1968

R.C. Sherriff’s wonderful autobiography

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R.C. Sherriff has had something of a renaissance in the past few years, thanks to the good people at Persephone Books. They’ve published A Fortnight in September, Greengates, and The Hopkins Manuscript, and other publishers have followed suit. The film adaptation of Journey’s End was very well received recently, and the play remains a text that is often studied in schools, I believe. And yet nobody has reprinted his autobiography, 1968’s No Leading Lady.

It goes for big sums online, but I didn’t know that I stumbled upon it in a Marylebone bookshop in 2019. It was only on the way home that I googled it and found that I secured something of a bargain – and, as so often, it took me a few years to read it. And oh my goodness, I absolutely loved it.

Many authors tend to write their autobiographies with their own lens for nostalgia. They will dwell on childhood memories and anecdotes about family members with no claim to distinction, beyond association with the author. Some rush through their writing career with some sense of embarrassment – others even end their books before they have gained success. I often find this approach infuriating. After all, I am interested in them because they are authors – not because they once left their hat on a train on the way to boarding school.

So, hurrah and hurray to R.C. Sherriff! In the first paragraph, we are thrown into the maelstrom of his writing:

I had left home early that morning on my round of calls, to be back in good time to change and get to the theatre well before the curtain went up. It was the first night of my first play in the West End, and I wanted to find out whether the director had been able to rescue anything from the shambles of the dress rehearsal. I had been at the theatre until near midnight the previous evening, and had caught the last train home worn out with worry and disappointment. The whole thing had crumbled to pieces; the play was in ruins, with the curtain due to go up on the first performance in a matter of hours.

I wondered if this would be an introduction to get our attention, and he’d jump back into the past. Well, he does after a few pages of this – but only back to the beginning of that play’s genesis. And yes, the play is Journey’s End, based on Sherriff’s experiences of World War One – well, based on his knowledge of life in the trenches, rather than specifically based on his life. And it started life as a play to raise money for the rowing club that Sherriff was in.

Marvellously, the first 200 pages of No Leading Lady – more than half the book – is about Journey’s End. Sherriff goes gradually from this humble start to trying (and failing) to get an agent for it. People were put off by it having no leading lady (one of the reasons for the autobiography’s title) and by believing, in the mid-1920s, that no audience had an appetite for being taken back to the trenches.

You’d have to read those 200 pages to experience the hopes and failures, the gradual back and forth of getting to success. Sherriff is turned down many times before he finally gets somebody willing to put on the play at a private club – where the lead part is played by a then-unknown actor called Laurence Olivier. It gets rave reviews, but this doesn’t translate into a proper transfer for the fee-paying public. Eventually, though, someone gives it a chance… and it is a runaway hit.

I have raced through the gradual way Sherriff reveals this, and he goes on to chart its fortunes in the West End, in America, as a film etc. I loved how steadily, slowly he did – he is not coy to tell us about the financial aspect, or the various setbacks that were obstacles before this ‘overnight’ success. We so seldom get this level of detail about a writer’s work, and I absolutely loved it – and I haven’t even read or seen Journey’s End! He does assume you’ll have familiarity with it, but I didn’t find it much mattered. Whenever I review a Sherriff book, I say that is a perfect storyteller – and No Leading Lady is another example of this perfection. He measures the pace so brilliantly, so that the 200 pages feel fully earned.

From another writer, it might have felt braggy. But even when Sherriff is discussing his big pay-outs, enthusiastic reviews, or huge audiences, he does so with a sort of childlike disbelief that you can’t help be happy on his behalf. He never felt something like this could happen to him, a humble insurance salesman (oh, and I loved the sections on his insurance work too). The other part of the book which gets a lot of focus is his time as an undergraduate at Oxford – delayed until his 30s, and with the same sense of being unexpectedly privileged and finding himself in a world he never thought he’d be part of.

But success isn’t guaranteed, of course. He doesn’t spend as much time writing about the next play, but it fails. So does the one after. Sherriff has over-extended himself far too much on his house – and while some of his frets about economising aren’t particularly relatable (he insists he needs two indoor servants, three gardeners and a chauffeur) he is candid about them. It is the most personal he gets. He also writes beautifully about his relationship with his mother, who goes everywhere with him. It’s an impressive balance of genuine openness about what he does write about, and a careful line around the parts of his life he doesn’t want to disclose.

Sadly, for me, he decides not to write much about his novels – except for The Fortnight in September, his first novel which restored his renown. The others don’t even get a mention, and I would have loved to read more about some of my favourites. He also worked for a time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood at a time when studios were flinging eye-watering sums at well-known writers to try to lure them. He writes a lot about his first screenplay, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but skates past others – including the one that got him an Oscar nomination, which isn’t mentioned in the book.

I can see that some publishers wouldn’t want to reprint No Leading Lady. It doesn’t follow the usual trajectory of an autobiography, and some might think it would only be of interest to fans of Journey’s End. But I thought it was a spectacular, involving and delightful look at a writer’s life. Sherriff is such a brilliant storyteller that I would happily hear him tell any story – in this book, he captivated me completely.

