mother, coyly but with determination, refused to come to my graduation exercises at college. When, a few months later, I ceased to be an only child, I found Clotilda surprisingly beautiful, and so she remained, gracefully avoiding the awkward age as I trudged into my late thirties. I was amazed when she married Malcolm Allen, confounded when she moved with him to a quiet, unassuming Virgin Island. Therefore, I scarcely turned a hair when one of her house guests was found, surprisingly to everyone else, murdered.

This is how I learned that I was reading a murder mystery! Agatha (the spinster in question) is visiting her sister ahead of Clotilda’s impending baby. There are a handful of other guests, assembled in a clear ‘one of these is going to be a murderer’ sort of way, with little other reason for them all to come together. It took me a while to disentangle them, as they tend to dart onto the scene and disappear – we have Dolly Woods, a silly, brash woman whom Agatha meets on the journey there, and her older, wealthy husband. There’s likeable Mary and her flirtation with Carl; there’s Clotilda and her fairly absent husband; there’s a local judge, whom Agatha grows swiftly fond of. And there is Agatha’s dog Nell, who has somehow made the journey.

I really enjoyed Parker Johns’ writing from the off. She gives Agatha an ironic turn of phrase and tone of voice that I definitely appreciated – I loved the deft way this paragraph finishes:

I liked Carl, too. He was the only one of the guests I had known before, if you except my shipboard abhorrence of Dolly Woods. He had introduced Clotilda to Malcolm, but I had forgiven him for it long since. Numerous theatre invitations during my winters in town had down down my resistance. When a boy of thirty pays that much attention to a woman scenting fifty, she’s just bound to weaken. Eventually I invited him up to my place in Connecticut for summer weekends, and he not only came but seemed to enjoy himself. It was he who had thrust Nell, my cocker spaniel, upon me, and he had been a loving godfather to her. I was grateful to him for always remembering her birthday and forgetting mine.

The aforementioned murder happens pretty quickly – a doctor is found, shot through the head. The mystery part seems to be pretty short-lived: Clotilda instantly confesses to the murder. This is curiously disregarded by everyone, with the feeling that pregnant women will confess to murder at the drop of the hat because of hormones, or something. But the plot thickens when Agatha establishes that the doctor didn’t die by shooting – he was shot after he was dead.

To be honest, the novel’s very promising opening isn’t lived up to. Parker Johns seems to have put all her stylistic effort into the first chapter or so, and the prose becomes much more plebian as we go on. Agatha remains an interesting character, but without the captivating charm that initially thrusts her on the scene. And, yes, it is novel (especially for 1940) for a 50-something spinster to be given a romantic storyline, and it is satisfying that her romance is also intellectual, rather than abandoning her wisdom on the opportunity for a man. But it doesn’t really make up for the novel’s less able elements.

The main one is structure – it sort of meanders on, but further deaths and crises but it’s hard to be very invested. Alongside that is a lot of padding from characters who seem rather one-note, except for Dolly Woods who makes an extremely unlikely transformation into a very likeable character. The title doesn’t seem to make any sense. We learn that Clotilda says “Hush, Gabriel” at the scene of the murder, and Agatha knows she always said it growing up, but since we already knew from the first chapter that Clotilda was at the scene of the murder, it doesn’t add much.

And then there’s the racism… that’s the key reason that I won’t be rereading (or keeping) this novel. I suppose a 1940 novel set in the Virgin Islands is unlikely to be culturally sensitive, and I wasn’t surprised by the slightly-off depiction of the Black inhabitants – though, on the other hand, pleasantly surprised by one of the characters being a Black doctor, well-respected in his profession. The n-word is used a couple of times, but by a character we are clearly meant to consider awful. BUT – I won’t explain exactly how, in case you ever read this – the solution to the mystery partly involves some horrendous racism. Sigh.

So, I think there is a kernel of something wonderful for Spinster September here – if Agatha had lived up to her initial introduction, she would have been a total delight. And if Veronica Parker Johns has written any novel more consistently and coherently, then I’d be interested to read it – at its best, her writing is wonderful. But, overall, this one ended up being a disappointment.

The House By The Sea by Jon Godden

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My first – and I hope not only – contribution to #SpinsterSeptember! It’s an annual event organised by Nora and is rightly very popular. Because there are so many interesting spinsters in fiction, whether joyful or miserable, deliberate or left on the shelf, adventurer or domestic.

I’ve read a couple of novels by Jon Godden (sister of Rumer Godden), and I thought Told In Winter was especially good – so when my friend Barbara offered me a copy of The House By The Sea (1948), I gratefully took her up on it. The title made me think it would be a cosy story of a beautiful location – and, after all, I had already loved a memoir of the same name by May Sarton.

Well, reader, cosy is not the word for this book.

It does start with slow, coldly beautiful descriptions of the isolated house and its coastal scenery. Edwina is a middle-aged, unmarried woman who has recently moved there, keen to get away from the oppressive friendship of a woman called Madge (though Madge also seems to have a room in this new house). We never meet her, but it’s clear that she has domineered Edwina in the name of protection. It did seem possible that she and Madge had been in a romantic relationship but, if this is the case, Godden only hints at it. It is clear that Edwina is starting to feel free – but it is also clear, even at this stage, that the house is not an uncomplicated idyll.

