1940s

Company in the Evening by Ursula Orange #1944Club

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I loved the first Ursula Orange novel I read (Tom Tiddler’s Ground) and was glad that the 1944 Club provided an opportunity to read another. Company in the Evening is one of the Furrowed Middlebrow reprints – extremely welcome, especially given how much Scott has made us all want to read Ursula Orange over the years. And, yes, it’s another really good’un.

The novel is from the perspective of Vicky, a woman who has recently divorced and is looking after her young daughter (born after the divorce) while also working at a literary agency. She is managing life rather well, but her mother can’t believe this is possible – and decides that Vicky should take in her sister-in-law. Rene has been living with Vicky’s mother, after being widowed (a very WW2 element to the story) – and she makes the move to Vicky’s household, fitting neither in the role of servant or relative. She will provide, Vicky’s mother optimistically hopes, ‘company in the evening’.

Vicky is more a real character than a likeable one. Or, perhaps, she becomes likeable because she is so understandable. She does not particularly want Rene to move in with her, nor does she know quite how to speak to her. Orange is very good in the scenes where Vicky tries to reach across the intellectual and social chasm between herself and Rene, wanting to find the right topics and language, but also (because she is only ordinarily nice; nothing special) not putting in quite as much effort as is needed. She is definitely an intellectual snob and, to a lesser extent, a class snob – but it is undeniable that this chasm would exist, even if Vicky cared less about it. The women are two different to understand one another.

Meanwhile, she starts to reconnect with her ex-husband – recognising, for the first time, that he might want to make something of the role of father, and that she never really gave him the chance. Looping back to the title – might he become the aforementioned company?

The dynamics of the unusual household are done extremely well. We always know what people are or aren’t likely to say, do, and feel, and understand how awkwardly these elements cohere – or don’t cohere. It is a funny novel, but not in the way that Tom Tiddler’s Ground was. It’s the war – set in 1941, if memory serves – and a more sombre light is cast over the book.

Having said that, all the stuff at her literary agency is amusing – particularly her dealings with an author who sends all her best stories elsewhere, and is maddeningly unhelpful in meetings. I love reading about anybody engaged in literary work, and this was all rich material for what a literary agency was presumably like in the 1940s.

Dorothy Harper wafted herself out of the office, all pearls, fur-coat and scent. I am sure that she always pictured herself as bringing just a little colour and romance—a breath of the outside world—into our drab lives. As neither of us ever did anything but listen patiently while she talked her society prattle, perhaps we encouraged her in this conception. I was ‘Miss Sylvester’ to her, as I was to all our clients. I am sure that had she known that I was (like her) a divorcee, she would. have been deeply shocked. Little typists in offices (she would think) have no business to be also divorced women with private lives of their own.

The oddball humour is perhaps an odd fit with the social anxieties – and with all the motherhood aspect, particularly when Vicky’s daughter has a health crisis. But I think it works well together – because, of course, people’s lives have funny moments and unhappy moments, and Orange has written something that is naturalistic in tone, if not in every word spoken. I’m so grateful that Scott and Furrowed Middlebrow have brought Ursula Orange back into print – and you can read his detailed thoughts about this novel on his blog.

25 Books in 25 Days: #17 Soap Behind the Ears

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I discovered my love for Cornelia Otis Skinner a while ago, and when I was in America in 2015, I ordered most of her work to my friend’s apartment. It was much cheaper to do that and carry then back then to pay for them to be shipped to England, and her books are very hard to find here. Since then, I’ve been rationing out her very funny collections of essays – this time, picking up Soap Behind the Ears (1941).

She writes very amusingly about the trials of everyday life – as a mother, as an actress, and as an observer of the ridiculous. Think Diary of a Provincial Lady meets Victoria Wood, but American. It’s all very diverting, and I can’t get enough of it. Which is a brief review, but I hope an encouragement to anybody who doesn’t know her to give her a try – her most famous book is the glorious Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, written with Emily Kimbrough, about travelling around Europe.

