1950s

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino

StuckinaBook All , , , , 6 Comments

The Baron in the Trees (1957) is my first novel by Italo Calvino – and the description of it is a real tussle between something that really appeals to me and something that really doesn’t. On the one hand, it’s historical fiction – starting very precisely on 15 June 1767 – and that tends to deter me. On the other hand, it’s a novel about a baron who decides to live entirely in the trees. That very tethered version of surreality is exactly up my street. And it comes recommended by people like Karen/Kaggsy, so that was enough to push me in the direction of giving it a go – in an English translation by someone with the excellent name Archibald Colquhoun.

Cosimo is a young baron who, like many other teenagers, has an argument with his parents over the meal table. To escape them, he petulantly climbs into one of the trees in the garden. The event, like the whole novel, is narrated by Cosimo’s younger brother Biagio.

I have mentioned that we used to spend hours and hours on the trees, and not for ulterior motives as most boys, who go up only in search of fruit or birds’ nests, but for the pleasure of get­ting over difficult parts of the trunks and forks, reaching as high as we could, and finding a good perch on which to pause and look down at the world below, to call and joke at those passing by. So I found it quite natural that Cosimo’s first thought, at that unjust attack on him, was to climb up the holm oak, to us a familiar tree spreading its branches to the height of the dining­-room windows through which he could show his proud offended air to the whole family.

Little did Biagio suspect at the time – he will never encounter his brother on the ground again. Cosimo decides he won’t come down that night, sleeping in the dampness with little protection except the foolhardiness of youth and stubbornness. Everyone expects that he will come down the next day, but… he doesn’t. He never comes down again.

It’s a bizarre premise for a novel, but it works brilliantly. It’s such a simple conceit, and Calvino does interesting things with it. On the one hand, we see some of Cosimo’s exploits – meeting ruffians, courting a beautiful young woman, getting involved with some of the most significant personages of 18th-century Italy. He doesn’t skirt around the practicalities either – we gradually learn how he shelters himself, how he gets about great distances, and even (rather coyly) how he deals with bodily functions. It has some of the plotting of a ‘rattling good yarn’, and occasionally the cadence of it. But I found the novel rather more beautiful than adventurous. And I think that’s partly because we see things from the perspective of the left-behind brother, telling the story of his brother ‘sneaking around the edges of our lives from up on the trees’. For example, how lovely is this from Biagio, early in Cosimo’s exploits?

The moon rose late and shone above the branches. In their nests slept the titmice, huddled up like him. The night, the open, the silence of the park were broken by rustling of leaves and distant sounds, and the wind sweeping through the trees. At times there was a far-off murmur – the sea. From my window I listened to the scattered whispering and tried to imagine it heard without the protection of the familiar background of the house, from which he was only a few yards. Alone with the night around him, clinging to the only friendly object: the rough bark of a tree, scored with innumerable little tunnels where the larvae slept.

There is (presumably deliberate) self-consciousness to the way that any of Cosimo’s further-off adventures are described secondhand by Biagio. He hasn’t been present, and it’s not the most elegant way of portraying these things, but it feels part and parcel of Calvino’s satire of 18th-century literature. And thankfully the satire is largely in terms of plot and presentation, rather than style. The reason I didn’t mind the historical fiction element of it is that Calvino doesn’t try to make it feel at all historical. The dialogue doesn’t ape the 18th-century, and there is a vitality to the novel that comes largely because it would be improbable in any time period – its setting in the past adds to the oddness, in an excellent way.

My favourite parts of The Baron in the Trees were the beautiful descriptions or the sections about how his escape affects the family. The more bombastic bits were enjoyable but not, for me, the heart of the novel. And it is a novel that has such heart, despite its unconventionality.

I’ve finally started my Calvino journey, and better late than never.

Why I’m Not A Millionaire by Nancy Spain

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

Nancy Spain has been having a new lease of life recently, with the re-issue of her detective novels. To a certain generation, she is also remembered as a regular on radio and TV panel shows. For me, I first came across her as a young journalist mentioned in Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne – and I knew that she talked about it in her 1956 autobiography, the eccentrically titled Why I’m Not A Millionaire.

The conceit of the title is that she explains how she has got to where she is – and why that path hasn’t led to untold riches. Along the way she covers her time at Roedean (a posh girls’ school), activities in war service, her big break in radio – adapting a novel by Winifred Watson, of all things, though not Miss Pettigrew – and her much-feted whirl through journalism, novel-writing, and celebrity. It’s such a delightfully insouciant and fun book which manages to bottle why she was so popular with public and stars alike.

We race through childhood rather quickly, though not without a few well-aimed barbs at Roedean and the type of woman who never moves on from her Roedean days. Quickly, we are thrown into her joyful 20s – moving with a wealthier crowd, but nobody appearing to give anything too much serious thought. Spain writes with exactly the right level of self-mockery, so you don’t dislike her younger self but also don’t particularly respect or envy her. Her abiding characteristic throughout the book could be described as ‘giving it a go’, and she doesn’t let experience, ability, or

All the West Hartlepool girls had a lot of money. They lived in big, prosperous houses with a full quota of maids cavorting in the back premises. They drank burgundy and fizzy lemonade for lunch and I was mad about them all. I thought they were a Very Fast Set Indeed. Considering that I was all the time mooning over Paddy or Michael they were very nice to me.

Then one day I ran out of money and couldn’t afford to pay for my round of gins-and-tonics. Bin pointed out in words of one kindly syllable how I mustn’t allow this to happen again. I had already spent the £50 Father had given me on rushing about to Liverpool and so on. (And my share of the petrol.) What was I to do?

