1960s

The American Way of Death (1963) by Jessica Mitford

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Cover of The American Way of Death

I remember being fascinated by The American Way of Death when I had my Mitfordmania in 2008. Eagerly reading everything I could about this extraordinary family, it seemed so strange and unexpected that one of their many achievements was revolutionising the American funeral industry. How on earth did that factor into the lives of English socialites in the mid-20th-century?

I kept an eye out for a copy of the book, finally buying one in 2019. And it might have languished on my shelves forever, only an episode of Lost Ladies of Lit spurred me to take it off the shelf – and, gosh, what an unusual and excellent book it is. If you think that you aren’t interested in the mid-century funeral industry in the US, then let me tell you – you will be.

Here’s how it opens:

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Where, indeed. Many a badly stung survivor, faced with the aftermath of some relative’s funeral, has ruefully concluded that the victory has been won hands down by a funeral establishment – in disastrously unequal battle.

Encapsulated in that paragraph is everything you can expect from Mitford throughout this book. The American Way of Death is characterised by a wry humour which makes it a constant delight to read, even when you are infuriated on behalf of those ‘survivors’. She is gently sarcastic in the direction of the bombast of the poe-faced men and women (mostly men) benefitting from other people’s grief, and she is driven by a sort of compassionate, righteous anger.

I have never organised a funeral, let alone one in mid-century America, and I have very little idea of what the process is – except for the bit involving the vicar. One of the features of growing up in a vicarage is that I often answered the phone to funeral directors, and they were always very pleasant and, indeed, jolly. (Incidentally, one of the strangest phone calls I ever took was a lady hoping to arrange funerals for both her parents – neither of whom were actually dead.)

Having said all that, it becomes clear from Mitford’s extraordinary research that undertakers in mid-century America (who were only recently adopting the term ‘funeral director’ that now seems so commonplace) were on the make. They confronted grieving families with the most underhand tactics of the secondhand car salesman, using the language of faith or duty to extort the most money possible from relatives at a moment when they were least able to defend themselves. Mitford spends much of the book exploring and uncovering what these tactics look like, from the layout of coffin (‘casket’) showrooms to the bending of the truth regarding laws around cremation or embalming. Indeed, you’ll get more details of embalming than you could ever have hoped for, including whether it does or does not impede the decomposition process.

Mitford is clearly winsome enough to have got plenty of funeral men to confide in her – sometimes in the guise of a grieving relative, sometimes more openly as a journalist. Alongside, she has done indefatigable research, gathering brochures, conferences notes and more in giving a full picture of the situation. The defences of the profiteers are pretty flimsy, and she exposes them as such:

The guiding rule in funeral pricing appears to be “from each according to his means,” regardless of the actual wishes of the family. A funeral director in San Francisco says, “If a person drives a Cadillac, why should he have a Pontiac funeral?” The Cadillac symbol figures prominently in the mortician’s thinking. This kind of reasoning is peculiar to the funeral industry. A person can drive up to an expensive restaurant in a Cadillac and can order, rather than the $40 dinner, a $2 cup of tea and he will be served. It is unlikely that the proprietor will point to his elegant furnishings and staff and demand that the Cadillac owner order something more commensurate with his ability to pay so as to help defray the overhead of the restaurant.

Mitford has such a way with words, and it is her style that keeps you reading. Being honest, the book can be rather repetitive. We know the premise and it doesn’t take long to get to grips with the broad trend of what’s going on. Her thoroughness means we see the industry from many different angles and perspectives, but The American Way of Death is endlessly interesting because of the compelling way she writes. What could have been a dry thesis often feels like a novel, peopled with bizarre characters – some good, many bad, and plenty of eccentrics.

One of my favourite sections was on florists – and specifically the increasing popularity of ‘no flowers please’ in funeral notices and obituaries. At the time of Mitford’s writing, the florists were up in arms. I have to quote in full this extraordinary letter, written to a local newspaper after a ‘no flowers’ request was printed:

We wish to express an objection to the reporting of an article concerning the death of —— as it appeared in a recent issue of your paper.

At the close of this article you reported, “The family has asked that flowers be omitted and any tribute be given to the Red Cross or to the Mary Endowment Fund.”

We feel it is not clean business or necessary in reporting a situation, for one business to express the opinion that another business can afford to be penalised in the light of charity. We do not believe in doing a good job of reporting it was necessary to include this paragraph, and the omission of this request would not have changed your ability of reporting his passing.

As a member of the Allied Florists of Saint Louis publicity committee, I know the Post-Dispatch has a generous share of our advertising funds, and the encouragement by your paper to ‘kindly omit flowers’ can hasten the day when the funds available for advertising could be so restricted that the newspapers of this community can lose that source of revenue they have been receiving.

It is not of my mind to question the wishes of any personal family. I naturally am puzzled as to why we florists have been selected as a business which can afford to do without a portion of their business at the expense of charity. I have yet to see a newspaper article on a paid obituary notice suggesting the omission of candy, liquor, cosmetics or tobacco, with funds to be forwarded to charity. It is only in the light of what I consider good business that I draw this to your attention.

This sort of thing scarcely needs any commentary! Mitford knows when to give people enough rope to hang themselves.

The American Way of Death is, of course, a snapshot of a particular time. Some of the things feel like they never caught on (does anybody say ‘cremains’ for cremated remains? Certainly I’ve never come across it) while some things feel irreparably embedded in Western culture. Apparently the publication of the book did lead to significant changes in the funeral industry, and a certain amount of outcry, but I suspect the creeping dominance of late-stage capitalism means some of the worst excesses have found their way back.

While the book was written as an exposé, it is so much more readable than you’d expect a 1960s exposé to be. We are no longer reading primarily as a way of understanding a public scandal – but it is fascinating as a cultural artefact and delightful as the work of a very funny, very persistent author. Come for the funeral facts; stay for the dry wit. What an unexpected classic.

