1960s

In A Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor – #1961Club

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I have steadily made my way through all of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, and there’s a strong chance that this is the final one on my reading list? She is very like William Maxwell – that the amount I like her is dependent very much on my mood, and seems to shift almost hour by hour. When I’m in the right mood, she is an exceptionally perceptive, amusing, precise writer. When I’m in the wrong mood, her novels just seem to wash over me.

Thankfully, I think I was in broadly the right mood for In A Summer Season. Like Love by Elizabeth von Arnim, which I read for the previous club, this concerns an age-gap romance where the woman is rather older. Unlike Love, though, the romancing has all happened offscreen already. Kate Heron is a widow who has now married a man ten years younger than her – Dermot, who is filmed with ideas for businesses, but little acumen and even less willingness to see things through. Kate is wealthy enough to mean he doesn’t need to buckle down to anything – though there isn’t really any indication that he has married her for her money. More on that marriage later.

Also living with them are Kate’s two children from her previous marriage – Tom, who works for his grandfather’s family business and is desperate to prove himself, and Louisa, who is a faithful Christian but perhaps equally interested in the priest as she is in the faith. Taylor captures the disconnect between people who live alongside each other, even when they care for each other. One person’s priorities and obsessions will not be another’s. They live parallel lives, unable or unwilling to communicate the depth of their experiences.

Despite being a widow with two grown children, Kate is still pretty young – by modern standards, at least. Yet there are oceans between her and the younger generation. This is her, responding to a remark made by Tom’s current girl:

“Blue suits you so,” Prue now said.

“They condescend,” Kate thought. “They behave like people who are trying hard not to be snobbish, and are led by that desire into an excess of insincerity. They are appalled for us that we are middle-aged.” She could remember trying to protect her own parents from the fact that their lives were virtually over.

She supposed blue did suit her, she agreed vaguely, to add something to the conversation; but talk about clothes bored her. It was like talk about sex. It had an enervating quality which had nothing to do with the subject herself.

Lest we forget, Kate is only in her 40s! And I love this paragraph, because it shows what Taylor does so often. Beneath the veneer of well-to-do people interacting amicably is a depth of feeling that continues to swirl and flow, even while the people obey the conventions of their class and milieu. I think Taylor is a very sexual writer, but it is seldom in the actions on the page. It is, instead, in the minds, motivations, and memories of her characters.

And what of the marriage between Kate and Dermot? In Kate’s mind, we see her considering Dermot as hovering between her generation and her children’s generation – ‘on the mezzanine floor as it were’. But it is not only their age that creates a disparity between them – though that is the factor that gossipy Aunt Ethel returns to, and the reason that most people attribute any fractures to. Instead, really, it is a clash of personalities. It’s clear that Kate’s first husband was more sensible, restrained, dispassionate, and that Kate has turned to an exciting, unreliable man who can bring something spontaneous and passionate out of her. But, in reality, it seems to bring out a reluctant maternal relationship instead.

There were voices in the kitchen, and then Kate came bustling in. Ever since a few evenings before, when Dermot returning drunk and late for dinner had spoken harshly to her, she had moved in a bright little whirlwind of her own making, with not a minute to spare for anyone. She was always on the wing, setting out on one errand after another, and no one could hope to detain her or say a word that would be listened to. Their words were what she dreaded – their thoughts she knew – and, trapped at mealtimes, she warded them off with a torrent of her own. The flow was more easily come by when she had had several drinks. In attaining this end, Dermot, full of uneasy contrition, was ready to encourage her.

A major flaw in In A Summer Season, to my mind, is that we never truly believe this is a happy marriage. We are told that they are deeply in love, but we are never really shown it. The quarrels and disconnect is the norm from the outset of the novel, and Dermot is too sulky and selfish for us to really believe that Kate has ever found an equal partner in him. There is a jarring difference between what Taylor expects us to believe about the marriage and what she is putting on the page, and that was a shame. Because we don’t really see emerging cracks – we just see the narrative catching up with what we’re already seeing. (And that’s when someone from Kate’s past comes back on the scene, but – unlike the blurb of my edition – I won’t spoil that.)

