1970s

A couple of #ABookADayInMay disappointments

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Inevitably, not every book in A Book A Day in May is going to be a success. The past couple of days have both been novellas that are gonna go straight to a charity shop (unless someone from the UK would like me to post to you – in which case, let me know). (You might not want to when you’ve read the reviews.)

The Cheval Glass (1973) by Ursula Bloom

When I read Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex – one of Bloom’s pseudonyms, and now in the British Library Women Writers series – I was amazed that a book so enjoyable and well-crafted could be written by an author of 500+ novels. How could one maintain that level of quantity AND quality? Well, I’ve long suspected that she saved her best work for the ‘Mary Essex’ name – and The Cheval Glass suggests that might be the case. It’s the first fiction I’ve read under her own name, and it’s pretty bad.

Pearl is a young girl living in a family’s ancestral home. Her mother Mary was taken very ill during childbirth and becomes an invalid, having to stay in bed most of the time – so Pearl entertains herself by rambling around the large house and its attics, inventing friends to play with. More on that later.

While Mary is ill, her husband (James) falls in love with Hilary, an artist who has rented a house in the village. This happens entirely off the page. We no sooner encounter her than this love is taken as read. Curiously (in one of several signs of terrible editing), we hear about the meeting twice. We also hear, twice, about Mary getting terminal cancer. Quite how that relates to difficult childbirth, I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s the sort of novel where people decide to Honourably Do The Right Thing and then tell each other about it thoroughly unnatural dialogue. Here’s James, speaking to Hilary…

In a low voice he said, “I could never part with you, Hilary. This love has come to pass and is for ever. When the hour comes and she goes,” he choked a trigle uneasily, for it hurt him, “when the hour is here, we will marry after a reasonable waiting period, and the neighbourhood will think that we became so accustomed to each other during her illness that this automatically ensued. They will accept it as being that.”

Alongside all of this is the significance of the cheval glass. It has been in the family for generations – and, in it, Pearl starts to see one of her ancestors from generations ago. Here she is, telling Hilary about it:

“There is a lady here,” she whispered, complacemently and calmly. “Another lady,” she said, as though this was merely a piece of information which she accepted as being true. No more.

“Another lady?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In the glass,” said the child, and stared up at her with a curious look in her eyes. She went on more slowly. “It is so very difficult to tell anybody who is grown-up, but she lives here. She does not always come when I want her. But most times. She is here.”

It’s a promising premise, but Bloom does very little about it. Everybody more or less immediately accepts that the mirror is a portal to the past, and ‘the lady’ (always in inverted commas) doesn’t seem to have anything more pressing to pass on than vague relationship advice to Hilary. Poor Pearl seems to disappear from the novel after the first half, having been seemingly its heroine, and The Cheval Glass becomes about Hilary’s rather tedious love triangle/square.

It’s a very weak novel, and shows clear signs of having been written at speed without any editing. Every sentence is clunky, and I found it rather a chore to get through. From now on, I think I’ll stick to Bloom when she appears as Mary Essex. Such a shame, since the cover is so striking.

The Grasshoppers Come (1931) by David Garnett

This one isn’t bad so much as it is not my taste. From the title, I thought it would be about nature – and that is how things start, with a three-page description of the heat and the ‘stridulations’ of grasshoppers:

As each day of the early summer passed, the sun grew hotter, the fine windless weather more settled, and the stridulation noisier, more incessant, and the little whirlpools, which seemed to catch up the flying insects over the reeds, larger and more powerful, holding them up longer in flight.

But then it becomes clear that it’s other flying things that are going to take centre stage – for this is also an aerodrome. Garnett cleverly describes the planes in similar manner:

Round and round they flew, some higher up wandering off a little way over the surrounding country, others lower down, and these lower machines were continually shutting off their engines and gliding almost silently in to land, dropping their tails as they settled down and bounced upon the earth, when, after a short run, they stopped until suddenly the engine was opened up again, and they would roar across the grass into the eye of the wind and fly away.

From here, it becomes a novella about life at an air base and descriptions of flying, with a variety of pilots I struggled to tell apart except one of them is a woman (in an era where all female pilots seemed to be celebrities). I suppose, in 1931, reading about flying was quite thrilling. I found it all a little tepid.

The Grasshoppers Come then gets into adventure mode, I think, with all manner of challenges and obstacles to the flying. Towards the end someone is stranded after a crash and has to survive of the self-same grasshoppers of the title, and I found this section the most compelling – perhaps because it didn’t rely on flying as inherently interesting.

So, there we go. Two more novellas off the shelf and off to a charity shop!

What’s For Dinner? by James Schuyler

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I wrote on Instagram that What’s For Dinner? (1978) was ‘like Ivy Compton-Burnett’s characters leapt forward a century and took to drinking cooking sherry’ and I’m half-tempted to leave my post simply at that. But perhaps I’d better say more.