My favourite piece was about trying to get new clothes for her young son – just the right amount of exaggeration in it. And here’s an excerpt from ‘The Body Beautiful’, about trying to get fit at a sort of trainer/clinic hellscape:

The time dragged almost as heavily as my limbs. Finally Miss Jones said I was a good girl and had done enough for the day (the dear Lord knows the day had done enough for me!) and I might go have my massage. I staggered out and into the capable arms of a Miss Svenson who looked like Flagstad dressed up as a nurse. She took me into a small room, flung me onto a hard table and for forty-five minutes went to work on me as if I were material for a taffy-pulling contest. She kneaded me, she rolled me with a hot rolling pin, she did to me what she called “cupping” which is just a beauty-parlor term for good old orthodox spanking. After she’d gotten me in shape for the oven she took me into a shower-room and finished me up with that same hose treatment by which they subdue the recalcitrant inmates of penitentiaries.

25 Books in 25 Days: #9 Tell It To A Stranger

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When I go to an independent bookshop, I try to always buy a book – to support them. And in 2009 in Woodstock, I bought Tell It To A Stranger (1947/1949) by Elizabeth Berridge. Both those dates are there, as the book selects stories from two collections – but I think it’s chiefly 1947. Now, I read the first half of this earlier in the year, but finished it today (which technically fits my ‘finish 25 books in 25 days’ motto). Look, I was at dinner and the theatre after work today, so I didn’t have much time.

The stories here are often about the effects of war – whether that is loneliness or readjusting to the old life or grief. Berridge draws so sharply, encasing dramatic moments in the everyday lives of ordinary people so subtly that you almost don’t realise until they’re upon you. It’s as though you’re scanning across a pleasant domestic scene and suddenly notice that somebody has a knife in their back.

In a quick review, I can’t summarise each story – and I think that might almost be pointless. Rather, I shall just say that Berridge is a very adept crafter of stories and I heartily recommend the collection, perhaps spacing them out a little. I’ve got a few of her novels on my shelves too, so it’ll be interesting to see if Angus Wilson (who wrote the preface) is right, and she is equally adept at both.

25 Books in 25 Days: #4 Our Heritage of Liberty

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Image result for stephen leacock
Image via WikiCommons.

I’ve loved Stephen Leacock for years, and was intrigued when I found Our Heritage of Liberty (1942) by Stephen Leacock in Hay-on-Wye a couple of years ago.

It’s a brief (75pp) history of liberty – from the medieval world to the 1940s, via Rousseau, the Victorians, etc. etc. Curiously, it is largely only about Western Europe and the USA – Leacock largely overlooks his own country of Canada. It’s quite interesting as a potted history, but I found it most valuable in the final quarter – where he talks about the various conditions of freedom in the 1940s, from housing to working. It’s not as witty as I’d hoped Leacock might be (Milne, for instance, can be very amusing even on serious topics – c.f. Peace With Honour), but it’s pretty good. It’s also interesting that every age thinks itself the exception and pinnacle…

To-day there are no new lands, and the machine in a certain sense has become the master, mankind the slave. Most of the habitable world has been explored and appropriated. Invention still goes on, but finds its readiest application in the means of death. Nor can even the industry of peace follow its perpetual changes. Nor is there left any longer the escape from civilisation, the new start in the wilderness. The last frontier is vanishing. From our narrowed world there is no getting away, except by what mathematicians call the velocity of escape – meaning to be fired off into space at the rate of seven miles a second – on which terms no traveller returns.

We cannot wonder that this imprisoned feeling, this loss of one’s own control, breeds in many people something like despair, a wistful longing for the “good old times”.

25 Books in 25 Days: #2 Prater Violet

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My second book for this challenge is Prater Violet (1946) by Christopher Isherwood – the second novel I’ve read by him, and apparently one I bought in Ambleside in 2012.

Completely coincidentally, this (like book #1 in my 25 Books in 25 Days) is another novel about the cinema – though looking at the 1930s and the arrival of talkies. Christopher Isherwood (or at least a character of the same name) is roped into the weird world of scriptwriting, slightly reluctantly. It’s a very fun account of working with a histrionic but visionary Viennese director, scathing cutting room experts, offended actresses, and all. I liked it much more than the previous Isherwood novel I read (Mr Norris Changes Trains) and I’m now really excited about reading more of this witty, self-deprecating Isherwood.