Because of this telling-but-not-showing, this isn’t one of my favourite Taylor novels. But it still definitely has her trademarks: complex and interesting characters, beautiful writing, and sharp wit. Just look at the last words of this paragraph, about Kate’s business-owner father:

At half past five, the factory gates were opened, and a policeman on point duty tried to untangle the traffic. In the swarm of bicycles, even Sir Alfred’s car was held up. He stared irritably before him, like a wasp caught in a spider’s web, impatient that he, for all his power, could not escape. His chaffeur blew softly but constantly on the horn, making slow progress through swerving and colliding bicycles. Nevertheless, Sir Alfred would not for anything have set out five minutes earlier to ease the congestion. He preferred to leave and be seen leaving at the same time as his men. There seemed some virtue in this to him, and he would not have believed that other people saw the thing differently. ‘I’ve never asked a man to do what I wouldn’t do myself, or haven’t done,’ he liked to say. This was untrue as well as uninteresting.

Just sublime. So, overall, I find the usual things to admire and enjoy in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, and I was mostly in the right mood to value them. I just wish she’d made Dermot a slightly more sympathetic character so that the trajectory of the plot had more impact.

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Pen To Paper by Pamela Frankau – #1961Club

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Pen to Paper : A Novelist's Notebook

I’m going to assume it was Brad’s review of Pen To Paper by Pamela Frankau that put it on my radar. I’ve only read a handful of her prodigious output, but I think she can be a brilliant, and brilliantly unusual, writer. She can also be a pretty poor, melodramatic one. And so I was intrigued about how she’d write about the craft of writing – for that is exactly what Pen To Paper is. (Incidentally, Brad’s review dates it to 1962, but I assume that was an American publication date or something – my copy was published in 1961, so fear not re: it’s eligibility for the 1961 Club.)

Well, I say that. It’s nothing like the sort of ‘how to write’ book that might be published nowadays. Doubtless that was the sort of topic suggested to her by a publisher, but Frankau has really written an autobiography through the lens of her writing. We don’t discover much that is personal (except in relationship with her father, more of which later) but we do get to take an entertaining journey through her career, alongside a rather subjective dose of writing advice.

Frankau’s first novel was published when she was still a teenager, and she wrote about one a year after that. She does seem to assume a little knowledge of her oeuvre, but I think you could enjoy Pen To Paper even if it were your first Frankau book. Certainly, most of what she says about writing tends towards the broad rather than the specific – for instance, her habit of the Rough and the Smooth. The ‘Rough’ is her rough draft, written on the right-hand side of notebooks, getting down the ideas and the characters and seeing what happens. The left-hand side is reserved for all sorts of edits and notes and self-recriminations – and the Smooth is the next draft, in which any manner of things may have changed. The idea of redrafting isn’t particularly unusual, but I enjoyed the way Frankau wrote about it, and the leap that is somehow made between a rough smashing-out of possibilities into (say) something as complex and brilliant as A Wreath for the Enemy.

When it comes to details of writing, she discusses such things as first vs third person, how to craft dialogue, when to use adjectives, how to vary sentence length etc etc. These are the bread-and-butter of ‘how to’ guides, but so much engaging in Frankau’s voice than in other people’s. That isn’t because her advice is particularly novel, but because of the tone it is given in: that of an author who has won her spurs, and has the right to a little didacticism, but can also be self-deprecating when need be.

What I found most interesting, though, was when advice turns into memoir. Here she is, writing about sex in books(!):

A scene that I saw with peculiar vividness and intensity before I wrote it once fooled me completely. It was concerned with lust. My character, over whose shoulder events were observed, was a strenuous, priggish fellow who had lived an asectic life. Lust took him unawares. After staring, in an unseemly way and with the crudest thoughts, at a woman whom he was meeting for the first time, he finally picked up a prostitute on his way home. I have made it sound rather silly; but it was an honest scene, a true and necessary stage in the life of the man. I wasn’t writing about sexual desire for my own fun, nor for the fun of excitable readers. Even so, when it was written, I was a little leery of it. Wasn’t it too frank, too violent for its context?

When I chanced to look at it again, about two years later, I was shocked. Not, as yuou might imagine, by discovering that I indeed gone too far. I hadn’t gone anywhere. The exposition of lust simply wasn’t there. What disturbed me in the writing of it had been thought and not said. The words were missing, the scene almost meaningless. Not as much as an overtone… The vivid apprehension in my own mind had deluded me and it was must have been a powerful delusion to last right through the reading of galleys and page-proof.

I suspect this happens far more often than one knows. I may be easy with the words and the words may even, on occasion, be easy with me, but this is not to say that they have passed my message accurately to you.