Basically, she describes her life like we imagine the Mitford sisters lived (albeit a little earlier). She writes with the same exuberant flippancy of Nancy Mitford. It’s so fun – I wondered if it might get wearing over this number of pages, but I never stopped enjoying it. She’ll start a paragraph with something like ‘It was about this time I discovered all my savings had been swallowed up and I was in an advanced stage of insolvency.’ That might irritate someone who likes their fictional and non-fictional heroines to be sensible and wise, but I am not that person. This isn’t the book to read for soul-searching, but it is a constant delight.

Spain’s multi-faceted rise through the entertainment world is interrupted by World War Two, and it’s the nearest we get to genuine pathos – when she describes some of the men she knew and lost. But mostly she takes the opportunity to be very funny about her experiences in the W.R.N.S – exploring the well-meaning chaos behind the scenes, and her own comic incompetency in the midst of it.

The Recruiting Department was very grand, seeing as how it was all the time in contact with the general public. Recruiting Officers were so terribly smart to look at that it hurt: some of them wore almost royal blue uniform monkey jackets and all of them wore black satin ties bought at Hope Brothers. I joined a circus of Third Officers whose business it was to whip around the London medical boards, making brief notes on the character and personality of candidates in the teeny weeny space provided on the interview form. People who engrave the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin in their spare time might well take lessons from a W.R.N.S. Recruiting Officer. Contrary to general belief, however, all successful candidates for the Service were not (a) titled or (b) the Last First Sea Lord’s second cousin once removed.

Spain’s experiences in the W.R.N.S. were turned into his first book, a memoir (I haven’t read) called Thank You, Nelson. She details its chequered path to publication – and then its unexpected success. A copy was sent to A.A. Milne by some well-meaning publicist, and apparently he was livid at the idea of a woman writing a book about war – then read it, and considered it marvellous. His review in the Sunday Times was apparently responsible for Thank You, Nelson selling out its first and second editions more or less overnight. As Spain writes, “I knew the book must be a success when the Chief Officer Administration at W.R.N.S. Headquarters said, ‘The book was very disappointing after the review.'”

Spain wrote to thank Milne for his review and, in turn, he wrote to invite her to visit him at their home in Sussex. And thus we get the handful of pages which first led me to the book – and how I delighted in them. Not least because Spain is unaffectedly admiring of Milne. Her tone is often so light and unserious that her moments of genuine, unadulterated admiration are particularly noticeable. How I loved this paragraph, and how perfectly it describes any truly perfect, short period of time:

He said a lot more, that darling man, but I have forgotten the details. It has fused, shimmering into the golden light of that magic afternoon in the sun.

Once Spain was established as a successful writer, her adventures still seem surprisingly chaotic – jumping between different newspapers and periodicals, as well as different genres in her own books – the one after Thank You, Nelson was a biography of Mrs Beeton – always (at least in her depiction) moments away from some sort of literary or pecuniary crisis. A lot of 21st-century social media is taken up with self-deprecating humour, pretending that our lives and careers are forever on the point of collapse – and it’s a brand of humour I enjoy. It’s also a brand a humour that we see throughout humorous British writers of the early- and mid-20th centuries – particularly women. Think a more exuberant E.M. Delafield.

Something I particularly appreciated about Nancy Spain’s autobiography is that she is not ashamed to name drop. If you’re like me, you want the celebrity gossip – particularly about the authors and actors of the period. Many memoirists coyly pretend they never meet the great and the good, or treat them simply as everyday friends. Spain is canny enough to know her audience are starstruck by them, and treats each person as the Name they are. And she is delightfully pithy about some of them, without letting herself off the hook – here she is on Eudora Welty:

Eudora Welty still takes high marks as a Remarkable Author. She is very tall, pale, and slender, and she comes from Jackson, Mississippi, in the deep, deep South of North America. She has hands like graceful fish. Her books are always exclusively about those deep, deep parts and I cannot understand one single solitary word of them. In those days that pleased and impressed my very much. I longed to write a book that no one could understand. (Alas, when people read my books they understand me only too well.)

I started the dropped names. Here is an incomplete list of the authors, actors, and others that she writes about – just the ones she spends time with, not including those she relates about at second hand: Noel Coward, Osbert Sitwell, Clemence Dane, Barbara Beauchamp, Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Beverley Nichols, Wolf Mankowitz, Monica Dickens, Dorothy Parker, Cynthia Asquith, Mae West, Vivien Leigh, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles, Clark Gable, Henry Green, Francis Wyndham, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Joyce Cary, Angus Wilson, Noel Langley, Nancy Mitford, Colette, Christian Dior, Joyce Grenfell and Winifred Atwell. I daresay Spain was discreet, but she gives a wonderful sense of indiscretion – or at least a lack of artifice.

The only really heartrending moment is the final line of the book – which is this:

Whatever the next forty years turn out to be, I am sure of one thing. They couldn’t possibly be more fun than the forty years that have gone before: whether I manage to become a millionaire or not.

When Why I’m Not A Millionaire was published, Nancy Spain was just under 40. She wouldn’t get another forty years – she would, in fact, die in a plane crash at the age of 46. What a lot of life she managed to pack into those few short decades – and what a joyful record of it. Every moment of this autobiography is a breath of fresh air, and I thoroughly recommend you spend the time with her.

The Oracles by Margaret Kennedy

StuckinaBook All , , , 6 Comments

It’s not often that I buy a book and read it straightaway, but I was so intrigued by The Oracles (1955) by Margaret Kennedy when I picked it up in Chipping Camden last weekend that I immediately started it.