Children at the Gate (1968) by Lynne Reid Banks

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Nobody immerses you in a world like Lynne Reid Banks. Given how devotedly I love The L-Shaped Room, it is curious how slowly I have read the rest of her works. But perhaps you’ve noticed one popping up here every year or so, and I’m enjoying getting more familiar with her wider work. I started with the ones set in the UK, since I always feel a little uneasy with a ‘Brits abroad!’ novel, particularly one from many decades ago – what sort of attitudes will it take for granted? I’d so much rather read about other countries from the perspective of someone from that country.

But Lynne Reid Banks has the honourable exception that she at least lived in Israel for a good number of years. And the protagonist of Children at the Gate (1968) is, like Lynne Reid Banks, an immigrant from a Western country – in the case of Gerda, Canada. Unlike Banks, Gerda is Jewish. And she has come to Acre (or Acco), Israel, following a recent divorce and a tragedy that we gradually piece together – one that has brought her to the brink.

Gerda’s only friend is Kofi, an Arab-Israeli man who is forthright and caring and suffering his own tragedies. He is easily the most lovable person in the novel, and Banks excels at creating men who are broken but kind – Kofi is like a stronger, more resilient version of Toby from The L-Shaped Room. He is, I suspect, something of authorial wish-fulfilment.

Reading a book set in the Middle East is, of course, a setting that comes with a lot of weight. Banks doesn’t skirt around the tensions between Israel and Palestine, or between Jewish-Israelis and Arab-Israelis, but because the novel is focalised through Gerda, the narrative shares her narrow view. Gerda, of course, knows a good deal about the geopolitical situation. But she is more immediately invested in her own life and her own hurts.

I don’t know how Banks does it, but she takes me totally into any world she creates. We wholly inhabit the buildings or rooms she describes. They become the whole world, and the reader becomes enveloped in the isolation and loneliness that Gerda experiences. It is largely self-inflicted, but that never made pain any easier to bear.

The square outside was pitch dark except for a paraffin lamp hissing high up on one of the arched galleries opposite. Our house has iron balconies but the rest of the square was built much earlier and has a kind of cloister with beautiful arches at first-floor level which goes round three sides of the square. I say ‘beautiful’ because at night they are – this is  Acco’s second self, her night-self, when all the day-smells are lifted from her and replaced by cool sea-winds drifting through her narrow alleys and flooding softly into the open squares; when darkness covers the dirt and squalor like snow, leaving only the shapes, the smooth outlines of domes and minarets against the stars, the perfectly balanced archways, the mysterious broken flights of stairs and half-open doorways, the cold but not unkind flare of a paraffin lamp showing a brief interior, its walls painted in grotto shades of blue and green and hung with prints whose cheap tastelessness a passing glimpse does not show.

Gerda is not satisfied with the life she has jumped into. It is really just an escape from a different, distant life that needed to be over. ‘I walked home through the maze of cobbled alleys and archways and squares. My loneliness was, for once, simple and uncomplicated.’ Banks is a pro at the short, sharp observation, and that reflection on her type of loneliness is not only accurate – it also tells us about the sort of self-analyst that Gerda is. She can be self-pitying at times, but she is the first to assess and berate herself.

I’m going to have to tell you a bit more of the plot, so stop reading if you want to get Children at the Gate and go in completely blind. But, to be honest, the cover and the title of the novel might clue you into something else that is going to happen. And it is the only really clumsy thing that Banks does in the novel. Because, suddenly, all the Gerda can think about is her desperation to have a child. It goes from something she hasn’t really considered to an all-devouring obsession.

Kofi is the man to help her. To save her (from herself, or from loneliness, or fear), Kofi convinces her to join a kibbutz. Lynne Reid Banks lived on a kibbutz and loves writing about them in her novels, often from the perspective of an outsider who finds themselves at odds to the environment. And Gerda is not an easy fit. Even among the other North Americans there, she doesn’t seem to slip into the role with ease. And things get yet more complicated when she ‘adopts’ a young girl called Ella. Her fast-track to motherhood is complete in one fell swoop – and the emotional response has to trail after it.

Of course I don’t know yet the full extent of what I’ve undertaken, but what fills me with anxiety is trying to analyse my own feelings towards her. I am obsessed with the need to make her well, to see her fat and laughing, to hear her chattering away to other children. I watch her by the hour, trying to imagine her with a head of curly hair, with an expression of happiness on her face. And I want her to turn to me. I want that desperately, that, even more than her health, is why I am really doing all this.

But do I love her? Do I love her? Or do I just want her to love me?

Adoption – even the informal sort that Gerda has undertaken – certainly should never be done as spontaneously and selfishly as this. Gerda has clearly adopted Ella to fill a hole she perceives in her own life, and Ella herself is something of an afterthought. And, yes, there are two children on the cover. A second ‘adoption’ follows, of Ella’s brother, and the young boy is violent, angry, fearful and has a vicious, jealous relationship with Ella. Both the siblings are Arab, and that adds further to the unstable dynamic of this new, chaotic family that is ruled by uncertainty. And yet, over time, the uncertainty becomes a sort of fierce love.

I shan’t go any further with the plot, but it is often fraught and often sad, and people behave unwisely and sometimes unkindly. But there is still somehow a force through it – the power of different kinds of love to overcome all the oppositions stacked in front of them. And maybe even the irrationality of love, and the damage it can bring in its wake, even if it comes from the best motives.

And, truth be told, it often doesn’t. Gerda is an immensely flawed character, and if you’re the sort of reader who gets frustrated at people behaving foolishly, then you’ll find Children at the Gate frustrating. But I think I loved it. Lynne Reid Banks creates characters who are so infuriatingly real that I can’t help care about them and want to know more and more about them. They are certainly all deeply interesting – and interesting is the best thing for a fictional creation to be, in my book.

Children at the Gate doesn’t have the life-affirming comfort that I unexpectedly found amidst the squalor of The L-Shaped Room, but it is still rich in life. It has power, vividness, and certainly demands emotional investment from the reader. I’m not sure I’d read it again, but it reaffirms my belief in Lynne Reid Banks’ unusual and sometimes uncomfortable brilliance.