These sorts of stories from her own experience aren’t functionally illuminating, but they are interesting and do provide some sort of general rule. Though I can’t really imagine anybody picking this up with the intention of using it to write their own novel – this is much more about spending time with Frankau, and better understanding what motivates and informs her writing. Which is, indeed, incredibly idiosyncratic. I work as a writer for a charity, which involves plenty of proofreading, and I felt a pang of sympathy for her proofreader here:

There is the word ‘grey’. To my mind ‘grey’ and ‘gray’ are two different shades of colour. ‘Grey’ has a blue tint and ‘gray’ a brown. So I spell the word according to the colour I want and the printer’s proof-reader changes it back to uniformity throughout. Then I change it again.

On the other hand, I did cheer her on here:

But American spelling will always be a minor trial to the English writer. I have expressed my feelings about ‘airplane’. There’s a clause in my American contract forbidding its use and likewise that of ‘mustache’.

Speaking of Americans, quite a bit of Pen To Paper is Frankau’s prolonged culture-shock at the US. Let’s gloss over her list of comparisons of Brits and Americans (e.g. Americans: slow / Brits: quicker) to an amusing moment that apparently scuppered her reputation across the Atlantic for a good number of years. She was writing her impressions of America for the Evening Standard, back in the days when British people were routinely paid to do such things.

I wrote, among other things: ‘Life in California is very beautiful, very hygienic, very tiring and very expensive.’ The editor, or somebody, left out ‘beautiful’.

Oops! Along the way, Frankau does have plenty to say about publishers, editors etc, including the editors of magazines. While she wrote an extraordinary number of novels, it seems that she didn’t have the same success in the periodicals and journals that were the mainstay of many authors’ earnings during Frankau’s career. While Pen To Paper is not very open about many aspects of Frankau’s personal life, she does go into a lot of detail about finances – and how little she has managed to retain from her profession. She rather self-generously ascribes this to a heart for helping other people out, and to the reluctance of editors to pay her well, but I did also wonder if our definitions of being without money would coincide. Still, she is a lot more open about the earnings of mid-century writing than I’ve seen anywhere except Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and that was illuminating.

And, ah yes, her father. Gilbert Frankau, who was once a big name author. She describes some fraught periods between them, and their apparently very different approaches to writing, and it does sound rather like they didn’t see eye-to-eye on many things. And yet she allots the final 50 pages or so to a memoir of Gilbert, which does feel rather awkwardly tacked onto the end. I imagine she would not have been published as a 19-year-old without his fame, so he is relevant to her literary career – and I would have loved to delve more into the tensions in their relationship, which were rather compelling when they came up – but I could have done without this sudden turn in tone and theme at the end.

But that aside, Pen To Paper is an enjoyable, very idiosyncratic book. It’s definitely more about Frankau than about the craft of writing, but I preferred it that way. She may not have set out to write it as an autobiography, and some of her cards are kept close to her chest, but I definitely ended it feeling much better informed about who she is as a person and as a writer.

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Abbie and Arthur by Dane Chandos – #1961Club

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I think my friend Caroline only ever gave me two books. One was A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau, and the other was Abbie (1947) by Dane Chandos. Which goes to show that she had exceptional taste, and also knew my taste very well. Sadly, Caroline died eight years ago and I’ll never get to ask her for recommendations any more – but I loved spending a decade in book group with her, and her recommendation legacy lives on: twelve years after I read the original, I finally read the sequel to Abbie.

Abbie and Arthur cover, showing a cartoon car on a blue background

Abbie and Arthur, like the previous book, is really concerned with the extraordinary, monstrous, eccentric Abbie, and told through a mix of her letters and a narrative from the perspective of her nephew, Dane. The ‘Arthur’ of the title is her quiet, put-upon, secretly brilliant husband – he appears just as much in the first book, so it’s really a question of the authors needing to find a variant title, I suppose.

Dane is one of the few people that she cares about. For the most part, she is selfish and domineering, though with a soft spot for husband, nephew and (particularly) any and all of the animal kingdom. Here she is, intercepting a hunt:

“Butcher-in-Chief!” I retorted. “Your horse’s hooves are trampling sacred soil and your old grandmother, could she witness such sacrilege, would turn in her grave not ten yards from where we stand!” (A pardonable exaggeration, I consider, since the pink granite angel which surmounts her must weigh all of five tons.) “Call off your hounds!” I concluded.

He shouted again.