When Edwina opened the door the hall was full of chalky blue light which came through the staircase window across the white banisters and on to the slate floor. Although she had spent the last three days in the house, unpacking, cleaning, and arranging her furniture, going back across the fields in the evening to her rooms in the village, she now felt as if she were entering the house for the first time. It was, she felt, entirely unaware of her, entirely empty, altogether silent, without life or breath – in spite of the furniture she had arranged, the curtains she had hung, the fire laid ready in the grate, her clothes in the cupboard. She hesitated on the doorstep, almost afraid to go in and break the silence.

Godden’s writing is beautiful, and Edwina is an interesting character. In some ways, she fits some stereotypes of middle-aged, unmarried women in mid-century novels: a certain naivety, a yearning for the domestic. But she is self-aware too, and realises how her life has been lived in the shadow of others. Coming to this new house is a chance, she believes, for transformation.

She thought, “For years I have been filled with Madge and before that there was someone else, who, I can’t remember, and before that another – my father, Jenny my nursemaid. I take on the colour of the person nearest me, just as I have taken on the colour and character of all these clothes in turn. Yes, a change of clothes is enough to change me completely.”

“What shall I do now that I am alone?” she thought. “What shall I become? An empty shell waits for any tide to flow and fill it. That is asking for trouble. That is dangerous.”

One of the things about opening an old hardback you know nothing about, which doesn’t have a dustjacket, means you are entering completely blind. There is no publisher’s blurb to give you clues, or even quotes from other authors to give you a sense of tone. So I did not at all expect the actual trouble and danger that arrive.

Edwina is walking through the empty rooms of her house, as usual, when suddenly she realises there is a man in the kitchen with her. He is hungry, dirty, tired and aggressive. His name is Ross Dennehay, and he quickly takes control of the house.

It is such an unexpected turn for the novel to take, and suddenly the long, slow, perhaps slightly boring, initial 70 pages make sense. We, like Edwina, have been lulled into thinking this is a quiet refuge at the edge of the world. Any unquiet has been in Edwina’s own mind, trying to establish her sense of identity when this has never hitherto been welcomed. And suddenly this scary man appears – threatening violence if he is not obeyed, and effectively keeping her prisoner.

But this shock somehow doesn’t shift the genre of The House By The Sea – it does not become a horror novel, or anything you might expect from the home invasion trope. Instead, Edwina seems to find something that she has missed: a new experience, and new roles. Instead of being the needy one in her friendship with Madge, she becomes cook, housekeeper, companion to Ross. He remains untrusting and angry most of the time, throwing her one kind word for every 20 rebukes, but she doesn’t seem to quashable. Instead, she keeps trying to assure him he can trust her – and there is even a lingering eroticism to the way she behaves.

He isn’t a rough and ready man who is hiding a heart of gold, by any means. In one tense, ruthless scene, he forces Edwina to listen to his story – why he is on the run, and why he ends up there. It involves rape and murder. As I say, this is not a cosy book. The dark edges of Told In Winter are a more present foundation in The House By The Sea.

I almost gave up on The House By The Sea because I was finding it so slow. Even after Ross arrives, Godden doesn’t alter her pace – just the intensity of the narrative. It is still steady, steady, steady – the most langurous thriller you can imagine. Throughout, she makes space for beautiful and evocative descriptions of the natural world around the world, like this:

The wind was up and moving round the house. It came from the sea and with the rain tore inland across the fields, crying and calling as it went. It found the house and beat at the walls and roof and plucked at the windows. The house stood firm. It presented a smooth unbroken surface to the night; the wind streamed like water over and round it and rushed on defeated. In the black spaces of the night the lamplit circle in the sitting-room, where the two armchairs were drawn close to the fire, was an oasis of peace and warmth and strength.

I’m really glad I continued with the book, though I still can’t entirely work out what I thought of it. It has to be read slowly, and it requires a patient reader. Ultimately, I don’t know whether it was a triumph or needed significant restructuring. But I’m sure the characters, the voice, and the feeling of it will stay with me – and that is certainly an achievement. You certainly won’t come across anybody quite like Edwina, or any similar situation, in any other novels this Spinster September.

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg

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For my second and final entry to this year’s Women in Translation month, I’ve read The Dry Heart (1947) by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from Italian by Frances Frenaye. I’ve read and loved a handful of the short Ginzburg books that Daunt are diligently republishing, so opened it up with high hopes – and immediately encountered this striking opening paragraph:

“Tell me the truth,” I said.

“What truth?” he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook and now he showed me what is was: a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a hankerchief.

I shot him between the eyes.

Gosh! Well, if that doesn’t draw you in, then what will? Most of the novella is then told in flashback, with occasional returns to ‘present day’ and the aftermath of this shooting. It’s not my favourite structure for a novel usually, as I find putting the entire story in flashback often deadens it – but it worked well in The Dry Heart.

As so often, it wasn’t until writing this review that I realised that the narrator is unnamed. (Do others notice this while they’re reading? I never seem to.) She is an emotional, hopeful woman who becomes a little obsessed with an older man she sees at the theatre – a man we later learn is called Alberto. When he’s present, she can’t quite understand why she is so fixated on him: he isn’t especially attractive or charismatic, and seems rather diffident and unwilling to develop anything approaching an emotional connection. But when he isn’t there, the narrator can’t stop picturing their future life together.