The Snake Has All The Lines by Jean Kerr – #ABookADayInMay Day 30

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Back in 2012, I read Jean Kerr’s best-known book, apparently turned into a beloved film, Please Don’t Eat The Daisies. She followed it in 1960 with The Snake Has All The Lines – a curious title that apparently comes from her son being cast as Adam in a school play about Eden, but complaining that the snake has all the lines.

Like the previous collection, a lot of The Snake Has All The Lines covers the experience of being a put-upon wife and mother – and, like that collection, it is episodic. The separate comic essays don’t have any overarching narrative, which makes her writing perhaps a little less satisfying to curl up with than something like Raising Demons or Life Among The Savages by Shirley Jackson – but certainly very diverting to dip into. Or, if you’re doing A Book A Day In May, read in one rush.

Kerr is very pithy, and the lines she opens essays with are well-crafted – e.g. ‘I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.’ She is gifted at observational comedy about domestic life, and does it with a precision and rhythm to her sentences that is always enjoyable. What I will say, though, is that those observations have become truisms over the years. Even in 1960, I suspect it wasn’t the peak of freshness to say that children are a handful and given to chaos, or that husbands are absent-minded and a little bit useless – in the six or so decades since, most comic writers would choose to put a little bit more of a spin on it.

Here she is on married life:

When a man calls you from Tulsa, he invariably makes the mistake of calling either from a public bar or from his mother’s living-room. Neither setting is exactly conducive to a free exchange of ideas. There, within earshot of his fellow revellers or his mother, he can hardly say the one thing you want to hear, which is that he misses you terribly, it’s been a nightmare, a nightmare! and he’s never going to make a trip alone again. For that matter, you can’t tell him you miss him either, because the children are there with you and they become downright alarmed at any hint that their parents have preserved this degrading adolescent attachment so far into senility.

And here’s an example of her take on children:

I know that small children have a cetain animal magnetism. People kiss them a lot. But are they really in demand, socially? Are they sought after? Does anybody ever call on them on the telephone and invite them to spend the week-end on Long Island? Dot heir own grandmothers want them to spent the whole summer in Scranton? No. For one thing they bite, and then they keep trying to make forts with mashed potatoes.

It’s all very entertaining, if not the most original. But there is more variety in The Snake Has All The Lines than I remember there being in Please Don’t Eat The Daisies. As well as wife-and-mother scenarios, Kerr is writing as a successful author and playwright – so there is an essay about dealing with bad reviews, for instance, and one about travelling with a show you’ve written. Most unusually of all, she dramatises Lolita and Humbert Humbert at marriage counselling, which I daresay I’d have understood better had I read more than one and a half pages of Lolita.

Kerr isn’t writing great literature and she isn’t pretending to be. But this is an example of a genre I love – self-deprecating domestic memoirs with an exaggerated tone and a clippy pace – and a very enjoyable example at that.

The Tin Men by Michael Frayn – #ABookADayInMay Day 21

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The Tin Men by Michael FRAYN on Between the Covers

I’ve read a couple of books by Michael Frayn from later in his career, but it’s quite a departure to read his debut novel – The Tin Men (1965). It is a raucous satire of – well, of quite a few things. And it is prescient in quite an astonishing way about one thing in particular.

We are at the William Morris Institute of Automation Research – chosen by Frayn because of the irony of being named after the artist William Morris, I assume, given his abhorrence of mass-production. The William Morris who made cars would presumably approve. Everything that is being achieved by the institute is a ludicrous extension of normal office practices, and Frayn writes in highly ironic terms about it all:

The whole of the William Morris Institute of Automation Research rang with the bongling and goingling of steel scaffolding poles being thrown down from a great height. The new Ethics Wing was almost finished. It was not before time. The noise and other inconveniences caused by the building of it had considerably reduced the amount of automation the Institute had researched into during the past two years. Experts had calculated that if the revolutionary new computer programmes being designed at the Institute had gone ahead without interruption, they should have put some two million professional men out of work over the course of the next ten years. Now there was a risk that some of these two million would still find themselves in work, or at any rate only partly out of work. But then, said the optimists, for progress to be made someone always had to suffer.

The various figures in charge of departments are a little interchangeable – or, at least, they are all eccentric and incompetent, though their eccentricities and incompetences differ a little in kind. There’s silent, almost immobile Chiddingfold, in charge of everything. There’s Riddle, the sole woman, cigarette always dangling from her lips and given to unexpected displays at company dos. There’s Hugh Rowe, using office hours to write a novel – but deciding it’s easiest to start by writing the fawning jacket copy or glowing reviews. It’s a joke that should get old, but someone remains amusing – even when we get to examples of his prose, which are clearly satirising something and ended up being maybe too good for satire.

My favourite example of the automation is run by Macintosh, doing research into automating morality – by creating Samaritan (and later Samaritan II and Samaritan III) which are programmed to sacrifice themselves in the event of a shipwreck, so long as they can identify that the other objects involved are humans. It’s an example of the humour in The Tin Men – which I found witty rather than laugh-out-loud, and which could be wearing if it weren’t for a certain variety in its applications. I kept being reminded of David Lodge’s Nice Work (though thankfully without Lodge’s fixed belief that writing about going to the toilet is hilarious) – and I thought it was a similar idea done much better and much less annoyingly. Of course, Nice Work came out a couple of decades later, so Lodge might well have been influenced by Frayn.

The humour does feel very of its time – and very of a certain milieu. Perhaps in the 1960s it was a daring, new humour. It now very much feels like the voice of older, middle-class men who can’t punch up, because there is no ‘up’, and so just punch around. We are expected to recognise these worlds, not as an outsider but as people mere steps away from this level of absurdity. I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy the tone, particularly after falling foul with Lodge, but I ended up rather liking it. Somehow it feels more dated than humour from decades earlier, but you can see how it could have been very fresh in the 1960s.