Everybody has been reading The Feast in the past couple of years, and I enjoyed it a lot – but had to add it to the list of Kennedy novels that haven’t quite bowled me over. I’ve read four or five of her novels – I’ve liked some, admired some, disliked some, even given up on one. But I’ve finally loved one: The Oracles is my favourite of hers by some distance.

Also published as Act of God in the US, the cover of my edition tells you how the novel starts. We are instantly flung into a vicious thunderstorm:

The thunderstorm frightened a great many people in East Head. It came after a phenomenal heatwave, and it reached the Bristol Channel upon a Saturday night.

During the afternoon it had rumbled a long way off, to the north-east, over the Welsh coast. At ten o’clock the thunder-claps were coming fast upon the heels of the flashes. An hour later it was described by everybody as right overhead, although this hardly did justice to its menace. Had it remained vertical it would at least have kept to its own place; it became horizontal, a continuous glare, punctuated by short sharp cracks. It no longer descended from the sky, but sprang out of the earth – sizzling along the roads and blazing through drawn window curtains.

Little does East Head know the far-reaching effects this storm will have… more on that in a moment. East Head is a small village that is ordinary in almost every respect. The one thing that sets it apart is the presence of Conrad Swann, the noted sculptor. His name looms large in avant-garde circles and he is widely revered by a sizeable group of acolytes, all of whom long to be close to him but who receive minimal encouragement in return.

Swann is better as a sculptor than a husband or father. He is living in East Head with a woman who is not his wife (who is, in fact, the wife of his best friend) – though this scandal is no longer new, and the villagers don’t much care anymore. This is 1955, after all, not 1925. He has a sizeable brood of children and his mistress has brought a couple with her too – all the children are left alone to live more or less wild, looking after one another and playing out elaborate fantasies in their back garden. There is little money to spare, and neither the villagers nor the acolytes want anything much to do with them – but they are self-sufficient. Which is just as well, because Swann has absconded.

Conrad Swann has been working on a new sculpture – all anybody knows is that it is called Apollo. There is a group of local intellectuals who want to put their village (and themselves) on the map, and they want to secure the sculpture with local public funds. Other intellectuals think it should be taken to a more prestigious place. And most of the villagers are contentedly mystified by it, and anticipate being mystified by anything Swann produces.

What only the reader – and one of the young Swann siblings – realises is that ‘Apollo’, discovered in the shed, is not the sculpture Swann was working on. What is taken for ‘Apollo’ is actually… a garden chair that was struck by lightning in the storm. It has been melted and bent out of shape. And – deliciously – the intellectuals think it’s a wonderful piece.

“Mr. Pattison!” said Martha solemnly. “Here is a work of complete integrity. It makes no compromise, no concession, to what the public may demand, or think that it likes. To state his secret, private vision is all that concerns Conrad. Can’t you understand?”

“That,” put in Carter, “is something which you can’t expect anybody to understand but us, Martha. The artists are the only honest people.”

Margaret Kennedy has great fun throughout the novel in poking fun at this sort of person – but The Oracles is much more than a satire of artistic elitism. I’ve not mentioned them yet, but the real central characters are Dickie and Christina. They have only been married for a couple of years, but is evident that both of them think it was probably a mistake. He is a solicitor regarded as ‘bumpkin’ by the oracles and considered too clever by half by some of the villagers. He has an honest, unpretentious interest in Swann’s work and is keen to learn more – and, brilliantly, he doesn’t fall for the hype: he even reads several books on Apollo to try and see a connection between the chair/sculpture and the god, without success.

This pursuit of art makes Christina feel alienated and judged, though. He makes the mistake of suggesting she could be ‘provincial’, and this unintentional barb echoes throughout the rest of the novel – Kennedy expertly shows us how someone can return time and again to a word that cuts them to the quick, and Christina retaliates with increasing unkindness. Ironically, Dickie is quite provincial himself much of the time, and doesn’t seem to mind. It is a marriage of unequals in many ways, and it comes to a head over a seemingly unrelated question of art.

Kennedy’s talent is to make both Christina and Dickie quite sympathetic – certainly moreso than any of the other adults in the novel. Dickie is driven by a genuine wish to learn, and Christina has an intense compassion for others, particularly children. They are seeing the worst in each other, but the reader can see the best in them. Here’s Kennedy on the aftermath of one of their feuds, caused by Dickie getting embarrassingly drunk at an event:

He could not, in any case, have told her much, because he remembered very little. He was desperately ashamed of himself. He had been drunk before, once or twice in his life, but only upon excusable occasions and never since his marriage. It shocked him deeply to think that his wife should have been obliged to put him to bed – that he had left her all alone and frightened for hours while he made a beast of himself. She had, he felt, every right to be furious and he was most anxious to apologise, if allowed an opportunity. He got none. She would not even permit him to say that his conduct had been bestial. Not at all. If he must know what she thought when she found him lying on the mat, he had better understand that a man in such a condition is generally rather pathetic. No, she was not angry. She was sorry for him. He need say no more about it.

Free and full forgiveness is the good woman’s most formidable weapon. Nothing makes a man feel smaller; yet few husbands have the brutality, or the strength of mind, to reject it. Christina was aware of its essential unfairness, but she was really very angry.

The Oracles is a very funny book but it’s a book with a lot of heart to it. Towards the end, as we see more of Swann himself, it feels little less heart-filled – but I still really fell for it. The ingredients I’d enjoyed in different Kennedy novels come together here in the perfect recipe – for me, at least. I’m aware that I probably think it’s Kennedy’s best work (that I’ve read) because it is the one that is closest to my taste. If it sounds like it could be closest to yours too, then I recommend seeking it out.

