Comyns

It’s about time I paid heed to Virago Reading Week, which has been popping up all over the blogosphere this, er, week. Thanks Rachel and Carolyn! I love it when publishers are hailed in this manner – long-term SiaB readers may recall I ran an I Love Hesperus week many moons ago, and of course have enjoyed Persephone readalongs, and cheered from the sidelines for NYRB Classics. As luck would have it – it certainly wasn’t my organisational ability – I happened to be halfway through a Virago when the week began, and even my current sluggish reading pace has allowed me to finish off The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns.

Props to Thomas (that’s a good American expression, right? As is that ‘right?’ there.) for his Virago banner, by the way. If you think you recognise those pics, head over here for Thomas’ competition.

It’s no secret that I love Barbara Comyns – she’s probably in my top five favourite authors, certainly top ten – and I’m fast reaching the end of her books. Just two novels to go… so I’m treasuring them as I go, and The Skin Chairs is no exception.

When I first started reading Comyns, I thought her novels were bizarrely different from one another, in terms of style. It’s only now, looking back, that I realise I started off with the three most disparate I could have chosen – Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, and The Juniper Tree. Having read more of her books, I realise that she does have an identifiable tone – surreal but matter-of-fact; an unnerving but captivating mixture, and one which leads to a very unusual angle on events. As shown most effectively in The Vet’s Daughter, but also on occasion in The Skin Chairs, even cruelties are dealt with in this unshockable, even tone. Here’s an example:

When she had gone we let Esme’s mice loose in the sitting-room, although they didn’t seem to enjoy it much, keeping close to the skirting board most of the time. There used to be a girl in our village who was continually beaten by her parents and I remembered she used to walk like that, close to the walls.

Lest you think this is a miserable book, I must add the scolding given to children when they sit on some graves: ‘Nanny found us and said that we had no respect for our bottoms or the dead.’ There are plenty of laugh-aloud moments.

The Skin Chairs is told in the voice of ten-year-old Frances, one of six children, who must go and stay with her Great-Aunt’s family: ‘My mother[…] sometimes became tired of us and would dispatch us to any relation who would agree to have one or two of the family to stay.’ Shortly after this, and having endured Aunt Lawrence’s unwelcoming home, Frances’ father dies and the rest of her family move to an unlikeable, small modern house. Relative poverty is a theme throughout Comyns’ writing, and she relishes writing of their privations – nightdresses made out of old sheets; ‘not being able to play with paint’, and so forth.

As with other Comyns novels, not much happens. This one has a little more of a central thread through it than some, in terms of the family’s destiny, but Comyns is best at her bizarre hangers-on. Chief amongst these is Mrs. Alexander, with her red-purple hair, turbans, mustard-coloured car, and golden shoes (repainted each evening by her chauffeur.) She keeps monkeys, and cleverly builds a wall after buying a piano, so that the bailiffs can’t remove it when she goes into debt. Then there is young widow Vanda, who neglects her baby, but thinks she’s doing a good job as the infant never goes short of orange juice. How Comyns thinks of all the tiny details, I can’t imagine. So many are bizarre and wonderful – unexpected, but not dwelt upon – and always mentioned so calmly.
The first day at school was not so bad as I expected. The worst part was when most of the girls trooped off into the dining-room and we had to eat our sandwiches in one of the classrooms. The only other occupant was a particularly plain girl wearing a patch plaid blouse and eating a pork pie. She said she adored eating pork pies and ate them in her bath.

And those skin chairs of the title? Yes, they’re human skin, and belong to a Major who lives in a large house in the village. They pop up near the beginning of the novel, and reappear every now and then – with some significance, but the true justification for the novel being called The Skin Chairs doesn’t rest with that. I think they’re the perfect symbol for what Comyns does best: the domestication of the surreal; the macabre passed over with matter-of-fact interest, and no more – there is probably a girl eating a pork pie close by, which will be equally involving.

If you haven’t read any Comyns yet, I urge you to do so (The Skin Chairs is going for a penny on Amazon.) The more I read of her, the more I feel sure that she has been unjustly neglected – and is one of the most intriguing novelists of the twentieth-century.