“You see, this umbrella of his I find extremely symbolic. It is the British respectability which thinks: ‘I have my traditions, and they will protect me. Nothing unpleasant, nothing ungentlemanly, can possibly happen within my private park.’ This respectable umbrella is the Englishman’s magic wand. When Hitler declines rudely to disappear, the Englishman will open his umbrella and say: ‘After all, what do I care for a little rain?’ But the rain will be a rain of bombs and blood. The umbrella is not bomb-proof.”

“Don’t underrate the umbrella,” I said. “It has often been used successfully by governesses against bulls. It has a very sharp point.”

“You are wrong. The umbrella is useless…Do you know Goethe?”

“Only a little.”

“Wait. I shall read you something. Wait. Wait.”

The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald

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The nice people at Post-Hypnotic Press gave me some codes for review copies of their Betty MacDonald audiobooks… approximately forever ago. I listened to The Egg and I (which I’d previously read) and finally remembered that the codes were still kicking around somewhere – so I recently downloaded and listened to The Plague and I (1948). As with The Egg and I, it was narrated by the excellent Heather Henderson.

I did a little poll on Twitter to try and establish whether ‘plague’ rhymes with ‘egg’ in American English – it sort of does when Henderson says it – to work out whether or not the title was intended to be a pun on The Egg and I. Jury’s out. But the ‘plague’ in question in TB. Back in the days when this was a much more real threat in America, Macdonald caught it from a man in her office – who, it turned out, had known he had TB and hadn’t bothered to do anything about it. The only cure is to go and rest in a sanatorium – not in the Swiss alps, as one might imagine, but in an American facility that was free to those who couldn’t afford the enormous bills of most places. As a young single mother, Macdonald was shunted high up the waiting list.

But we don’t get there for a while. I’ve discovered that Macdonald likes to ramble around a topic for a while before she gets to the gist of a book. And so we hear all about her family’s history of hypochondria and illness for a while – for rather too long a while, in my opinion, as by the time we get to the main point of The Plague and I, it feels as though we’ve been waiting impatiently in the wings for hours.

Once we get there, though, The Plague and I is dependably funny – Macdonald writes wonderfully about all the different roommates she has – but also rather harrowing at times. Fans of The Egg and I will know that Macdonald can write very amusingly about hardship, but there is a distinction between calamitous events on a farm and the Kafkaesque cruelty of the sanatorium. On the one hand, they are trying to save their patients, and perhaps have to be cruel to be kind. On the other hand, there are so many draconian rules (no talking, no coughing, no using the bathroom) – that they won’t tell people until they break them – and patients never have anything explained to them. To be suddenly moved into solitary confinement, or taken for an operation without being told what it will be – it must have been terrifying, and Macdonald manages to convey that, while also finding (with hindsight) the ridiculous in each situation, and laughing at it.

Her fellow patients include Kimi, a Japanese girl who is kind, delivers occasional sharp humour, and forever mourns that she is too tall to find a husband. I could have done without Henderson’s impersonations of a Japanese person – it felt a little uncomfortable – but I don’t really know what is usually done in such situations with an audiobook. And then there’s another sympathetic patient, whose name escapes me for the moment – who complains a lot, but is intelligent, and sees Macdonald as a comrade in arms. Besides them, most of the others get short shrift from Macdonald – whether the femme fatale type, forever talking about how sleepy she is, or the young woman who doesn’t take any of it seriously.

We know, of course, that Macdonald survived TB – but, from within, she never knew how long she’d be there, or how well she was. The whole experience sounds maddening and horrifying, but she turns it into an entertaining and often laugh-out-loud book. Henderson’s narration wonderfully judges the frustration, bonhomie, and nervousness that make up Macdonald’s persona in The Plague and I. If you haven’t read this, or any Macdonald memoir, I very much recommend listening to the audiobook.

The Boat by L.P. Hartley

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The Boat

When Rachel and I discussed trains and boats in novels in an episode of ‘Tea or Books?’ – you can hear the episode here – David had a few suggestions in the comment section, one of which was The Boat (1949) by L.P. Hartley. I was particularly pleased to see him mention it because it was on my shelves. John Murray kindly sent me all their L.P. Hartley reprints a few years ago, and I’ve been fully intending to get to them – better late than never, as The Boat is brilliant.