I shouted back:

“The colour of your coat, bloody as it is and matching your speech and, I am told, your politics, merely exaggerates the brutality of your so-called sport. A more appropriate colour for your cowardly pastime would be ywllow, a hue which only your colleagues of the Berkeley are men enough to sport!”

Her moral compass is wonky, though. In the course of this book, she (probably?) burns down the house of a friend in order to persuade her to move nearer, and (probably?) murders someone in the aftermath of an accident at sea. And yet…

What do I mean by ‘and yet’? I suppose I mean that you can’t help loving Abbie, despite all that. The novel plays out on a heightened level where these acts of ludicrous selfishness feel more like pantomime than malice. There is a neighbour with whom she has a lengthy feud – in the previous book, Abbie was thwarted while trying to steal her irises, and now Abbie considers this a theft of her irises – and yet, we are told, Abbie sat up with her for many nights when she was extremely ill. And this act of kindness does, somehow, seem to balance her bizarre excesses of immortality. Which is an impressive feat for an author. Abbie is exhuberant, irrepressible, and the success of the book weighs almost entirely on her character – and succeeds.

But my favourite scenes are when Abbie is outwitted. For the most part, in Abbie and Arthur, this is done by Arthur himself – and he is a star, the Richard to her Hyacinth Bucket, endlessly patient but not above a sharp word now and then, and manages to maintain his own moral path.

Perhaps my favourite moment in the book is a subtle jibe from the authors. If you’re reading this and thinking ‘that reminds me of Aunt Mame by Patrick Dennis’, then you’re not alone. It was published between the first and second Abbie books, and this is how Abbie ends one of her letters – for those not in the know, ‘Même’ is French for (among other things) ‘same’:

PPPS. – I am told that one of your dear Mother’s fellow-countrymen has written a book called, I think, Auntie Même, in which the central character seems to be oddly like me (or so Maud says). See if you can get me a copy (as soon as the book is remaindered), as I wish to look into the matter & sue if feasible.

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Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff

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Sad to say, though I have eked them out for years, I’ve now read my final book by Helene Hanff. I bought my copy of Underfoot in Show Business in 2012, but I’ve pictured the lovely new edition from Manderley Press.

Hanff is, of course, best known for the delightful 84, Charing Cross Road, and aficiandos of that book will recognise some of the people and incidents in Underfoot in Show Business – you might recall, for instance, that Hanff made money writing for American detective dramas. Or perhaps you think fondly of Maxine, who snuck nylons onto the desk of No.84 – she figures large in this book. This book actually came first, and it is a bold, brash, delightful announcement of her arrival on the literary scene.

What role did Hanff play in showbusiness? Well, she wanted to make it as a playwright. The book charts her attempts to succeed in this select sphere – and very funny it is too. While she is something of a ball-buster (if I may be permitted some American lingo) in her most famous book, here her humour is very self-deprecating. From the way she frames her stories, we can be pretty confident that she will not make it as a playwright – even though there is definitely early promise. She wins various scholarships and awards, she gets phone calls and meetings with some of the most important people in the theatrical world, and she seems to write and re-write plays at the drop of a hat.

We never get a sense of what her writing for the stage is actually like – Underfoot in Show Business is not that sort of memoir. It’s really just an excuse for Hanff to laugh at herself – and, for good measure, everyone else involved in this strange world. The cheerful insincerity of producers and agents, the breathless optimism of everyone, and that colossal waste of time that dogs everyone’s attempt to ‘make it’. (The book may be 65 years old, and about a time even earlier, but I suspect a lot of things have not changed.)

Producer No.3 was elderly and semiretired but he’d had a legendary career in his day.

“Yours is the first play he’s been interested in in five years,” said my agent, impressed. “He wants to take you to lunch.”

I met the legendary producer for lunch at the Algonquin, where for two hours he talked of his producing days, the great stars and playwrights he’d discovered and the contrasting sorry state of the contemporary theatre. When we parted, he wished me every success and certainly hoped one of these younger fellows would have the sense to produce my play. (Agent’s translation: “I guess he’s broke.”)

Maxine only hovers around the peripheraries of 84, Charing Cross Road, but here she is a star. Flame-haired, vibrant, an excellent actress and totally tone-deaf, Hanff basks in her star-quality and her friendship – while sharing similar levels of disappointment and picking-yourself-up-again. Maxine is not a pseudonym – you can look up Maxine Stuart, to see her successful, if not world-grabbing, acting career. She is such a whirlwind and a breath of fresh air, from using pilfered stamps to pay bills to getting a role in a musical without revealing her inability to sing. You certainly can’t help but love her. Maxine and Helene have the sort of friendship we all long for.