James Schuyler first crossed my radar as a chance purchase in Hay-on-Wye – I bought, read, and loved his novel Alfred and Guinevere, which is the most realistic portrayal of the way children speak that I’ve ever read. What’s For Dinner? is also chiefly concerned with how people speak – and you hope that it’s not realistic, though it probably is.

The novel opens with a dinner party. Norris and Lottie Taylor have reached the stage of marriage where they ignore and rile each other with equanimity, neither of them discontented and neither of them particularly happy at where life has left them. Coming to visit is the Delehantey family – Bryan and Maureen, their twin teenage sons Nick and Michael, and Bryan’s mother Biddy. They are a ramble of chaos by comparison, proud of their old-fashioned values – which mostly take the form of Bruce being dominant and forever quashing any sign of life from his son, Maureen being houseproud and judgemental, and Biddy sassing them all. (It’s hard not to love Biddy, for all her complaining and martyr complex – she’s one of the few characters unafraid to be exactly herself.)

From the opening pages, we know this is going to be an unsettling but fun journey. The set-up might be quintessentially American Dream of well-off neighbours being neighbourly over apple pie, but everything is always slightly at odds with everything else. The hosting couple bicker while not really listening to each other. The visiting family don’t really want to be there. Nobody hates anybody else, but everybody is mutely exasperated by everyone else.

One of the reason this novel made me think of Ivy Compton-Burnett is how heavily dialogue is used. Here is a section, which also shows Schuyler’s brilliant way of weaving together clichés, antagonisms, banalities, and the disconnect when interlocutors all want to talk about something different:

“Competitive sports,” Bryan said, “make a man of a boy. They prepare him for later life, for the give and take and the hurley-burley.”

“You might say, they sort the men from the boys,” Norris said.

“Do you mean that?” Bryan asked, “or is that one of your sarcasms?”

“It could be both,” Norris said. “I wasn’t much of an athlete, so I have to stick up for the underdog.”

“You ought to take up golf.”

“As the saying goes, thanks but no thanks.”

“Norris always looks trim,” Mag said. “Do you go in for any particular exercise?”

“Just a little gardening. A very little gardening.”

“I thought you had a yardman,” Maureen said, “who came in and did that.”

“We do. But Lottie doesn’t trust him around the roses. No more do I, for the matter of that.”

“Roses,” Biddy said, “the queen of flowers.” She shook out the crocheted maroon throw, so all could see it. “Isn’t this just the color of an American Beauty?” It wasn’t, but if anyone knew it, no one said it.

If a lot of the character work is done through conversation, then it’s bits like those final words that really sold me on What’s For Dinner? – ‘It wasn’t, but if anyone knew it, no one side it’. I love it when an author undercuts his cast, gently ridiculing their pretensions and falsities.

The dinner scene goes on for so long that I wondered if it would be a one-scene novel. But no. We get a clue where What’s For Dinner? might go when Lottie takes a break from socialising to go to the kitchen – and down some wine.

When the second part of the novel begins, Lottie is living in a residential home for alcoholics, trying to be cured. We’re introduced to a wide array of patients and their visiting spouses and families, variously bitter, over-enthusiastic, withdrawn, and brash. The same dialogue-heavy approach continues, but now the characters are even more unhinged and unlikely to speak with anything resembling logic.

Group was in session, and Dr Kearney looked bored. “All right, Bertha,” he said, “you’ve made yourself the center of attention long enough. We’ve all heard your stories of marijuana, music and LSD. You’ve convinced us that you were a real swinger, and you swung yourself right in here.”

“You never talk about your problems, I’ve noticed,” Lottie said, “the things behind your actions. That might be more interesting and helpful. To all of us, not just yourself.”

“My only problem,” Bertha said, “is that I have a family. They’re nice, but they bug me.”

“Bug you?” Mrs. Brice said.

“They let me do anything I want, but all the time I can tell they secretly disapprove. They don’t know what to make of me , but I know what to make of them. Spineless. Nice, but spineless.”

“We haven’t heard much from you, Mrs Judson,” Dr Kearney said.

“I never did talk much,” Mrs. Judson said.

“That’s true,” Sam Judson said. “Ethel was never much of a talker. She shows her feelings in other ways.”

“In other ways?” Norris said. “I’d be interested to hear an example.”

I wondered if Schuyler would be able to sustain the brilliance of his tone with this wider cast and more serious topic, but I needn’t have worried. If there was something particularly excellent about the brittle tension of a dinner party, then there is something equally exhilarating about seeing Schuyler rope more people into the madness. We lose the subtext of a dinner table representing so much more – but he handles both small-scale and crowd dazzlingly. In fact, the only dud note in the novel comes in the scenes of teenagers – either the twin boys together or when we see them with a wider gang. The dialogue doesn’t ring at all true, and let’s just say he falls into a common trap with twins that I complained about the other day. It’s curious, considering how good he can be at conversation between younger children.

