1950s

Some Tame Gazelle – Barbara Pym

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I wasn’t intending to join in with Barbara Pym Reading Week, which I’ve seen everywhere around the blogosphere (well done Thomas and Amanda!) and, it seems, I might be late to the party – because I hadn’t spotted that the week ended on a Saturday.  Oops.  Well, hopefully they’ll let me sneak in as a last minute participant, because I have just finished Some Tame Gazelle (1950) – Pym’s first novel – because I realised Mum had given it to me, and thus it would qualify for Reading Presently too.

This isn’t my first Pym – although it is only my second.  The first one I read, back in 2004, was Excellent Women.  I’d rather expected to love Barbara Pym devotedly, and was a bit nonplussed by my lukewarm response.  I certainly liked it, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting – it was set in London, for a start, which wasn’t at all what I envisioned Pym being like.

Some Tame Gazelle, at any rate, is set in the countryside.  That helped me get in the right frame of mind.  It has the same “three or four families in a country village” that Jane Austen recommended as the perfect novelistic topic (for her niece at least, and to many Pym is a figurative niece of Austen) – more emphatically, it reminded me of the close-but-carping rural communities inhabited by Mapp and Lucia in E.F. Benson’s series of novels.

The families in question are really households, I suppose.  I shan’t write too much about the plot, because there have been so many reviews of Some Tame Gazelle in the blogosphere this week (scroll through Thomas’s blog to find all Barbara Pym Reading Week links), but I’ll give a brief precis.  Belinda and Harriet Bede are eldely sisters living together, and we see most of the goings-on of the village through Belinda’s eyes (although Pym often gives a moment or two from perspective of other characters, which gets a bit dizzying.)  Neither are immune from the arrow of Cupid – the title, indeed, derives from the poet Thomas Bayly:

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:
Something to love, oh, something to love!
 Harriet develops a love for every curate she sees – a love somewhere between maternal and romantic – while Belinda is more constant in her love.  It’s for their local vicar, an Archdeacon, who was with Belinda at university, is unaffectionately married, and gives sermon which were ‘a long string of quotations, joined together by a few explanations’.  Indeed, a less lovably man would be difficult to create.  He is selfish, snaps at everyone, quotes self-importantly and at length at the drop of a hat, neglects most of his vicarly duties… and yet I get the idea that we are not supposed to think Belinda foolish in her affections.  Is he in the same boat as Jean-Benoit Aubrey, Heathcliff, Rochester, and all manner of other literary romantic heroes whose charms entirely pass me by?  Belinda, on the other hand, is very lovable – as, indeed, is Harriet, despite one being cautious and the other impetuous.

But I suspect Pym is chiefly read for her tone.  As I mentioned, she is frequently mentioned in the same breath as Jane Austen – recently by Thomas himself – and while (from my limited experience of two Pym novels) I would say she has neither Austen’s genius nor her tautness, Pym is certainly a worthy successor to Austen’s love of irony.  And now, of course, I can find no examples.  But time and again the narrative voice says something which coyly suggests – oh so innocently – that the character is foolish, or doesn’t know as much as they pretend, or in some other is not being honest.   This narrator is far too polite to say so outright, and isn’t so common as to wink, but… raises her eyebrows a touch.

As for me?  I still like Pym.  I liked Some Tame Gazelle rather more than Excellent Women – it was funny, affectionate, moving without being heavy-handed.  As the son of a vicar, I relished reading about church families, even while it all seemed rather unlikely from my experience. It even felt like the 1930s novels I love so dearly (although published in 1950, I couldn’t work out when it was meant to be set – everyone has servants, and levels of propriety are decidedly pre-war, but I suppose these things were both true for some 1950 villages).  But I still don’t love Pym.  I love Jane Austen, and (later) E.F. Benson, E.M. Delafield, and other authors who laid out the blueprint Pym picked up – but I still felt as though I were reading at one remove from the originals.  And, of course, even Austen was not an original – if I’d read Pym before I’d read Austen, perhaps I would love Pym more.

If other people did not love Pym so wholeheartedly, then I think I would sound very enthusiastic.  I think Pym is a very good writer, and Some Tame Gazelle is a lovely novel – but it will not be on my top ten for this year, I suspect.  Perhaps I am still too young?  Perhaps I am too familiar with the generation above Pym. When so many people rate her as one of their absolute favourites, even my very-much-liking of Pym feels a little bit like a failure.

What I really do love is the cover, and indeed all the covers of these Virago Pym reprints.  But curiously I can’t find any information about the designer or artist on the book jacket – I hope I’m just being dozy, because otherwise very poor show Virago.  Very poor show indeed.

Ring of Bright Water – Gavin Maxwell

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You know how I don’t shut up about Miss Hargreaves?  (Have you read it?  It’s great.)  Well, Hayley is (in a rather better mannered way) equally enthusiastic about Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water.  Since Hayley and I often enjoy the same books, I’ve been intending to read it for ages – but every copy I’ve stumbled across in charity shops has been rather ugly.  I wish I’d seen the beautiful cover pictured.  When Hayley lent me her copy (as part of a postal book group we’re both in) I was excited finally to read it.

Well, I say ‘excited’.  There was a part of me that was nervous – because I rarely read non-fiction when it’s not about literature, and I have no particular interest in wildlife rearing.  If it didn’t come with such a strong recommendation from Hayley, I doubt that I’d ever have considered reading it.  And I would have missed out.

Gavin Maxwell doesn’t really structure Ring of Bright Water in a traditional beginning-middle-end sort of way, which I imagine the film adaptation probably does – it isn’t encircled by the life of any single animal, or his occupancy of his remote Scottish home, but instead meanders through many of Maxwell’s countryside adventures.

I’m going to concentrate on the ones which made Ring of Bright Water famous – the otters – although (cover aside) you wouldn’t have much of a clue that they were coming for the first section of the book, which looks at the flora and fauna of the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and such matters as whale fishing (Maxwell is strongly against, despite having run a shark fishery – there is a constant paradox between his love of his animals and his killing of animals).  The only cohesion (and it is quite enough) is that it’s Maxwell’s opinions and voice, and connected with marine and rural life.