Five memoirs I’ve read recently

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Quite a large percentage of the non-fiction I read or listen to is accounted for by memoirs and biographies. While glancing at my pile of books to be written about on here, I realised that five of them fell into the category of memoir and autobiography – while covering an extraordinary range between them. And all by authors where I haven’t read anything else by them. Here they are…

My Father and Myself (1968) by J.R. Ackerley

I have four of Ackerley’s books, because I’ve always assumed I will enjoy his writing (and because they are delicious New York Review of Books Classics) – I took to Twitter to ask people which I should start with. While My Father and Myself didn’t win the poll, the replies were sufficient to convince me.

As the title suggests, this book is more or less equal parts about Ackerley and his father, Roger – a relationship that grows steadily more fascinating as the book continues. At times, they have a shocking openness, particularly around sexual matters – while there are other, major parts of Roger Ackerley’s life that his son had no idea about until after his death. I shan’t spoil what they are, because they are revealed rather late in this book – though I was already aware of them because I’ve read The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley by Diana Petre.

From the attention-grabbing opening line onwards (‘I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919’), Ackerley is an excellent storyteller – particularly about the things that interest him. What most seems to interest him, for better or worse, is his own sexual exploits. There is an awful lot about the young men he encountered through life and what he did to them (and they to him). There is a startling candour in these passages. In a biographer, it would have felt unprofessionally prurient; in Ackerley’s own words, it seems like a lengthy attempt to understand his own fascination with this aspect of his life.

More interesting to me was his perspective on his parents’ marriage – people say that nobody knows a marriage except those in it, but constant onlookers can perhaps have a more even-handed view. His mother put up with a lot; his father was not a monster, but lived by a set of principles that combine curiously and don’t benefit many people, including himself.

Honesty and accuracy are not the same thing, of course, and Ackerley’s striking openness sits intriguingly alongside the limits of his self knowledge. It’s a fascinating read, often uncomfortable, but mesmerising too.

Diary of a Lone Twin (2019) by David Loftus

To talk of the death of one’s twin to surviving identical twins is almost impossible; the break of that bond is too painful and shocking to describe, too unbelievable to imagine.

Loftus was in his 20s when his identical twin brother died, not long after they had celebrated their birthday together. Three decades later, he takes us through the diary of a year – a year where nothing significant happens in relation to that death, but which is as good an opportunity as any to continue processing the grief, seeing what has happened to him over the years.

As you probably know, I have a twin brother (Colin, who is also reading Loftus’s memoir), and the idea of losing him is as unbelievable as that quote at the beginning suggests. My life doesn’t make sense without him. And that’s the world David Loftus was thrust into, from a brother who was also his best friend. We don’t learn at first how he died, and Loftus measures out the parts of that story throughout the first half of the book. It feels oddly like a thriller, as we piece together how it happened – eventually discovering that it was shocking medical malpractice.

Of course, Diary of a Lone Twin is not an objective account, nor should it be. Rather than simply a description of what happened, it is Loftus’s thoughts on life without John – and how it might have been different. It’s also about his recent second marriage, about his son, about his career as a food photographer. At times, it felt like other things were crowding out the story of John and its aftermath (I could particularly have done without the pages about how much he hates cats). But, even with the padding, this is a very engaging attempt to describe the unthinkable.

Delicacy (2021) by Katy Wix

I listened to Wix reading this extraordinary memoir – about cake and death, as the subtitle says (and isn’t it a brilliant title for that?). It looks through the significant moments of Wix’s life through the prism of cakes that she associates with each of them. And it’s about the deaths of her father, her mother, and her best friend.

I first encountered Wix as a contestant on Taskmaster, and she appears in almost every good British TV show of recent years. While she is extremely funny in character roles, her personality and comic sensibility is rather different on her own terms – it is still funny, but it is equally melancholy. In her narration, there were plenty of lines that would have made me laugh if I’d read them on the page, but she delivers them with calmness, almost a sadness, which makes them effective in a very different way. A possible exception is the chapter on a personal trainer, which does have moments of poignancy but is more unabashedly hilarious than other sections of Delicacy.

As well as discussing the loved ones she lost, in difficult and painful ways, Wix also writes about her career – the highs and the lows, and particularly about the way that she has been expected to look and behave as a woman in the industry. She doesn’t name many of the productions she’s been in, so it’s not a tell-all in that sense, but she is still very candid about the treatment she experienced. And there is a moving, tense chapter on a possible reunion on a project with a bully from her early life.

As you can perhaps tell from this overview, I don’t remember any of the specific cakes that Wix associates with different moments of her life. As a framing technique, it isn’t especially relevant – but if it helped her produce a book this good, then hurrah.

Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds at Once (2021) by Phil Wang

Another comic I first encountered on Taskmaster, and a memoir published in the same year – which I also listened to as an audiobook read by the author. Wang spent the first 16 years of his life in Malaysia, and the second 16 in the UK – so this book is about a life split down the middle in years, but also in terms of identity. He writes of feeling not Malaysian enough for Malaysia and not British enough for Britain.

The book is divided into different categories – food, nature, language etc – which gives Wang opportunities for covering a vast amount of material. There is definitely some serious stuff about racism in here, and about the differences between cultures and the difficulties of trying to ‘be from two worlds’ without either of them suffering – but it’s also a very, very funny book. Wang’s writing is much more punchline-driven than Wix’s, and a lot of the book would feel equally at home as stand-up. I definitely recommend you try the audiobook, if you read Sidesplitter, because it really requires Wang’s insouciantly optimistic voice.

