1947

The Museum of Cheats by Sylvia Townsend Warner #1947Club

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In 2011, probably around the time I was writing my doctoral chapter on Sylvia Townsend Warner, I madly bought up all her collections of short stories. And, let me tell you, some of them are not easy to find affordably – but I wanted to stock up my shelves. Fast forward five years and I’ve read… none of these collections. And possibly none of the stories, thinking about it. So hearty cheers for the 1947 Club sending The Museum of Cheats up my tbr pile – it’s absolutely brilliant.

Warner tends towards the brief, with short stories, which is exactly how I like them – presumably because she had to fill certain spaces in the New Yorker, and anywhere else that housed these. The only exception is the title story – and I’m actually going to gloss over that one, as I found it much my least favourite story in the collection; it is on the model of The Corner That Held Them (a Warner novel I found intolerably dull, though it has many devoted fans), concentrating on the history of a building rather than the details of people’s everyday lives.

But, setting that one aside, Warner has an expertly observant eye. I was reminded a little of Katherine Mansfield – in terms of the searing through to the centre of a matter, and the potentially life-altering moments among the banal; indeed, how the banal can be life-changing. We see a hostess curious about the unkind caricature she finds on a notepad by the telephone; a woman show paintings to an uninterested visitor; a returning solider discover his books have been given away. The most striking story, perhaps, is ‘Step This Way’ – about abortion.

Warner opens each story with confident finesse, immediately taking the reader into her unusual view of the world. Here is the opening of ‘A Pigeon’:

The two large windows of the room on the first floor looked straight out into the trees of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A pigeon was cooing among the greenery. Tears rushed into Irene’s eyes. She had a sentimental character, and how sad it was, really, a girl of her age, as innocent as that bird, and all by herself, sitting opposite a solicitor called Mr. Winander and having an interview about her divorce.

The balance of that sentence and those clauses, ending on the word ‘divorce’, strikes me as so cleverly done. And she is not simply concerned with drama; I love the way Warner finds a gentle humour in the curious patterns of normal speech. This is in the same story:

“Mrs. Johnston, you must forgive me asking this. Are you quite sure that you wish to go forward with a divorce?”

“Oh yes, definitely. I never was one to stay where I wasn’t welcome.”

I suppose we have to acknowledge that these stories were probably written and published in 1946, at least some of them, but the collection certainly came out in 1947 – and, yes, the war looms large. I wasn’t expecting it to, actually. It seemed the sort of thing that would pass Warner by in her concentration on the minute. Having said that, she still looks at the war as it affects individual relationships and minds – nothing so dramatic as a world stage. This, from ‘To Come So Far’, is representative of the way Warner uses the war for her own quirky angle:

She was worn out with getting on her husband’s nerves, being alternately too strong or too weak – like tea. If he were a returned soldier, all this would be natural. Magazines were full of stories about manly nerves unable to face the return of civilian life or articles on How to Re-Acclimatise Your Man, and newspapers were full of accounts of murdered wives. But throughout the war Arnold had been an indispensable civilian, jamming enemy broadcasts, and throughout the war they had got on together perfectly, complaining of the discomforts of living and giving each other expensive presents because to-morrow we die. Now, in 1946, Arnold was mysteriously as indispensable as ever and they hadn’t died.

She has such a great turn of phrase. It’s there throughout Lolly Willowes and, twenty years later, her style remains unmistakably hers – and these sorts of unexpected stylistic quirks seem to me to be even more appropriate in a short story. It’s the sort of context that can carry the weight of something slightly bizarre, without it distorting a full-length character study. For example, in ‘Story of a Patron’ – all about the discovery of a ‘primitive artist’ – she includes this:

Mr. Haberdone asked to see more examples of Mr. Rump’s art, and Mr. Rump produced a portrait of Mrs. Rump. It was a remarkable likeness, quite as accurate as the portrait of the cactus but more dispassionate, as though Mrs. Rump had been grown by a rival seedsman.

One of my favourite stories in the collection was also one of the most curious – ‘The House with the Lilacs’. Most of the stories in The Museum of Cheats capture moments in ordinary lives, showing how extraordinary they can seem to the people experiencing them. In ‘The House with the Lilacs’, the reader is left uncertain – Mrs Finch reminds her family of a house they looked at when choosing where to live, and recalls it in perfect detail, but not where it was. The rest of the family know that neither they nor she have ever seen such a house. And that is more or less where we leave it. Even more intriguingly, in a letter Warner wrote to William Maxwell, she describes Mrs Finch as ‘my only essay at a self-portrait; her conversation and her ineffability’.