Alberto doesn’t try to disguise that he is in love with another woman – but she is married. He has determined on singleness, since he can’t have her, but – with those cards on the table – is willing to propose.

When Alberto asked me to marry him I said yes. I asked him how he expected to live with me if he was in love with somebody else, and he said that if I loved him very much and was very brave we might make out very well together. Plenty of marriages are like that, he said, because it’s very unusual for both partners to love each other the same way. I wanted to know a lot more about his feelings for me, but I couldn’t talk to him for long about anything important because it bored him to try to get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over the way I did. When I began to speak of the woman he loved and to ask if he still went to see her, his eyes dimmed and his voice became tired and faraway and he said that she was a bad woman, that she had caused him a great deal of pain and he didn’t want to be reminded of her.

If you’re not familiar with Ginzburg’s writing, this is a good indication – she writes fairly plain prose, and uses it to crystallise emotions and emotional miscommunication in a simple way. It works very well, getting to the heart (pun not intended) of any scene with the directness of an arrow.

As the story progresses, we already know the ending – and we can guess how we might end up there (and learn pretty soon that, yes, Alberto is having an affair with the woman he’s in love with). But Ginzburg does a couple of more subtle things with this premise. One is the significance of the drawing, and the drawings that Alberto does as the story progresses – and the other is the scene in which the narrator and the woman Alberto loves meet each other. I think that’s the strongest moment in the story, overturning expectations.

Perhaps, also, it’s the scene I found most interesting because of the relationship between the two women: rivals, but both vulnerable, neither getting what they want from the situation or from their lives. And, as a complementary point, the reason I didn’t love The Dry Heart as much as the other Ginzburg novellas I’ve read is a matter of personal taste: I find stories of romantic couples much less interesting than the other sorts of relationships that Ginzburg has centred narratives around, particularly parent/child.

Perhaps that’s because narrative art of the past few centuries has been so obsessed with romantic love that it is refreshing to find somebody (especially somebody of Ginzburg’s talent) turn an equal attention to one of the many other fundamental relationships that make up our lives. So The Dry Heart is doubtless just as good as the other books I’ve read by her – but didn’t captivate me in quite the same way.

Huffley Fair by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

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Huffley Fair by Dorothy Evelyn Smith | Goodreads

Ever since discovering the miraculously good O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith, I’ve been steadily making my way through her other novels – wondering if anything will be equal to it. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by her, though that extraordinary spark seems to have only struck once. The other novels are very good but not classics. So, what of Huffley Fair (1944), the most recent I’ve read?

The novel covers quite a long time period and several generations of a family, and we are back in a similar setting to several of Smith’s other novels – the moors and the surrounding villages. Here is the opening paragraph, with Smith’s ability to capture place beautifully and invite you in.

Up on the hill-tops the day was broad awake; warm with sun, bright with gorse and hawthorn and star-eyed daisies, loud with bird-song and the hum of bees, washed with dew and wind. But deep in the valley, where the Huff was a dark-and-silver thread between two towering hills, the day still slept, waiting for the sun.

Into this scene comes a group of travellers – of gypsies, in the language of the novel. I say ‘family’. There are quite a few tangential relationships between these people, but they are bonded together by their work and their lifestyle as itinerant fair-workers – rather disdained by all the communities they go to, and perhaps disdaining them in return, but accepted for their brief period of their work. The fair offers entertainment to the children and to the townfolk doing long hours at tedious jobs. Among them is Lou, a pretty, unsociable young woman who will come to the centre of the novel.

One family unlikely to be found at the fair is Abel’s. He is a serious-minded craftsman, opening the novel finishing off a chair. Unorthodoxly, he intends to use it to propose to Hilda, a neighbour for whom he feels no love and little affection, but who seems the inevitable choice as a wife. She, in turn, considers him her last hope (more on her in a minute). But while Abel gets his living from building furniture and the like, his passion is as a preacher at the Mission. He preaches fury and fire, the love of God swept up more forcefully in the wrath of God. It is the passion that draws people: his church is exhilirating, and far more people come than to the tamer churches nearby.

The kindest, loveliest characters in the novel are Abel’s parents – Alfred, who also preaches, and Eliza, who bakes and cares and worries. The evilest character in the novel is Hilda’s father – who brings out the sharpness of Smith’s pen:

Years ago, Samuel Berridge had come to Huffam to die. That he was still living was a matter of some regret to a number of people, not least of whom was his daughter Hilda.

Fat, timid, a good hosuekeeper and willing slave, and foolishly fond by nature, Hilda had been marked down from birth as her father’s lawful prey. Her mother departed this life at the earliest possible moment, thankful in the knowledge that in heaven there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Her brothers bolted from home as soon as they knew how to turn a penny, honest or otherwise. Her sisters leapt into the arms of the first young men who looked at them, safely entrenching themselves in homes of their own. On Hilda’s shoulders fell the task of caring for her father’s declining years, and it was a task no one wished to wrest from her.

Samuel is such a dark character in the novel, and some of the abuse was really difficult to read.