Schuyler is apparently best known as a poet. From reading his prose, I really couldn’t guess what his poetry would be like. It seems he only wrote three novels, the third being A Nest of Ninnies, co-authored with fellow-poet John Ashbery. I’m quite sad to have nearly come to the end of his novelistic output, because he is such a lively and piercing writer of prose – but perhaps I should give the poetry a go.

A Bird in the House by Margaret Laurence

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Regular visitors to StuckinaBook will know how much I adore Margaret Laurence, and particularly here Manawaka sequence of novels. They have a little overlap, though can be read independently – and it includes some of the best novels I’ve read in recent years, particularly A Jest of God. The only one of the five I hadn’t read was the penultimate in the sequence, A Bird in the House (1970), and is the only one that’s not really a novel: it’s a series of linked stories about a young girl called Vanessa.

Through her eyes, steadily growing up over the course of the stories, we see a family tied together and falling apart. She is loyally close to her father and sporadically close to her mother; a little brother is born in one story; she fears some grandparents and adores others. The patterns and habits of her family are all she knows, and she details them with the interest of an anthropologist and the familiarity of a constant observer.

The world is a kaleidoscope of people and philosophies, and Vanessa is gradually working out who she is and what she stands for. But it is a curious blend of perspectives – because it is not really through the eyes of eight-year-old Vanessa, but 40-year-old Vanessa looking back. The naivety and newness of everything is layered with the reflections of a middle-aged woman remembering them.

This blend comes most to the fore in the way Aunt Edna is depicted. She is unmarried, looking after Vanessa’s cantankerous grandfather but also dependent on him. As a child, Vanessa loves and admires Edna, accepting her role as an inevitable part of the fabric of her life. But the older Vanessa clearly feels a whole range of emotions to Edna – pities her position, hopes for her, admires her spirit, recognises the limits on it. As a narrator, she is rather older than this spinster aunt – who, to young Vanessa, of course seems old. Through the stories, Laurence masterly weaves these complexities. The last line of this paragraph is brilliant, and quintessentially Laurence:

If someone coming to the Brick House for the first time chance to light a cigarette when Grandfather was home, he gave them one chance and that was all. His warning was straightforward. He would walk to the front door, fling it open, and begin coughing. He would then say, “Smoky in here, ain’t it?” If this had no effect, he told the visitor to get out, and no two ways about it. Aunt Edna once asked me to guess how many boyfriends she had lost that way, and when I said “I give up – how many?” she said “Five, and that’s the gospel truth.” At the time I imagined, because she was laughing, that she thought it was funny.”

Another instance of her lovely turns of phrase comes in a story about Piquette Tonnerres – a character and family overlapping intriguingly with one of the major families in the next book in the Manawaka sequence, The Diviners: “I could not reach Piquette at all, and I soon lost interest in trying. But all that summer she remained as both a reproach and a mystery to me.”

Each story was published separately and can be read separately – so we see Vanessa grow up, but we are also reintroduced to the family each time. Impressively, it doesn’t feel repetitive or annoying to read so many introductions in sequence – it feels, rather, like a fresh development on each character whenever we meet them again.

I think the stories I liked most were the ones about particular people who come briefly onto the scene. The one about Piquette, ‘The Loons’, is a good example. Another is ‘The Half-Husky’, about a local boy who torments her pet dog (which is quite hard to read). Laurence is too sophisticated to give her stories a neat message, but we are pulled towards moral conclusions that never quite coalesce. Vanessa is clearly learning, though doesn’t come to any finalities. Rather, these stories show us experiences and wonderings and leave behind an impression of beauty and brutality intertwined. Nothing is sentimental in these stories, but somehow they are touching. Adult Vanessa clearly has a mix of nostalgia and sadness about her childhood – not least because of a tragedy that happens almost incidentally in one chapter, then spreads out like dye in water throughout the others.

Laurence is at her best, I think, when she can really lean into the development of a character and examine every aspect of their emotional life. It’s why A Jest of God remains her masterpiece, in my eyes. But A Bird in the House is excellent too – beautiful writing, extraordinary knowledge of human character, and moments that will certainly remain in my mind. Now I’ve finished the Manawaka sequence, the only real question is when I’ll go back and read them all again.

The House by the Sea by May Sarton

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There is always something rather fun about spontaneously choosing a book to read next. You can forget the urgent pile of books that should logically be the next on the list and go, instead, for something that absolutely meets the mood of the moment. And so it was the other night when I was walking along my bookcases, pulling off various titles and deciding they weren’t quite right, that I decided to read Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. Until I got to the ‘S’ section of my autobiographies/biographies bookcases and discovered that… apparently I didn’t own it. But I did have a later volume, The House by the Sea (1977) and so I chose that instead.

The journal takes place a couple of years after she has moved to the house of the title. The previous house saw an extremely difficult and sad period of her life – she doesn’t go into detail about this, and I assume it is the topic of earlier journals.