And then the otters come along.

The first otter only lives for a day or two, but after that comes Mij.  He is really the star of Ring of Bright Water, and the high point in Maxwell’s affections.  I can’t give any higher praise than to say that someone like me, interested in the animal kingdom chiefly when it concerns kittens, was entirely enamoured and captivated, and briefly considered whether it would be practical to get a pet otter.

Otters are extremely bad at doing nothing.  That is to say that they cannot, as a dog does, lie still and awake; they are either asleep or entirely absorbed in play or other activity.  If there is no acceptable toy, or if they are in a mood of frustration, they will, apparently with the utmost good humour, set about laying the land waste.  There is, I am convinced, something positively provoking to an otter about order and tidiness in any form, and the greater the state of confusion that they can create about them the more contented they feel.
Er, maybe not.  Maxwell sets out to tell you how incomparable the otter is as a pet – cheerful, companionable, spirited – and only slowly does he reveal that they are completely untameable, very destructive, and occasionally (if repentingly) violent.

But Mij is still a wonder – or, rather, Maxwell is a wonder for the way he tells his story.  He is certainly a gifted and natural storyteller, and the reader is easily lulled into similar levels of affection towards Mij, and a complicit sympathy with Maxwell (and never for a moment what a novelist would subtly ask – that we would pity the loner, or wonder at his isolation.)

I don’t want to spoil the high-jinks (yes, high-jinks – and tomfoolery, mark you) of the book, and I don’t think I can capture Maxwell’s tone – so I will give my usual proviso for books I didn’t expect to enjoy so much: read it even if you don’t think you’ll like it!  (And if David Attenborough is your bag, then you’ll probably love it even more.)

It is a beautiful book, for the rhythm and balance of its prose alone, quite apart from the topic or the setting.  I’m really pleased that, years down the line, I’ve finally taken up Hayley’s recommendation – even if she had to lend Ring of Bright Water to me to make that happen.

The Foolish Immortals – Paul Gallico

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I don’t think I’ve read any author whose work is as disparate as Paul Gallico (and I probably start all my reviews of his books by saying that.)  I started with the novel I still consider his best, of the ones I’ve read: the dark fairy-tale Love of Seven Dolls.  Then there is the whimsical (Jennie), the amusing and eccentric (the Mrs. Harris series), the adventure story (although I’ve not read it, The Poseidon Adventure surely falls into this category.)

I started The Foolish Immortals (1953) hoping that it would be in one category, it shifted into another, and then it revealed a whole new facet of Gallico’s writing arsenal.  Confused?  I’ll try to explain…

The concept of The Foolish Immortals immediately appealed to me, because it sounded like the sort of topic which could easily be given the Love of Seven Dolls treatment, revolving (as it did) around manipulation, wilful delusion, and a touch of distorted fairy-tale – the last of which seems to be the ingredient which appears, in some form or other, in all the Gallico novels I’ve read.

Hannah Bascombe is rich, old, American heiress, who has successfully invested the money her business man father left her to make herself one of the richest people in the world.  There is only one aspect of her life over which she does not have ultimate control – and that is its span.  She has, she notes, reached her three-score-and-ten, and cannot have many decades left to live.  And yet… and yet, she hopes that money and power might be able to secure her immortality.

Enter, stage-left, Joe Sears.  He is a poor man and a chancer, clever and manipulative, and sees an opportunity.  Having enlisted the dubious help of a young (but visually ageless) ex-soldier called Ben-Isaac (in case Gallico didn’t signpost it well enough, he’s Jewish), Sears manages to get an appointment with Hannah Bascombe.  To do so, he has to get past her beautiful, utterly dependent niece Clary – but, having manoeuvred his way to Hannah, he recognises her vulnerability, and thinks that it could be a good way to make himself some money…

“What if you were able to duplicate their years?  Supposing you were able to outwit the Philistines waiting to trample your vineyards by outliving them, like Mahlalaleel, Cainan, Jared and Enoch, generation after generation down through the centuries until no living man would remember when you were born and not even unborn generations of the future could hope to be alive when you died?”
He offers Hannah this possibility, based on the ages to which people are described as living in the Old Testament (often many centuries) – suggesting that he knows where they can find a food which will give Hannah the same longevity.  And it’s in Israel.

A bit of persuasion later, and they’re off.  Nobody really trusts anybody else on this venture, and everybody is out for themselves.  Things grow even trickier to decipher (for the reader too) when they stumble across a man purported to be Ben-Isaac’s missing, much-beloved uncle – a much-lauded academic who is, it turns out, working on the land.  Sears is, naturally, suspicious of this stranger, particularly when he takes over and Hannah appoints him the leader of their venture.  Who is scamming whom?

And this is where Gallico’s other genres come into play.  There is a sizeable amount of what I admired in Love of Seven Dolls, but Sears is never quite as credible a villain as Monsieur Nicholas – in neither a fairytale nor a realistic way – simply because Sears is quite an inconsistent character.  Which matches the change in genres – in Israel, things turn rather ‘adventure novel’ for a while, as they caught up in a shoot-out.  I know this sort of thing is supposed to be very exciting, but I find it unutterably tedious, and ended up skipping most of that section.

So we come onto the genre I’d yet to encounter in Gallico’s novels – the spiritual or religious theme.  As you might know, I am a Christian, but I don’t often read novels which feature faith – and, I have to say, I was a bit nervous to see how skilfully Gallico would handle it.  And, I’ve got to say, I was quite impressed – both the Jewish and Christian characters experience direct or indirect encounters with God while travelling through Israel, and these sections were moving (although, it must be conceded, entirely out of kilter with the rest of the novel.)

There are a few more twists and turns, a few more rugs pulled from under feet, and The Foolish Immortals concludes.  It is a very interesting, but maddeningly inconsistent novel.  Not inconsistent in quality (perhaps), but in style and tone.  It’s as though Gallico wanted to write a novel which took place in Israel, and couldn’t decide whether it should be about faith, boyish adventure, or unsettling manipulation – and so threw all of them in together.