The moment that changes the trajectory of the novel – and Hilda’s future among others’ – is Abel stumbling across Lou on the moors, who has sprained her ankle. He tends to her, somewhat unwillingly, and somehow they go swimming together. Smith gives us three ellipses for what happens next – but when we see Abel come to the Mission (late for preaching), she gives an extraordinary scene of his preaching. We feel whipped up in the furore his congregation experience, and it’s clear he is driven by some new force. It’s hard to convey sermons (I remember two others in fiction, very different – Lease of Life by Frank Baker and Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck) but Smith does it with brio.

What has made him so animated? If we hadn’t guessed, we can piece it together a little while later – when Lou reveals to her fellow fair-goers that she is pregnant. They reason that she can get some money from the father and so, reluctantly, she allows herself to be taken to demand it. What they don’t expect is Alfred insisting that his son marry the woman he has made pregnant. And so a marriage takes place that nobody truly wishes, least of all Lou. And there goes, it seems, Hilda’s chance of security.

The next section of the novel shows Abel and Lou living together in Huffley, Abel having refused to stay with the family – and, indeed, he cuts himself off completely. They live a few miles away but may as well be at the other end of the universe. Absurdly, Abel blames Lou for all of this – for tempting him to sin, and ruining his life. Smith doesn’t overly editorialise, but any reader will be deeply frustrated by him: he makes everything worse for everyone through his stubbornness, unkindness and selfishness. Lou believes that she has wronged him and, in a subdued, sad way determines to ‘make it up to him’ through her lifelong obedience. Huffley Fair keeps going into the next generation too, and beyond, with their child and her future. But I shan’t reveal any more of the plot because we’ve gone far enough.

So, what was Huffley Fair like to read? Smith writes beautifully, and her characters are so well-realised and believable. It’s that believability which makes them so painful to read at times. As elsewhere, she captures the landscape in a memorable and evocative way and, as the novel takes place over several decades, we see the shifts that come with modernisation and the approach of war.

There is brightness in the novel – chiefly Eliza, and perhaps her other son, Walter, whom I haven’t mentioned. I thought Huffley Fair was very well-written and I did like reading it but, gosh, what a heaviness to it all. I often say how surprising it is that O, The Brave Music is such an uplifting novel when so many sad things happen to the characters. The opposite is true for Huffley Fair: it is such a melancholy novel. The aftermath of one man’s stupid, cruel choices is drawn out through years and years, and it is bitterly sad. Maybe that’s the difference between the triumph of hope over unavoidable tragedies in O, The Brave Music versus the very, very avoidable tragedies in Huffley Fair where hope is deliberately trampled under pride.

It’s still very good, but goodness me it won’t cheer you up. I’m not sure I’ll reread, certainly not as often as I know I’ll return to O, The Brave Music throughout my life, but I’m glad to continue expanding my relationship with Smith.

My Late Wives by Carter Dickson – #ABookADayInMay Day 11

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Carter Dickson is the not-especially-hidden pseudonym of John Dickson Carr, and he wrote murder mysteries under both names and a handful more. He specialises in the locked-room mystery, which is one of my favourite tropes – though I have only read one of his books, his first novel It Walks By Night, which I thought was pretty poor. Thankfully, My Late Wives (1947) is a significant improvement on that novel, particularly in character and in writing style, and it has restored my hopes in pursuing him as a writer.

There’s quite a convoluted set up to the novel, so bear with me. It somehow makes sense on the page. We open with the speedy account of Roger Bewlay – a serial killer, who has murdered four wives in turn, while living under different aliases. None of their bodies have ever been discovered – despite there being a young woman who witnessed the final dead body through the window, watching Roger Bewlay casually lighting a cigarette.

Fast forward 11 years. A lawyer called Dennis Forster – an upstanding, stolid, not especially characterful character – is going to see his friend Beryl, a theatre producer. Her big theatre star, Bruce Ransom, is coming to the end of a long run and is eyeing up his new project. An anonymous script has come through the post about the life and crimes of Roger Bewlay – and a bet about the likelihood of the ending gets out of hand. Ransom vows to masquerade as Roger Bewlay – or, rather, as someone pretending not to be Roger Bewlay, but deliberately making a poor job of it. As part of this, he must woo a naive young woman of his choosing. As I said, it’s quite convolted, and it’s impressive that Dickson makes it very clear what’s going on.

Dennis wants to warn Scotland Yard, so that they at least won’t burst onto the scene and arrest Bruce Ransom – and that’s how series detective Sir Henry Merrivale (‘H.M.’) gets involved. It’s strange to encounter a series detective in his 17th outing, because so little is done to contextualise him. There’s really no reason for him to be involved in this story, and his disappears for long stretches of time. It often felt like he was fighting with Dennis in being our primary perspective and, particularly towards the end, seemed to only turn up to be needlessly cryptic about what he’d worked out.

From what I can gather, he is a jumble of affable eccentricities – with a bullish, toughman overlay, so he doesn’t feel too much like a P.G. Wodehouse character. E.g. ‘H.M., if the truth must be told, is a notoriously bad driver with an absentminded habit of leaving the handbrake on, or of sitting and thinking about something else while the car bears straight towards a stone wall.’ Or this explosion:

“I really am a meek sort of feller, my wench. Honest. I’m a man of mild language. I never use profantiy, God damn it. Otherwise, so help me! I’d have told him to take his ruddy file and stick it…

“What I mean is,” coughed H.M., suddenly remembering his high-mindedness and assuming an air of piety, “that it wasn’t a very nice thing to do; now was it?”