If there is one irresistible piece of magic here among many others, it is the slightly curving path down to the sea that begins in flagstones on the lawn, cuts through two huge junipers, and proceeds, winding its way down to Surf Point, through the wood lilies in June, to tall grasses in summer, the goldenrod and asters in September, leading the eye on, creating the atmosphere of a fairy tale, something open yet mysterious that every single person who comes here is led to explore.

I am drawn to any fiction or non-fiction about houses, and Sarton certainly gives us a sense of the idyllic remoteness of this home. She is still in touch with the world, still travelling for lecture series and communicating with a wide number of friends, but has this place to retreat to. But the beautiful place is not treated like a fairytale escape. In this volume, Sarton details her anxieties – about ailing friends, about her legacy, and often about the encroaching signs of old age.

Growing old… what is the opposite of ‘growing’? I ask myself. ‘Withering’ perhaps? It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it. 

Sarton was only in her early 60s when she wrote the journal, and would live for another two decades, but she writes often about her fears of losing faculties – and, more than once, worries about falling and not being found. This is a precise honesty to the way she writes about fears that so many people must have, particularly if they live alone. It is not written with self-indulgence or false attempts to cheer herself up – rather, she documents her experiences and reflections with the emotion of a memoirist and the rigour of a historian.

But this is not a sad book by any means. The reflections are often more content, and nowhere more enjoyable than when Sarton is writing about the natural world around her. I loved this beautiful paragraph on snowfall:

I woke late … it was nearly seven when Tamas began licking his paws, his gentle way of saying, “It’s time to get up.” I woke to a world thickly enclosed in walls of big-flaked snow falling very fast. Now it is thinner, there is more wind, and it looks as though for the first time in this house I’m to be snowed in for the day. How exciting and moving that is, the exact opposite of an outgoing adventure or expedition! Here the excitement is to be suddenly a self-reliant prisoner, and what opens out is the inner world, the timeless world when my compulsion to go out and get the mail at eleven must be forgotten. How beautiful the white field is in its blur of falling snow, with the delicate black pencil strokes of trees and bushes seen through it! And, of course, the silence, the snow silence, becomes hypnotic if one stops to listen.

Sarton makes clear that she was writing the journal for publication, and so it doesn’t feel intrusive to read her day-by-day experiences. I’ve only read her novels before, and have now built up a much closer portrait of their author. She can be cross, particularly with fans who arrive at her door without warning and disrupt her day. She can go to great lengths to do kindnesses for others, and think little of it. She warmly appreciates the fine work of other artists and writers, and feels guilt when she has to censure any work that is sent to her – and values creativity too highly to ever lie or even prevaricate.

I really warmed to Sarton, and I loved reading The House by the Sea. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it on my favourite reads of 2023. She generously invites the reader into a fully realised world, without artifice or exaggeration, and I think it is that thorough reality that makes the book so beautiful to read. It felt like time spent with a friend.

Novella a Day in May: Days 28 and 29

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Day 28: Sleepless Nights (1979) by Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Hardwick is one of those authors who has been published both as Virago Modern Classic and a NYRB Classic, and there can few greater accolades (other than being a British Library Women Writers author, am I right??) I bought Sleepless Nights back in 2009, and have a couple other books by Hardwick on my shelf, but have yet to read any.

In this novella, a woman looks back on her life – a jumble of recollections and reflections.

It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading now. Every morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread with its pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds. How nice it is – this production of a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home. The niceness and the squalor and sorrow in an apathetic battle – that is what I see. More beautiful is the table with the telephone, the books and magazines, the Times at the door, the birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street.

That is the opening paragraph, and gives an indication of Hardwick’s striking, rather brilliant prose. And I don’t have a lot to say about Sleepless Nights, because my experience of it was finding her writing absolutely sumptuous and wonderful, and seldom having any idea what was going on. Names would recur, but I was unable to attach much by way of character to them. There is a lovely few pages on Billie Holiday, who is the only name I can remember, a day after reading the novella.

But, nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it. Because each sentence is a little masterpiece. It was like relishing a series of beautiful brushstrokes, but seeing them as abstract mini-artworks, rather than cohering into a single portrait. I daresay that is partly that ‘transformed and even distorted memory’, but mainly because of me. I find I am less and less able to put together a novel told in this abstract way, where beauty is prioritised over clarity. But, as I say, that didn’t stop me enjoying and admiring it. Just probably not quite the way that was intended.

To finish on Hardwick, here’s another quote I noted down:

“Shame is inventive,” Nietzsche said. And that is scarcely the half of it. From shame I have paid attention to clothes, shoes, rings, watches, accents, teeth, points of deportment, turns of speech. The men on the train are wearing clothes which, made for no season, are therefore always unseasonable and contradictory. They are harsh and flimsy, loud and yet lightweight, fashioned with the inappropriateness that is the ruling idea of the year-round. pastels blue as the sea and green as the land; jackets lined with paisley and plaid; seams outlined with wide stitches of another color; revers and pockets outsize; predominance of chilly blue and two-tones; nylon and Dacron in the as-smooth-as-glass finish of the permanently pressed.