Love and Salt Water by Ethel Wilson #SpinsterSeptember

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

I haven’t actually read very much of the book I had decided to read for Spinster September – a brilliant brainchild of Nora aka pear.jelly – but one of the other books I was reading also qualifies. Ethel Wilson was one of the Canadian authors I was keen to find on my recent holiday, and while I was there I bought and read her final novel, Love and Salt Water (1956).

The novel follows Ellen Guppy through large sections of her life, starting in childhood. Of course, nobody would call a young girl a ‘spinster’, so not all of this novel qualifies – but it’s clear from the opening paragraph that Ellen doesn’t have the stereotypical views of marriage that other girls of her generation are expected to:

When Ellen Cuppy was eleven years old and sat on the foot of the bed, getting in the way of her big sister Nora who was packing her suitcases with great care, she thought how sad it was for Nora, who was so fair and pretty, to marry that old Mr. Morgan Peake who was all of forty; yet Nora did not seem to mind, but shook out the crêpe de Chine nightdresses and laid them on the bed and slowly folded them again with tissue paper in between, and Ellen thought that Nora was like a lamb getting ready for the sacrifice; and thinking of lambs and sacrifices she thought of garlands and timbrels and damsels and maidens and vestal virgins, such things as she read about and liked the sound of but did not understand.

Not long into the novel, Ellen’s mother dies – in fact, Ellen discovers her. Wilson is such a good writer that the scene of this discovery is haunting, and she shows us a reaction that is unusual and yet entirely right. In many ways, the Bildungsroman plot of Love and Sea Water treads some expected paths – but Wilson’s observant eye means that, within this, nothing is ever quite as you’d expect. I thought young Ellen’s response to her mother’s dead body was brilliant:

She stretched out her hand toward her mother’s telephone and drew it back, to defend her mother and herself – and her father too – just for a few more moments, against her mother having died. Yet she was sure her mother had died. This must be what that is.

When she had cried awhile, standing there in her nightdress in the stillness of the room, very frightened with this quiet stranger her dear mother, she managed to pick up the telephone because she must at some time pick it up, and all the while she never took her eyes off her mother whom she was now giving over to other people’s talk and arrangements (it was strange how strongly Ellen felt this as the minutes advanced).

The first hints of the ‘salt water’ of the title come to prominence when Ellen is whisked away by her grieving father on a cruise. She is disorientated and confused, and trying to behave well and keep her father happy. Wilson shows us this in the background, but swirling around is the life of the ship – including the tragedy of a bo’sun swept overboard. She balances Ellen’s internal narrative with reality: her grief is not as significant to the other passengers as the day-to-day gossip and drama that they are experiencing themselves.

As the years pass, Ellen’s sister Nora follows conventions – marrying an older man, having a child, relishing the trajectory that is held up as the ideal. Ellen, meanwhile, is not self-consciously maverick. Her character is fairly quiet and unassuming, and she doesn’t make ripples for the sake of it. But this conventional path doesn’t work for her. She meets some suitable men, but is not interested in them – or at least not sufficiently – despite the urging of her relatives. I think this passage, coming after a proposal from a man she is merely fond of, could be a mantra for a certain group of the fictional women being remembered during Spinster September:

[…] at once her freedom became essential to her again. This free life-without-an-object, which had become so boring, was suddenly necessary to her security. She knew this life well, and would not exchange it for some other life which might be only a new conformity, and then perhaps a prison far away with a stranger.

Will Ellen end the novel a spinster? Well, I shan’t spoil it for you – but I will say that it was a very satisfying ending, true to her character. My edition has an afterword by Anne Marriott and she mentions an alternative ending that Wilson wrote – and I’m very glad she didn’t use it. The one that was published is excellent.

I really enjoyed Love and Salt Water – a short novel, and where some scenes and stages of Ellen’s life are truncated and could perhaps have been explored in more depth. But also one which comes with the wisdom and clarity of a full life and a long writing career. And I particularly enjoyed recognising the settings, as parts of the novel take place in both of the cities I visited – Vancouver and Toronto.

An accidental addition to Spinster September, but glad I could contribute!

Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay No.28

StuckinaBook All , , , 11 Comments

After a few days of feeling a bit lukewarm, or worse, about the books I’ve been reading, it was great today to read a really brilliant little novella. Sagittarius (1957) is my first Natalia Ginzburg, though I do have Family Lexicon on my shelves – and I also have Valentino, because Daunt Books have just republished Sagittarius and Valentino and sent me copies. Thank you!

This novella, translated by Avril Bardoni, is only 122 pages but manages to get so much into that short space. Here’s how it opens:

My mother had bought a house in the suburbs of the city. It was a modest house on two floors, surrounded by a soggy, unkempt garden. Beyond the garden there was a cabbage patch, and beyond the cabbage patch a railway line. It was October when she moved, and the garden lay beneath a carpet of wet leaves.

The house had narrow wrought-iron balconies and a short flight of steps down to the garden. There were four rooms downstairs and six upstairs, and my mother had furnished them with the few belongings that she had brought with her from Dronero: the high iron bedsteads, shaky and rattly, with coverlets of heavy flowered silk; the little stuffed chairs with muslin frills; the piano; the tiger skin; a marble hand resting on a cushion.