And what is the most prescient thing? Another worker, Goldwasser, is working on the automation of newspapers – and it sounds extraordinarily like AI:

The soporific quiet which filled Goldwasser’s laboratory in the Newspaper Department was disturbed only by the soft rustle of tired newsprint. Assistants bent over the component parts of the Department’s united experiment, the demonstration that in theory a digital computer could be programmed to produce a perfectly satisfactory daily newspaper with all the variety and news sense of the old hand-made article. With silent, infinite tedium, they worked their way through stacks of newspaper cuttings, identifying the pattern of stories, and analysing the stories into standard variables and invariables. At other benches other assistants copied the variables and invariables down on to cards, and sorted the cards into filing cabinets, coded so that in theory a computer could pick its way from card to card in logical order and assemble a news item from them.

Frayn’s vision is still tethered to the concrete, piecing through physical cards to form a newspaper-article-by-prediction, but it is still astonishingly similar to what generative AI is doing now. Musings about whether the automation machines can take over the ‘work’ of prayer are clearly satire, but still incredibly close to current conversations about the ways in which AI might remove spiritual or soulful elements of creativity.

Oh, and I’ve forgotten to say that this isn’t simply a string of funny ideas and people – though the funny ideas are probably the strong point of The Tin Men. There is also an ongoing plotline about the Queen being on her way to open the new wing. It gives some momentum to a novel that could otherwise feel a bit scattergun.

The Tin Men has very little in common – stylistically or thematically – with the later Frayn books I’ve read, and I’m glad I read it. As well as being a fun, silly, eerily farsighted novel, it helps fill in a part of literary history that I’m less aware of and which seems less ripe for rediscovery than others.

The Swan in the Evening by Rosamond Lehmann – #ABookADayInMay Day 20

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The Swan In The Evening: B Format: Fragments of an Inner Life (Virago Modern Classics) : Lehmann, Rosamond: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Crossing Day 20 feels like we’re on the home stretch, and I am still really enjoying doing A Book A Day in May – certainly finding it much easier than last year, when my eyes were still pretty ropey eight months after Covid. And there’s something I particularly like about reading books that have been on my shelves for ages – such as Rosamond Lehmann’s The Swan in the Evening (1967), which I bought in 2011.

The subtitle of this book is ‘Fragments of an Inner Life’, and fragments is the word. The first section is a fairly impressionistic take on her childhood – stray memories coming together to form some sort of image, however imprecise. Or, rather, she goes for very precise scenes that flow into other precise scenes, without really trying to cohere into anything very detailed. Some of it is in the present tense, giving it a childlike immediacy.

I am in the Parish Hall; it is a Sale of Work. I circulate among the visitors with a trayful of lavender bags which I proffer to the long lean sallow nurse in a grey uniform. I know her: she looks after a little boy with a squint and a funny way of talking, who is said to have tantrums and beat his head against his nursery wall, who once presented me with a letter that said, in grimy reeling print: ‘Dear Rosy sprinkel me with kisses if you want my luv to gro yore everlasting Joey.’ The nurse bends down to me, smiling, and says in a low confidential voice: ‘I’m stony broke.‘ At once such terror grips me that I almost swoon. Why? How was it that this harmless if unfamiliar slang phrase took sinister form as she uttered it and dropped on me with the chill weight of granite! Absurd, morbid child… Mad, like all children…: or so very little madder.

Among the memories given their sudden spotlights is one that a longer-lasting impression: the death of the six-year-old daughter of a man who works on the family estate. Without being able to truly understand the depths of this tragedy, young Rosamond sees its impact. It lingers with her as an incomprehensible sadness – and, later, becomes something all too comprehensible for her.

The second section of The Swan in the Evening tells us about the death of Lehmann’s daughter, Sally. Or, rather, the death is focalised through Lehmann’s own absence – her daughter is fairly newly married, in a distant country, and Lehmann is innocently going about everyday life. There are hints at a premonition, understood only in retrospect, and a veil drawn over the shock of the phone call – and the days and weeks after that.

But she picks up some time later, where she starts trying to communicate with Sally beyond on the grave – explained in no more metaphysical terms than that Sally is still alive, though not in the way such things are usually considered. From here, Lehmann goes through a curious mix of sharing how she believes Sally is communicating with her – and a defence of this belief. I’ll be honest, the combination was quite confusing. Lehmann is adamantly not part of any traditional religion, but she does piece together her beliefs from various different writers and influential figures.

It’s clear that her real reason for writing The Swan in the Evening is to relay her experiences and explain why they are reasonable. How could it be anything other than poignant. But it’s also quite abstract, even when she seems to be mounting her defence. This is from earlier in the book, but it’s a good example of the style I mean. Fluid, flowing from one thought to another, quite hard to pin down. Rather less firmly constructed than her novels, from my limited reading of them.

Myself in extremis, floored; myself saved, rejoicing: each of these opposed conditions deemed while it lasts, to be perpetual; yet even then a shadowy third, an onlooker, watching, recording, in the wings… Perhaps this is an abstract of anybody’s childhood. But of course it is only one aspect of the truth, or of illusion.

I think perhaps the most interesting part of my edition was the afterword she wrote when Virago Modern Classics reprinted it – highlighting bits she would have liked to phrase differently, and sharing some of the public and private responses she got to the initial publication. The Swan in the Evening is an interesting addendum to the life of a very good novelist, and of course a grieving mother is unlikely to be able to express that level of sorrow to anybody who hasn’t experienced it (and yet should certainly be allowed to try). I’m just not sure what the book is trying to be, and so it ends up being a jumble of different things that are not limited enough for memoir or wide enough for proper autobiography. I would, for example, have liked a lot more about her writing career. I hope the book was helpful for her to write, and it’s diverting to read, but it certainly earns the word ‘fragments’ from the subtitle.

Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera

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I was quite a way into my choice for 1969 on A Century of Books – Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall – when I decided I’d had enough. I’m sure I’ll go back and finish it and, in another mood, might even enjoy it. Drabble is a brilliant writer. But I was finding the details of a new mother’s affair with her cousin’s husband very, very tedious. I simply didn’t care.

And so it is perhaps surprising that I turned, instead, to Kundera’s short story collection Laughable Loves, translated from Czech by Suzanna Rappaport. After all, if I was finding one person’s granular exploration of an affair very uninteresting, what was I hoping to find in a book that – in my edition at least – was described as ‘seven short stories of sexual comedy’?

Well, if I picked up this book blind, it would have gone right back on the shelf. Nothing sounds less up my street than ‘stories of sexual comedy’. But luckily this isn’t my first rodeo with Kundera, and I know that he’s an absolutely brilliant writer – and, indeed, this is a pretty inaccurate description of what we’ll find inside.

I think the stories in Laughable Loves are published in different orders depending on your edition, but mine starts with a fascinating one called ‘The Hitchhiking Game’. A young couple are on a road trip together and have just stopped for petrol when they slide by silent agreement into their hitchhiking game. He pretends to be a stranger; she pretends to be a hitchhiker. There is an eroticism to it, though it isn’t just foreplay. This is a way for them to find an exciting freedom in their personalities, able to say things they wouldn’t normally, but with the solid bedrock of a stable relationship beneath it. Only, in this story, the bedrock is starting to shift.

“I wouldn’t have to think too hard about what to do with such a beautiful woman,” said the young man gallantly, and at this moment he was once again speaking far more to his own girl than to the figure of the hitchhiker.

But this flattering sentence made the girl feel as if she had caught him at something, as if she had wheedled a confession out of him with a fraudulent trick. She felt toward him a brief flash of intense hatred and said: “Aren’t you rather too sure of yourself?”

The couple bob and weave between their parallel personalities – the real and the costume – with each sentence in danger of commenting on the wrong one. It’s a beautifully crafted story, growing steadily darker, and reminded me a lot (in theme and sensibility) of Harold Pinter’s play ‘The Lover’ (1962).

If ‘The Hitchhiking Game’ is fraught and tense, then the next story is elegiac – from the title ‘Let the Old Dead Make Room for the Young Dead’ onwards. The title comes from a middle-aged, unnamed woman visiting the grave of her (rather older) husband – only to find that somebody else is now buried there.

Upset, she went to the cemetery administration. They told her that upon expiration of leases, graves were canceled. She reproached them for not having advised her that she should renew the lease, and they replied that there was little room in the cemetery and that the old dead ought to make room for the young dead. This exasperated her and she told them, holding back her tears, that they knew absolutely nothing of humaneness or respect for man. But she soon understood that the conversation was useless. Just as she could not have prevented her husband’s death, so also was she defenseless against his second death, this death of an old dead man, which no longer permitted him to exist even as a dead man.

While in this old town, she meets a young man (also unnamed) who was infatuated with her in the past. He is 15 years younger than her – about the age she was, when he last saw her – and they quickly go from reminiscences to romance. Then the story becomes about her inner conflict: should she sleep with this younger, attractive man, or would it shatter his remembrance of her beauty which would, in turn, shatter her own self-image?

Yes, there was no doubt about it: if he got her to make love, it would end in disgust—and this disgust would then tarnish not only the present moment, but also the image of the woman of long ago, an image he cherished like a jewel in his memory.

It is a curious will-they-won’t-they, with rather more psychological acuity than that premise would usually be expected to hold. Kundera was only 40 when this book was published, and of course not a woman, but it seems to me (admittedly also about 40 and not a woman) a very insightful portrayal of the many emotions that face a woman in this woman’s position.

Ok, you’re thinking, I’m beginning to see why ‘sexual comedy’ was thrown about as a term. And, yes, quite a few of the stories have some sort of sexual impetus in them – but my favourite of the book doesn’t really. ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is one of those things-spiral-out-of-hand stories. Klima, the narrator, is a professor who gets a letter from Zaturetsky, asking him to write a review letter of his scholarship, for a journal. The amateur scholar is laughably bad, and Klima enjoys mocking the research with his girlfriend, but wants to avoid conflict and so sends a vague letter implying (but not promising) that he’ll write a review at some point.

Zaturetsky is determined, though. He starts turning up at Klima’s office, and Klima’s long-suffering secretary makes up excuses for his absence. Eventually Zaturetsky is turning up at Klima’s home, and the further lies Klima makes up to avoid writing the review end up derailing his job, his relationship, and his standing in the notoriously censorious society. It’s a brilliant and believable exploration of a lie getting out of hand that has a through-line to Kundera’s first novel about a joke getting out of hand (The Joke), albeit that was very dark and ‘Nobody Will Laugh’ is the funniest story in this collection.

I’ve written at length about the first three stories because they are the strongest in the collection. Indeed, I was anticipating Laughable Loves being a late entry on my Best Reads of 2024 list – but sadly the collection is a bit uneven. The Symposium is particularly shapeless – about various medical staff and their would-be exploits – and others lack the excellent grasp of pace and structure that mark out the brilliance of the first three. Thankfully, Laughable Loves ends on a stronger story – ‘Edward and God’ – about a man who pretends to believe in God to appease his girlfriend. Like ‘Nobody Will Laugh’, it’s a lie that begins to get out of control, and a reminder of how much Communist Eastern Europe persecuted Christians at the time – though it is also a lie that begins to become psychologically more and more important in Edwards’s life, while still resisting the pat ending of a genuine conversion.

It’s always a joy to go back to a Kundera book. I’ve read eight now, somehow without including his most famous, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This collection isn’t as postmodern and stylistically daring as he can be, but it is a reminder of his searing understanding of human relationships – both their tragedy and their comedy, often intertwined.

I can see why Penguin called these stories of sexual comedy, and that is an area that fascinates Kundera – but I think anybody buying the book on that premise will be disappointed, and it may well deter those who’ll find in Kundera far more nuance, psychological insight, and slanted beauty than those words suggest. (This edition has an intro by Philip Roth, which I have absolutely no interest in reading.)