Day 29: The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman (2005) by Denis Thériault

What a perfect little novella The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman is. Translated from French by Liedewy Hawke, Thériault’s book is a perfect use of the form – using the slim space to somehow make something with a beauty that depends on delicacy and brevity.

Bilodo is a postman in his late-20s, and perfectly happy. ‘He wouldn’t have wanted to swap places with anyone in the world. Except perhaps with another postman.’ He doesn’t have a girlfriend and doesn’t have many close friends. When he is not delivering letters up and down the many, many steps of the tall buildings on rue des Hêtres, he mostly spends his time in his small apartment, playing videogames and ignoring the attempts of a colleague to find him a girl.

But he does have one illicit pastime:

Among the thousands of soulless pieces of paper he delivered on his rounds, he occasionally came across a personal letter – a less and less common items in this era of email, and all the more fascinating for being so rare. When that happened, Bilodo felt as excited as a prospector spotting a gold nugget in his pan. He did not deliver that letter. Not right away. He took it home and steamed it open. That’s what kept him so busy at night in the privacy of his apartment.

And, one day, one of the envelopes he steams open only includes this:

Under clear water
the newborn baby
swims like a playful otter

He discovers that a woman in Guadalupe, Ségolène, is exchanging haikus with a man on Bilodo’s postal route, Grandpré. Of course, Bilodo can only read Ségolène’s side of the exchange – but he grows obsessed with her, with the haiku form, with this curious relationship that expresses itself solely, and slowly, through the exchange of written verse.

I don’t want to spoil more of the novella, which only comes in at 108 pages, but Bilodo gets much more involved in the correspondence. And the end of The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman is unexpected, brilliant, and curiously beautiful. I gasped, and yet it is the sort of denouement that confirms the beauty of what has gone before.

This is the second novella I’ve read this May about someone discovering a stranger’s personality through their verse, and I think does it more subtly. I’m so impressed by Hawke’s ability to translate the Haikus in a way that, I assume, keeps both their original meaning and the feel. Because the feel is the most important part. And the feel of the whole novella is lovely – precise, delicate, poignant.

The Home by Penelope Mortimer (Novella a Day in May #26)

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THE HOME | Penelope MortimerLook, yes, I’m cheating again – The Home (1971) isn’t a novella, since it’s 230 pages, but I had a bit more time to read today, and I thought I’d spend it here. And I’m so glad I did – The Home is brilliant (and, indeed, rather better IMO than the other Mortimer I read earlier in May, My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof).

The home of the title is the one that Eleanor Strathearn moves to after leaving her husband Graham – because of his affair with a younger woman, also called Eleanor though known as Nell. He has bought her the house, under some sufferance, and she has taken almost all the furniture. She goes with their youngest son, Philip (15) – they have four other children, adults living lives of careful detachment from their parents.

The course of the novel follows the aftermath of this split, and brings in their respective mothers too. Mortimer is brilliant at combining different permutations of the family and showing the dynamics that emerge – sometimes confiding, sometimes awkward, usually fraught in some way.

What I loved most about The Home is the tone of voice. Mortimer is drily funny and quite odd, and fans of Muriel Spark or Beryl Bainbridge will find a lot to enjoy. Her descriptions of people are always slightly off-kilter and wonderful. Here is Eleanor’s mother, Mrs Bennet:

While not exactly believing in God – the prospect was a little ridiculous – she was devoted to death, regarding it as the cure for all evils, by which she meant life. However, she remained indomitably alive. Other elderly ladies – at the time of the break-up she was eighty-two – suffered from fluttering hearts, poor eyesight, deafness, arthritis. Mrs Bennet was healthier than she had been at eighteen, and as much in command of her faculties. She also grew more knowledgeable every year, and was now far better informed about politics, the arts, drug addiction, space travel, sexual permissiveness and other topics of absolutely no use to her than her husband, a gentleman farmer and Justice of the Peace, had ever been.

There is a cynicism about romance and relationships throughout The Home – one character says, “Whoever heard of a happily married couple in 1971?” – but there is also a sort of hope that is as indomitably alive as Mrs Bennet. Or at least a triumph of hope over experience. Everybody wants slightly different things, and knowingly damages and disregards the people around them in pursuit of these things – but doing so, at the same time, with genuine love and care. It is all excellently observed.

I don’t know The Home is less well-known than some of Mortimer’s other books. It probably isn’t quite the exhilarating tour de force of The Pumpkin Eater, but it is certainly recognisable as the same brilliant authorial mind. I loved it.

Novella a Day in May: Days 16 and 17

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Day 16: Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes (1987) by Per Petterson

TAshes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Amazon.co.uk: Petterson, Per, Bartlett, Don: 9781846553707: Bookshis 1987 book was translated from Norwegian by Don Bartlett in 2013, which is when I think I got it as a review copy. Well, here I am, almost a decade later I’ve read all 118 pages of it. There seems to be some disagreement about whether this is a novella or a series of short stories – it’s kind of both, in the way that Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book is. Arvid Jansen is an eight-year-old boy in the 1960s, living with his family on the outskirts of Oslo, with a scathing older sister, a worrying mother, and a father who never stops speaking about ‘before the war’. There is also a grandfather, who dies in one of the first chapters/stories – a brilliant portrait of a young child’s mingled grief and indifference, scared of things changing but not really in mourning, and trying with inadequate words to convey all he is experiencing but not really comprehending.