Like a curiously high number of narrators of my Books in May, this one is unnamed – as is, as far as I can tell, her mother. The narrator’s sister does get a name – Giulia – and much of the first half of this story is about the dynamics between the three women in their new home. The mother is domineering, determined, and relentless in her disparagement of her daughters – while simultaneously trying to praise them to others, and secure them husbands. The narrator is resentful and equally determined herself, though more often in what she refuses to be than what she actually does. Indeed, she is quite a passive character – an obstacle, rather than a catalyst.

In not many words, Ginzburg manages to show a complex, detailed, and wholly believable family group. Her little moments of seering observation are brilliant, and tell us so much about a person – for instance, the narrator comments on her mother that ‘when things were going badly for someone else, she always felt a little thrill of pleasure disguised behind an urgent desire for action’. There is love but little affection between the female characters.

The mother is ambitious for herself, as well as her daughters’ marriages, though in this case it is an ambition paired with inertia. She speaks a lot about her big plans for her future – opening an art gallery, say – but does little but talk. She relies on financial help from relatives, including her sisters who run a shop which she, the mother, believes she could run much more efficiently – though her brief stint there is unsuccessful.

Into their lives comes Signora Fontana and her curious coterie of hangers-on. She has connections to the great and the good (and, importantly, the rich) and Signora Fontana and the mother quickly encourage each other into an excitable friendship.

When we went back to the sitting room, my mother and Signora Fontana were already on first name terms. They had certainly had a good talk ranging over a multitude of subjects and had decided that the art gallery as projected by my mother should become a joint venture for the two of them; and it was going to be wonderful and exciting, a true intellectual centre in a city which had, up to now, catered so inadequately for the arts. They were sitting together on the divan like old friends, with an ashtray brimful of cigarette butts and mandarin peel beside them. Menelao was sitting on my mother’s knee, and as soon as we appeared she said that cats were better than dogs and Giulia’s puppy had tried her patience to the limit. Seeing the three of us enter together, Signora Fontana cried that she simply had to do a group portrait of us. My mother, agreeing, said that I should have to be decently dressed, however: she couldn’t bear that dreadful jumper, it made me look like a Russian factory worker.

As the novella continues, Signora Fontana and the mother are forever going for coffee together and making plans, but all the rich friends are busy all the time and the art gallery – or shop, named Sagittarius, hence the title – remains a discussion topic rather than an actuality. The reader has to wait and see whether dreams will become reality, or if there are reasons why it keeps being put off into the distance.

The plot is entirely unpredictable, but what elevates Sagittarius is Ginzburg’s clear-eyed understanding of human relationships. And particularly the lies we tell, and the lies we choose to believe. It all comes from the daughter’s perspective, and she is an interesting and well-constructed mixture of dispassionate and occasionally frustrated. Her passivity means we can go several pages where she seems objective, and then a flare up of resentment or confusion or pathos will remind us that we are reading a very personal view of the situation.

Sagittarius has made me keen to get to more Ginzburg. I was reminded of Stefan Zweig’s brilliant ability to sum up entire relationship dynamics through a crucial, feverish short period. And I thought of Sybille Bedford’s excellence at mother/daughter relationships. Both great authors to be reminded of, while being also very much her own writer.

My Face For The World To See by Alfred Hayes #ABookADayInMay No.24

StuckinaBook All , , 6 Comments

My Face For the World to See (New York Review Books Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Hayes, Alfred, Thomson, David: 9781590176672: Books

When Madame Bibi read Alfred Hayes’ In Love earlier in the month, it reminded me that I had My Face For The World To See (1958) on my shelves. I’d bought it because I’ll always pick up a NYRB Classic, and this one looked interesting – set in mid-century Hollywood, and only 131 pages.

It’s yet another unnamed narrator – this one being, like Hayes, a screenwriter. He is very successful and wealthy, and also the same age as me (37). He’s also clearly rather discontented. We don’t learn huge amounts about his wife, except that she is currently away and he doesn’t seem to miss her very much. (‘I thought of my wife. She was at a distance. The distance was in itself beneficial. I supposed I was being again uncharitable. She was what she was: I was what I was. That, when you came down to it, was the most intolerable thing of all.’) While at a party, he is looking out at the sea when he sees a young woman wandering into the sea, martini glass in hand. Is she simply drunk and foolish, or is she trying to kill herself?

He suspects the latter, and so does the reader, but she is saved from drowning and more or less laughs it off. Somehow they get to know each other, which spirals into a sexual relationship quite quickly and haphazardly. She is also unnamed, but she is sharply drawn with a pathos that rings true for modern-day Hollywood too – one of the success-hungry, fame-hungry, work-hungry young actors who will probably never get more than a handful of lines in a handful of mediocre films, but cannot get away from the longing.

At this very moment, the town was full of people lying in bed thinking with an intense, an inexhaustible, an almost raging passion of becoming famous, and even more famous if they were; or of becoming wealthy if they weren’t already wealthy , or wealthier if they were; or powerful if they weren’t powerful now, and more powerful if they already were. There were times when the intensity with which they wanted these things impressed me. There was even, at times, a certain legitimacy to their desires. But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things so coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why. It might have been only a private blindness, a private indifference which prevented me from seeing how gratifying the possession of power or the possession of fame could be.

The narrator doesn’t seem to have the same longing. He has found career success, but he doesn’t appear to want much more of that – but he certainly has longing. It’s unclear for what. Perhaps, as his namelessness and the title of the novella suggest, some sort of more solid identity? Some way of presenting himself to the world and to others that feels more secure, and which he can be prouder of?