Sadly, The Museum of Cheats is pretty scarce – though more copies seem to be available in the US than in England; despite living in Dorset, Warner’s stories always found a more appreciative audience in New York. I can only imagine that her other stories would be equally rewardingly tracked down (if not as appropriate for the 1947 Club). I’ll certainly be making sure I read more from my Warner shelf before too long.

 

Mr Whittle and the Morning Star by Robert Nathan

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Mr Whittle and the Morning StarRobert Nathan was one of the authors I was keen to keep an eye out for when I went to Washington DC earlier in 2015. On my previous trip, I’d found Portrait of Jennie by Nathan in a bookshop nearer the Folger Shakespeare Institute – a book I’d read about during my DPhil research but hadn’t been able to track down – and found it very enjoyable (and subsequently also enjoyed the film). He’s not at all easy to find in the UK, and much more common in the US, but often found around the mass market paperbacks and the second-class hardbacks…

Anyway, after scouring the shelves I managed to bring back two: The Enchanted Voyage and Mr Whittle and the Morning Star. My weekend away in Shropshire was an ideal time to treat myself to reading one of them – Nathan struck me as that sort of indulgent, probably not-very-high-quality, eminently-readable author. Either would have done, but it was Mr Whittle and his morning star that accompanied me to the house.

Well, both Robert Nathan novels I’ve read have taken me less than a day. Granted, both were short – but they are also both novels with the perfect balance of lightness and wit. They’re not great literature, but they’re also not trash; Nathan has a turn of phrase that puts him above the dross, even if it doesn’t get him into the greats.

So, what is the premise for Mr Whittle and the Morning Star? It’s the sort of quirky thing that I like: Mr Whittle is sure that the world is about to end. Not from any spotting of the four horsemen of the apocalypse or anything like that, but because of the threat of nuclear war. He tries to warn his students (he is a university professor), his wife, his 12 year old daughter – but none of them are particularly perturbed. Much like Shirley Jackson’s brilliant novel The Sundial, his announcements are met without drama, and it makes for very amusing reading. While Whittle is musing on the end times, his wife replies with anxiety about buying a new dress for their daughter.

His mind strayed into dreamy speculation. How hard it was to imagine nothingness – to realize, for instance, that no one would ever remember anything that had happened. To think that music and the alphabet and noodle soup would simply disappear into thin air, never to be mentioned anywhere again – and after such a short existence, geologically speaking. All man’s knowledge, from the wheel to penicillin…

This element of the novel was handled beautifully; Nathan apparently has quite a way with the eccentric and unusual (as I discovered in the fantastic-themed Portrait of Jennie). Sadly – for my reading enjoyment, at least – there is another element of the novel which somewhat takes over. Forty-something Whittle becomes infatuated with one of his students, the beautiful Penelope Andrews. Mrs Whittle, meanwhile, develops something of a brief relationship with one of the couple’s friends. It’s all very naive and old-fashioned (so far as affair storylines go) but also not particularly interesting – and rather distracts from Nathan’s more innovative plot.

And (spoilers) the ending is frankly bizarre – God turns up in the clouds and has a chat with Mr Whittle. Nathan more or less has enough charm to carry it off. Indeed, it is the charm of his writing that keeps me hooked throughout. I’m already excited about reading my next Robert Nathan novel, and sad that so few of them are readily available in book form (though plenty of them can be found as ebooks, some of you will be pleased to know).

Has anybody read Robert Nathan? Is anybody tempted? He was very prolific, but there isn’t that much info out there about him or his work…

 

A ghost story for Christmas…

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….but perhaps the least scary ghost story you will ever read! It’s R.A. Dick’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) which I read for Shiny New Books. Here’s the beginning of my review…

Nobody loves a good reprint better than I do, and so I was quite excited to see a series from Vintage called ‘Vintage Movie Classics’, wherein they republish the books that were adapted into great films. (This series may only be available in the US; I have to confess that my conversations with Vintage did not entirely illuminate the matter.) I expected to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Godfather, and those sorts of texts – it was a surprise to see entirely books and films I’d never heard of (Back Street, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Cimarron etc.) which doubtless says more about my filmic knowledge than anything else. It was a lovely surprise, though – what better than reprints that will be unknown gems?
The one title I had come across before was R.A. Dick’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir, as I had had my eye on it during doctoral research – and found it too difficult to track down. So I was certainly grateful that a new copy was forthcoming – and The Ghost and Mrs Muir was every bit as enjoyable, silly, and entertaining as I’d have hoped.

Abbie – Dane Chandos

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A friend from my book group kindly lent me Abbie (1947) by Dane Chandos about a million years ago, and I’ve somehow only recently got around to reading it.  I think it looked almost too inviting – it seemed a delicious treat of a book that I didn’t think I quite deserved.  And I thought it might be a sweet, old-fashioned children’s book, which isn’t something for which I’m always in the mood.