He is ebullient and larger-than-life and I’m sure Dickson had many longstanding readers who rejoiced and seeing him again. I quite enjoyed my time with him, but he didn’t really feel like he matched the tone of the novel or contributed much to its plot. And his insistence on calling Beryl ‘my wench’ was pretty tiring.

In the final quarter or so of the novel, My Late Wives does what so many novels of this genre seem to do – become suddenly an adventure novel. I prefer detective novels to maintain their even tone right to the end, keeping to the drama of the drawing room rather than car chases, overblown fights etc. But this one was so overblown that I could enjoy the theatrical silliness of it – and maybe Dickson was reflecting the theatrical lives of his main characters.

Dickson’s writing in My Late Wives is so much better than his debut novel. Witty, pacy, shrewd – and not overwritten in the way of my only other experience with him. I really enjoyed rattling through the plot, and particularly Beryl as a character. What I will say about the plot is that it is not subtle. I am terrible at working things out, and the solution to this one was pretty glaring. (This isn’t really a locked-rooom mystery, incidentally.) Some ‘clues’ stood out a mile and, to be honest, there just weren’t enough male characters in the book for Roger Bewlay’s true identity to be much of a mystery. One key ‘shock twist’ is more or less spelled out earlier in the novel, to the point where it didn’t even seem like it needed revealing. But there was one element that was hidden in plain sight and which totally passed me by, and I thought that was an excellent gamble.

Normally, a weak plot or an easy-to-guess plot would spoil this sort of novel for me, but there was something in the spirit and vim of My Late Wives that meant it didn’t much matter. I still really joyed this one, and I’m glad I’ve got a couple more on my shelves.

 

Back by Henry Green

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You know when Caustic Cover Critic used to those funny posts of appalling cheap reprints of classics? Here’s an example. Among those that are simply confusing were a few that clearly put the title into some sort of search engine and stuck whatever appeared on the front. Three Men in a Boat gets three men in speedboats; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire gets a seductive woman hanging outside the Colosseum; Little Women gets a woman who is admittedly quite short, but is also apparently in the military of an East Asian country.

Well, when I pick up Harvill Press edition of Back (1946) by Henry Green, I can’t help feeling that it is a similar scenario. ‘The River Picnic’ by Victor Pasmore is a lovely painting, and painted only a handful of years before the novel was published – but it does seem to have been chosen primarily for the naked back on it. And the ‘back’ in Back refers to something quite different.

It is very timely, as a 1946 novel – because the title comes from Charley Summers coming back from the Second World War, having been held as a prisoner of war for the majority of it (and also having had a leg amputated). One of the first places he goes to is a graveyard – to visit the resting place of Rose, the woman he had loved.

What should he do? All he had was this suit he stood up in, which he had bought, and which the tailor had not delievered, but had kept safe till he got back. The rest was looted. Oh, he was lost in this bloody graveyard. Where could she be? Rose that he’d loved, that he’d come so far for? Why did she died? Could anyone understand anything? Perhaps it would have been bestg if they had killed him, he felt, if instead of a sniper’s riflge in that roebush that had pooped off something heavier at him. Rose would never have known, because she had died some time about that identical week. God bless her, he thought, his brown eyes dimmed suddenly with tears, and I hope she’s having a jolly good rest.

Charley cannot return as a grieving widower, or even a grieving partner, because Rose was married to another man – one who is ignorant of their relationship, and ignorant of the fact that their son is (probably) Charley’s. Charley does know the boy is probably biologically is, but seems pretty unmoved by it. He is too occupied with his grief for this woman. Rose remains hard for the reader to grasp: she is the catalyst for this man’s complicated series of responses, but she is something of a cipher herself. I think, and hope, this is deliberate on Green’s part.

Things get complicated when Charley goes to see Rose’s parents, who knew of their friendship. Rose’s mother has some kind of dementia, or possibly a grief-inflicted psychological response, and Rose’s father is caring for her in a chaotic sort of way. The scenes with Mr and Mrs Grant are bittersweet, of course, but also the parts of the novel where Green’s humour is at the forefront. It is undeniably a sad situation, but he finds the comedy of the absurd.

Mr Grant points Charley towards a local young widow, Nancy – and Charley is shaken by how much she looks like Rose. Indeed, he thinks she is Rose. And it’s this relationship that is the core of the rest of novel, as well as Charley’s wavering belief that she is, or is not, the woman he loved. Sometimes he seems to believe both things at once.

It’s an interesting angle on the mental disintegration caused by war, and I particularly appreciated the way Nancy’s personality manages to circumnavigate the curious box that Charley is trying to put her in, so that the reader does get to know her despite it. She resents being a ‘walking memory’, particularly for somebody else’s existence. But she also doesn’t seem able to escape a relationship of sorts with Charley who, after all, is paying attention to her in a world where not many people do.

Stylistically, I found Back rather a mixed bag. I’ve struggled with some Green novels (Living was incomprehensible), enjoyed others (Loving and Blindness), and Back was a curious mix of straightforward prose and very stylised. Well, I assume it was stylised. There were a fair few sections where Green layered on clause after clause, with a rhythm of commas which seemed purposeful. Here’s one example…

Another morning, in London, in which he worked, Charley ran across a man by the name of Middlewitch, whom he had met, in July, at the Centre where he had been to have his new leg fitted.