Raining Cats and Donkeys (1967) by Doreen Tovey

Definitely the most uncomplicatedly fun book on this list, it’s one of a series that Tovey wrote about having Siamese cats and a donkey. It opens with:

Charles said the people who wrote this bilge in the newspapers about donkeys being status symbols were nuts.

At that moment we were in our donkey’s paddock dealing with the fact that she’d eaten too many apples, and I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

It’s representative of the entirety of this short memoir. The book is a collection of self-deprecating stories that show how complicated life can get when you fall in love with spirited pets. The stakes are not often particularly high, and that’s what makes them so entertaining to read – because things might go awry, but at the end of the day Doreen and Charles will be happy together, contentedly accompanied with a menagerie of animals.

Tovey is very good at conveying the characters of the two cats, Solomon and Sheba, and Annabel the donkey – without ever making the mistake of making them too twee or fanciful. She is a keen observer of genuine animal behaviour, in its ruthlessness and obstinacy as well as its more gentle moments, and describes them with humour and affection. My edition was given to me by my friend Kirsty and Paul, and has an earlier handwritten dedication from 1968: ‘For Alan, as a Bedside Book (to encourage earlier bedtimes). I can see that it would have done.

The Quest for Christa T. by Christa Wolf

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For quite a few years, I’ve spotted too late that German Literature Month was happening in November – run by Lizzy’s Literary Life. And this year I also spotted it pretty late in the day, but I didn’t have any emergency reading to finish for book group etc., so decided to see what I had on my shelves. Even better if it qualified for Project Names. So I was very pleased to dig out The Quest for Christa T by Christa Wolf, originally published in 1968 and translated into English shortly afterwards by Christopher Middleton.

It’s a short novel in which the main character is Christa T, but her life is told entirely in retrospect. Her friend is the narrator, although we don’t learn much about her – instead, she gives us a fractured portrait of Christa as she knew her [pronouns are going to be tricky in this post!].

We know from the outset that Christa died young, and we keep waiting for further hints that might explain how. And since we start in Hitler’s Germany, there is the constant threat of Nazis being the answer to that question. Especially since Christa is alarmed by the rampant nationalism she sees around her – the placards and the shouting.

But this is not what kills her. We move on into post-war Germany, as Christa meets various suitors, and tries her hand at teaching. Hers is an ordinary life in extraordinary times. An ordinary and not very ambitious life, that becomes exceptional because of Wolf’s way of writing this strange novella. It resists every norm of writing the usual Bildungsroman – it is, as the title suggests, a quest. Christa might be dead, and she cannot be physically sought, but the narrator is on a quest to compile an understanding of her – for letters, papers, and memories.

She wasn’t aware of the effect she had, I know. I’ve seen her later, walking through other towns, with the same stride, the same amazed look in her eyes. It always seemed that she’d taken it upon herself to be at home everywhere and a stranger everywhere, at home and a stranger in the same instant; and as if from time to time it dawned on her what she was paying for and with.

The writing is so unusual. Fragments of recollections are spread on the page, interspersed with guesswork and extrapolations. She is piecing together a life from what she knows and what she imagines – and the reader is always chasing a little to keep up. It’s like an impressionist painting, but where nothing quite coheres. The Quest for Christa T reminded me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, but where that exercise in piecing together a life flows in beautiful, poetic sentences, like the coming in and going out of tides, there is no similar beauty in Wolf’s writing. It is beautiful, but in a different way – a stark, disjointed, abstract way. Each sentence is set at slightly the wrong angle to the next one. So, even when the words are profound or lovely, they don’t quite settle before we see Christa from a different vantage. We are putting together an impression of a life at one remove, with jigsaw pieces that don’t quite align.

As such, it isn’t an easy or quick read. I found I really had to concentrate as I read it. But it definitely rewards the effort. It’s not the sort of novella that I think I’ll remember in terms of the details – but I’ll certainly remember an impression of Wolf’s novel, and what it felt like to read it.

 

25 Books in 25 Days: #22 Several Perceptions

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I started At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept this morning, and was only a page in when I knew it wouldn’t work for today’s book. So I took a quick look through my paperback shelves, trying to find the sort of thing I fancied (at the right length, of course) – and landed upon Several Perceptions (1968) by Angela Carter.

I hadn’t heard of this until I came upon it in an Oxfam a year or two ago – I bought it despite this dreadful cover. I think it’s only the second Carter novel I’ve read, after Wise Children. It concerns Joseph – a moody, miserable gent who has recently broken up with his girlfriend (not his choice) and whose only friends seem to be an overly-sexed man called Viv, his prostitute mother, a slightly mad homeless man, and (perhaps) the mousy new resident in his building, Annie Blossom. Looking for purpose, Joseph releases a badger from a local zoo (did zoos ever cage badgers?!) and starts having flirty, desperate, or philosophical conversations – sometimes all three – with the aforementioned group of people.