Frederica by Georgette Heyer

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Believe it or not, I’ve only read one Georgette Heyer before – I listened to April Lady and really enjoyed it. In the three years since, I’ve bought quite a few Heyer novels but haven’t actually got around to reading any of them. A little while ago, I thought I’d see if any of the Heyer titles on my shelves matched gaps on A Century of Books – and landed on Frederica (1965), which comes rather late in her publishing career.

Like most of Heyer’s novels, this is a Regency romance – and she certainly enters into the style and ethos of a novel from the period. How many 1960s novels would open with this lack of urgency?

Not more than five days after she had despatched an urgent missive to her brother, the Most Honourable the Marquis of Alverstoke, requesting him to visit her at his earliest convenience, the widowed Lady Buxted was relieved to learn from her youngest daughter that Uncle Vernon had just driven up to the house, wearing a coat with dozens of capes, and looking as fine as fivepence. “In a smart new curricle, too, Mama, and everything prime about him!” declared Miss Kitty, flattening her nose against the window-pane in her effort to squint down into the street. “He is the most tremendous swell, isn’t he, Mama?”

Lady Buxted responded in repressive accents, desiring her not to use expressions unbefitting a lady of quality, and dismissing her to the schoolroom.

Uncle Vernon – more commonly known as the Marquis of Alverstoke, or just Alverstoke – is very wealthy and very selfish. His sisters are forever importuning him with requests to use his power and connections to help their various offspring, and he languidly refuses to do any such thing because it doesn’t interest him. There is a very believable grown-up-siblings dynamic between them, with a fair dose of Mr Bennett being needlessly antagonistic to his wife in Pride and Prejudice, all the while intending to help. But more often than not, Alverstoke won’t do anything for anybody else unless he finds it interesting. It’s not a very attractive character trait, truth be told, and it’s fortunate that Heyer manages to make almost every occasion an example of an exception to the rule – so the rule is really just what we are told, and the exceptions are what we are shown.

Bursting into this contented world are the Merriville family. They are oprhaned and as desolate as you’d expect of a family who will never have to work for a living. Oldest of the lot is (as we might expect from the title) Frederica – a sensible, clever, funny and caring woman who considers herself on the shelf as a spinster, aged 24. Next is Charis, who has that Regency trio of characteristics: beautiful, dim-witted, and kind. And finally three brothers, one of whom is away at Oxford. The other two are Jessamy, pious and anxious, and Felix, enthusiastic and boisterous.

It’s an enjoyable whirlwind to encounter, and Alverstoke finds himself rather taken aback. Having initially turned down the opportunity to help them as guardian, he ends up agreeing when he sees that they aren’t really mercenaries – and that Frederica is a capable, unsentimental woman. From this point onwards, none of the negative character traits that we’ve been led to believe beset Alverstoke ever really appear again.

What makes Frederica so fun is Heyer’s unceasing commitment to the Regency vibe. It’s a rich, detailed prose which you can’t read quickly, as the verbal sparring between characters is delightfully Austenesque and the narrative voice itself is, if not on Austen’s level, still great fun. Here, for instance, is Alverstoke trying to get Frederica to be chaperoned in town:

“I was under the impression that I warned you that in London country ways will not do, Frederica!”
“You did!” she retorted. “And although I can’t say that I paid much heed to your advice it so happens that I am accompanied today by my aunt!”
“Who adds invisibility to her other accomplishments!”

and here is Alverstoke being wonderfully bitchy to his sister:

“Do you mean to tell me that Mr. Trevor read my letter?” demanded Lady Buxted indignantly. “Your secretary?”
“I employ him to read my letters,” explained his lordship.
“Not those written by your nearest and dearest!”
“Oh, no, not them!” he agreed.”

The only downside to Heyer’s commitment to verisimilitude – in my opinion – is the vast quantity of era-appropriate slang, particularly from the boys. Here’s a selection, just flicking through: basket-scrambler, ninny-hammer, Friday-faced, high fidgets, rumgumption, Queer Nabs, mawworm, and so on and so forth. I can see how some readers would love these touches of authenticity, but they always took me out of the action. They were the only times it felt like Heyer’s researchw as being unceremoniously dumped into the dialogue.

To go back to the hero and heroine: what really warmed me to Alverstoke was his reluctant devotion to the young boys. (I didn’t need to warm to Frederica, as I loved her from the off.) And Heyer does the boys so well – especially the youngest, who believes he is offering a great treat to the men he meets by talking to them at length about mechanics, and being escorted to mills or something. Her eye for young people is so accurate, and timeless.

The Marquis believed himself to be hardened against flattery. He thought that he had experienced every variety, but he discovered that he was mistaken: the blatantly worshipful look in the eyes of a twelve-year-old, anxiously raised to his, was new to him, and it pierced his defences.

Frederica is a long book, and did feel long. My copy was about 300 pages but the font is tiny – I see other editions are around the 400-page mark. There are some brilliant set pieces – a runaway dog; a chase after a hot air balloon – but most of the novel is simply the steady, detailed study of these people interacting, squabbling, matching wits and falling in love. I had to relax into it and not expect anything to happen quickly – but, on those terms, it was a total treat.

The Clocks by Agatha Christie

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The Clocks - Wikipedia

I’ve reached the point where I can’t really remember which Agatha Christie novels I’ve read and which I haven’t. Which I suppose is a good thing, because it means I can go back and re-read them and will have probably forgotten who the murderer is. Or, more likely, think I’m being very clever when it comes back to me.

But I definitely hadn’t read The Clocks before. Published in 1963, that means it falls towards the end of her writing career – but before the books got really bad. It’s also technically a Hercule Poirot but, for reasons we will come onto, it doesn’t really feel like one.

(Btw, I shan’t give away huge spoilers – like the culprit – but there will be some milder spoilers in this review, so you are warned.)