Hanff does eventually get regular writing work for TV, for which she is grateful while still finding and delighting in the ridiculous elements of it. Particularly tricky are the unspoken restrictions of TV detective dramas – the tiny cast meaning the list of suspects is often down to two, and the sponsorship by a cigar company meaning they have to scotch a plot point involving cigarette ash. It’s fascinating.

And when she isn’t working directly in writing, she gets a job reading for a studio – making her way through recent novels, and writing up reports about whether or not they had potential for adaptation. It sounds an other-worldly job, but I do have a friend who did the same thing until she retired a few years ago. While it is only tangentially related to the main thrust of her memoir, I think it was the part I found most interesting and entertaining. And I’m going to leave you with her hot-take on one of the books she had to read…

Well, on the blackest Friday I ever want to see, I was summoned to Monograph and handed three outsized paperback volumes of an English book which was about to be published here I was to read all three volumes over the weekend, and since each volume was double the length of the usual novel I was invited to charge double money for each. I hurried home with the three volumes and after dinner began to read Volume I. And if Monograph’s office had been open at that hour, I’d have phoned and quit my job.

What I had to read, during that nightmare weekend — taking notes on all place names, characters’ names and events therein — was fifteen hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J. R. R. Tolkein. (I hope I’m spelling his name wrong.) I remember opening one volume to a first line which read: “Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday…” and phoning several friends to say good-bye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five hundred more pages of that.

I also remember the bill I turned in:

For Reading and Summarizing:

TITLE: Lord of the Rings
AUTHOR: J. R. R. Tolkien
Volume I: $20.00
Volume II: $20.00
Volume III: $20.00
Mental Torture: $40.00

TOTAL: $100

They paid it.

Ha! I’d recommend absolutely anything by Hanff, and Underfoot in Show Business is no exception. What an irrepressible, witty, vital writer. What fun to be able to spend more time with her.

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The Chateau by William Maxwell – #1961Club

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Apparently, I bought The Chateau by William Maxwell back in 2009. Worse, I got it through the post, so I was clearly impatient to be getting into it – and I remember that I relatively quickly started it and read about 100 pages. At which point I stalled, and for many years there was a bookmark at the 100-page mark, taunting me.

Thank goodness for the 1961 Club. This was the first book I started for the challenge, and I went in with some trepidation. Although I remembered very little about the plot beyond the premise – a young American couple, Harold and Barbara, are visiting France shortly after the Second World War – I did remember that I found it very slow. Having now successfully got to the end, I haven’t changed my mind on that. The Chateau is slow – ponderously, intentionally, glacially slow – but in a way that, in the right mood, is an extraordinary experience.

Harold and Barbara set off with high hopes for their holiday. They anticipate romance, beauty, and the comradeship of a nation which has recently won a war with theirs. In the opening chapters, we follow their train journey through the country – drinking in the beauty, not yet disillusioned. It is strange that the woman whose chateau they are staying in hasn’t come to the station to meet them, but as they are taken in humbler transport across the countryside, they are beguiled by the prospect of their new, temporary home:

Before long they had a glimpse of the chateau, across the fields. The trees hid it from view. Then they turned in, between two gate posts, and drove up among curving cinder drive, and saw the house again, much closer now. It was of white limestone, with tall French windows and a steep slate roof. Across the front with a raised terrace with a low box hedge and a stone balustrade. To the right of the house there was an enormous Lebanon cedar, whose branches fell like dark green waves, and a high brick wall with ornamental iron gates. To their eyes, accustomed to foundation planting and wisteria or rose trellises, the facade looked a little bare and new. The truck went through the gate and into a courtyard and stopped. For a moment they were aware of much racket the engine made, and then M. Fleury turned the ignition off to save gasoline and after that it was the silence they heard. They sat waiting with their eyes on the house and finally a door burst open and a small, thin, black-haired woman came hurrying out. She stopped a few feet from the truck and noted bleakly to M. Fleury, who touched his beret but said nothing. We must look very strange sitting in the back of the truck with our luggage crammed in around us, Harold thought. But on the other hand, it was rather strange that there was no one at the station to meet them.