Petterson is very good at giving the child’s point of view – it has that matter-of-factness, and at the same time building an understanding of the world. Here is Arvid thinking about his mother, and about ageing:

She’d looked the way she always had for as far back as he could remember, and she still did right up until the day he happened to see a photograph of her from before he was born, and the difference floored him. He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions. The palms of his hands were quivering and he tried to resist time and hold it back. But nothing helped, and with every pop he felt himself getting older.

Some of the dangers in Jansen’s world are philosophical and abstract, like this. But there is also malice in his world. There are bullies, there is the animosity between his father and his uncle, and his father’s drunken sadness. Petterson combines the contemplative with the unsettling.

Apparently Arvid Jansen appears in quite a few Petterson works, usually rather older than this boy. I haven’t read any of those, but now I’ve met Arvid as a child, I’d be intrigued to encounter him as an adult.

Day 17: The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath (1978) by Dodie Smith

the girl from the candle-lit bath dodie smith 1978 001This was Dodie Smith’s last novel, written when she was in her 80s, and it is quite a departure from her earlier work. While I Capture the Castle might feature the heroine in a bath when she first encounters the hero, nobody would describe Smith’s most famous work as a thriller. And that is what The Girl from the Candle-Lit Bath is at least trying to be.

Nan is fairly recently married to an MP, and is worried that he is having an affair – she has spotted him handing a parcel to a shadowy stranger, and he is being coy about where he’s been. We never really get to know him, and even Nan doesn’t seem to particularly like him, but such is the start of the plot. In the first few pages she meets a taxi driver, after twisting her ankle and needing a lift, and he begins to talk to her about the possibility that her husband is hiding something even more significant.

The novella is told through a series of ‘tapes’, as Nan decides to record herself speaking, as a way to think things through. It’s an interesting device that felt a bit like a 1970s update of the 18th- or 19th-century heroine who had to commit all her thoughts to letters, no matter how precarious the situation.

And the title? Nan is famed from a TV advert, before she later made a success in television.

It began with something quite idiotic. I did a very well-paid commercial, advertising a soap first made back in the eighteen-nineties. They copied a wonderful bathroom in some old country house, with a marble bath, gleaming silver plumbing and all sorts of elaborate details, and they lit it only by candle-light. I came on in an exquisite negligée, took it off and stepped into the bath, but owing to the dim lighting, clever cutting and various tricks, I was never seen quite nude, even though the bath water was clear and not a bubble bath. Again and again I was almost seen but always something – usually the soap, in a silver soap dish – got in the way. The commercial was a great success and I became known as ‘The Girl in the Candle-lit Bath’ and got quite a large fan mail.

Her husband allows (!) her to start acting again, and the part of this novella I most enjoyed were her experiences re-entering the theatre as an understudy. At the same time this novella was published, Smith published the second volume of her memoirs – which, if memory serves, looked at the period of her own life when she was trying to make it as an actress. Smith is clearly at home in this world.

Where she is less at home is the thriller – the story suddenly takes a leap for the more dramatic, after a relatively promising start, and we are lost in a sea of chases and espionage and peril. It’s not at all convincing, and mostly feels very silly. I’d read Barb’s and Jane’s very unflattering reviews, and at least forewarned is forearmed. I quite enjoyed the first half, which have elements of Smith’s delicious humour (“Anyway, they hated the idea of the public tramping over beautiful old houses, which should be private, part of their owners’ private lives. If the Slepes ever acquire a private life they’ll be bitterly disappointed”) but the second half is too absurd and unsuccessful to make this a book worth seeking out.

Journey Through A Small Planet by Emanuel Litvinoff (Novella a Day in May #4)

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Journey Through a Small PlanetOops, I keep cheating on this novella challenge – though today’s cheating was accidental, since I was about 30 pages into Journey Through A Small Planet (1972) by Emanuel Litvinoff when I realised it was an autobiography. Simply from seeing it on the shelf, I had assumed it was a sci-fi novella – though that in itself would have been a surprise, being worlds away from The Lost Europeans, my (brilliant) previous experience with this writer.