This is a slightly baffling novel, not least because Joseph seems to sometimes wander into the unbalanced – and I never worked out what the title was about – but Carter is such a fine writer. Her choice of words is so clever – often unexpected, and yet finding the deeper truth in the cracks between cliches. Every page has an example, but one I particularly liked was his view of Annie:

Miss Blossom, the husk of a woman, what was she doing? Making herself a small lunch of beans on toast or performing some other flat, thin activity, ironing rayon underwear or filling in a form?

That ‘flat, thin activity’ is so unusual, and yet creates a vivid impression on the reader. Unusual and vivid is a pretty great description of Carter, actually. I’m not sure why Several Perceptions isn’t better known – or perhaps it is, and I just haven’t noticed it being mentioned – but it was quite the experience.

Btw, for a much more thorough review, check out Helen’s from a few years ago.

The Past is Myself by Christabel Bielenberg

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When we did the 1947 Club and the 1951 Club, I noticed in my own reading – and I think in the reading across the blogosphere – that the war was surprisingly absent. I say ‘surprisingly’. Perhaps there is nothing unsurprising about people wanting to put hell behind them for a few years, either unwilling or unable to face what had passed. It’s interesting, in my 1968 reading, that two strands have emerged – the bright, bold, intoxicating world of the ’60s emerging, and a more concentrated look back over the shoulder at the past. Few books could be more eye-opening than Christabel Bielenberg’s 1968 memoir The Past is Myself, reprinted a few years ago in a beautiful Slightly Foxed Edition.

Bielenberg’s surname sounds German – and, indeed, is – but she was raised English. (Or Irish… it seems to be conflated. After Greensleeves, is this becoming a 1968 pattern?) She married Peter Bielenberg during the interwar period, and adopted German citizenship in 1934 – Germany was her home and she seems to have been broadly accepted. Oddly, her Englishness doesn’t seem to have been much of an issue throughout the Second World War – at least it isn’t mentioned as being so in The Past is Myself – but her staunch resistance to Nazism was a constant threat to her life. It starts in 1932, sort of, but much of the book (unsurprisingly) focuses on the bulk of the war. But I did think this was great:

The history of the years between 1935 and 1938 in Germany could be summarised by a conversation overheard between two Hamburg dock-workers, sitting over their beer in a riverside pub (Hamburg dock-workers are not renowned for their garrulity). “Ja, ja, ja,” sighed the one, and again after a long pause, “ja, ja, ja”.” “Listen,” said his friend, gazing mournfully into his beer-mug, “can’t you, for one moment, stop discussing politics?”

This memoir tells of life in Germany for somebody who despised Hitler and his policies – for somebody who was ‘Aryan’, but violently opposed every step of the Nazis’ campaign. Like Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg’s excellent On the Other Side, this gives an important perspective that helps us remember that an individual is not their country.

Bielenberg takes the reader painstakingly through the events of each month, each week, and for the first half the memoir it is a case of slowly escalating horror. We probably all know what happened – the Nuremberg laws and the gradual removal of the rights of Jewish people; the increase in political prisoners and Hitler-worship; the erosion of every public voice of dissent. Bielenberg expertly puts us into the world of somebody who hated Nazism but, after initial protest, realises that dissent means death – and then anybody could be an informant.

Just the same we knew that when meeting new people, they would probably play the game as we did. The conversation at first would be guarded and noncommittal. We knew that we were none of us Nazis, but were we all of us, drunk or sober, also discreet? Had we other mutual friends? Were they real friends or just names dropped to impress? I would find it hard to describe the wary approach, the half-finished sentence, the guarded reference which led at the time to mutual confidence, and to the realisation that the air had at last been cleared and all present could sit back and indulge in plain high treason. The procedure was a delicate one, one that had to be carefully learned if we valued our lives, and would trust our fellows sufficiently to put our lives in their hands.

Though published in 1968, Bielenberg delivers the narrative as she experienced it, day by day and moment by moment. She seldom, if ever, gives hints of what was to come for her own family and friends, nor does she include particularly detailed accounts of what later became widely known, in terms of concentration camps. So we don’t see the full scale of the horror that the Nazis implemented – though there are glimpses: a man she meets on a train who has been part of the SS extermination team, for instance, or the rumours of cattle trucks which come back to those in Berlin. Hers was not the worst experience of the war, of course. She was never sent to a concentration camp – though her husband spent time in dire conditions in a prison (through connections to those who organised the foiled plot to assassinate Hitler) and there is a significant section dealing with Christabel’s interrogation when trying to have him released.

It is revealing to read about somebody anti-Nazi, pro-Britain who also suffered at the hands of British and Allied bombers – caught between two enemies, in a way. She writes about the indiscriminate cruelty of bombing campaigns brilliantly:

There was no moon, and there were three air raids in the three nights that I was in Berlin. The bombs fell indiscriminately on Nazis and anti-Nazis, on women and children and works of art, on dogs and pet canaries. New and more ravaging bombs – blockbusters and incendiaries, and phosphorus bombs that burst and glowed green and emptied themselves down the walls and along the streets in flaming rivers of unquenchable flame, seeping down cellar stairs, and sealing the exits to the air-raid shelters.