Yet again, this is a book I’m criticising for not being written in the way I’d hoped it would be – but with, I think, greater justification than with yesterday’s post on Consider the Years, because in the case of The Foolish Immortals, it started off in the way I’d expected.  With this ingenious idea, Gallico could have written one of my favourite novels.  As it turns out, he’s written a good book, which I find quite intriguing, a little bewildering, and not insignificantly disappointing.

The Easter Party – Vita Sackville-West

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Hayley has a good track record of giving me books that she hasn’t hugely enjoyed, which I end up loving. First off was Marghanita Laski’s Love on the Supertax (which remains my favourite of her novels, although I’ve only read three); now is Vita Sackville-West’s The Easter Party (1953). I couldn’t get a good photograph in the light, so I played around with the image instead.

It certainly isn’t an unflawed novel.  It is melodramatic and improbable.  But, with the odd reservation or two, I loved it.

The Easter party in question is a gathering at Anstey, the beautiful country home of Walter and Rose Mortibois.  In the party is Rose’s dowdy, contented sister Lucy, with her husband Dick and 22 year old son Robin; eccentric, flirtatious Lady Quarles, and Walter’s witty, intelligent brother Gilbert.  It is a curious group of people, all a little wary of the situation, each with their own private or public anxieties.  Which sounds a very trite way to describe the scenario – and, truth be told, Vita Sackville-West doesn’t wander too far from the trite, at times.

This is especially true in the comparison of Rose and Lucy.  Rose is in a loveless marriage – or, rather, an unloved partner in a marriage, for she devotedly loves Walter.  He, however, never made any bones about what he was offering her.  He prefixes his proposal with “I will not pretend to be in love with you,” which is, of course, what every little girl dreams of happening.  By contrast, Lucy and Dick have a delightful marriage.  It is very rare to come across a lovely, loving couple in fiction, and Vita S-W has to be congratulated for creating a pair who, in middle-age, still call each other ‘Pudding’, and are adorable rather than nauseating.

So, yes, we have the rich, unhappy woman and her poor, happy woman.  (By ‘poor’ I mean, naturally, ‘only has one bathroom’ – they’re not on the streets.)  It’s not the most original set-up, and I did wonder whether Vita was writing this in a rush – it was her penultimate novel, and I already knew that I hadn’t been much of a fan of her final one.  But this turns out to be more than a collection of amusing, exaggerated characters and well-worn, inevitable moral lessons.  Vita Sackville-West weaves something rather wonderful from this material.  For starters, it is amusing – here is Gilbert’s faux-horror at the idea of meeting Lady Quarles:

Are you trying to tell me that Lady Quarles is cosy?  If so, I don’t believe it.  Nothing that I have ever heard of her indicates anything of the sort.  It is true that my cognizance of her is limited to the piles of illustrated papers, all out of date, which I contemplate only when I visit, in a state of the greatest apprehension, my dentist or my doctor.  I am perhaps then not in the best of moods to appreciate the charm of irresistible, lovable ladies propped on a shooting-stick in tweeds or entering a theatre by flashlight in an ermine cloak, but on the whole I think I had better not risk transferring my acquaintance with Lady Quarles from the printed page to the flesh.  I might be disillusioned.
She is a wonderful character when she arrives – garrulous, excitable, somehow loved by all despite being an almighty nuisance.  I found her a little less tolerable when she started bearing her soul – because she started declaiming things in a very third-act-Ibsen way.  Thinking of The Easter Party in dramatic terms was very helpful for these segments…

It is, however, with the host and hostess that The Easter Party gets more interesting and original – and stand above similar novels.  I don’t know about you, but I find passion between humans in novels rather dull to read about – it’s so apt, if not done perfectly, to smack of the third-rate melodrama.  Perhaps it’s my diet of soap operas which has made me so intolerant of these unconvincing sounding conversations.  But what I will run towards, eagerly, are novels where a human is has a passionate love for something non-human.  I was going to say inanimate, but that’s not true for the central passions in The Easter Party.

For Rose, it is (besides her cold husband) Anstey and its gardens.  In Vita Sackville-West’s exceptionally brilliant novella The Heir, a man develops a loving obsession with the house he inherited.  Thirty years later, Vita Sackville-West is still exploring the relationship between person and property.  She, of course, had this deep bond with her family home Knole (and was justifiably pained and outraged that the laws of primogeniture meant her gender precluded her inheriting it.)  This affection, along with her expertise as a gardener, enables her to write beautifully and movingly about Anstey and its grounds:

The beauty of the renowned Anstey gardens!  Rose stood amazed.  Svend [the dog] brought one of his little sticks and dropped it at her feet and stood looking up, waiting for her to throw it, but she could take no notice.  She was gazing across the lake, with the great amphitheatre of trees piling up behind it, and the classical temples standing at intervals along its shores.  It was one of the most famous landscape gardens in England, laid out in the eighteenth century, far too big for the house it belonged to.  The house, however, was not visible from here, and, but for the temples, the garden might not have been a thing of artifice at all, but part of the natural scenery of woods and water, stretching away indefinitely into the countryside, untended by the hand of man.  Already the legions of wild daffodils were yellowing the grassy slopes, and a flight of duck rose from the lake which they frequented of their own accord.  The air was soft with the first warmth of spring, which is so different from the last warmth of autumn; the difference between the beginning and the end, between arrival and departure.
But this is familiar Vita territory; I was not surprised to encounter it.  A more unexpected, and unexpectedly moving, passion was the relationship Walter has with his Alsatian Svend.  (And in case you’re worrying, based on my previous reading of Lady into Fox and His Monkey Wife, fear not – their relationship is entirely unsuspect.)  Walter, who cannot express affection for any human, including his wife, is devoted to his dog.  The scenes describing their companionship and mutual trust could have felt like a mawkishly over-sentimental Marley and Me intrusion, but are done so cleverly and touchingly, that I doubt anybody could censor them.  And that’s coming from a cat person.  Svend even becomes an important plot pivot…

There are enough lingering secrets and unlikely speeches to make The Easter Party feel like a throwback to theatrical melodrama, but Vita Sackville-West combines these with gorgeous description, genuine pathos, and a web of delicate writing which bewitches the reader.  It’s a heady mixture, and one I doubt many authors could pull off – but I loved it.  Vita Sackville-West will never be in the same stable as Virginia Woolf, the author with whom she is still most often mentioned.  She wasn’t trying to be.  She was a talented writer, crafting something unusual – somehow both willfully derivative and original, and (for me, at least) an absorbing, delightful, occasionally tragic, read.  Thank you, Hayley!