Instead, we are taken to the East End of London in the years after the First World War. Emanuel is the son of working-class Jewish immigrants from Russia, living in a community that shares his poverty and his ethnicity. I won’t say faith, because Emanuel determines relatively early in childhood that he doesn’t want to follow the Jewish religion, though of course he remains Jewish. And in the eyes of many people at his school and, later, his first places of employment, he is still Russian. Even though he has never been there. Sadly, recent political decisions in this country show that British-born children of immigrants don’t today have much more certainty that their nationality will be respected…

I found the writing in The Lost Europeans captivatingly beautiful. In Journey Through A Small Planet, the prose is much more understated – Litvinoff is more interested in translating the perceptions of his childhood than in framing it elegantly. We see how he is bullied and ostracised at school, both by pupils and teachers – on the first day, his form teacher makes much of his ‘foreign’ surname, and sets the trend for the way Emanuel will be treated by everyone who encounters him. Despite there being a significant Jewish population in his area of London, none of his contemporaries at school seem to be Jewish – and Emanuel feels all the more alienated because he doesn’t see himself in his community either. Judaism pales in comparison to Communism in his mind. He is captivated by faintly understood tenets, and Litvinoff takes us inside the passion and in-fighting of those on the left of the spectrum in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Of course, Emanuel is also occupied with less abstract issues. There is hunger, there is lust, there is envy – all the human emotions, conveyed with all the sense of newness that everyone feels in experiencing them for the first time. Eventually he disappears from home in a way that seems very far-fetched, but presumably happens. And the autobiography – or perhaps memoir – ends almost in the middle of a scene.

Along the way, the infant Emanuel and the adult Litvinoff coalesce. The emotions are the child’s, but he blends it well with the observational power of the reflecting adult. It combines to give the memoir an authenticity that is amplified by perceptiveness. Here’s a rather lovely bit I noted about a child (otherwise a background character in the book) whose father returns from long exile:

Acquiring a father unexpectedly like that could be either horrible or marvellous for a boy. In Mendel’s case it was marvellous. You’d see the two of them walking hand in hand through the raucous streets, talking to one another as if no one else in the world existed. They went to museums, parks, art galleries, visited the Tower, climbed the Monument, inspected the Palace Guard, all things that Mr Shaffer must have dreamed of doing with his son during those long years of waste and deprivation in Russia. If the boy was happy, the man was ecstatic. I saw him one Sunday standing in the marketplace utterly dazed by the mounds of ripe fruit, barrels of shmlaz herring and pungent strings of sausages, gazing at these and the stalls flowing with coloured silks and heaped with new-smelling leather, as if the wonder of the world was spread before his feasting eyes. And the way Mendel smiled up at the tall man you’d think he was the father, not the child.

If Journey Through A Small Planet didn’t bowl me over quite as much as Litvinoff’s fiction, it impressed me in a different way. Definitely recommended – and now I’ll re-shelve it in the correct section of my library.

Love by Angela Carter – #NovNov Day 25

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It is very brave to call your novella something so broad and essential as Love – as Angela Carter did in this book from 1971 – because it necessarily seems to give a grand universality to something specific. In the case of this story, the bizarre relationships between Annabel, Lee, and Lee’s brother Buzz. (This cover isn’t the one I read – it’s one on Wikipedia that I rather love, though I’m not sure how representative it is of the novella.)

Like Magnus Mills’ Three To See The King I read yesterday, Carter writes a surreal and unnerving world – but where his is told sparely, Carter’s prose is luscious and almost ornate, even when she is describing unpleasant things. This excerpt isn’t unpleasant, but it is near the beginning of the book and seems to offer a symbolic sense of being drawn to two opposites – when she sees sun and moon simultaneously.

On her right, she saw the sun shining down on the district of terraces and crescents where she lived while, on her left, above the spires and skyscrapers of the city itself, the rising moon hung motionless in a rift of absolute night. Though one was setting while the other rose, both sun and moon gave forth an equal brilliance so the heavens contained two contrary states at once. Annabel gazed upwards, appalled to see such a dreadful rebellion of the familiar. There was nothing in her mythology to help her resolve this conflict and, all at once, she felt herself the helpless pivot of the entire universe as if sun, moon, stars and all the hosts of the sky span round upon herself, their volitionless axle.

The ‘love triangle’ isn’t quite that – Buzz is just obsessed with his brother and Annabel, who have their own overwrought and dangerous relationship. The depiction of Buzz is quite odd. He is introduced in a voluminous dark cape, and seems to live in it; the other characters call him a freak, though without being exactly clear what they mean by that.

Throughout the novel, these three tussle with love and power and violence – drawing others into their web, while also playing at some distorted version of the domestic. It’s all rather strange, like a portrait that – once you look closer – has features that can’t possibly be true, or that unnerve on examination.

This is the third or fourth Carter novel[la] I’ve read, and I certainly admire her writing. In something like Wise Children it is also a bit fey and even joyful. Love has funny moments (”It is like screwing the woman’s page of the Guardian”) and moments of neat insight (‘the false cheerfulness of five in the morning’), but overall it is not a joyful book by any means. Carter is perhaps one of those writers I recognise as great, but don’t especially relish spending time in the company of. It’s undeniably good, but leaves me with a feeling of having a bit sullied.