The morning after the two sleep together, he wakes to find she has already left. I quote this as an example of Hayes’ writing, which I found rather exquisite without being unnecessarily embellished. He really draws you into the minutiae of a moment:

When I awoke again, she was gone. I did not at first remember she had been there; she had slipped out from beneath the blankets and left them carefully arranged as though she had wanted to create the impression, for herself too perhaps, that she had not occupied at all the other half of the bed. I remembered her with a small effect of shock. When had she gone? There was the pillow, indented; in the bathroom, a scrap of tissue with lipstick; on the floor in front of the fireplace, two glasses with what remained of the Scotch. But that was all; only the smallest sort of disarrangement, only the merest trace: she had been careful, as well as quiet.

Typing that out, it really is a riot of colons, semi-colons and commas. If I were writing it, I’d probably be tempted to tidy it up. But it didn’t seem at all obtrusive while I was reading it. Rather, it flowed beautifully to me – the pacing of his realisation, the psychological insights coming naturally alongside the visual observations.

I really appreciated Hayes’ writing, but my only drawback to the novella was that I wish he’d treated the story a little differently. On the one hand, it is just the snapshot of a brief, spontaneous, unexpectedly complicated encounter. But there are moments of melodrama and shock that feel a little jarring. Similarly, I was jarred by a graphic scene at a bullfight in Tijuana. David Thomson’s introduction calls it ‘a magnificent, remorseless scene’, but I found it an inelegant distraction to the flow of the narrative.

Perhaps it is appropriate for a novella set in Hollywood to have a few very dramatic moments, but I think Hayes’ writing would be better served by the mundane. He is so good at exploring the everyday in beautiful prose, I don’t think he needed the gimmicks of shock moments. I still think My Face For The World To See was very good, but perhaps not as good as it almost was?

How To Be a Deb’s Mum by ‘Petronella Portobello’ #ABookADayInMay No.8

StuckinaBook All , , 14 Comments

Hayley/Desperate Reader gave me her copy of How To Be A Deb’s Mum (1957) by Petronella Portobello a couple of years ago – she wrote about it on her blog – and rightly thought that it would be up my street. The author name sounds very unlikely and is indeed a pseudonym – albeit for the also unlikely name Lady Flavia Anderson. It’s told in letters from Petronella to an old friend, Pris, and does exactly what the title suggests: it’s all about being a Deb’s mum.

‘Deb’ here is, of course, debutante. And the book feels a little anachronistic since debutante balls were far less a feature of the 1950s than of the generation earlier. Indeed, Petronella harkens back often to her own debutante season in the ’30s – because, though often describing herself as practically decrepit, Petronella is only 38 herself. Though she is also a widow, and we hear very little about the departed husband.

There are some questions about why Petronella is bothering with this old-fashioned tradition – especially since she lives in the highlands of Scotland, and has to travel to London and rent a house to host all the requisite dinner parties of the season. The question comes chiefly from Alice Hardcastle, a friend who really seems to be a nemesis.

“After all,” I go on, “you may ask what it did for us, Alice, but we shouldn’t be sitting in this train talking, if we hadn’t got acquinated twenty years ago in the same racket.”

“Ah! Then you do admit it’s a racket?”

“No I don’t,” I protest. “I have friends in every corner of Britain, and I want Jane to have the same. Go to a cocktail party in Cornwall or take a job in Manchester, and there’s always someone you know to rescue you from being left high and dry.”

I realise too late that I am using just the wrong argument with Alice, because if we were both honest we should admit that neither has gained anything by association with the other, and that each would probably prefer the loneliest corner of the Midlands to making small talk together. But I cannot carry honesty far enough and say, as I am tempted to do, that only by making a large number of acquaintances can one weed out the incompatibles and cultivate the congenial among one’s fellow human beings.

If you’re sensing some Provincial Lady-esque tone from that, then I’m with you. There is a lot in How to be a Deb’s Mum that certainly feels in that world, with the same self-effacement and mild mockery of others, and ultimately good-humoured beneficence.

And, to be honest, a lot of the novel does feel very much older than the 1950s. There are a few stray things that date it to the period – the young women wear lipstick and nail polish without any fear of censure; somebody brings along a man who is a ‘bearded Existentialist from her Chelsea art class’ – but for the most part it does feel unaffected by anything else happening in the world in 1957. The focus is entirely on how to make this Deb season the perfect one for young Jane. I have to say that Jane doesn’t come off the page as fully as her mother, and I’d be hard-pressed to say anything about her character except that she is excited, a little overwhelmed, obliging and occasionally able to be swayed into something unwise by other people her age.

I thought the book was really fun. The only thing that stops it being a classic is that it is rather one-note – a steady walk through everything involved in the Deb season, and the politics of whom to invite to what, which invitations to accept, and how to be appropriately quid pro quo among the hundreds of young women (and their mothers) who are also fighting to give their daughters the best chance in life. ‘Chance’ does seem to mean social success and other opportunities, not solely a husband (and men are given rather a scant look-in in the novel). Though, of course, a good deal of consideration is also given to ensuring Jane dances with the right young men, and dodges the wrong ones. There is some japery about men who are Not Safe In Taxis, which feels rather dated and unpleasant.

The only other plotline is Petronella’s own relationship with family friend Freddy – who steadily goes from being a reliable friend to perhaps something more, and I was certainly more invested in this than in anything that might be going on in Jane’s life.

So, thanks Hayley for sending to me! It is rather a curiosity – a period piece that probably would have felt oddly out of sync with 1957 even in 1957. It is a window on a very small part of society at a time when their traditions were fading away from dominance – and a really fun time to be had reading it.