Room at the Top (a pleasant surprise)

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If you read my recent appearance on Danielle’s blog, taking you on a tour around my bookshelves, you might have noticed this picture:

Being observant people, you will have spotted all sorts of things.  Half the Queen’s head, on my breakfast tea mug, perhaps.  David’s eye (David being the teddy bear), maybe?  A little bit of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, if you’re very astute.  But what you won’t have missed is that book slap-bang in the front of the photo – one which scarcely seems to accord with my reading tastes.  It was, in case you hadn’t guessed, a choice for my book group.

Could there be a less promising cover?  A louche man in a trench coat; a cover design which combines the worst excesses of ClipArt with the block capitals of a child learning to write; worst of all, the tagline (which mercifully you wouldn’t have been able to read on Dani’s post): ‘The famous novel of the drivingly ambitious, sexually ruthless Joe Lampton, hero of our time.’

It sounds absolutely ghastly, doesn’t it?

It’s fair to say, dear reader, that I approached Room at the Top with some trepidation.  Yes, it was given to me (so it’s on the Reading Presently list) but by a man who, inexplicably, had about two dozen copies in his garage, and I don’t think had read it.

But – but – as with A Confederacy of Dunces, another book group choice, I misjudged it.  Although Room at the Top isn’t in the same league as John Kennedy Toole’s superb novel, every moment of which I relished, it’s certainly much, much better than I’d dreaded from the cover, tagline, blurb…

I think Room at the Top compares interestingly with Francoise Sagan’s Sunlight on Cold Water, which I savaged recently.  Both novels are about men sleeping with various women, falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat, and trying to discover their futures – but somehow Braine’s was engaging, while Sagan’s was an overly-introspective bore.  If I were to describe the plot of Room at the Top in detail, I really don’t think it would appeal to many of my readers.  A recently demobilised soldier works his way through fairly menial financial jobs, feeling bitter about the rich and lustful about their daughters.  He falls in love; he falls out of it.  He seeks parent-replacements.  And he has a fair bit of sex.

So why did I like it?

Basically because John Braine can write well.  He’s in that school of writing which I always think of as the Orwell-school, simply because he was the first author I read from that stable.  The similarities aren’t in topic or genre, but in the use of language.  Orwell has a prose style that is somehow both beautiful and plain.  Sentence by sentence, it seems serviceable, even a little utilitarian, but it builds up into a richness which is hard to pinpoint.  At its best, every word is just right – without the elaborate tapestry of a Woolf or even an Elizabeth Taylor, or the entrenched humour of a von Arnim or Austen.  Of course, the only excerpt I noted down is rather more ornamental than most of Room at the Top, but… well, here it is.  Lampton is visiting the bombed-out house where he and his parents had lived:

I stepped forward into the bareness which had been the living-room.  I was sure about the cream valance, the red velvet curtains, the big photograph of myself as a child which had hung over the mantelshelf; but I couldn’t be quite certain about the location of the oak dining-table.  I closed my eyes for a moment and it came into focus by the far wall with three Windsor chairs round it. […]

The walls had been decorated half in fawn and orange paper and half in imitation oak panelling.  The paper was reduced to a few shreds now, the imitation oak panelling was pulped with dust and smoke and weather.  There had been a pattern of raised beads; I struck a match and held it close to the wall and I could still see some of the little marks where as a child I’d picked the beads off with my fingernails.  I felt a sharp guilt at the memory; the house should have been inviolate from minor indignities.

My predominant impression is that John Braine was too good a writer to write this sort of book.  He was one of the Angry Young Men, but the anger in Room at the Top feels rather tepid – and as though it has been put on for show, trying to join in with the big boys.  Lampton rails against the corporate system for a bit, and talks about ‘zombies’ in all areas of life – people from his despondent hometown who hopelessly go through the motions of living.  But I never really felt that his heart was in it.  What Braine chiefly wants to do, it feels, is write a good novel – regardless of the topic or the didactic rage of Angry Young Men.  Well, this was his first – I have no idea how his other novels turned out.  Perhaps he took the unassuming beauty of his prose and turned it to topics I’d find more palatable.  Perhaps not.  Either way, Room at the Top was a very pleasant surprise.

We Were Amused – Rachel Ferguson

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Thanks so much for the wonderful suggestions on my art post the other day; I’ll reply individually soon.  Some of you also liked the pictures I’d found, which was lovely – I really have fallen in love with Korhinta since I posted it, despite not much liking anything else I’ve turned up by Vilmos Aba-Novak.  Right, books.

Anyone who saw my Top Books list for 2012 will know that I love an autobiography, particularly if it’s one by an author from the interwar period.  Rachel Ferguson seems such a complex, interesting novelist (and an actress to boot) that I was excited to read her autobiography We Were Amused (1958).  Well, it was definitely an interesting, involving read – and it’s made Rachel Ferguson seem more eccentric and complex than I could ever have imagined!

I’ve only read a couple of her novels – The Brontes Went to Woolworths and Alas, Poor Lady – which could scarcely be more different.  The former is a madcap tangle about a family who have no boundary between fact and fantasy; the latter is a sombre examination of the fate for aging unmarried women in the period.  Both are excellent – you might all be more familiar with The Brontes Went to Woolworths, and tomorrow I’ll be posting a longer excerpt from We Were Amused which relates to that novel.