On a couple of occasions, these long, clause-heavy sentences take up most of a page. There are far more of a shorter, but still distinctive, variety. But not enough for it to feel like a storytelling technique? And, indeed, fewer and fewer as the book continues – so that it feels a bit like something Green tried and then wearied of. For most of Back, the writing is – dare I say it – quite ordinary. If you read this novel in isolation, you certainly wouldn’t consider him a leading light of Modernism. Perhaps, by the 1940s, he had tired of some of the formal and linguistic trickery that had earlier been his calling card.

So, I enjoyed Back and thought it was a very compelling psychological portrait. I suppose I just hoped for a bit more, and for something a bit more distinctive. It was good, but it could have been rather better.

Choose by M. de Momet

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Last year, I decided to watch three films which dealt with oh-so-relatable problem of “Oops! I remarried and my first spouse is still alive!” The first was the execrable modern schlock One True Loves; the second was misogynistic Too Many Husbands (1940) and the third was another 1940 hit and comfortably the best of the lot – My Favorite Wife, starring Cary Grant and possibly overshadowed by him also starring in The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday in 1940. Big year for Cary.

I will say this: the oops-remarried genre sparks some very good titles, regardless of the quality of the films themselves. When I saw Choose (1947) by M. de Momet advertised on the back of another 1940s book, I couldn’t resist getting a copy – sadly without the excellent dustjacket above. I forget exactly what the advert said, but it was clearly another novel where someone found themselves in an accidental bigamy pickle.

We rush straight into the heart of the thing. Shelly has been married to Peter for a year when (on page two) she receives a letter from her first husband, John, saying that he is coming home. He went missing during the Second World War and was presumed dead – but has in fact been in a POW camp for years, missing an arm and a leg but otherwise fully alive. Shelly’s friend George offers what I could consider some rather unduly calm advice:

“Try not to worry too much, it may settle itself quite easily. One of these two must have a greater claim.”

“But which? That’s the question. Which? John had the first claim, and Peter has the last. I can’t see the answer to this – I don’t think there is an answer.”

Before John comes home and discovers the truth, we are whisked back to their initial meeting and courtship. Indeed, the next 140 pages of this 200-page novel focus on the development of their romance and their young marriage and happiness together. Reader, any hope I had for Peter winning the husband-off quickly faded. Choose is really a fairly silly romance hung on a conceit that de Momet, for some reason, thinks should be incidental to seeing John be forceful and bold and Shelly be giggly and overwhelmed. As an example…

She held out her hand. He took it and let it lie on his outstretched palm. “What a little hand,” he murmured. “So very little – it’s like a child’s. You’re so young… so young.” His voice was low as if he were speaking a blessing.

Shelly didn’t feel lonely any more – she felt as if someone had wrapped something very soft and comforting about her as a protection from the hashness of the world.

I wondered about ‘M. de Momet’, about whom I haven’t been able to find any info. Is ‘M.’ an initial, or does it stand for ‘Monsieur’, with that French-sounding surname? My suspicion is that it’s a pseudonym – and it certainly feels more like a woman writing for most of the novel, though I was given pause by how much Shelly enjoys John explaining things to her. Surely only a man would have written that part of their wooing?

Choose isn’t badly written, and it certainly isn’t well-written. As you might guess from the excerpt above, it rattles along good-naturedly. There are some enjoyable descriptions of homes and nature and a very idealised version of young love. It toys with being daring at times, though in such an unprogressive way that I can’t imagine anybody being scandalised by the hints at sex – though perhaps we might be more scandalised now by his careless ignoring of consent.

He bent and kissed her.

“Shelly, I am going to sleep with you tonight.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s a horrid business for a girl, so we’ll get it over now. I don’t want our honeymoon to be spoilt.”

She turned her head so that her face was buried in his shoulder.

Yikes. Anyway, by the time we’re back in the present, we haven’t learned a thing about Peter or why Shelly chose to marry him – only that she turned him down a fair few times first. He doesn’t stand a chance in the choice of the title – and I’m rather astonished that M. de Momet decided to make that decision such a small part of the novel. It feels like such a waste of an inventive idea – which can be treated comically, tragically, or everything in between. Instead, in Choose it is an afterthought to a very ordinary, silly, enjoyable and forgettable 1940s romance novel.

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

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Someone in my book group chose The Razor’s Edge (1944) by W. Somerset Maugham after hearing it recommended on a YouTube video – making it my second Maugham of the year, after reading Theatre for the 1937 Club. It wasn’t one I was familiar with, and the paperback that arrived did little to encourage me – isn’t this the drabbest thing you’ve seen? Maybe it faded over time… Anyway, here’s a short and unenthusiastic review of the novel.

The novel is supposedly narrated by Maugham himself, in a conceit that doesn’t quite pay off, and concerns three main characters. The first is an American immigrant in France – a dyed-in-the-wool snob:

During the years that followed our acquaintance became fairly intimate without ever developing into friendship. I doubt whether it was possible for Elliott Templeton to be a friend. He took no interest in people apart from their social position.