Mme Vienot is the woman and their hostess. They are her paying guests – the sort of visitors who are clearly needed to help with the ancient family’s dire financial state, but who have to go through a pretence of familiarity. It puts them in an awkward position. When the house doesn’t have all the provisions that the advertisement declared – hot water, bicycles to borrow – they cannot complain as they would in a hotel. They are, after all, guests of a sort.

Maxwell has crafted such real people. We feel the awkwardness of the mismatch between hope and actuality – and, more than that, their determination to find the best in the chateau. Harold is occasionally indignant; Barbara is occasionally conciliatory. And there is much to love, too. It is still beautiful, it is still France. True, nobody precisely explains the protocol (they are embarrassed to learn, from other guests, that they should have stayed longer after the meal in the evening) – and, true, Mme Vienot is curiously distant and unfriendly, and Americans are not as beloved as these two Americans had presupposed – but this doesn’t entirely spoil the delight they are taking in the adventure. They are young and in love and passionate, and this is not a novel about disillusionment. It is a gentle novel about a culture clash and the triumph of human nature to persist through it.

I found Harold and Barbara fascinating characters. We’re used to novels about two people falling in love, and perhaps used to portraits of slightly jaded or bitter married couples, but it is less usual to come across an established married couple who are still strongly moved by their mental and sensual love for each other. Maxwell’s writing is always beautiful on the sentence level, often subtly weaving in and out of metaphor in a way I find immensely satisfying.

Somebody who matches him, the curves and hollows of her nature fitting into all the curves and hollows of his nature as, in bed, her straight back and soft thighs fit inside the curve of his breast and belly and hips and bent legs. Somebody who looks enough like him that they are mistaken occasionally for brother and sister, and who keeps him warm at night, taking the place of the doll that he used to sleep with his arm around: Barbara Scully. Barbara S Rhodes, when she writes a check.

What helps the couple feel particularly vivid, though, is Maxwell’s humour. He is excellent at capturing a familiar sort of flippancy between two people who love each other – for instance, when Harold is manfully reading aloud from a history book, Barbara interrupts him with “Couldn’t you just read it to yourself and tell me about it afterward?” These lighter scenes were among my favourite, and leavened a novel that could have felt a bit too pensive without them.

They don’t spend the whole time in the chateau. Over their months in the country, they travel out to different cities, and Maxwell details their activities – the privations of post-war life, the nostalgia about a trip from Barbara’s childhood, detailed scenes of their attempts to get to grips with the value of things, availability of food, correct manners etc. Along the way, they can’t truly connect with the French people they meet – always, they are coming up against invisible walls. They aren’t rejected, and many people are amiable, but nor are they embraced.

Perhaps the most moving relationship is with a couple they meet. Harold thinks Eugene has the possibility to be a dear friend…

Eugene began to sing quietly, under his breath, and Harold rode a little closer to the other bicycle, listening. It was not an old song, judging by the words, but in the tune there was a slight echo of the thing that had moved him so, that day in Blois. When Eugene finished, Harold said: “What’s the name of the song you were singing?”

“It’s just a song,” Eugene said, with his his eyes on the road, and pure, glittering, personal dislike emanating from him like an aura.

The painful discovery that someone you like very much does not like you is one of the innumerable tricks the vaudeville magician has up his sleeve. Think of a card, any card: now you see it, now you don’t…

What a true tragedy, cutting more sharply than many more overblown tragedies. How relatable, how piercing. And how quintessentially Maxwell to slide effortlessly from a specific moment to a general truth, done with an elegance that really feels like he is seeing straight through his characters into the heart of the human condition. Perhaps more difficultly, he does the same for happiness:

They should never have left Beaulieu, but they did; after ten days, he went and got bus tickets, and she packed their suitcases, and he went downstairs and paid the bill, and early the next morning they stood in the road, waiting for the bus to Marseilles. It was impossible to say why people put so little value on complete happiness.

What a beautiful paragraph. I’ve highlighted some of the disjoints in the characters’ experience – between what they hoped and what they experienced, between friendships and unexpected emnities – but there is also so much beauty, life and love in this novel. Maxwell is too subtle a writer to weigh the scales entirely on one side.

The Chateau is quite a long novel, and feels longer. As I said at the beginning, it luxuriates in its slowness. In the wrong mood, I was a little bored and wanted more action, less reflection. But in the right mood – and I was in the right mood almost the whole time I was reading it – I absolutely adored the novel. His exceptional writing, his understanding of people, and his generosity in developing characters make The Chateau something special.

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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.