Indeed, even without seeing the full evil of the concentration camps, I was still left afresh with the shock at how evil people can be. For how many thousands of Germans must have been coopted into targeting Jewish people, running death camps, being part of the cruel regime? The millions who felt helpless to prevent or oppose it – well, that I can understand. Particularly in the nationalistic, often xenophobic world we are seeing more and more of. People often talk about Trump and Hitler together, and say that Trump is no Hitler. I absolutely agree that he is not Hitler as Hitler was in, say, 1942. But the similarities between Hitler in 1933 and Trump in 2017 are many – targeting a faith group, playing on brash nationalism to do so, trying to quieten dissent from others and calling the unpatriotic if they do it. Reading this book brought home those similarities and dangers.

The Past is Myself (stupidly vague title aside) is in many ways a brilliant book, with an unstinting portrayal of what her life was like and, to the extent that she was able, what Germany was like. I’ve been very enthusiastic in this review. I can’t quite put my finger on why I don’t think it’s a brilliant book. Something in the writing style, or the structure? I don’t know. Usually I find it quite easy to pinpoint why I haven’t found a book worked perfectly, but there’s something elusive here. It’s still exceptionally valuable as a resource, and very good in doing what it does, but I probably wouldn’t rush to read anything Bielenberg wrote on any other topic.

Still, a sombre and poignant end to the 1968 Club for me.

 

Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

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This is normally the time in our club weeks that I start to wind down, and maybe do a round up, but I’ve read so much for the 1968 club that I’m keeping going! Sorry that I’ve not been rounding up reviews quite as assiduously as I should have been, but it’s really exciting to see people join in – and I’ll put together a full list before too long. But still this review and another one to come before the end of the week!

Greensleeves by Eloise Jarvis McGraw is testament to the fact that I will eventually finish those books that I got halfway through and forgot about. I bought it after Jenny from Reading the End enthused about it somewhere… I thought it was on her blog, but her review was in 2008 and I bought it in 2015 so WHO KNOWS. Well, I read 150pp of it when it arrived, and somehow it fell down the pile of the books I was reading concurrently… it’s almost like I knew that the 1968 Club would come along and give me the proper moment to finish it.

Greensleeves was rescued from obscurity by (a) the aforementioned Jenny, and (b) Nancy Pearl, celebrity librarian – and the copy I have was published in her oddly-titled ‘Nancy Pearl Book Crush Rediscoveries’ series. The novel is about an eighteen-year-old girl, Shannon, who has never quite felt she belonged – and not just for the reasons that most people that age feel that way. She has been shunted between various parents and parental figures, between parts of America and Ireland and England (‘Ireland’ is several times called ‘Britain’, I think. Hmm, McGraw, hmm), and she has serious misgivings about her future.

So, sure, she ends up going undercover as a spy in a boarding house, trying to work out whether or not there are grounds to contest a weird will left by a Mrs Dunningham – she has bequeathed money for people to go skydiving or maintain a weed garden or study useless subjects, etc. A change is as good as a holiday. And Shannon is so used to being several different people that adding another doesn’t seem too big an obstacle – so she disguises her accent (and her intellect) and becomes Georgetta. She has a towering 60s bouffant, bright clothes, and half the brain Shannon has – but more confidence and charm in speaking with people. That’s the idea, anyway – the number of made-up relatives, and a certain awkwardness and uncertainty which she can’t quite hide, prove stumbling blocks occasionally. Shannon/Georgetta becomes a waitress at the local restaurant (or ‘luncheonette’) – a perfect vantage from which to question people.

Only she didn’t quite account for the presence of Sherry (male despite name; friendly, charming, and optimistic regular of the restaurant, who nicknames her Greensleeves) or Dave (rude, but sexy, 20-something occupant of the boarding house). She finds herself in something of a love triangle.

What makes this novel not annoying, though, is that the central issue isn’t Boy A vs Boy B, but Shannon trying to come to terms with her own personality. She does this through trying to understand others – whether that be Sherry and Dave, the other beneficiaries of the will, or the deceased Mrs D. It’s a very true portrayal of what it means to be on the cusp of adulthood when your background is too myriad to make your path obvious.

But mostly the book is great because it’s so energetic. There is pep. The characters are slightly quirky, Sherry is a real love, and there is a sense of optimism and kindness that pervades it, somehow even when people aren’t behaving kindly.

As for the 1968 Club – this feels very representative of a certain sort of 1960s America, because of fashion and dialect, but it also feels extremely modern in the way it’s written. Other 1960s novels carry something of there period in each paragraph, for better or worse, whereas Greensleeves could have been written this week – I would totally have believed it was a historical novel, if a gap of 50 years makes something historical.

I imagine this novel would mean much more if one read it as a teenager – do press it upon any teenage readers who might enjoy it – but it’s still great fun to read as an adult, and has one of the few will-they-won’t-they narratives that made me actually care.

Thanks Jenny for bringing it to my attention initially, and thanks 1968 Club for making me finally finish it!

The Wedding Group by Elizabeth Taylor – #1968Club

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When I was going through the 1968 titles I had for the 1968 Club, I spotted that there was an Elizabeth Taylor there that I don’t hear all that much about. And that’s probably going to change this week, of course! But The Wedding Group – one of her final novels – is one that I knew nothing at all about. I must have read a review or two occasionally, but it hadn’t stuck. And I thought – why not?