Next is Elliott’s niece Isabel – an intelligent but avaricious woman, whom Maugham cannot mention without talking about how wonderful her legs are. Third of the trio (and weirdly the one that the novel’s Wikipedia page thinks is the only main character) is Larry. He is engaged to Isabel, and declares that his intentino is to ‘loaf’. When pressed on his plans, that is all they are: he doesn’t need excess money or company. He will simply exist.

Having set the ball rolling with these three, the narrator meets them at various times and in various places. Occasionally they feel the need to update the narrator with what he’s missed in the meantime, meaning that many long, long chapters are relayed to him. One of the things I hate in storytelling is when one character says, “Let me tell you about the past…” and then goes on to remember every single word of dialogue uttered many months earlier. On and on and on, all of it deadened because it’s happened and we, the reader, weren’t there. I complained about that fatal flaw in the first 80 pages or so of Theatre – in The Razor’s Edge it’s even worse, and even more monopolising the narrative. If only somebody had told him to show not tell.

It’s particularly a shame, because when the reader is present for scenes, they are much more vital and interesting. Some are even funny. Isabel’s unfortunate choice of husband leads to some fascinating, well-drawn scenes some years into marriage, while there is a protracted scene about Elliott being shunned from a socialite’s party that felt vibrant, funny, and moving. When he wants to, Maugham can do it. Why did he bog so much of the novel down in dullness and conversations we can’t possibly care about?

The Razor’s Edge wastes the talent of an author who didn’t know how to wield it. If he’d told it all as it happens, in the moment, it could have been an engaging book with brilliant characters. As it is, the brilliant characters have to fight their way through total tedium.

A couple more #ABookADayInMay books (Sylvia Townsend Warner + Marjorie Stewart)

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We’re nearly there, everyone! The end is in sight, and it looks HOPEFUL that I’m going to make it. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been harder this year for various reasons – but we can save those thoughts for another day. Today, let’s look quickly at my choices for Day 27 and Day 28.

Image borrowed from Scott’s excellent review

A Garland of Straw (1943) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

I bought most of Warner’s short story collections in one fell swoop in 2011, and since then I’ve been rationing myself – and I have hardly any left. This collection was published in 1943 and most of the stories are war-centred, and chiefly set in the UK. Because they were published in the New Yorker rather than at home, she doesn’t assume too much knowledge about the home front in England – which means they can be accessed easily by the 21st-century reader.

Some of the best stories in here are very much wartime experiences. I loved ‘From Above’, about a woman evacuating her home because a time-bomb has been discovered nearby. ‘Noah’s Ark’ – about child evacuees in the countryside, and their disdain for rural animals in comparison to the city zoo – is brilliant on the spitefulness that can lie deep in adults. There is a sly horror in a story about a woman returning to her ancestral home, which was requisitioned for soldiers to be stationed there, and finding it so badly damaged that people think it’s been bombed. She’s excellent on the bland, friendly truisms that cannot forge any emotional comfort in a crisis, however kindly meant. Another strong story, very Warner, is on a political firebrand who cannot stop himself getting Jane Austen novels out of the library.

At their best, the stories have Warner’s inimicable airy sharpness. She can so incisive about people without any malice – a searing description with the objectivity of a photographer and the subjectivity of a gossip. This isn’t quite an example of that, but it is a very Warner opening (to ‘Out of My Happy past’):

When I was young there were two thigns that I lived for. One was music and the other was advice. In the matter of music I was fairly eclectic; I liked listening to it, performing it, transcribing it, and composing it. In the matter of advice my tastes were purer; I only liked giving it and, to itnerest me, it had to be uncontaminatedly my own.

The stories in A Garland of Straw seem shorter than most of her work (though I’d have to flick through some others to check that) – and it is a little to their detriment. Some short story writers really thrive on the incredibly brief story (Marjorie Barnard was great at that), while others make full use of 40-50 pages (Alice Munro, anyone). I think Warner is best at about 20-25 pages, and most of the stories in A Garland of Straw are under 10 pages. It doesn’t quite give her enough room to breathe, in some cases. She doesn’t really do stories that rely on shock or the striking moment. Rather, her stories are representative pieces of lives.

Some of the stories in A Gardland of Straw are a bit forgettable, and others don’t have time to flourish to their potential. And then there are some that are brilliant. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, and not a collection which shows her at her absolute best – for that, I’d recommend Swan on a Autumn River (published in the US as A Stranger With A Bag). But middling Warner short stories are still a good read, and there’s a lot to admire.

I Will Hold My House (1950) by Marjorie Stewart

I Will Hold My House is one of those novels that could be brilliant if it had been rather less ambitious. Or maybe the issue is with my memory. There are just SO many characters that it’s impossible to keep track of them all.

The novel is about a series of houses along the coast in Sussex, each with occupants facing their own crises and triumphs and regrets and hopes. I counted 26 major characters. We go in and out of the houses for the first chapter or two, and I made copious notes on the inside cover of what the houses were called, who lived in them, which was next to which. Often we learn these things in several stages…

There are so many that, each time Stewart cycles through them, they barely have time to do more than express a single motion before the whole whirl starts again. Gradually, some stood out more than others – but I can’t say I particularly cared about any of them. The writing was good enough – a better-than-average domestic novel, but without any bite or sharpness to set it apart. I enjoyed it enough to finish it, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone.