Well, I was right and I was wrong.  It isn’t remotely sweet or a children’s book, but it is wonderful.

You (like my friend) are probably aware of my penchant for characterful old ladies in books, and Abbie does not disappoint.  The episodic novel is narrated by Dane (I thought it might even be a sort of autobiography, until I discovered that Dane Chandos was actually the pseudonym for two authors, Peter Lilley and Nigel Millett) who, from his schooldays onwards, has a close and amusing relationship with his Aunt Abbie.

Abbie is composed of interspersed letters and narrative – the letters being from Abbie, who jaunts off around the world (she hires camels in Algeria, haggles in French markets, skis in Switzerland) but always returns to her East Anglian garden.  Gardening is perhaps the least exotic of her hobbies, but it is also her most passionate.  She judges everyone on their gardening abilities, she is willing to steal and deceive for her art, and this piece of dialogue (which I choose more or less at random) is from one of the chapters on gardening:

“Drat the regatta. We’re too late now, anyway.  I have to get those camellias put in.  Now please take care of them, Arthur.  Do not make an impetuous gesture.  Cotoneaster twigs are very delicate.  Prenez garde!  These old gaffers should not be allowed on the roads, especially when there are such handsome almshouses at Upper Dovercourt.”
Abbie is an interesting creation.  Battleaxe types are always a joy to read in some measure, but the author’s (or, in this case, authors’) task is to keep them on the right side of sympathy – or open them entirely to ridicule.  It is that which separates the Lady Catherine de Bourghs from the Miss Hargreaveses of this world.  Abbie is certainly not a figure of fun – much depends on the reader developing the fondness for her that Dane (the character) clearly has for his aunt.  How successful is this?

Well, the negatives.  She is unabashedly xenophobic – but not racist in particular, because every non-British person (indeed, every non-British non-upper-class person) meets with her disdain.  She is quite selfish.  She is rude, abrupt, and tells everyone to ‘Prenez garde!’ all the time.

And the positives.  She is very funny – sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.  She loves her nephew and her husband.  He is called Arthur, is calm and sensible, and balances out her forthright sense of purpose.  He is also, along with Dane, capable of quietening her down. The authors give us enough examples of Abbie being bested (my favourite being in the garden theft incident, by a confident neighbour) that we can afford to like her.

Make no mistake, she would be a horror to know as a person – and her xenophobia is only understandable as a product of her time – but I couldn’t help loving reading about her energetic exploits and astonishing self-confidence.  The more low-key her social battles (arguing with a waiter, or going for a dress-fitting) the more I loved it – things got a bit out of hand with runaway camels and the like. But my taste always leans to the domestic and social minutiae.

Any fan of slightly silly, very funny, early twentieth-century novels will find a lot to like and laugh at in Abbie.  And, even better, I’ve just discovered that there is a sequel, Abbie and Arthur!  Thanks Caroline for lending this to me, sorry it’s taken an age to read it…

Hetty Dorval – Ethel Wilson

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Somehow I’d forgotten, when noting down books to read for my Reading Presently project, that quite a few of my unread Persephones had originally been gifts.  So there might be a little flurry of them as I come to the end of the year… and first up is the shortest, which accompanied me on my trip to the Lake District (and which I read in its entirety on the train): Hetty Dorval (1947) by Ethel Wilson. (Thanks, Becca!)

Hetty Dorval isn’t really the heroine of the book, and she certainly isn’t its narrator – that title goes to Frankie (Frances) Burnaby – but she is perhaps its leading figure.  Frankie first sees her on her arrival in their small British Columbian community, and is enchanted (and a little intimidated) by Hetty’s beauty and lack of convention:

We walked our horses side by side, I feeling at the same time diffident and important.  Mrs. Dorval did not ‘make conversation’.  I discovered that she never did.  It began to seem so easy and natural riding beside her there and no one making an effort at conversation that I was able to steal a few looks at her side face.  This was especially easy because she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion.  Through the years in the various times and places in which I came to know Mrs. Dorval, I never failed to have the same faint shock of delight as I saw her profile in repose, as it nearly always was.  I can only describe it by saying that it was very pure.  Pure is perhaps the best word, or spiritual, shall I say, and I came to think that what gave her profile this touching purity was just the soft curve of her high cheek-bone, and the faint hollow below it.
Frankie is only a child, and does not understand the mystery of the woman – but agrees to keep coming to visit her secretly, flattered because Hetty Dorval refuses to have any other people call.  And, of course, it all ends rather calamitously.