Truth be told, I was a bit anxious after the first chunk of the book.  I often write here, when reviewing memoirs, that the author mentions miserable events without creating anything remotely like a misery memoir.  Well, Rachel Ferguson gets close… with her love for the dramatic and heightened, she describes her mother’s childhood as utterly miserable, and her maternal grandmother as a tyrant.  Here’s a typically bizarre Ferguson paragraph:

‘Cumber’, as our Greenwood cousins called her (‘because she cumbers the earth’), was, as Annie Cave, a member of what Wells has termed that essential disaster of the nineteenth century, the large family.  Having married Dr. Cumberbatch, she herself produced five children who lived, a sixth who had the sense to die in infancy, plus at least two who never even succeeded to cradle status.  And all this without anaesthetics, in an era of tight lacing.
Details of Cumber’s ogredom palled a little, and I confess that I couldn’t wait for Ferguson to set aside childhoods – her mother’s and her own – and get to the business of living.  More particularly, living as an aspiring dancer/actress and, later, writer.  These sections were rather wonderful.  Ferguson takes her haphazard life rather casually – all the opportunities and achievements which came her way are thrown in without much explanation, so she’ll suddenly be working for Punch, or having her first novel published, or going on a theatrical tour, without much notice.  It’s definitely better than labouring all these points, but it’s a curious division of spoils considering how many pages she devotes to her experiences judging cat shows…

For most of us, I think it’s this middle section of the autobiography which will most appeal.  It’s so full of intriguing details and behind-the-scenes information (come back tomorrow for background info on The Brontes Went To Woolworths!) which is invariably interesting to those of us who have never published a novel or appeared on the stage.  She does expect a lot of knowledge of interwar actors, dancers, and journalists which I am (alas) unable to provide – but I need no prompting when she talks about E.F. Benson, E.M. Delafield, and Violet Hunt.

Even if Rachel Ferguson had no creative career upon which to reflect, We Were Amused would be special for her striking, surreal turn of phrase.  Here is a couple of examples:

Our hall wallpaper, which for some reason was not replaced when we moved in, was a real caution and an abomination in the sight of the Lord: it suggested fir-trees and pineapples in a very bad thunderstorm indeed.
and

Socially Teddington was still of the epoch which invited its doctors to dinner but seldom, if ever, its dentists.
Very amusing! But, if only one could believe that Rachel Ferguson were sufficiently detached!  Perhaps it is foolish to expect an author to be detached in their autobiography, but her moments of irony and satire are weighed down by her equally peculiar outlook on many topics.  Yes, she may have written that twist about dentists with a grin on her face, but she is deadly serious when she suggests the working class have got too big for their boots and are ‘overpaid’.  Complaining about the lack of live-in servants feels madly outdated for 1958, she seems faintly insane when writing ‘the only cathedral town that doesn’t tire one out is York’ (what can she mean?), and I lost the thread completely when it came to the chapter on ghosts.  Ferguson assumes a level of credulity (not to mention a familiarity with famous hauntings of the 1930s) which left me entirely cold towards her my-sister’s-friend’s-cousin-heard sort of anecdotes about poltergeists and phantom footsteps.

Even stranger, to me, is her total fixation upon London – well, Kensington.  She describes a period spent in a different area of London as though she’d been exploring a South American country, or taken a voyage to Moscow.  She has no time at all for any of Britain’s other cities, towns, and villages.  Life begins and ends with Kensington for Ferguson – she’ll often assert that somebody is a Kensingtonian, and consider it credentials enough to satisfy the reader.  I shall never understand the London-centric mind, and I should probably give up hoping I ever shall.

So, it’s a curious mix.  It’s almost all fun and interesting, but the selection and apportion of pages – not to mention the tone and turn of phrase – certainly mark out Rachel Ferguson as an eccentric.  If you’d wondered how much of a departure she found The Brontes Went To Woolworths, well… if anything, she seems to have toned things down for the novel.

The Winds of Heaven – Monica Dickens

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Firstly, just thought I’d let you know that I’m back in the blogosphere (after two or three days of not reading much) and have replied to all recent comments, including all the wonderful and interesting comments on the On Commenting post.

Having recently got all excited about Persephone publishing their 100th title, I decided to check my unread Persephones against my A Century of Books list, and see how many blank spaces could be filled.  I have loved doing A Century of Books, but there’s no denying that some of those blank spaces are frustratingly elusive.  However, this cross-referencing did fill up two gaps – which happened to cover the whole cross-section of Persephone’s ethos.  Today’s book is at the light, frothy end of the scale – the book I’ll review tomorrow is serious and important.  I’m very glad to have read both.

My parents gave me The Winds of Heaven (1955) for my birthday a year or two ago, and it’s been on my large pile of books I’m looking forward to reading – especially since I am already a huge fan of Monica Dickens’ semi-autobiographical, very hilarious One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet.  But haven’t yet, somehow, read Mariana.  Anyway, The Winds of Heaven is very different from those – gone is the humour, gone is the absurdity, and present instead is one widower’s lonely, awkward life, bustled from pillar to post (those pillars and posts being represented by three rather selfish daughters.)

Lest we be in any doubt that those heavenly winds of the title be metaphorical, the opening paragraph is this:

When the winds of Heaven blow, men are inclined to throw back their heads like horses, and stride ruggedly into the gusts, pretending to be much healthier than they really are; but women tend to creep about, shrunk into their clothes, and clutching miserably at their hats and hair.
Louise Bickford is certainly of the creep-about variety.  She is recently a widow, left with enormous debts by an unscrupulous and selfish husband, and must spend her days living with one or other of her three daughters, on rotation.  In this novel, Monica Dickens draws her characters with broad strokes.  Having recently read V.S. Pritchett’s complex and brilliant delineation of his father, it was even clearer that Louise’s husband Dudley is essentially a cartoon villain.  Louise is downtrodden by him, and throughout the novel he looms in her memories like a bogeyman, apparently unkind and cruel from their honeymoon onwards.  Indeed, nobody would read The Winds of Heaven for its range of subtle character portraits – every marriage in the novel has at least one ‘bad’un’, and sometimes two.  On the flipside, some characters are just hopelessly nice.  Here are the various daughters and families:

1.) Miriam – sharp, pre-occupied, but not cruel.  Husband Arthur – cross, irascibile.  Daughter Ellen – sensitive, withdrawn, kind.  Other children Simon and Judy – young, excitable.