 

A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley

StuckinaBook All , , 19 Comments

A Perfect Woman by L. P. Hartley | Hachette UK

About ten years ago, John Murray did some rather lovely reprints of L.P. Hartley’s novels – and it was around that time that I read their edition of his brilliant novel The Boat. And then Harriet wrote a wonderful review of A Perfect Woman (1955), and I was all set to read it asap. I suspect most of you will understand that somehow more than eight years went past before I finally read it. And it’s another excellent book.

L.P. Hartley is known best, of course, for The Go-Between – which holds the distinction of being one of the relatively few novels that me, my brother and both my parents have read. He’s not entirely considered a one-hit wonder, as quite a few people know The Shrimp and Anemone and the rest of that trilogy, and quite a few of his books turn up in secondhand bookshops – but there is still a wide range of his books that don’t get mentioned. And I haven’t seen many people talk about A Perfect Woman.

For quite a long novel, the plot is simple and the cast list is short. There are four main characters: Harold and Isabel, a middle-class couple who have married fairly contentedly for a fair number of years. Alec Goodrich, a novelist. And Irma, the Austrian barmaid.

How do these four come to know each? It starts when Harold – respectable accountant, unimaginative and (for that reason) broadly happy – is on a train journey. He finds himself oddly interested by a man sitting in his carriage/

Yet there was nothing so remarkable about the man. He was above the average size, loosely built and inclined to corpulence; he was wearing a good brown tweed suit, a brown and white check shirt, a knitted brown tie and pair of heavy brown suede brogues. So far so good: all was in rural symphony. But there was a discordant note, the socks. Dark blue and of cheapish material they were obviously meant for town. In his vacant mood the discrepancy worried Harold. Cautiously he lifted his eyes to the stranger’s face. There, at a first glance, everything seemed to match., The general impression was sandy.

The gentleman is reading After the Storm by Alexander Goodrich. And is, it transpires, Alexander (Alec) Goodrich himself.

“Well, yes I am.” He leaned forward, put his hand on his knee, and said with great intimacy, as to an old friend, “It’s always been my ambition to find somebody in the train reading a book of mine. I never have, but sometimes I read one myself in the hope that someone will connect me with it.”

Alec is boyishly open, and yet with an undercurrent of something else. He is clearly used to getting his own way, and expects no obstacles in his path. Luckily his own way is usually pretty harmless – in this instance, for example, he wants Harold to take over his tax affairs. The offer is made with spontaneous enthusiasm. Harold, who is seldom spontaneous, agrees with some misgivings.

Back home, he relates the tale to his wife Isabel – who is, it turns out, a big fan of Goodrich’s writing. It is characteristic of their marriage that he would not know that. She, in turn, has dampened down the evidence of her intelligence and literary leanings – as, the narrator drily notes, ‘was likely to happen when a woman of slightly superior social standing, decidedly superior brains and greatly superior imaginative capacity married a dullish man and lived in the provinces’. She is also expected to devote most of her energies to motherhood – Hartley is brilliant at observing children, and giving proper weight to the depth and strength of their emotions and fears. Jeremy and Janice are both drawn so distinctly and believably. Jeremy – eight, I think – is serious and worried. Janice (6) is obsessed with marriage and much less anxious, but still with a fragility that is very moving.

When Alec comes to stay, he befriends Harold and Isabel happily – but the woman who really bowls him over is Irma, the barmaid of the local pub. She knows she is a figure of fun to many of the locals and regulars, and takes it in good part – but Alec sees something different, and asks Harold to connect the two. Reluctantly, Harold agrees to try and woo Irma on Alec’s behalf.

From here, the tangle of the four characters gets tricky. Secrets and lies abound, and the worlds of literature and tax affairs provide an unlikely but wonderful background. Hartley’s theme is eternal, but I loved the way he bedded it firmly in the clash of 1950s middle-class stability and a kind of relentless bohemia. These four are not likely friends, and the whirlwind of their experiences together will loom long in all of their lives. But there is nothing sensational in the way Hartley presents this novel. He resists anything that would make this melodramatic, and it is instead moving and rather beautiful.

What a storyteller. I haven’t mentioned that A Perfect Woman is also a page-turner. The way Hartley combines reflective insight and tense pace is very impressive.

Hartley seems to bubble under as one of those authors who doesn’t need rediscovery – he certainly isn’t forgotten – but he is one of those mid-century novelists who hasn’t received their proper due. I’m already looking forward to reading my next book by him.

Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley

StuckinaBook All , , 6 Comments

MMRTLNC1959.jpgI almost never read science fiction, but one of the good things about the Audible Plus catalogue is that I can explore all manner of books that I probably wouldn’t race to pay money for or have taking up shelf space. And at some point I stumbled across Robert Sheckley’s 1959 novel Immortality, Inc. and added it to my downloads – and listened to it last week.

From the Wikipedia page (and, indeed, the fact that the novel has a Wikipedia page at all), I get the impression that Immortality, Inc. is well-known in certain circles. I was drawn to it because time travel is one of the bits of sci-fi that I find fascinating, and the title made me think of Paul Gallico’s intriguing novel The Foolish Immortals, about a scam to fool people into thinking they have immortality.

At first, Thomas Blaine doesn’t have immortality – he simply has his lifespan moved dramatically forward. The novel opens with a car crash in 1958 – his car careers out of control, the steering wheel comes off, and he is killed instantly – impaled on the steering column, which is quite the detail. But then he wakes up. It hasn’t been a dream – he’s just been in a coma.