The novel follows the various different times that the paths of Frankie and Hetty overlap, as the narrator realises and mentions, when she is a young adult:

But this is not a story of me […] but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared.  It is not even Hetty Dorval’s whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty’s whole story and she does not tell.  I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and by strange chance.  Circumstances sometimes make it possible to know people with sureness and therefore with joy or some other emotion, because continuous association with them makes them as known and predictable as the familiar beloved contours of home, or else the place where one merely waits for the street car, or else the dentist’s drill.  Take your choice.  But one cannot invade and discover the closed or hidden places of a person like Hetty Dorval with whom one’s associations, though significant, are fragmentary, and for the added reason that Hetty does not speak – of herself.  And therefore her gently impervious and deliberately concealing exterior does not permit her to be known.
It is a curious and interesting way to structure a novel, because it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and an obviously skewed sequence of events.  Both factors enhance the mystery and complexity of Hetty, seen through the narrator’s evolving eyes.  The early enchantment becomes, inevitably, disenchantment – as Hetty’s past is revealed to show her not only disliked, but dislikeable.  Hetty Dorval is a intriguing counterpart to another Persephone book, Susan Glaspell’s Fidelity, and all others of its reactionary ilk which sought, George Bernard Shaw style, to show that the fallen woman need not be immoral.  That was so much the dominant narrative of interwar fiction that a ‘conservative’ viewpoint would be more revolutionary than a liberal one – or so it seems to me.

Not that Wilson is making any grandiose point about sexual morality – rather, she is depicting one woman’s sexual morality, and the impact this has on another young girl growing up.  Hetty Dorval is psychologically so subtle that the narrative can read deceptively simply – but it is an impressively measured and restrained portrait of two women.  Well, restrained, that is, until the final section where things get suddenly melodramatic – but somehow it doesn’t feel out of place; it is as though emotion had been repressed or held back for so much of the novel, that it has to burst out at some point.

The Persephone edition has an afterword by Northrop Frye, of all people, and an amusing and interesting letter from Ethel Wilson to her publisher, obviously in response to various corrections and suggestions – largely asking for them all to revert to her initial wording.  It’s always great to see ‘behind the scenes’, and this is the sort of thing to which the reader all too seldom has access.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is a “small” story of ordinary dramas, but it illustrates a big truth that is easy to forget in a world that prizes the independent spirit.” – Teresa, Shelf Love


“This is a book definitely worthy of its dove-grey cover and beautiful endpapers!” – Jane, Fleur in Her World


“This small book so captures the wild joy I feel in the wind, in nature, in prairies, hills and mountains.” – Carolyn, A Few of My Favourite Books

Of Love and Hunger – Julian Maclaren-Ross

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It’s no secret that the novels I tend to like are by women, about women, and (some would say) for women – just think of the Provincial Lady, the novels of Jane Austen, and any number of other examples.  Of course, my favourite novel is by a man (Miss Hargreaves) but I don’t think anybody would guess that from reading it.  And yet, dear reader, I seem to be developing an affection for a new variety of British literature: men of the 1940s.

The first Proper Grown Up novel I ever read (besides teenage books and the odd Agatha Christie) was Nineteen Eighty-Four, at the relatively late age of 13.  I loved it then, and I loved it on re-reading it a few years ago.  It’s entirely plausible that my tastes would have developed along Orwellian lines first, rather than wavering off – but better late than never, I have discovered a deep admiration for quite a few novels of the downtrodden, 1940s, lower-middle-class-hero[ine] variety. Most notably Patrick Hamilton’s extremely brilliant The Slaves of Solitude – and it was my love of this novel which led Dee (from LibraryThing’s Virago Modern Classics group) to send me a distinctly non-Virago novel: Of Love and Hunger (1947) by Julian Maclaren-Ross.

A long intro to a short book – Of Love and Hunger (which takes its title from Auden and MacNeice’s Letters From Ireland) concerns Richard Fanshawe, a vacuum cleaner salesman who is always in debt and never in luck.  I don’t believe the novel has a ‘message’ (it’s too sophisticated for that) but this quotation does rather set the tone:

Straker said: “Doesn’t seem much place for fellows like us, does there?””No.””What I mean, we’re kind of out of things.  Nobody seems to want us much.  Fellows who’ve been out east, I mean.  We don’t seem to belong any more.”
Fanshawe has spent some time ‘out east’, and found that the return home is not a welcome for heroes.  He is stuck in a dead end job, behind with the rent on his flat, and without any particularly close friends – but, before you vow never to read a word of Of Love and Hunger, this isn’t a particularly despondent novel.  Maclaren-Ross was a few years too early to be an Angry Young Man, and instead is one who embraces the bohemian, and shows the fundamental ordinariness of man.  Not the fundamental goodness – Fanshawe is not good – but nor is he bad.  He lives day to day, trying to earn his keep (and, if possible, keep his keep), and being friendly with people when he gets the chance.