2.) Eva – bohemian.  Lover David – unreliable.

3.) Anne – lazy.  Husband Frank – adorable.

I’m being a little unkind to Monica Dickens, and I should point out that none of this prevented me enjoying The Winds of Heaven to the utmost.  It just isn’t a finely-drawn, perceptive novel – it’s light and broad and completely, wonderfully entertaining.  It reminded me a great deal of Richmal Crompton’s novels, which I love but which (I now recognise) are far from great art.  Indeed, the relative staying with various families is a plot Crompton uses more than once, and to great effect in Matty and the Dearingroydes.

Having called this novel entertaining, I should add that its themes are often sombre.  Chief amongst these is Louise’s situation – being loved but unwanted by her family, an awkward imposition wherever she goes.  In the hands of Elizabeth Taylor this would be a subtly crafted, very moving story – in the hands of Monica Dickens, it is moving but never heartbreaking.  Serious themes do not a serious novel make.  Indeed, the novel is still more entertaining than it is cautioning or saddening.  In fact, I’m trying to work out why it was so fun to read, when there is almost no comedy in it, and the events are all rather melancholy – from miserable affairs to accidents with farm machinery.  I think it’s the same experience one has when watching a soap opera – the events are so over the top, and the characters embodying individual traits (Anne might as well just be a sign saying Selfish and Lazy) rather than complex personalities, that it’s impossible to feel distraught for them, and instead you can settle down to guiltless enjoyment of the spectacle.

All of which sounds like I’m damning Monica Dickens with faint praise – but I have admiration for authors who can create an action-packed, page-turning novel, with underlying seriousness, and still produce a credible narrative.  Dickens’ writing is never poor, and Louise herself is rather a well-drawn character – just one surrounded by characters who aren’t particularly.  And which of us lives on Elizabeth Taylor alone?  It is no mean feat to produce a loveable, engaging novel.  It’s the light end of the Persephone scale, but it’s perfect for a winter evening when you want something relaxing and enjoyable, with just the right amount of thought-provoking paragraphs laced into the mix.  Thinking about it, The Winds of Heaven is the literary equivalent of The Archers… and that, my parents would assure me, can be no bad thing.

A few little reviews…

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It has come to my notice that it is December, and there are only 27 days left this year.  I have almost 20 reviews to write for A Century of Books… oops, didn’t work this out very well, did I?  (Well, I still have 10 books to read – but I have 4 of them on the go already.)  So I’m going to rush through five of them today – books that, for one reason or another, I didn’t want to write whole posts about.  But do still free to comment on them!

Daddy Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster
An orphaned girl is given a scholarship by a mysterious, anonymous man – she has only seen his back – and one of the conditions is that she must write updates to him, without getting any replies.  She nicknames him Daddy Long-Legs.  Can you guess what happens?  Well, I shan’t give away the ending.  I was mostly surprised at how modern this children’s book felt, despite being a hundred years old – a lot of it would have been at home in a Jacqueline Wilson story.  I enjoyed it, but did find it a little creepy, and rather repetitive, but these are probably signs of not having read it when I was the target age.

Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he is an enormous bug.  Which is going to make his job as a salesman somewhat difficult.  The reason I’m not giving this novella/short story its own review is that I don’t feel I have anything new to say about it.  Kafka is famed for his matter-of-fact approach to the surreality in this story, and rightly so.  What surprised me here was how middlebrow it all felt.  It is definitely comparable to David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox – which actually seems to have greater pretensions to literariness.

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Another one which surprised me – I’d always heard that Marie Stopes started a sexual revolution in the UK, offering knowledge about sex to the everywoman for the first time.  Turns out she is much more conservative, and less revelatory, than a lot of the other guides written around the same time, and earlier.  I read these guides for my current DPhil chapter, by the way – my favourite so far being the person who argued that sexual intercourse and reproduction were acceptable as separate impulses, because protozoa separated them.  Sure, why not?  (I wonder if I’ve just made all sorts of inappropriate search terms for this blog now…)

Miss Hargreaves: the play (1952) by Frank Hargreaves
This is something of a cheat, since it was never published – but it was performed, with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role.  Tanya tipped me off that copies of all performed plays were in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives in the British Library – so I had the great privilege and pleasure of reading the play, with Baker’s own penned changes.  It’s pretty similar to the novel, only with the action restricted to a few settings.  Such fun!

V. Sackville West (1973) by Michael Stevens
I’m a sucker for a short biography, and I hadn’t read one of VSW before, so I gave this one a whirl.  It’s a critical biography, so Stevens discusses and analyses the work while giving an outline of VSW’s life.  About halfway through I thought, “this feels way too much like a doctoral dissertation.”  Turns out it was a doctoral dissertation.  I think I’ll be turning to a more charismatic writer for my next biography of Vita, as this one was rather prosaic and charmless, although very thoroughly researched.

Right, well that’s five down!  How are the other Century of Bookers getting on?

Guard Your Daughters – Diana Tutton

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41. Guard Your Daughters (1953)

What a heavenly book!  What a glorious find!  It has gone into my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.  There was never any question that it wouldn’t.

Occasionally I started a book and, after a page or two, know that I will hate it *cough* Mary Webb *cough – less frequently, it takes only the first page to tell me that a book is astonishingly brilliant (step forward Patrick Hamilton.)  Rarest of all is the book where, before the end of the second page, I know I will read and re-read it for many years to come.  We all recognise the difference between a book we admire and a book we love.  Often these overlap, but there are very few novels which feel like loved ones, so deeply are we attached to them.  Guard Your Daughters is on that list for me, now.

First off, I have to acknowledge how similar it is to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.  I mentioned that the other day, but I don’t think I can really write a review without acknowledging it again.  Guard Your Daughters was published five years after I Capture the Castle, and I think Tutton must have been influenced by it – or perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist?  (Disclaimer: I’m going to make two big assumptions – that you’ve read I Capture the Castle, and that you love it.  I won’t give away any significant spoilers, but my references to Dodie Smith’s novel might not make complete sense if you’ve not read it…. ok, disclaimer over!)