Timothy Casson makes his living writing articles, usually travel articles, and has spent happy, carefree years touring Italy and the like. But now he has been requested to write about England, to support the war effort, and it is partly this stricture that finds him renting a house in an English village – having chosen a house next to the river largely because of its boathouse. He has a passion for rowing and for boats, and has proudly brought his boat with him. But he discovers that the local gentry aren’t happy at the idea of disturbing the fishing, and the landowner – who also owns the river – has to decide whether or not to allow him his rowing.

Such is through-thread of this novel, which is over 450 pages long. Such, one might say, is the river running through it – at just the right moments, perfectly judged, Hartley returns us to this theme. A letter may be sent to the old lady whose decision it is, or Timothy might make a bold decision against his plan – it crops up just often enough to remind the reader that it is something of an impetus. And it pays off in a bold climax – but the novel is not really about climaxes. It is slow, observant, gradual – brilliantly paced, while not being remotely pacey.

I talked a bit about this in another podcast episode – it really is one of the most brilliantly structured books I’ve read. I had to read it slowly. It took months, and I read many other books at the same time, but that was how it worked – gradually finding my way through the hundreds of pages, letting this life ebb along beside me.

For it is mostly about Casson’s life – about his relationship with his maid and cook (who are hilarious; I loved every scene in which they appeared, particularly when they considered themselves affronted), about his gardener, about a fledgling romance, about confusing conversations with the vicar’s absent-minded wife, about failures to ingratiate himself with the local landowners. Most touchingly, about a pair of young boys who are briefly evacuated to his house. Hartley puts together a village world – but, unlike most rural novelists, we are not introduced to that world as a whole. We feel our way through it, alongside Timothy, learning more and more about it but feeling forever at a slight distance. He is nobody’s equal in this social hierarchy.

Lest this sound worthy but dull, I must emphasise that The Boat is an extremely funny – often, as I said, through Timothy’s baffled methods of living with servants, but also through Hartley’s dry tone. His observation often has the mildest of barbs, and the balance of his sentences makes them joyful. While this isn’t the most amusing part by any means, it’s a section I noted down as enjoyable…

Mr Kimball was a sweet-pea fancier, and knew more about them than Timothy knew of all of the rest of the world’s flora put together. Like most experts, he had an attitude towards his subject which no amateur could hope to enter into; the beauty of the flowers he took for granted; what interested him was their size, shape, colour, the difficulties attendant on rearing them, their habits of growth and above all their prize-winning capacities. But even this last was devoid of excitement for him; the thrill of the prize was subordinated to and almost lost in the various technical points necessary to secure it. The winning of the award was not so much a crowning glory as the logical outcome of having fulfilled all the conditions, and he expatiated at equal length on Mariposa which had taken several first prizes and on Wolverhampton Wonder which, owing to an exaggeration of certain qualities, attractive to the public but fatal to the true harmony and balance of the bloom, was never more than Highly Commended. Timothy listened, bored as one must be with an accumulation of details outside the grasp of one’s mind, but respectful, because he recognised in Mr Kimball’s dispassionate approach to his hobby the signs of an austere idealism which was lacking in his own art. From time to time Mrs Kimball supplied the personal touch that her husband had left out – “Mr Kimball stayed up until three o’clock the night he thought Bradford Belle had caught cold,” and so on, but he clearly deplored these womanly intrusions, and quickly elbowed them out of the conversation.

You see, perhaps, that Hartley does not rush. Mr and Mrs Kimball aren’t important characters, but nothing is hurried in Hartley’s prose – but it is a wonder to read each unhurried moment. And somehow the more eventful moments didn’t feel out of place, but almost earned by the mellow timbre of the rest of the writing. I could have done without the letters he writes and receives from two off-stage characters (who remain off-stage throughout); I suppose are there to help us work out Timothy’s personality, and give him opportunity to reveal himself in ways that he can’t to these neighbouring strangers. See, I even argue myself out of my criticisms.

This is such a leisurely book, and also an extraordinary one. Thank you for prompting me to read it, David, and I hope that – in turn – I might have prompted some others to do so.