One of the people he befriends is Sukie, who is (I quote the blurb) ‘dark, desirable – and married to his friend’.  Which makes the novel sound a bit like a love triangle – and, although it is a bit, it’s not pivotal.  More important, to my mind, are the men he meets through work.  There are some very amusing depictions of the bureaucracy and farce of vacuum selling that reminded me of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (albeit rather less hyperbolic) and I had a soft spot for Heliotrope – larger than life and twice as crooked – who is full of gusto and deceit, but a friendly face (and prolific offerer of raw onions.)

For the most part, nothing momentous happens.  Maclaren-Ross depicts an ordinary life that can’t get much better and won’t get much worse – the daily trundle to keep the wolf from the door, and the lack of ambition or drive that means Fanshawe will never be a rags-to-riches story (not least because he’s never been as low as ‘rags’ implies).  But somehow Of Love and Hunger isn’t hopeless.  It isn’t a celebration of the everyday, or raging against it, but simply a depiction of it – and it is the truly great writers who can show us the ordinary, and wish to do no more.  I’m used to many exceptionally good (and not so good) writers doing that when ‘the ordinary’ is a tea table in a drawing room – I’ve only recently started finding them elsewhere.

It’s always nice, not to mention a little ego-boosting, to read an introduction and discover that one has had the same thoughts as the Noted Expert (in this case, D.J. Taylor, who writes cogently and informatively, all too rare in introductions). I read it after I’d finished the novel, of course, and was pleased to see that he also mentioned Patrick Hamilton and George Orwell.  Of course, it was really Dee who spotted the connection, and she was right.  And fans of those writers will find much to admire in Of Love and Hunger.

One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes

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Back to normal now, folks!  You’d think I’d have taken the opportunity to write lots of reviews, ready to post… but… I didn’t.  Although I hope you were suitably intrigued by the little clues I gave yesterday… the first one up is the brilliant re-read.  So brilliant, in fact, that it’s leaping onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About…

39. One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes

I do more re-reading now than I used to, but I tend towards books I already know I’ll love.  So there are some novels I’ll read every two years or so, and some that I don’t remember much about, but knew I loved ten years ago, say.  What I seldom do (understandably, perhaps) is re-read books that I didn’t love – those that I disliked, or thought only quite good.

Thank goodness I decided to re-read Mollie Panter-Downes’ One Fine Day.

I first read it back in 2004, and thanks to never emptying my inbox (currently at 76,992 emails – all read, don’t worry) I can tell you that I reported thus to my online book group: “I did enjoy this, but not as much as I was expecting given Nicola’s love love love of it.  I was expecting E.M. Delafield and it landed more Virginia Woolf than I thought it would??  Memorable, though.”  The Nicola in question is Nicola Beauman, doyenne of Persephone Books, who has often held up One Fine Day as an almost perfect novel.  Indeed, it was she who rediscovered the book for Virago’s Modern Classics series.

Well, turns out Nicola was right, of course.  I had initially thought One Fine Day only fairly good, whereas now I believe it is an absolutely excellent – and, indeed, important – novel.

My early comparison with Virginia Woolf is one that I stick by, although why I would have thought that was a bad thing, I can’t imagine.  But I am aware that a lot of you will be turned off by the mention of Woolf – let me encourage you not to be!  One of the reasons that I think One Fine Day is an important novel is that it is something of a bridge between the middlebrow and the modernist.  It is Panter-Downes’ style which makes the novel so exquisite, and yet it has none of the inaccessibility of which Woolf can be accused.  She has all the fluidity and ingenuity of the great prose/poetry stylist, combined with the keen and sensible observation of the domestic novelist.  Time for me to hand over to Mollie Panter-Downes for a fairly long excerpt:

The bus was full of women, sighing, sweating gently under the arms of their cotton dresses as they held on to their baskets and their slippery, fretful children.  A tiny boy screamed like an angry jay, drumming his fists on the glass.  He wa-anted it, he wa-anted it!  Bless the child, wanted what?  It, it, ow-w-w! he wept with fury at adult stupidity already frustrating his simple world.  A spaniel on the floor at somebody’s feet shifted cautiously, lifting a red-cornered eye towards his owner, hoping and trusting that no one would tread on his paw.  Human uneasiness and irritability seemed to fill the bus with hot cottonwool, choking, getting up the nostrils.  If it did not start in a moment, it might burst with pressure from its prickling cargo.  Only a young man, a hiker, seemed to sit aloof and happy in the heat.  He wore a blue shirt and drill shorts; on his knees was a knapsack.  His neck was a dull red, so was the brow of his cheerful, ordinary face.  Perhaps he had only just come out of the Army or the Air Force, thought Laura, watching him study his map with such happy concentration.  Ow, ow, ow-w-w, wept the tiny boy, unable to escape and go striding off amongst the bracken, still handcuffed to childhood.  I’ll smack you proper if you don’t stop, threatened his mother.  The young man studied his map, reading England with rapture.  The driver, who had descended to cool his legs and have a word with a crony outside the Bull, swung himself up into his seat.  An angry throbbing seized the bus, the hot bodies of the passengers quivered like jelly, the jaws of an old woman by the door seemed to click and chatter.  With a lurch, they started.  The tiny boy’s tears stopped as though within his tow-coloured head someone had turned a tap.  His brimming eyes stared out at the streets as he sat quietly on his mother’s lap, clutching a little wooden horse.

I think that’s brilliant, just beautiful.  Mollie Panter-Downes also has a great way with metaphors and similes, offering unexpected images which somehow don’t jar, and convey much more than a simple statement could.  I’m not going to be able to resist quoting MPD (if you will) quite a bit, by the way, so here’s an example: ‘Now that he was home, he could not abide the thought of other people’s bath water running out, meeting on the stairs with forced joviality, someone else’s life pressed up against one in a too small space like a stranger’s overcoat against one’s mouth in a crowd.’

It’s unusual for me to talk about the style of a novel before I address the rudiments of the plot, but I do think it’s MPD’s style which sets her apart from her contemporaries.  In terms of plot, nothing really happens.  One Fine Day, as the title suggests, is all set during one day.  The war is over, and people are beginning to get back to their old lives – only, of course, nothing can ever really be the same.  Laura (the central character, through whose eyes we see most of the novel) goes shopping, visits a family in the village, tries to retrieve her dog from a gipsy encampment, and walks up a beautiful hill.  The events of the day are, in fact, uneventful.  It is this ordinariness, in contrast to the uncertain and unkind days of war, which resonates throughout One Fine Day.  Laura’s observations and reflections are not dramatic or life-changing – but that is their beauty.  What a relief it must have been to read about the pursuit of a gardener, or the view from a hill, rather than menacing newspaper headlines and the constant worry about loved ones.  The novel relaxes into this peacefulness and freedom – but with a continuous backward glance.  The war has changed Laura.  She is

a bit thinner over the cheekbones, perhaps, the hair completely grey in front, though the back was still fair and crisply curling, like rear-line soldiers who do not know that defeat has bleakly overtaken their forward comrades.

There is an undercurrent throughout One Fine Day of changed times – not just the working-class villagers who no longer want jobs in domestic service, or need to pay strict adherence to codes of class civility.  Laura has been separated from her husband Stephen for years; he has not watched their daughter Victoria grow up.  The family is not destroyed by this, nor is it even unhappy – but it is strained, and it is tired, but resilient.  Mollie P-D conveys so perfectly the triumph and relief of this weary, determined little family unit, who do not fully understand one another, but who stand together, grateful for all they have managed to keep.

Alongside Panter-Downes’ beautiful writing, it is the character of Laura which is the novel’s triumph.  Perhaps the two cannot quite be separated, because she is built of this wonderful style – it is not quite stream of consciousness, it never leaves the third person, but it flits through thoughts and noticings and reflections as Laura does.  And she is such a wonderful character.  She reminds me a bit of Mrs. Miniver, but without her slight tweeness.  Laura loves beauty, especially beauty in nature; she is a little absent-minded and uncertain, but she is strong and caring and optimistic.  Laura is observant but not judgemental; intelligent but not an intellectual.  A line of poetry runs through her head, in relation to her everyday activity:

Who wrote that? Laura wondered absently.  She could not remember.  Her mind was a ragbag, in which scraps of forgotten brightness, odd bits of purple and gold, were hopelessly mixed up with laundry lists and recipes for doing something quick and unconvincingly delicious with dried egg.

Laura is a perfect heroine for the wave of feminism which re-evaluated the worth of domestic life.  Perhaps especially because she does not entirely idealise it herself; she describes her class and people as ‘all slaves of the turned-back fresh linen, the polished wood reflecting the civilised candlelight, the hot water running into the shining bath.’  But she is a willing slave – all grumbles and laments are covered in the sheer gratitude Laura feels for life and freedom.  I can’t convey quite what a wonderful character Laura is, nor quite how perfectly Panter-Downes understands and shapes her.  To create a character who is both realistic and lovable must be one of the most difficult authorial tasks.  She is as psychologically well-developed as Mrs. Dalloway or Laura Ramsay, but as delightful as Mrs. Miniver or the Provincial Lady.  It is an astonishing combination.