Two unsuccessful #1976Club reads…

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I’ll finish off my reviews for the week with a couple of 1976 books that I didn’t really like or dislike. Both had pluses and minuses, but were really just mediocre [in my opinion] and so I shan’t say too much about them. I’ll do another post before the end of the week, rounding up all the many wonderful club reviews I’ve seen.

In the Purely Pagan Sense by John Lehmann

I bought this a few years ago because of Lehmann’s connections with Leonard and Virginia Woolf – I’d already read his very bitter memoir of working with them, Thrown To The Woolfs. He spent eight years as managing director of the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, but his career covered many other literary avenues – running his own publishing house, founding periodicals, writing poetry and biography, and championing many poets. His sister was the novelist Rosamond – and In the Purely Pagan Sense was, I think, his only novel. And it is only scarcely a novel – because the first-person narrator, Jack Marlowe, is clearly more or less Lehmann himself.

As I’ve been writing afterwords for the British Library Women Writers series, about societal changes for women through the early twentieth century, it’s amazing how often I have to resist writing about sex again. It is one of the biggest shifts of the period – not so much what was happening, but what was permissible to write about. And gay sexual relationships seem to have followed a similar trajectory, though not at exactly the same time. When In the Purely Pagan Sense was published, gay sex had been officially legalised in the UK for a handful of years – but clearly Lehmann didn’t yet want to put his own name to the descriptions in this novel.

And, good lord, there is precious little else in In the Purely Pagan Sense. Essentially it is a litany, from adolescence through to his fifties, of Marlowe’s sexual conquests. He doesn’t seem ever to have encountered a man who wasn’t sexually attracted to men – and, specifically, to Marlowe himself. We don’t learn an awful lot about the many men he engages with – usually a brief physical description, particularly the size of their thighs, and whatever happened in the bed, and onto the next. There are two or three who linger for longer periods, and they were quite interesting. But otherwise it’s mostly soft porn, and it all gets a bit tedious.

This is against the backdrop of enormous events of the mid-20th century, and the blurb optimistically says ‘his pursuit of pleasure also provides an accurate and revealing picture of Europe between the wars’, but he is too preoccupied with one sort of ‘revealing’ to bother too much about any other.

Lehmann writes well, and I’m sure he could have written a psychologically much more interesting novel. This one was entertaining to turn pages, but it’s going to a charity shop.

Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley

This biography was the eleventh book published by Persephone Books – and it’s curious that, so early in their publishing history, they issued a book that is such an outlier to their usual output. Being by a man, about a man, quite late in the century, and a biography, it is a Persephone minority in many ways. So surely it must be brilliant? Erm…

I don’t know how well know Grenfell is as a war poet. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him mentioned out of the context of this biography – and I didn’t see much of him as a poet within it. As the Persephone site says, ‘so much of it is about his mother’, Ettie. There is far, far more about her – her passions and assignations – than it is about Julian, who only really comes into his own in the final hundred pages of this 400-page book. And when he does, he seems truly awful – relishing war, and seeming to think it universal that people would quite enjoy killing.

Of course, there’s no problem with writing a biography of an unpleasant person, or even several unpleasant people. But I found the whole book a curious mix of good writing and total clumsiness. Mosely relies heavily on quoting letters and the like in full, often one after another. He doesn’t seem to have any sense of pacing or perspective, and rambles in whichever direction catches his attention. We learn almost nothing about Grenfell’s development as a writer or, truly, about him as a writer at all. It seems bizarre to call the book Julian Grenfell and have him such a cipher in the background for most of the book.

And yet, the writing is often really impressive, and I did find myself whirled along by it a lot of the time. Particularly towards the end. Here’s a section (though one where his summary of Julian’s views on war is not reflected in anything else he says):

To feel oneself within the processes of destruction and yet to love life because these are the processes out of which life continually comes – this is dangerous, because destruction can thus be encouraged. This was Ettie’s predicament: she wanted to make war holy. But then Ettie, ashamed of childish feelings, had toc all war by grandiose names; her dangerousness was in the delusion. Julian saw war for what it was – its childishness and terror – and he did not want to describe it otherwise. And so, in spite of his pleasure, he does not seem an encourager of war; pleasure did not involve approbation. That he did not seem to want to go on living was perhaps the sign of Ettie’s victory over him: the growing-up part of him had been too much alone. As a dying hero he could be a child in his mother’s arms again. But part of him would still be amused by this. He could see both the scene and himself in relation to it: this ‘he’ that saw being neither victim nor killer; but codifier; artist.

Julian Grenfell is certainly a very unusual biography, and perhaps that means it will be loved and admired by some – it’s a risky approach, because it can equally leave someone like me nonplussed. If you want something beautifully written, bewilderingly structured, and very coy on the topic of its central subject, then you might well prize Mosley’s book.

Since both books covered here are concerned with the past, neither are very reflective of what was going on in 1976. But I always think, each club year, to see how the previous years of the 20th century were considered from that vantage.

From my week’s books, I had three successes and two not-quites – I think The Doctor’s Wife by Brian Moore ended up being my favourite of the five.