To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski

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I read To Bed With Grand Music (1946) by Marghanita Laski for the excellent Undervalued British Women Writers conference I went to a while ago, but it’s been one of those titles I’ve had on my real or imagined tbr pile for a long time. It seems such an unusual novel – and so risky that Laski published it under the pseudonym Sarah Russell.

To BEd With Grand Music

It takes place during the Second World War, and our ‘heroine’ – in a fairly loose sense – is Deborah, whose husband has been called up to fight for King and Country. Before he leaves, he initiates a frank chat about what will happen whilst he’s gone. He can’t, he assures her, be expected to remain celibate. He is sure (he adds) that she will understand. Deborah isn’t happy about it…

But, once alone, she rather quickly falls into her own life of dalliances, kicking off with an American soldier named (of course) Joe. It’s rather more nuanced than that, but the reader can see it coming – she finds her scruples gradually worn down, and after the first, the scruples more or less don’t exist. We are taken on a rather dizzying whirl of the men she has relationships with in London – well, some are rather briefer than relationships – and Laski does a great job of delineating them and demonstrating what their appeal is to Deborah. Sometimes it is power, sometimes money, sometimes charm, sometimes looks. One of them, mais naturallement, is French.

Meanwhile, her son is left in the countryside (with the rather more affectionate and capable housekeeper), and Deborah feels only occasional pangs of guilt.

Deborah understood him. “You’re at least the third person,” she said, ” who has asked me if it mightn’t be better if I went home to my chee-ild. Well, darling, that’s just one of the things I’ve really thought out for myself and I know it’s better to be happy than unhappy, and not only for me but for my baby as well. I like this sort of life, in fact, I love it, and seeing as how I’m hurting no one and doing myself quite a lot of good, I rather think I’ll carry on with it. I’ve come to the confusion that conventional morals were invented by a lot of unattractive bitches to make themselves feel good.”

Laski balances two things well – a real investigation of what might confront a woman in Deborah’s position, and (I think I’m right in saying) some sort of satire. It feels like a parody of the Casanova type – there is a real treadmill of conquests – but the tone remains firmly realistic, never allowing hyperbole to creep in, or any laughter from the author. The mix works well, even if it ends up wrong-footing the reader a bit.

This isn’t as sophisticated as some of Laski’s novels, perhaps chiefly because it’s only really doing one thing. The plot, or even the scenario, is really the point of the novel – an exercise in examining one woman and her choices, rather than a more complex canvas. As such, it works very well at what it is trying to do, and shines a light on a part of the war that most 1940s fiction left in darkness, but it is not her most ambitious novel. But, for the parameters she sets, it is both very good and very intriguing.

 

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“No matter where you stand on the issue of Deborah’s character, this is an absolutely fascinating, brilliantly written portrayal of a completely different side of wartime life” – Book Snob

“This is a very interesting book to compare to Laski’s other World War II title, Little Boy Lost.” – The Bookbinder’s Daughter

“And so I found another Marghanita Laski book that I could argue with while reading. She is so good at that!” – Fleur in Her World

 

A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor

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Roses

I recently went to a brilliant conference in Chichester called ‘Undervalued British Women Writers 1930-1960’. I mean, the only way this could have been more perfect for me is if they’d shifted those dates back to 1920-1950 – but I overlooked that, because there were papers on beloved authors including E.M. Delafield, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Barbara Comyns, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, Marghanita Laski, and more. My paper was on Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontes Went to Woolworths, which was great fun to talk about.

Once the conference programme came out, I did a bit of homework – reading Laski’s To Bed With Grand Music (review forthcoming) and Taylor’s A Wreath of Roses. I didn’t quite finish A Wreath of Roses (1949) in time to hear the excellent paper about it on my panel, but I’ve finished it now and it’s excellent. It’s vying with At Mrs Lippincote’s for my all-time fave Taylor novel.

It certainly starts more dramatically than most Taylor novels. I’m not going to spoil what happens in the opening pages, because it came as a very effective shock to me, but it’s something that Camilla witnesses as she is about to go and visit her friend Liz and Liz’s old governess. The moment is dramatic, but Taylor cleverly leaves the details undeveloped and the effect unspoken – it just quietly haunts both Camilla and the reader for the rest of the novel.