A delightful reread for #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

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I read Ashcombe (1949) by Cecil Beaton back in 2012, sitting in the Bodleian Library. I quickly knew I needed my own copy – and this beautiful edition arrived. Here we are, 12 years later, and I have re-read and re-loved Beaton’s tale of finding, renovating and loving a beautiful countryside home in Wiltshire. Will I still feel the same as when I first wrote about it?

I think I must have been drawn the book initially because of its inclusion of Edith Olivier – I certainly read it during my DPhil, which included a chapter on her novel The Love-Child. It was while staying with Olivier in 1930 that Beaton made the decision to go and visit Ashcombe – a sizeable house left in some disrepair, hidden at near-inaccessible lengths in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside. (It is clearly a mansion, however homely Beaton tries to make it sound.)

I do not know if the others spoke during the trek up the hill. I was perhaps vaguely conscious of their eulogoies, but I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand. Some people may grow to love their homes: my reaction was instantaneous. It was love at first sight, and from the moment that I stood under the archway, I knew that this place was destined to be mine. No matter what the difficulites, I would overcome them all; considerations of money, suitability, or availability, were all superficial. This house must belong to me.

As it happened, the house never did belong to Beaton. The subtitle to Ashcombe is ‘the story of a fifteen-year lease’ – and Beaton did indeed lease the house and its significant grounds from its owner, who hadn’t thought it quite habitable. And indeed it wasn’t. The nominal rent of £50 per year was so low because Beaton would spend so much money on restoring the house – and, in the days before listing restrictions (or maybe even planning permission?), he went much further than restoring. Ashcombe has lots of (black and white) photographs included, and some of these are before and after sets – where he’s clearly extended windows, added walls and doors, and knocked things about at whim, as well as extensive landscaping. The landlord certainly got good value, but also seems incredibly tolerant for Beaton to pursue any whim at all. How many of our landlords would let a tenant have every visitor sketch their hand on the bathroom wall?

The photographs also show many of the people who came to stay. While Beaton leased Ashcombe for 15 years, he never lived there full-time. It was a retreat from a week in London, and he was often away abroad for months at a time. But while he was there, he brought packs of the great and the good from London (and even, before he was sure of the cook’s ability, all the catering from London too). We get to sneak into their lives, which seem to be a whirlwind of costume parties, charades, artistry and camaraderie. Quite what the locals thought we never discover – these are privileged, wealthy, often titled men and women who have seemingly endless energy and opportunity for antics. Many are names you’ll probably recoginse – Augustus John, Salvador Dali, Rex Whistler, Siegfried Sassoon. Even Tom Mitford gets a look-in, which he seldom does in books about his sisters. Naturally, I relished the times he spoke of Edith Olivier – older than most of her famous friends, and relatively new to this world, having been oppressively sheltered until her father died when Olivier was already firmly middle-aged, if not old.

Of the neighbours on whom I grew to rely more and more, Edith Olivier was perhaps the most cherished. It was she who, by bringing me into contact with so many new friends, was so largely responsible for my having blossomed into a happy adult life: and it was she who continued, without effort on her part, to discover your people of promise and bring them to her house. So many of the young writers, painters and poets came to her with problems about their work and their life, and they knew that after she had listened intently to their outpourings, her advice would be unprejudiced, wise and Christian. Edith’s youthfulness and spirit were of all time: she had unlimited energy, vitality and zest for life. Interested in every strata of humanity, she had never been known to be bored. After a strenuous day she would retire to bed, not to sleep, but to read at least three books, one of which she was to review, in addition to writing a most detailed journal of all that had happened to her during the previous twenty-four hours.

Having sat in Wiltshire Record Office with volumes of the journal, I can attest that it is ‘most detailed’. She wrote at enormous length and in horrendous handwriting.

So much of Ashcombe is joyful: the joy of home and the joy of friends. Beaton writes brilliantly about the pull of a beautiful place, and about the frenetic happiness that a group of carefree people can bring out of each other. They are unafraid of simple silliness. But the book does have its mournful edge. Nine years after the lease began, the Second World War started.

I remember I was about to step into a hot bath when I was informed that Poland had been invaded. The news was like a death knell. We had to wait one endless day more before we heard, from a calm but tired voice on the radio, that Hitler had refused the last request for a peaceful solution to his demands.

At Ashcombe, as we sat listening to the Prime Minister in the small parlour, my mother wept a little. The speech was soon over. We were now at war.

Beaton writes with sensitivity about the impact on war – mostly on fatalities among his friends, particularly Rex Whistler, since Beaton’s own wartime experience was clearly easier than others. Ashcombe is something of a retreat from the worst of the bombing and devastation in London, but is not left unaffected.

Almost equally sombre is the end of the lease. Beaton hoped to continue living there (at least for some of the year) for the rest of his life – but, after the lease had been extended a few times, I finally came to an end. The landlord wanted it back and there was nothing Beaton could do. Houses are often important in fact and fiction, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a better account of the heartbreak of leaving a home you have truly loved, against your will. It only happened to me once (when all my housemates rather suddenly chose to leave Oxford), but it is devastating and takes a long time to get over.

Beaton may have had other homes and I daresay they were palatial and beautiful – but Ashcombe clearly caught and kept his heart. In this delightful, poignant, effervescent book, he has given the house an excellent tribute.