I wrote blandly, back in 2004, that One Fine Day was ‘memorable, though’, unappreciative wretch that I was!  Truth be told, I had not remembered much of the novel.  And I doubt I will remember which steps Laura took, which neighbours she encountered, nor which views she expressed.  This is the sort of novel which cannot be remembered for its contents; only for the impression it leaves.  And that I certainly shall not forget.  I’m so grateful that I returned to One Fine Day, and was given a second chance to appreciate properly the work of brilliance that it is.  I am only left wondering, of course, quite how many other novels I have underestimated in this manner…??

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“An ordinary day, an ordinary family, ordinary lives, but an extraordinary novel.” – Margaret, BooksPlease

“The author’s love for this part of England absolutely sings through this little gem of a novel” – Geranium Cat’s Bookshelf

“But there were also fundamental changes in England’s social fabric, which this short novel portrays in exquisite and sometimes painful detail.” – Laura’s Musings

“It is a moving, elegiac novel about love, beauty, and most importantly, freedom” – Rachel, Book Snob

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

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36. The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

Lizzy Siddal and I agreed to do a readalong of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude (1947) when I realised that we both had recently got copies – I bought it off the back of a recommendation from my friend Rhona, and I am hugely indebted to her, because Hamilton is an incredibly good writer, and The Slaves of Solitude is a great novel. It is often hilarious, but somehow also increasingly bleak. As you can see, it’s straight onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. It’s not often that you can tell from the first paragraph that a novel will be brilliant, but almost from the first word of The Slaves of Solitude, I knew I was onto something special.


It’s 1943 in Thames Lockdon, a rather dreary suburban town in which 39 year-old Miss Roach (we don’t learn til about halfway through that her unwelcome Christian name is Enid) has found herself, since she’s been bombed out of her flat in Kensington. She is forced to live in a boarding house, inaptly named the Rosamund Tea Rooms – but it might as well be the third circle of hell. I know I quoted this section in an earlier post, but I’m going to do so again – this is the paragraph which made me certain that Hamilton was a writer of no small talent, and that I was in for a treat with The Slaves of Solitude.
As she let herself in by the front door she could in the same way see the Rosamund Tea Rooms – the somewhat narrow, three-storied, red-brick house, wedged in between a half-hearted toy-shop on one side, and an antique-shop on the other. She saw its bow-window on the ground floor, jutting out obtrusively on to the pavement; and above this, beneath the first-floor windows, the oblong black wooden board with faded gilt letters running its length – “The Rosamund Tea Rooms”. But now, since the war, it was the Rosamund Tea Rooms no more – merely, if anything, “Mrs. Payne’s”. Mrs. Payne would have taken the sign down had not the golden letters been far too blistered and faded for anyone in his right mind to imagine that if he entered he would be likely to get tea. All the same, a few stray people in summer, probably driven slightly mad by the heat, did still enter with that idea in mind, and quietly had their error made clear to them.It was the word ‘half-hearted’ that did it. So few writers would have picked that word, there, and it creates such a perfect image.

There can be few places described as dispiritingly as these Tea Rooms. The guests creep miserably around the house, obeying the notes which proliferate:
Mrs. Payne left or pinned up notes everywhere, anywhere, austerely, endlessly – making one feel, sometimes, that a sort of paper-chase had been taking place in the Rosamund Tea Rooms – but a nasty, admonitory paper-chase. All innovations were heralded by notes, and all withdrawals and adjustments thus proclaimed. Experienced guests were aware that to take the smallest step in an original or unusual direction would be to provoke a sharp note within twenty-four hours at the outside, and they had therefore, for the most part, abandoned originality.I just meant to write that there were notes, but when I flicked to the page in question, that quotation was irresistible. I have a feeling this review will go in that direction – Hamilton’s writing is just too delicious and perceptive and perfect for me to paraphrase. He is a prose writer par excellence and, even though I’m going to try and make some comparisons, in reality utterly defies comparison. He has the breadth and rich extravagance of Dickens, but the subtlety, nuance and irony of Austen. Reading it is like being in a whirlwind, but also in the calm at its centre. Hamilton never puts a step wrong.