Like many Taylor heroines, Camilla is intelligent, literary, sensitive, and slightly wary of her way in the world. On the train, on the way to her friend, she meets Richard Elton – it is, she muses, the sort of name that an author would make up for a hero – and the meeting is not an immediate success. He is handsome and mysterious, but he also rebuffs her reference to Emily Bronte, and she ‘felt she had sacrificed Emily Bronte, throwing her in as a spur to conversation, uselessly’. There’s a great bit (not least for my conference paper) on how she and her childhood friend Liz had imaginary childhood tea parties for various literary luminaries – identified only as Emily, Charlotte, Jane, Ivy, and… Katie? Not sure who the last is.

When she arrives with Liz (and the slightly cranky ex-governess), she falls into trying to resurrect a friendship that has the significant obstacle of Liz having married a man (a vicar, no less) who Camilla intensely dislikes. He isn’t there, for the most part, but it colours their friendship – as does Liz’s baby boy, though that is a more nuanced obstacle, being chiefly a path down which Camilla cannot follow her friend. Oh, and the governess – Frances – is no stock character. I don’t think Taylor would know how to wrote one of those. She is a painter who, in her final years, is branching out into a whole new style of painting. In the midst of all this, two men arrive – one, a correspondent Frances has had for many years and never met; the other, Richard Elton back on the scene, darkly mysterious and intriguing.

There’s no author quite like Taylor for depending on my mood. Sometimes I love reading her beautiful writing; sometimes I find her writing impenetrable – and I think it must depend on how I’m feeling, rather than her writing. I’ll have to go back to A Wreath of Roses another time to see if I find it more of an obstacle then (though why would I put that to the test?) – this time, I was just able to soak in how good the prose was. Here’s the opening paragraph, to give you a flavour:

Afternoons seem unending on branch-line stations in England in summer time. The spiked shelter prints an unmoving shadow on the platform, geraniums blaze, whitewashed stones assault the eye. Such trains as come only add to the air of fantasy, to the idea of the scene being symbolic, or encountered at one level while suggesting another even more alienating. 

She is even better when she is writing about people. Time and again, Taylor shows everyday thoughts and moments in a nuanced, clear light. While A Wreath of Roses includes events that are much less ‘everyday’ than those in most of her other novels, and is certainly darker and more gothic, she still excels are crystallising the slippery truths behind friendships, enmities, uncertainties and identities.

I read bits of this in a graveyard next to a half-ruined priory, which was a pretty ideal place to read it – though the weather was warm and lovely, rather than hauntingly gothic. Context – my mood, the weather, font size, whatever – may have a lot to do with it – but I’m still going to say that this is one of the best Taylor novels I’ve read so far, and one I would certainly re-read.

 

Others who got Stuck into it:

“The characters are brilliantly observed, and this novel is a wonderful exploration of friendships.” – Heavenali

“It’s not all cozy rooms with lace curtains, plants in pots, ticking clocks, ornaments and coronation mugs, the wireless playing, and tabby cats waiting.” – Buried in Print

“One of the most moving and valuable studies of human isolation ever committed to print.” – Bentley Rumble

 

Evenfield by Rachel Ferguson

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evenfieldFor some reason, despite quite a lot of reading time, I haven’t managed to finish more than one short book so far in 2017. What’s going on? Well, for now, here’s a Shiny New Books review of Evenfield (1942) by Rachel Ferguson – one of the new Furrowed Middlebrow reprints. It’s quite an extraordinary novel – in terms of what it’s trying to do and be. Below is the intro to my review, and you can read the whole thing here.

The launch of the Furrowed Middlebrow series from Dean Street Press, under the editorial eye of blogger and middlebrow expert Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow, is an occasion for much rejoicing. His knowledge of neglected writers from the twentieth century is second to none, and I very excited to see which names he picks for the ongoing series. But there was one name in the first tranche that particularly thrilled me: Rachel Ferguson.

Ferguson is known now, if at all, as the author of The Brontës Went to Woolworths and Alas, Poor Lady, which have been reprinted over the years, but the rest of her novels have remained neglected. Dean Street Press have now brought back A Harp in Lowndes Square, A Footman for the Peacock, and Evenfield, written between 1936 and 1942. The last and latest of these is the novel I’ve read for Shiny New Books, and it is a bizarre, enticing curio that could have come from no other pen.