The location of the murder is 19, Wilbraham Crescent. Christie describes the street in a way that I enjoyed:

Wilbraham Crescent was a fantasy executed by a Victorian builder in the 1880’s [sic]. It was a half-moon of double houses and gardens set back to back. This conceit was a source of considerable difficulty to persons unacquainted with the locality. Those who arrived on the outer side were unable to find the lower numbers and those who hit the inner side first were baffled as to the whereabouts of the higher numbers. The houses were neat, prim, artistically balconied and eminently respectable. Modernisation had as yet barely touched them – on the outside, that is to say. Kitchens and bathrooms were the first to feel the wind of change.

I think that’s a lovely observational, about kitchens and bathrooms, and it’s expressed well and elegantly. Christie is often unfairly dismissed an excellent plotter and poor writer, but I disagree. A lot of The Clocks is quietly amusing and she has a good eye for social detail.

Anyway, a young typist called Sheila Webb is called to a new client’s house. Mrs Pebmarsh has requested her by name to 19, Wilbraham Crescent, and off she goes, letting herself in (as instructed). She finds a living room with numerous clocks on the mantlepiece and other places – far more clocks than anybody would normally need. And, more curiously, they are all at 4:13pm – an hour ahead of the current time.

But that’s the strangest thing Sheila finds in the room. The other, behind the sofa, is the body of a dead man.

She runs out screaming, and encounters our narrator for half the novel – Colin Lamb. Christie goes back and forth between third-person narrator and Colin’s perspective, and he is really our detective for the novel. He’s also rather smitten by Sheila.

We gather some facts: Mrs Pebmarsh says she did not request a typist. She does not know who the man in her house is, and she is blind – so he may have been there for a while without her noticing. Colin begins questioning all the various neighbours, who do rather get confusing, as we pretty quickly go to lots of different houses and encounter a large number of people who may or may not have any bearing on the novel. It’s an opportunity for Christie to enjoy herself though – there’s a ‘cat lady’ totally devoted to her cats; there are some rowdy but intelligent young boys; there is a glimpse of a certain type of political discourse in 1963:

“Each of these four clocks represented a time about an hour later than the cuckoo clock and the grandfather clock.”

“Must have been foreign,” said Mrs Curtin. “Me and my old man went on a coach trip to Switzerland and Italy once and it was a whole hour further on there. Must be something to do with the Common Market. I don’t hold with the Common Market and nor does Mr Curtin. England’s good enough for me.”

Plus ça change, if I may.

So, where does Hercule Poirot come into this? Just barely. We know that we are in a Poirot novel because of there are stray mentions of Ariadne Oliver (and Christie has her usual good time poking fun at Oliver for choosing a Finnish detective when she doesn’t know anything about Finland). The man himself enters by way of interview with Colin Lamb, an old friend – or, rather, a younger friend whom Poirot tries to educate, but in a sort of frustrating way where he never says what he means. A few times, Colin Lamb traipses off to Poirot’s residence to lay his new findings at Poirot’s feet and get some sort of enigmatic reply in return. At no point does Poirot himself talk to anybody else involved, or visit the scene of the crime. It’s all rather strange. Why is he there at all?

For much of The Clocks, I thought I was onto a real winner, and wondered why it wasn’t talked about more about Christie’s oeuvre. It was a page-turner with entertaining writing and a fun (if occasionally slightly overwhelming) cast of characters. The sidelining of Poirot was odd, but I went with it. Even the occasional hints of spy rings didn’t put me off – and I find Christie very tedious in spy mode, which she couldn’t resist returning to.

Well – without spoilers – The Clocks did end up being a disappointment to me. I’ll just say that the solution wasn’t at all satisfying, and it felt very anti-climactic compared to her usual cleverness. I feel like the inventive set-up deserved a better pay-off. I’m glad I read it and I enjoyed myself, and from another author I’d be very impressed, but this definitely isn’t one of Christie’s masterpieces.

A Meeting By The River by Christopher Isherwood

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Christopher Isherwood is one of those authors everyone knows about, and you sometimes see mentioned, but whose wide-ranging catalogue of books doesn’t seem to get as much attention as you’d expect. Beyond the sexy German-set novels, what else did Isherwood write? A few years ago I loved Prater Violet, and recently I read one of his much later works – A Meeting By The River (1967). It’s one of his only novels not to be given a Wikipedia page, which might or might not speak to its general reception – but I thought it was really excellent.

The novel (or perhaps novella) is told entirely in letters and diary entries written by two brothers – Oliver and Patrick. They are somewhat estranged. There is clearly a history of power struggles between them, and neither trusts what they read or hear from the other. But, as the first letter shows, Oliver re-opens correspondance because he has something significant to say.

I’m only writing because of a stupid misunderstanding which has now got to be cleared up without further delay. I admit I was responsible for it in the first place, though I must say I don’t see why I or anyone else whould be expected to account for his actions to people they don’t really concern. The point is, Mother is still under the impression, and I suppose you and Penelope are too, that I’m here working for the Red Cross in Calcultta, just as I actually was working for them in Germany, up to a year ago. Well as a matter of fact I’m not. I’m in a Hindu monastery a few miles outside the city, on the bank of the Ganges. I mean, I am a monk here.

Oliver is about to be fully received into the Hindu monastery, renouncing the world (though, as he points out to Paddy, this wouldn’t prevent him receiving letters – he is not totally disappearing). Patrick/Paddy writes back an enthusiastic letter full of bonhomie – and the reader thinks it’s going to warm up to being a cheerful tale of brothers reuniting. It is received more or less as such, and Oliver writes back explaining the monastic process a little more. And then Patrick writes back, suggesting that he come and visit Oliver in Calcutta.

And this is the first of many times that Isherwood pulls the rug from under our feet a bit. Because, after this exchange of letters, we get our first taste of Oliver’s diary.