Here are some of the similarities: The narrator is a young girl (Morgan Harvey is 19, to Cassandra’s 17) who lives with her eccentric family in the middle of rural nowhere.  Her father is a writer (although Morgan’s father is a successful and prolific detective novelist, not an avant-garde sufferer from writer’s block) and there are posher folk living nearby.  Tutton even seems to make reference to Rose’s disastrous attempts to dress up for her neighbours, when Morgan and her sisters are preparing to visit theirs:

Luckily, if you bother to read a few illustrated papers you can always find out what to wear when, so that we didn’t make any crashing faux pas, such as wearing long dresses or flowers in our hair.

The most significant similarity is the feel of the novel.  Just as I Capture the Castle has a warm, nostalgic feel to it (don’t ask me how), so Guard Your Daughters feels like a novel one read repeatedly throughout childhood, even though I hadn’t read a word of it before this week.  Without being like those mawkish Edwardian children’s books where everyone Learns A Lesson, Tutton has created a wonderful family of people who love one another and, somehow, make the reader feel included.  ‘About fifty years out of date’, as one sister cheerfully confesses, and ‘living in a completely unreal world’ as another admits, but this isn’t a realist novel.  This is a novel which glories in its own delightful eccentricity – but not without serious undercurrents.

Right, the family.  While Cassandra was blessed only with one sister and one brother, Morgan has four sisters.  Dreamy, shy Teresa is the youngest (at 15) – she warmed my heart by her forthright hatred of sports.  Next is Cressida, the only one of the unmarried sisters who craves a normal family environment – she rather blended into the background, but that turns out to be important.  Morgan is the middle sister.  One year older than her, Thisbe is dry, sardonic and loves to make visitors feel awkward – the only thing she takes seriously is her poetry.  Oldest is Pandora, recently married and thus absent from the home.  When she visits, her perspective on life has changed…

“The thing is–” said Pandora.

“What?”

“I realise now – I never did before –” She hunted for words and I turned and stared at her.

“What are you trying to say?”

“I realise now that we’re an odd sort of family.”

“Well of course we are.”

“But I mean – Oh, Morgan, I do want you all to get married too!”

“Five of us?  I doubt if even Mrs. Bennet managed as well as that, unless she fell back on a few parsons to help out.  However, dearest, we’ll do our best.”

It is obvious that life cannot be normal for these five – but Guard Your Daughters isn’t self-consciously wacky or absurd.  The events are entirely plausible – there are very amusing scenes where Morgan and Teresa try to run a Sunday School lesson, or Morgan and Thisbe attempt to negotiate a cocktail party, or the girls try to put together a meal for a visiting young man while subsisting on rations (and finer things illegally given by a nearby farmer.)  The various relationships between sisters aren’t unlikely either – except perhaps the standard of their conversation and wit.  What makes the Harvey family eccentric is their detachment from the outside world, and their complete absorption in the feelings and doings of the family unit, to the exclusion of almost everybody else.  (The family unit is completed, incidentally, by their father and mother.  No Mortmain-esque step-parents in sight.  The father is only mildly absent-minded, and the mother… well, she has sensitive nerves… it’s not all easy-going in this household or this novel.)

But, despite Pandora’s fears, they do manage to meet a couple of young men.  Gregory’s car fortuitously breaks down outside their gate (remind you of any novel?) and, later, Patrick offers Morgan and Teresa a lift in his car while they’re on their way to a nunnery to learn French… Aside from owning cars, these young man share bewilderment at the Harvey family, and both become objects of desire for one sister or another.  Unlike I Capture the Castle, the romance plot never becomes of overriding importance.  Far more important is the family, their love and rivalry, and definitely their comedy.  There are many very amusing scenes, and a few quite moving and difficult ones, but the main wonder of the novel is the family, and Morgan’s voice.  She is not so self-conscious as Cassandra, but has an inviting, charming, slightly wry outlook on her sisters – coloured, of course, by her love for them.  I have no idea how Tutton has created such a lovable character – if I knew, I’d bottle it.

These aren’t the sisters in the book, of course… but they could be.
(picture source)

It’s so difficult to write about a book when I have simply loved it.  I want to shelve any critical apparatus (not that I usually drag it out on my blog) and substitute rows of exclamation marks and smiley faces.  Guard Your Daughters is so warm, so funny, so lively and delightful.  It’s a warm blanket of a novel, but never cloying or sentimental.  Basically, if you have any affection for I Capture the Castle, you’ll feel the same about Guard Your Daughters.  I’m going to go one step further.  I think it’s better than I Capture the Castle.  There.  Said it.

Bizarrely, unbelievably, criminally, it is out of print.  But I’ve seen the edition I have (the Reprint Society, 1954) in lots and lots of bookshops – I think they may have overestimated the demand!  I would love people to read it, so I’ll probably buy up copies when I see them, and force them on friends and family… if it’s languishing on your shelves, then go and grab it asap.  I’m so grateful to my friend Curzon for initially recommending it to me, and later Nicola Humble (author of the absolutely essential The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920 to 1950s) for reminding me about it at a conference earlier this year.  It’s probably my book of 2012 so far, and if you manage to get a copy, please come and let me know what you thought.

Oh, what a heavenly book!

All The Books of My Life – Sheila Kaye-Smith

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I recently read one of my favourite ever author autobiographies, Sheila Kaye-Smith’s All The Books of My Life (1956) without having read any of her novels.  I have read two volumes about Jane Austen which Sheila Kaye-Smith co-authored, and now I have read her autobiography (of sorts) – but I have still yet to read any of her fiction.  Should I?  Being ‘rural novels’, I have an unreasoning terror that they will be exclusively in cod-dialect, and feature sturdy (but honest) young men and flighty (but honest) young women.  Everything, in fact, that Stella Gibbons warns there might be, in Cold Comfort Farm.  My experience with Mary Webb has done nothing to assuage these fears.

Most of us turn to author’s biographies or autobiographies to elucidate their novels, or simply because we want to learn a bit more.  My way of doing things seems a bit contrary, but I happened to flick through All The Books of My Life in the Bodleian the other day (somehow it has found its way to the high-use open shelf collection – who could possibly have been reading it?) and I knew I’d have to get myself a copy.  As the account of writing and living as a novelist, it is deeply interesting.  As the perspective of a reader in the first half of the twentieth century, it is a joy.