I don’t consider myself an Elizabeth Taylor superfan, though her writing is impeccable, and I truly love some of her novels. And yet, despite no superfan status, I seem to have read almost all of her novels. Spoilers for how I feel about this one: it’s not her best, but it’s good. My early sense is that it’s not going to remain with me in the way that others have done. But I read it on a plane, and that’s never an ideal reading scenario, so… take this review with a pinch of salt??

It starts with a description of a many-layered family in Quayne that we don’t end up seeing that much of – it’s more of a restrictive, mistrustful background to illustrate the world that Cressy has come from. It’s an artistic world – the blurb to my Virago edition tells me that the grandfather of the clan is based on Augustus John (though Chris’s post mentions other potentials) – but it’s one that is instinctively wary of elite intellectual sets, modern life, and everything that Cressy longs to explore. Mostly, she wants to escape her oppressive mother Rose. And the vision of what she wants to experience is very 1968:

It was to that world beyond the beech woods that Cressy was looking. She dreamed of Wimpy Bars and a young man with a sports car, of cheap and fashionable clothes that would fall apart before she tired of them. In that world she might find a place for herself.

She rebels and gets a job in an antiques shop – which isn’t exactly the quintessence of teenage rebellion in 1968, but is, on the other hand, very Elizabeth Taylor. There she (re-)meets David, a journalist in his 30s who has previously visited Quayne and written about the family with some superior mild distaste. Indeed, he has wrongly labelled her in a photograph, and received a letter from her putting him right – he obviously thinks she is self-conscious, silly, and odd. What he doesn’t realise is that he is all those things too, in a slightly different way.

The strength of the novel, I think, is in the drawing of David’s mother Midge. As the novel starts, he lives with her – only later does he move (though no further than next door), and grows to question her influence on him. He feels that he cannot go to London, as he dreams of doing, because she is scared to be on her own – his father lives not too far away, oblivious and indifferent to the pain his selfishness has caused the family.

As with The Soul of Kindness, where Taylor shows us the real imprisoning agony of being a hypochondriac, in Midge we see a compassionate depiction of a woman whose terror of being alone is real – while still exasperating to those around her. In one scene, Midge believes she is about to be burgled – she leaves her jewellery on the stairs, and cowers in fear upstairs. It’s very moving, and shows that nothing is one-sided – for Midge is also a restrictive force when it comes to her son, though without the intentional stifling of Quayne. Rather, it is her need of him that has kept him tied to her apron strings. This is the fascinating relationship of the novel.

Oh, incidentally, I love when Taylor allows her own authorial comments to seep through. This is rather brilliant – I quote both paragraphs because it shows Taylor’s observational powers, and the way she makes the ordinary seem bizarrely profound – as well as the disjoint between what people are doing and the thoughts they vocalise:

The sandwiches they had ordered were now put in front of them, and Nell lifted a corner of one of hers and peered short-sightedly inside – hard-boiled egg, sliced, with dark rings round the yolk, a scattering of cress, black seeds as well.

“The reason, they say, that women novelists can’t write about men, is because they don’t know what they’re like when they’re alone together, what they talk about and so on. But I can’t think why they don’t know. I seem to hear them booming away all the time. Just listen to this lot, next to me.”

So, there is a lot to admire and appreciate in The Wedding Group, and it’s possible that I’d be raving about it if I’d never read another Taylor novel. But I almost take her writing talent and perceptiveness for granted – and this novel has too many scenes (and, dare I say, characters) that don’t quite go anywhere, and don’t leave much of a mark. Or perhaps it’s just because I read most of it on a plane, who knows. Unfair to judge her by her own standard, perhaps, but I don’t think 1968 was quite Taylor’s year – though, equally, she is incapable of writing a bad novel.

Another Part of the Wood by Beryl Bainbridge – #1968Club

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So much of my 1968 Club reading has been non-fiction about the first half of the 20th century, and it’s about time I interspersed a novel that is well and truly 1960s. Another Part of the Wood was Beryl Bainbridge’s second published novel, and there are already many hallmarks of what makes Bainbridge so unusual – a cast of unpleasant, warring characters; unexpected catastrophes; not quite letting you know what is going on. The copy I read is one I bought in 2012, and was from a Penguin series where each cover was designed by Allen Jones. I do love it when reprint series like this look beyond the obvious. We don’t need another edition of Frankenstein.

Another Part of the Wood takes place at a holiday camp, but one which feels very much like a prison camp – a group of people are staying in extremely basic huts, without plumbing or sufficient food. It’s in rural Wales, but the ‘holidaymakers’ have come from the town – George, the owner of the site, isn’t expecting all of them; nor is his stuttering, anxious assistant Balfour. Characters pop up out of nowhere, with unspecified pasts and past relationships, adding to the chaotic tangle Bainbridge creates. George is only really expecting Joseph – a man with big ideas and ideals, who has come from London intending to discuss politics and philosophy. He comes with Dotty, a girlfriend who is tiring of him, and his son Roland. And a mysterious boy (man? It’s unclear) with the ominous name Kidney. He is clearly disturbed in some way, and must take his pills regularly, though Joseph is keen to get him off them – and seems to believe that a bit of fresh air is all he needs. What does he need? We don’t know, because Bainbridge tells us so little – making him all the more sinister as an unpredictable entity.