At first, he is simply confused – and the medical staff, reporters, and business people around him are not providing any answers. It is more important that he answers their questions: about what he is experiencing, how he feels about it etc. It turns out that he is at the centre of a publicity campaign for the organisation that has made this time travel possible. Their priority is getting good footage of his awakening, rather than explaining what’s going on.

What’s going is that it’s 2110. Sheckley gradually introduces us to the changes that have taken place over 150 years – some of which are quite dispiriting. One of the first things Blaine sees is a long queue, and he thinks he ought to join it, but soon realises it is a line for a suicide booth.

In 2110, thoughts about what being alive means have changed significantly, as have the corresponding scientific abilities. Blaine is living in a body that belonged to somebody else, a strong and muscular young man, and he quickly finds that there is a trade for bodies. Minds are transferred between bodies, either from people who willingly choose to die or from people who are trafficked. Then there are zombies, who occupy bodies that are about to die.

Where does the immortality come in? That is the afterlife – something that has been scientifically proved, but which is only entered naturally with a one-in-a-million chance. Otherwise you have to buy your way in. Inequality hasn’t disappeared. Quite the opposite.

It’s curious, given the whole scope of human imagination that Sheckley could have developed, that he is most fixated on mortality. There are scenes where Sheckley has to fight for his life, where his mind or body are at risk of being stolen, where he needs to kill others. It does all give a (literal) vitality to the novel that would have been lost if it were crammed instead with fanciful scientific inventions that have no real urgency. Perhaps that’s why this novel appeals to this sci-fi sceptic – because it is about the essentials of life, and the trappings of a fictional future don’t get in the way of that too much.

Oh, and there’s a romance plot. Because of course there is.

It’s interesting to read a novel written in the 1950s about the 2110s. We are still closer to the 1950s, but of course a lot of time has passed since Sheckley wrote his futuristic vision. Some details about 2110 thus seem amusingly old-fashioned – and not just references to Abyssinia and Ceylon. Of course, he couldn’t have been expected to come up with the idea of the internet, but the modes of communication and broadcast feel more 1950s than any decade since.

Overall, I really enjoyed Immortality, Inc. At the heart of it is a confused man trying to work out what’s going on, and that’s usually a good vehicle for a reader who is also confused and trying to work it out. We can share his fascination, both amused and horrified in turn, and there is a pleasing simplicity to the survival dramas he undergoes. Naturally I won’t spoil the conclusion, but it ties up the narrative neatly and makes sense of various parts of the plot that seemed a little odd along the way.

I don’t think it has tempted me to dive headfirst into science fiction, but I enjoyed my sojourn there.

House Happy by Muriel Resnik

StuckinaBook All , , 18 Comments

House Happy (1958) by Muriel Resnik is one of the books I’ve bought for my Project 24 – I’d seen it every time I’ve been to Astley Book Farm, and I finally couldn’t resist and had to splurge a little to bring it home with me. The cover has a lot to do with it – as does the intriguing subtitle ‘A Tale of Mortgages and Mirth’. And it ended up being a lot of fun.

The cover is very accurate about the starting point of the novel – which begins with the bedframe you can see in the bottom left. Lucy Butler is a divorced mother of two who is drawn to elegance and beauty even when it is impractical. And one of the things that catches her eye is a beautiful French bedframe – which is only five dollars. By the time she’s got it delivered it costs several times that, and the chain of events it kicks off is extremely expensive. Because she decides she needs a new home to fit the bedframe – and sets her heart on one that she certainly can’t afford.

Lucy Butler reminds me a lot of Cornelia Otis Skinner’s essays – the same sort of amusement at being expected to take part in everyday life, and the same ability to get through it absurdly but in tact. While Skinner is very self-deprecating, Lucy seems to coast along on naivety and charm. She is certainly attractive to most men – particularly when she walks, which is a detail Resnik labours and which feels very of its time. (Allegedly her husband left her because she walked too seductively, which… ok.)

I kept thinking of other novels as I read House Happy, the trouble being that they’re not really household names and thus the comparisons might not be helpful. The tone is like Thorne Smith, albeit several notches less farcical; the sequence of events is rather like Eric Rabkin’s Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, though without the underlying sense of tragedy. It all feels a bit like a screwball comedy, tethered to the domestic.

My favourite scenes were when Lucy looked on as a helpless bystander, dizzied by proceedings, particularly when trying to exchange contracts as the housing solicitors (curious spellings Resnik’s own!):

They brought in a chair for me and had a terrible time finding room for it, and then the secretary started reading the most boring contract all about the party of the first part and the party of the second part and one of them was me but I don’t know which. And it was full of whereases and therefors and wherefors and so forth and Arthur kept interrupting with his silly ideas about changing a whereas to a wherefor or the other way round. Really he’s so petty and it was just terrible.

Similar confusion and frustration happens when she is trying to arrange garbage collection – a saga that I very much enjoyed. Many details of finding, buying, and moving into a new house haven’t really changed in the decades since Resnik this, though I doubt many of us find tens of thousands of dollars becoming suddenly available when we take a closer look at our property portfolios.

I haven’t mentioned any of the other characters, and it’s true that Lucy is the undisputed star, but I also enjoyed her cynical sister and her two teenage sons – one of whom is very excited about the move, and the other keeps trying to put obstacles in the way. And yes, there is a romance element, of course. It’s not the most convincing element, but I was happy to go along for the ride.

Overall, House Happy is a good mix of domestic detail and silliness, and I really enjoyed my time in House Happy. It’s too intentionally absurd in tone to have the sort of mimesis that appears in lots of novels about mid-century housewives and mothers – but it’s something different, and joyful.