Bloom

War Isn’t Wonderful by Ursula Bloom – #1961Club

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It always feels slightly like cheating to pick a club book that is really about an earlier period… but with memoir, it’s kind of inevitable, isn’t it? Ursula Bloom wrote literally hundreds of books – including some excellent, funny novels under the name Mary Essex – and plenty of those were autobiographical. War Isn’t Wonderful is her take on the Second World War, drawing on her diaries of the period. Like so many war memoirs, it is a very personal, often idiosyncratic perspective on a world-dominating event – and, to my mind, thereby much more interesting than any attempt at objective overview. (Incidentally, my copy is signed!)

It is a mix of contemporary diary entries and narrative reflections from 1961. Naturally, those 1961 summaries have a level of considered distance, and the diary entries have immediacy. It’s an intriguing mix. From 1961, Bloom of course knows how long the war will last – she also knows which triumphs and tragedies lie ahead of the diarist, and when the particular highs and lows of wartime will ebb and flow. The 1940s diarist is in the moment. She may be looking back to the shifting experiences of war, and ahead with hope, but she is mostly preoccupied with the present moment. Particularly as war continues, and privations get worse and the intolerable length of it all seems to weigh more heavily.

And, yes, I imagine the contextual sections were added because there weren’t enough diary entries, or they wouldn’t have made sense on their own. Somehow the hybrid works well, combining immediacy and the perspective of years. Still, of the two, I think the diaries were what made War Isn’t Wonderful so interesting. Who could resist a detail like this?

April 29th, 1942

To what lengths will one fall! A friend rang me up and said she knew of a small leg of mutton, and not ewe mutton either. Ewe mutton is frantic! If I went to a certain address in a certain square, rang the bell and said I came from her about some mutton, they’d give it to me. I debated over this. I had not seen a complete leg of mutton in years, and what one could do with a beautiful thing like that in the larder filled me with a thrill. In the end I went round to the address. A charming young girl came to the door. I said what I had been told and she nodded, laid a finger to her lips and said ‘You want number 63’ and shut the door hurriedly. I went off to No.63, and a much older woman came to the door; apparently she had been warned that I was on the way, for she said with some delight, ‘Have you come for your chemise?’ I said that I had, and she pushed into my arms a great fat parcel that couldn’t have been anybody’s chemise ever. When I got home I opened it and there was a really nice little leg of mutton, and with it half a pound of butter and some biscuits in a tin. My lucky day!

I think the best book about the Second World War that I’ve read is London War Notes by Mollie Panter-Downes. One of the things I most appreciated was how steadily it takes you through the mood of the city through the months and weeks of the war. It’s easy to think of the war as one amorphous whole, from so many decades away, but Panter-Downes – and Bloom – are excellent at giving you a fuller sense of the shifting emotions of the individual, and of the wider populous.

January 9th, 1944

Perhaps the worst aspect of the war is its dullness. At this time of year it is mid-breakfast before we can get any light or air into the flat, which I find impossible. When black-out time comes (so early at this period) it means hours in airless rooms or plunging about the streets which is downright dangerous. Every restaurant has a queue waiting for it. Many shops have nothing to sell.

And, alongside this, something I appreciate is how much of Bloom’s attention is occupied by things that have little to do with the war. She notes in the introduction that ‘early in the thirties […] I had been stricken with paralysing headaches which had made me almost an invalid. These headaches were wrongly diagnosed and treated as being a form of migraine, but in the early fifties they were discovered to be caused by an arterial trouble and were cured by surgical operation’.

Twenty years of paralysing headaches is horrifying to think about, and goodness knows how she managed to write so much while suffering that. I once had a few months of terrible headaches that took ages to diagnose, and I don’t think I achieved much of anything during that time. Anyway, there are many diary entries where her headaches are all she can write about. Because, of course, intense pain in your own body is more immediate, more real, than news of any number of bombings – even if they are only a few streets away. It helps bring home how life continues – for better or worse – in the midst of any national or global crisis.

Another preoccupation is housing. Yes, there is the wartime-specific experience of having your home destroyed by bombing – but Bloom spends more time on the purchase, and instant regret about purchasing, a countryside cottage. Again, it could happen at any time and has little to do with war. But it is still paramount in her mind. In other writers’ hands, it could have been very funny – think Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House. Bloom can certainly be wryly funny, but she is also authentic. When something has driven her to despair, she says so frankly. It isn’t cloaked with self-deprecating humour – we are there, at the heart of whatever she is feeling.