This is a short novel, and much of it focuses on the claustrophobia of these characters (and Lionel and May, who also come; Lionel’s salient characteristic is that he had a buttock shot off once) and the fraught tension as they bicker and singularly fail to enjoy themselves. Lynn Barber writes in her introduction to this edition that Bainbridge’s initial drafts were often ten times the length of the final novel – that she’d cut away and cut away, making sure nothing superfluous came in. The sparseness works; her writing style is confident even at this early stage, and not a word is wasted – indeed, we aren’t told enough to know quite where we are.

We can feel a dread that something terrible will be the climax to the novel – but also that other moments of huge significance will be thrown away as everyday mundanities. And all I will add about the plot is another word: wasps.

In case you want proof that this is quintessential 1968, here’s a description of a coat that Dotty gets from a shop:

The flowered coat was made of some kind of velvet. It rippled and shone. It was orange and blue and green and black, with a mustard-yellow ground, and there were buttons small as beads going from wrist to elbow. Balfour thought it was terrible.

He prayed she wouldn’t wear it now. He visualised her stalking, swathed in velvet, through the busy market town, the bell-bottoms of her denim trousers flaring out beneath the long and violently coloured hem.

It’s not replaced my favourite Bainbridge (which is Injury Time), but this is my fifth book by her, and it’s helping build up a picture of a strange, assured, quirky novelist who knew exactly the sort of book she wanted to write, and wrote it.

I Follow But Myself by Frank Baker #1968Club

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If you’ve read my blog for a while, you’ll have heard the words Miss Hargreaves more than you would have believed possible. (And yet people still call it Mrs Hargreaves! I need to work harder.) It’s perhaps my favourite novel, and I’ve read it many times since I was introduced to it in 2003 or thereabouts. And since 2004, I’ve had Frank Baker’s autobiography waiting on my shelves – so when I saw it was published in 1968, I knew that it was finally time to read it.

So, why has it taken me thirteen years to read I Follow But Myself? Partly – as I explained on the latest episode of our ‘Tea or Books?’ podcast – because I save up books I’m excited about reading until The Perfect Moment. Partly because my love of Frank Baker hasn’t fared brilliantly outside of Miss Hargreaves – I’ve read three or four other books by him, and they’ve not been very good. My worry was that I Follow But Myself would follow that trend. So, essentially, I’d built it up into quite a behemoth of a reading experience even before I opened the first page.

Baker organises his autobiography in quite an unusual fashion – told through portraits of nine people who were important in his life. These are mostly people who were not noted outside of the lives of those who knew them, but it does include a couple of famous names – Edward Garnett and Arthur Machen. But the best chapter is certainly, to my my mind, the one where he writes about Amy Carr – an old, kind, helpless lady he knew, forever anxious about others, besotted with Shakespeare, writing poor poetry, and in turmoil over whether or not she could believe in God. His portrait of her is affectionate and true, showing an intimate friendship, and its waning – through to her sad end in increasingly small rented rooms, and her death. It is a beautiful, poignant chapter – and the book is worth the read just for this handful of pages.

Amy Carr unfailingly gave me courage when I most needed it; she made me see the intrinsic value of such uncelebrated lives as hers; she was a pure artist who kept her vision; she was the pure in heart. And if, at the end, above the Atlantic Ocean, falling and restlessly swaying beyond the Cassiterides, she was not given the Light of the Glory of God, then life does not makes sense and our eyes were given us for nothing. But I will believe that she was thus rewarded.

Whoo. *Wipes eyes* *Continues*.

As a thread through these portraits, we also see Baker’s life and career – at least at first. This trajectory becomes a bit looser as the book continues, and it’s perhaps not a coincidence that the strongest chapters are towards the beginning. And I had to jot down this description of Alfred Rose (topic of the third section, and somebody Baker knew through his religious education):

Looked like the Devil… yes; he did. His big bent nose flared to sensuous nostrils, like the nostrils of one of the darker people in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment; a quiff of greying black hair sprang up, Mephistophelean fashion, from his balding pate; hair coiled over his knuckles; his lips were tight and thin, the upper jaw prominent; his black and grey morning clothes with the shining polished black shoes were like a Civil Service camouflage, concealing hooves and little black batlike wings. I often imagined I could see Dionysiac horns prodding out from just behind his ears, which were large. But the most satanic thing about him was his voice: deep and soft, with an insidious sibilance, the unmistakable serpent song. And perhaps it was this which really charmed, for I never liked his appearance, yet charmed I certainly was.

This is not very like Miss Hargreaves, but it is similar to much of his other fiction – though stronger and more successful, somehow, in non-fiction. It gives you a taste of his writing style – whirling, seeing beyond the obvious, slightly obfuscatory. Curiously, for the autobiography of a writer, he never feels quite at ease writing about his writing. He was an actor during WW2, touring with Sybil Thorndike amongst others, and seems much more comfortable writing about this stage – but when it comes to his novels, he only really writes about the first one. I haven’t read The Twisted Tree, though I have it on my shelf (mais naturallement), and we see quite a lot of his drafting and re-drafting it – and one of the most successful chapters is the one focused on Edward Garnett, already famous as a writer and editor who had brought D.H. Lawrence to prominence. Mutual friends had invited Garnett and Baker to stay, and it was important that Baker didn’t let on his own writing ambitions – wanting a friendship to develop naturally, so that Garnett wouldn’t feel that he was being taken advantage of. It’s the funniest section, and paints Garnett as the most realistic sort of grotesque.