Patrick’s first letter fooled me completely to begin with, because it worked on my guilty conscience. I was ashamed of my silly childish secretiveness. I wanted him to tell me he understood perfectly what made me behave like that, then assume the responsibility for putting everything right again, like a true Elder Brother. So I accepted what he wrote at its face value and believed what I wanted to believe.

But this second letter shows the first one up. It’s obvious to me now that he was just playing with me, as he always used to. He hasn’t changed a bit. And why should I have expected it? You don’t change unless you want to, and it’s clear that nothing has happened to make him the least dissatisfied with himself as he is.

The reader has also probably ‘accepted what he wrote at its face value’, and I felt quite wrong-footed here. Who was correct? Was it charming, bombastic Patrick – or Oliver, whom I now knew was mistrusting and wary?

This all accelerates when, despite Oliver trying to put him off, Patrick does arrive on the scene. He alleges he’s there to support his brother and find out more about Oliver’s new life and future – but we know from Patrick’s letters to his wife and his mother that he’s trying to dissuade Oliver from taking this step. Oliver is suspicious himself, but goes back and forth on whether he can trust what he’s hearing.

In some ways, A Meeting By The River is quite a simple story of feuding brothers miscommunicating, worn down by years of mistrust and rivalry – yet also bonded in a way that cannot be dismissed. What makes it unusual is the setting in an Indian Hindu monastery. What makes it so brilliant is the way Isherwood constantly wrong-foots the reader. After each letter or diary entry, I felt on firmer ground – then you’d gradually discover how Patrick was lying in a letter, or how Oliver jumped to the wrong conclusions in his diary. Later, Oliver reads some of Patrick’s letters, and the plot thickens further when he suspects Patrick left them out on purpose, so his brother would read his lies.

It’s done so well. Isherwood is so, so good at the ways that people deceive each other (and themselves) – not in big, gradiose, elaborately crafted falsehoods, but in the small, thoughless moments the suit the occasion, without thinking about the wider implications. And that’s before I get to the affair that Patrick is trying to keep hidden…

A Meeting By The River is a slim novel, deceptively simple – but I think it is a masterpiece in miniature. Isherwood may be more remembered for the showy subversion of books like Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, but for my money his real brilliance can be seen on show in quieter, cleverer works like this one.

Everything’s Too Something! by Virginia Graham

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Towards the end of A Book A Day in May, I read Virginia Graham’s Everything’s Too Something! (1966) and said I wanted to write about it a longer length – because it is such a delightful book, and I didn’t want to short change it.

I first came across Graham because Persephone Books publish her poetry – and that led me to her absolutely delightful correspondence with Joyce Grenfell, published as Dear Joyce, Dear Ginnie. From there, I turned to Here’s How and Say Please, which are a spoof how-to guide and a spoof etiquette guide respectively. She has that Provincial Ladyesque humour, combining self-deprecation and wry wit, and I relish it.

Everything’s Too Something! is a collection of essays that were originally published in Homes and Garden. Do magazines like that still have humorous columns in them? Are they of such joyful quality? Across the 36 short essays in this book, Graham covers some topics that link to Homes and Garden – though, curiously, they include how awful it is to have to tour around somebody’s garden. But really she turns her attention to anything – anything, that is, that would fall into the attention of a middle-class, middle-aged woman in the 1960s.

This ‘review’ is likely to end up being simply a list of quotes that amused me, so let’s just go with that. I think she (again, like E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady) is very good at the comic list, getting exactly the right balance of relatable observation with the slightly outlandish. For instance, here on friends of friends whom you haven’t met…

The friends of friends are always a problem. Some can be ardently welcomed into the circle, but there are always a number who not only do not get loved but are more or less mythical. Joyce can go on talking about Enid for years; how well she cooks ravioli, how she has composed a trio for horn, bassoon and drums, how sweet her chilren are, how ill her mother is, what she said to the magistrate, where she gets her corsets and a host of other intimate details relating to her life. And yet one never gets round to meeting the woman. ‘You would love her I’m sure,’ says Joyce. ‘I’m sure I would,’ you reply half-heartedly.

I’m not sure Graham would have considered herself at the forefront of 1960s feminism, but she does her bit for exposing the foibles of the patriarchy – mostly by satire. There’s a funny section on not trusting male drivers, for example, and there’s this from an essay on men and women living together:

It is unfortunate how many women are idea-prone. A man is an impractical creature, and a woman often can’t help having an idea which would get him out of the mess he is in – and, incidentally, the mess she will have to clear up. She might, for instance, have an idea about getting out the step-ladder instead of balancing the telephone directory on a stool on a table.

She might have an idea that it is better to start a bonfire with small sticks rather than full-grown trees. She might even go so far as to have an idea that the nails she has been handing one by one to her husband for an hour, might to advantage be parked on some adjacent shelf, or even in his pocket.

Then there’s this little snapshot of courtship vs marriage:

I remember my husband, when he was my fiancé, licked down, with his little pink tongue, all the envelopes for our wedding invitations. When it came to our first post-marriage party he refused to lick down one because, as he confessed, it made him feel sick and always had. The only thing a wife can deduce from this is that love wanes on marriage, and that her dear one is not prepared to feel sick for her now the nuptial knot has been tied.

Graham was 56 when the book was published, and had got to a time of life when she could write this next excerpt, though from the vantage of 38 I feel much the same some days:

The nice thing about getting to my age is that there are so many nice things to complain about. Of course, the young complain too, but their grumbles are usually concerned with more cosmic things such as the Condition of Man. The Condition of the Roads doesn’t worry them at all.

Most non-fiction published nowadays is described as ‘important’, and there’s definitely space for books which challenge our worldview, shows us about lives we know nothing about, educate us and so forth. I’m not sure how often, today, books are published like Everything’s Too Something! – that is to say, trivial and diverting, but also exceptionally well written. Caitlin Moran is the closest that comes to my mind, though even her writing has become increasingly keen to be important. I love that there is also room on the shelf for someone like Graham – whose writing couldn’t possibly be considered important, but is absolutely wonderful nonetheless.