That extends to the end of war. There is a searing melancholy even in armistice, and that’s exactly the sort of accuracy we’re unlikely to see in historical fiction or adaptations.

There had been none of the eager rejoicing of 1918 when we had really believed that war had been removed for ever. Now we never thought that for a moment. Perhaps this was the most wretched part of a victory that was ice-cold. There is a limit to human endurance and we had had too much; we were not the same people who had gone out to fight. Perhaps the best of us had gone.

Bloom wrote so much, and it’s always hard to believe that anybody who wrote more than 500 books could have written any that were any good. I’ve certainly read some very sub-par books by Bloom and some excellent ones. War Isn’t Wonderful is closer to excellent than execrable. It might not be very 1961, but I thought it was fascinating, well-written and, above all, unforgettably honest.

1961 Club badge: a library from the 1960s, with the dates 13-19 April 2026 and The 1961 Club overlaid.

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!

The ABC of Authorship by Ursula Bloom

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ABC of AuthorshipOne of the Project 24 books I mentioned the other day was The ABC of Authorship (1938) by Ursula Bloom – and, just as I couldn’t resist buying it, equally I couldn’t resist immediately reading it. For sound advice in 2017, it’s pretty useless – as a glimpse into the world of writing in the 1930s, it’s great fun.

I say ‘writing’, but I should clarify that she is chiefly concerned with only one small corner of authorship. While she does devote a chapter to novels at the end, and airily passes by poetry in a handful of sentences, this book is chiefly concerned with stories in small magazines. That alone dates it. There was a proliferation of small magazines in the early twentieth century, both regional and national, and they were happy hunting ground for the budding author. Bloom devotes a lot of The ABC of Authorship in advising how best to approach these – down to individual magazines, and whether they would prefer (say) a story about a dashing hero or a domestic scene. I imagine it was fairly useful advice in 1938 – though the editors of those magazines may have been inundated with a certain sort of story.

Let’s be clear who Bloom was and the sort of market she’s talking about. She is apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific author ever – and wrote (gulp) over 500. I’ve read three of them, all novels she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Essex – she had various pseudonyms, and wrote under her own name too – and they were witty and enjoyable, and pretty good examples of light middlebrow fare. Under other names, and when writing for magazines, I think she favoured writing a little to the south of middlebrow – though certainly not racy. But she is certainly well placed to talk about getting stuff out there – she seems, as far as this book shows, to have written stories and serials every day, as well as those hundreds of novels.

She kicks off with a chapter called ‘Let’s Have a Look at Yourself’ – essentially saying “are you aware that you actually have to do something?” From here, we get chapters on how to find a plot (including, amusingly, plagiarising straight from plays you see), the business side of Fleet Street, writing features (she apparently once dictated 1000 words about a European queen over the phone), writing articles, writing serials, and the vagaries of the Editorial Mind. This last is mostly about editors being real people too – but also advising that you buy all the small magazines out there, make notes as to their contents, and know when styles changed. Thus you may impress editors.

She scatters examples throughout – some that she has had published, some suggestions, and one that appears to be ripped off from Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage – and they occasionally make for entertaining reading. While a lot of her advice is practicable and doubtless useful to those who bought this book in 1938, it’s hard not to smile at some of the things that she thinks make for good inspiration. Her original thoughts include writing an article on ‘Look to your future’, or a piece called ‘Don’t be Lonely’. She advises that any serial, if lagging, can be livened up with a bull that’s got loose.

My favourite gosh-haven’t-times-changed moment came when she advised that you could always make money with ‘informative verse’, adding ‘I have taken household tips from magazines and have set them into two-line verses, for which there has never been any difficulty in the way of a sale’. Imagine finding any editor in the world who’d give you good money for the examples she offers:

The perfect gent knows it’s a sin
To tuck his napkin ‘neath his chin.

A heinous friend I had, called Nelly;
She used a spoon when eating jelly!

What should you not do? I mentioned that she wasn’t racy – I perhaps didn’t go far enough. Amongst other things, she advises not writing about adultery, the Royal Family, or having lost a child.

It’s hard not to warm to Bloom in this book – I hope it’s clear that I’m smiling rather than sneering. She is so positive, so encouraging, and clearly extremely successful. I sincerely hope that lots of young writers found her advice got them on their way to writing careers. She couldn’t have known the window into the past that she’d be providing 80 years later, or how much this man in 2017 would enjoy the book.