Otherwise, in terms of his own writing, there is a list of characters (only given because he is discussing Dickens’ influence on him), and the odd mention that he is working on a particular novel. The process of writing Miss Hargreaves is not described; the novel is only mentioned in passing a couple of times, chiefly as a financial success, and he admits that he is sick of it. A shame, for I would have dearly loved any context to its creation.

But it isn’t just Miss Hargreaves who gets very few moments in this book – Baker’s wife and children are scarcely mentioned either. He sometimes dates things by when his marriage took place, and drops in the occasional reference to his children, but he doesn’t describe his courtship or wedding, nor do any of these people seem to be much of a presence in Baker’s life at any point.

Indeed, Baker remains rather an enigma. Sometimes we hear almost uncomfortably personal discussions – he writes a lot about masturbation, unexpectedly, and the guilty it caused him as a teenager; he discusses homosexuality in a way that feels a bit like he is describing his own experiences, but never quite gets there. His views on priests and schoolteachers spending time intimately (though not more than that) with young boys are pretty odd, if not autobiographical. Most unexpectedly, when working as a secretary at a boys’ school, ‘I found myself sacked for a crime I had not only never committed but of whose nature I was totally ignorant. Sodomy’. And then he will turn to another description of somebody he knew, or their way of experiencing the world, and retreats into the shadows.

So, as an autobiography, it is curious – and leaves the reader curious. It was done in exactly the way he wanted it, and not the way anybody else might have asked. He has certainly followed but himself in its crafting. But it is worth it for the chapters on Amy Carr and Edward Garnett alone – I have the feeling I will often return to those. The rest is a bonus.

 

Bloomsbury by Quentin Bell #1968Club

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The first book I finished for the 1968 Club was a book that is very much not about the 1960s – Bloomsbury by Quentin Bell, which looks back at the lore of the Bloomsbury Group. And he does this in something under 100 pages, rather bravely. But he is almost uniquely qualified to do so – being Vanessa Bell’s son, and thus Virginia Woolf’s nephew. (Incidentally, I’ve realised that much of my reading for the 1968 Club has been non-fiction looking back at earlier decades of the twentieth century. Whether that says more about me or about 1968, who knows…)

It’s clear that this isn’t an exhaustive biography of all members of the Bloomsbury Group – I’m going to assume you know what that is; in brief, it was the artistic and literary (and, er, economic) elite living in Bloomsbury, many of whom were related or had liaisons. But Quentin Bell quietly rails against the ways in which the group is depicted – which hasn’t really abated since 1968. As he points out, there was never such a thing as a homogeneous Bloomsbury Group – he even draws out a map/diagram of who was in the inner circle at which time. And he isn’t interested in gossip:

I am not required nor am I inclined to act as Clio’s chambermaid, to sniff into commodes or under beds, to open love-letters or to scrutinise diaries. On the present occasion I shall leave Bloomsbury linen, whether clean or dirty, unaired.

He sounds quite defensive, and indeed he is. He argues that Bloomsbury ‘has been criticised from a bewilderingly large number of points of view’, and he spends much of the first chapter defending them against accusations of elitism or taste that was too backward-looking or too biased. As he points out, with some examples, there was no unified taste or point of view from Bloomsbury. Intriguingly, he dwells for a while on what D.H. Lawrence thought of them all, tracing the individual relationships and commentaries that Lawrence made – challenging the idea that he hated them collectively. If it comes from a place of defensiveness, it is nevertheless well collated and argued.

Thus it is rather a surprise to come across, on p.61 of around ninety pages, ‘Nevertheless I think that the mistrust and dislike of Bloomsbury was very understandable.’ As a tangential outsider/insider, he can look back from 1968 and play roles on both sides of the courtroom. He puts it well with a comparison to an aristocratic family from Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day:

The Hilberrys are very sympathetic, despite their virtues, not simply because they have money and privilege but because they assume that they will, in the natural course of things, play a leading role in the cultural life of England. Members of Bloomsbury were accused of arrogance, of intellectual snobbery. But it was worse than that; they did not need to be arrogant; they could afford not to be snobbish.

He notes that his appearance on the scene of the Bloomsbury Group was towards its end, and he briefly describes how it disintegrated – his word – in a section that I wish could have been much longer. Perhaps the ends of such things are always harder to describe than their beginnings, if they do just slowly disintegrate – ending, appropriately enough, not with a bang but a whimper. The way that Bell describes it is the book’s most beautiful sentence:

The nineteen-twenties made it and broke it; it was then that it soared, burst in lazy scintillating splendour and slowly expired in still glowing fragments.

As I’ve mentioned, Bloomsbury is very short – only 89 pages of written text, though also a lot of extra sections of photos. These include some Vanessa Bell cover designs I haven’t seen before (though, frustratingly, in black and white) and his access to archives is certainly enviable.

Altogether, I could have wished Bloomsbury a bit longer, and maybe organised a bit more intuitively – but it’s a valuable part of a large puzzle that we lovers of the 1920s and ’30s are likely to be fascinated with forever.