Kaye-Smith apparently wrote an earlier autobiography about ‘my marriage, my home and my religion’, and decided that, turning seventy, it was time to dedicate an autobiography to the books she has read.  It’s like My Life in Books, I suppose.  From the book about Charles which taught infant Sheila to read, to the latest developments in her reading taste, Kaye-Smith threads the narrative of her life with the books which have influenced her.  Naturally, perhaps, the quotations I have jotted down are those which deal with the books, rather than the life.  Her life is interesting, but I found myself nodding in agreement so enthusiastically at her readerly opinions that I couldn’t help but mark them down.  Excuse a torrent of quotations… beginning (let’s keep this chronological, shall we?) with her early affection for Lewis Carroll’s Alice:

My delight in Alice in Wonderland, which I feel with increasing strength every time I read it, dates from the very dawn of understanding.  It is surely a wonderful achievement to have written a book that does not lose a spark of its magic in the re-reading of sixty years.  As I grew up I came to prefer Through the Looking-Glass – the adventures and characters are more significant and I am increasingly amazed at the brilliance of its construction – but my first introduction was to Wonderland, by means of a version specially prepared for small children and called The Nursery Alice.  This had the Tenniel illustrations, but they were all in colour, and the book must have been an expensive one for it was always kept in the drawing-room.  I remember the panic with which I saw my mother lock the drawing-room door when a thief was supposed to be about, for I felt sure that his main design was to steal my Alice.

There is something rather adorable about that, isn’t there?  I love how Kaye-Smith is able to recall the perspectives she held at various stages of her life.  Not only does she remember the books she read, but how she felt about them and the impact they had.  She covers all manner of obscure novels and esoteric books, but my next two excerpts concern well-known writers, and I’ve selected them purely because I agree with them so whole-heartedly…

I do not think a full-grown sense of humour is required to appreciate Dickens, but it is advisable to read him as I did for drama and pathos.  He is primarily a comic writer.  His character-drawing – and no one more signally then Dickens has given honorary members to the human race – is the drawing of a humorist, that is of a caricaturist, who can often show more of his model’s essential quality than a ‘straight’ artist, but certainly requires a mature mind to appreciate him at his full value.  I read Dickens not to laugh but to cry, for in those days I wanted most of a novel was the gift of tears.

And how could I resist this account of her experiences reading Ivy Compton-Burnett?  Not only do I agree with her assessment of Dame Ivy, but it shows that a false-start with her needn’t be the end of the story… encouraging words for any of you who have tried and failed to enjoy ICB!

For many years I found her unreadable, and the praise of her admirers was as the meaningless clamour of those who worship strange gods.  I myself bore all the marks of the Philistine – I complained that her novels were only dialogue, that the characters all talked alike, that they did not belong to the story and so on.  When J.B. Priestley in one of the Sunday papers investigated her cultus and found it more of a craze, I murmured ‘the Emperor’s clothes…’

Then came what can only be called my conversion.  It was one of those mental switch-overs in which a pattern that had seemed meaningless as black on white is suddenly filled with meaning by the discovery that it is really white on black.  I. Compton-Burnett’s novels are not pictures, they are designs, and bear the same relation to life as the stylized rose on the wallpaper bears to the realistic illustrations in Flowers of the Field. One does not quarrel with the wallpaper flower because it has a symmetry and formality which the model lacks.  We obtain both from the book and from the wallpaper the essential meaning of a rose – indeed there may be more abstract meaning in the wallpaper design than in the naturalistic picture.  I. Compton-Burnett is definitely an abstract novelist.
[…]
When with a deep sigh of satisfaction I closed Mother and Son I did not at once, as I should have in the case of any other author who had so delighted me, rush to order more books by the same hand.  I shall doubtless read them all in time, but they must be spaced out – probably as far apart as their actual dates of publication.  To sit down and read, say, six I. Compton-Burnett novels in succession would be like sitting down to a six-course dinner consisting entirely of caviare.  The addict would find that bad for the palate as well as the digestion – time must pass and other food be eaten if he is to recapture the original savour.  So promising myself a treat in the future not too far away, I open a novel by Monica Dickens.

Sheila Kaye-Smith (photo source)

I shouldn’t be giving the impression that All The Books of My Life is simply a collection of reviews tacked together.  When Kaye-Smith subtitles the book ‘an autobiographical excursion’, she means just that – the books really do frame an autobiography and, especially in the second half, anecdotes and reflections prompt or are prompted by comments on the reading Kaye-Smith undertook at any point in her life.  For example, there is a fascinating account of a friend in early adulthood who suffered a psychiatric-disorder which made her believe in her own false double-life.  Details of fan letters and increasing literary celebrity will appeal to anybody intrigued by the status of authors in the mid-century.  Towards the end of the book, there is quite a bit about Kaye-Smith’s Catholicism and various theological and spiritual books, which will appeal to some readers (although mostly went a bit over my head, as her spiritual reading seems rather more learned than mine.)  And any well-known admirer of Jane Austen could hardly craft a book without humour – it is a subtle wit, found chiefly in the turns of phrase Kaye-Smith uses, or wry conclusions to paragraphs…

Love and violence also swelled the sales of another spinster novelist, E.M. Hull, author of The Sheik, whose remarkable picture of desert life started a public demand for sheiks that was fostered by the cinema until it died of its own absurdity.

We all love reading the words of bibliophiles, otherwise we wouldn’t be reading blogs.  All The Books of My Life demonstrates that you don’t need to have the remotest interest in an author’s work to find their autobiography engaging, and I found herein the dual pleasures of agreement and discovery.  For all the head-nodding passages, there were two or three about books and authors I have yet to encounter.  It is perhaps surprising that more authors do not choose this bookish format for their autobiographies, and I wish more would, but I am delighted to have found (entirely by good fortune) so sublime an example.  But I still won’t be throwing my hat into the ring and trying one of her bain’t-youm-be-alost rural novels.