Although we see this horrible place through Miss Roach’s jaded eyes, it is one of her boarding house companions who is most memorable – indeed, as Harriet writes in her review, he is surely one of the most memorable characters of all English literature. His name is Mr. Thwaites and he is the dominant figure in the small kingdom of the Rosamund Tea Rooms. He is in his sixties, but has lost neither energy nor the habit of bullying. Mr. Thwaites is a grotesque, but one who is entirely believable. His hideously affected tricks of speech are recorded perfectly by Hamilton, each a separate anguish to Miss Roach. I hope Harriet doesn’t mind me copying across a section from her review, as the examples she has chosen are perfect; these are Harriet’s words, with Hamilton’s/Thwaites’ in the brackets:
He is fond of substituting the third person verb for the first (“I Keeps my Counsel — like the Wise Old Bird”), is partial to hideous cod dialect (“I Hay ma Doots, as the Scotchman said”), and falls into dreadful and protracted archaisms (“She goeth, perchance, unto the coffee house…there to partake of the noxious brown fluid with her continental friends?”)
Like all great comic nemeses, Mr. Thwaites is both a joy to read and a horror to imagine. He is secretly pro-Hitler, and loathes the Russians – one of the points of attack against Miss Roach, since he willfully misconstrues her silence on the topic of Russians as an all-abiding love for Socialism:
This, clearly, was another stab at the Russians. The Russians, in Mr. Thwaites’ embittered vision, were undoubtedly perceived as being “all equal”, and so if the Germans went on retreating westward (and if Miss Roach went on approving of it and doing nothing about it) before long we should, all of us, be “all equal”. “My Lady’s Maid,” continued Mr. Thwaites, “will soon be giving orders to My Lady. And Milord will be Polishing the Pot-boy’s boots.” Failing to see that he had already over-reached himself in anticipating very far from equal conditions, Mr. Thwaites went on. “The Cabby,” he said, resignedly, “will take it unto himself to give the orders, I suppose – and the pantry-boy tell us how to proceed on our ways.” Still no one had anything to say, and Mr. Thwaites, now carried away both by his own vision and his own style, went on to portray a state of society such as might have recommended itself to the art of the surrealist, or appeared in the dreams of an opium-smoker.
But this hellish existence is not static for Miss Roach. She meets an American Lieutenant and begins an uncertain, meandering relationship with him – which mostly involves sitting next to him at the local pub while they both drink too much, and being nonplussed by his roars of affection or amusement. Miss Roach is plagued by doubts as to whether she should take his intentions seriously or not – alternatively laughing at herself, and wondering what she might miss out on. It is all observed so perfectly, so subtly.

And then there is Vicki Kugelmann. Vicki is a young German woman and a friend of Miss Roach – believed to be shy and unassuming, albeit with ghastly old-fashioned and odd linguistic quirks (“Hard lines, old fellow” ; “Do be sporty!”) – until she is persuaded to move into the Rosamund Tea Rooms. Their quiet friendship develops somehow, as Vicki becomes more domineering and cavalier herself, into a passionate and unspoken hatred. Vicki manages Mr. Thwaites as Miss Roach could not dream of doing; she patronises and frustrates Miss Roach; she flirts with the Lieutenant.
“No,” said Vicki. “That is not me, my dear. I do not Snatch. I do not Snatch the Men….”

Miss Roach was about to say something, but Vicki, still patting her, went on.

“No, my dear. I put him off. Have no fear. I do not Snatch. I am not the Snatcher.”

Then, with a final “No, I am not the Snatcher. Do not be alarmed. I do not Snatch,” the German woman, in a dignified way, left the English one alone in the dining-room of the Rosamund Tea Rooms.
Through the second half of the novel, this battle weaves and wends itself, on many fronts. On the small stage of a boarding house, Hamilton enacts the most impassioned and fierce of antagonisms – but always in miniature, and always in undertones. Anger seethes through the dialogue, but it is quashed by the modes and manners which Miss Roach will not – cannot – relinquish.


I had vaguely heard of Patrick Hamilton, because of his novel Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, but hadn’t heard of The Slaves of Solitude. (Actually, a search of my inbox shows me that ‘Anonymous’ mentioned it on this post back in 2009 – thanks, whoever you were!) Why? But why? Hamilton is a great writer, and this is a great novel. It is so rich; so filled with perfect observations and finely sculpted dialogue. (Hamilton was, after all, a successful playwright – amongst his works is Gaslight, later a famous film.) Nothing is over the top; everything is subdued and repressed by the force of good manners and Miss Roach’s enforced calmness. But that makes each line more potent, and each emotion more powerful.

What else can I say? The Slaves of Solitude is unusually, astonishingly good. I could read it over and over again. Instead, I shall move onto the rest of Hamilton’s output – thank goodness there is more, and bless Rhona for introducing me to his genius.