Continuing my Barbara Comyns interest, I spent my train journey back from Liverpool reading her first novel Sisters By A River. I bought the novel in Somerset, but there are loads available on Amazon. I say ‘novel’, but there is no structure to this book, really – lots and lots of little essays or vignettes or really just anecdotes. They’re vaguely chronological. I was especially interested by this novel as it’s openly based in Bidford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, where my very close friend Lorna was brought up, and I’ve been several times.

I can’t stand books which use incorrect spelling to reproduce the mind of a child (which put me off Our Spoons Came From Woolworths a bit) but I discovered in the Introduction that Barbara Comyns couldn’t actually spell as an adult, and the publishers decided not to edit her manuscript (the Intro says she couldn’ spell because her mother went deaf when Barbara was young… I couldn’t really see the connection).

This book is actually autobiography – never sure how accurate, and it certainly has all the surrealism I’ve grown to expect from Comyns. Her childhood makes the Mitfords seem dull. Quite similar, actually – six daughters in her case, in a rambling old house with an angry, mad father. The mother is also pretty mad, and the children are fairly uncontrolled, running riot over the house and area, making their own rules and creating their own world. This is representative of the insanity (spelling mistakes intentional! ):

‘Things at home were getting pretty grim about this time, Daddy was particularly mororse and glum through money worries, then he would drink and try and forget but it only made things worse, he never got jolly when he drank, just miserable, I can’t think why he did it. Mammie was always quarreling with him, they were the two best people at agvergating each other I have ever met, she was getting awfully sick of us too, more even than usual, she had got an awful new habit of thinking people were falling in love with her, it was very trying and embarising, we would come on her gazeing into space, her lips moving in an imaginaru conversation with a ficticious lover, she even went so far as to tell Daddy she had lovers and was unfaithful to him, this caused the most frightful rows, usually ending in him throwing all her clothes out of her bedroom window or Mammie running down to the river bank screaming and saying she was going to drown herself, sometimes waving an unloaded revolver above her head, but she never did commit suicide, sometimes the maids, if they were new, would run after her and drag her back to the house, but we would just sit on the chicken pen roof or somewhere peaceful.’

Long sentences, as you see! Everything in the book is told with a child’s calm indifference and no sense of causality. Difficult to know how disingenuous the writing is – either way, it is very effective, and this bizarre autobiographical- novel-anecdotal- chat is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read. At first I thought I’d find it too affected, but in the end I loved it. Would make great reading alongside Mitford stuff.

The tone throughout was rather surreal – ‘Daddy very much dislike finding odd human bones about the house, they had a habbit of getting tucked down the sides of the morning-room chairs’ is the comment on an archeological dig in the garden – but even more surreal when you realise it’s mostly true. Tales of ugly dresses and bad haircuts are told in the same captivating, undemonstrative style as those of Grannie dying and Father throwing a beehive over Mother. If this motley assortment of remembrances were made-up… well, I don’t think they could have been. Such a bizarre childhood, so of its time, and yet utterly fascinating. Completely devoid of charm, but somehow, in a way, it charmed me. I still think Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is Comyn’s best book, of the five I’ve read (standardised spelling for a start!) but Sisters by a River is mesmorising, and a book I’ll return to many times from sheer incredulity and amazement.

Thought I’d just finish off these thoughts by quoting the blurb Barbara Comyns wrote herself in 1947:

The river is the Avon, and on its banks the five sisters are born. The river is frozen, the river is flooded, the sun shines on the water and moving lights are reflected on the walls of the house. It is Good Friday and the maids hang a hot cross bun from the kitchen ceiling. An earwig crawls into the sweep’s ear and stays there for ten years. Moths are resurrected from the dead and bats becomes entangled in young girls’ hair. Lessons are done in the greenish light under the ash-tree and always there is the sound of water swirling through the weir. A feeling of decay comes to the house, at first in a sudden puff down a dark passage and the damp smell of cellars, then ivy grows unchecked over the windows and angry shouts split the summer air, sour milk is in the larder and the father takes out his gun. The children see a dreadful snoring figure in a white nightshift, then lot numbers appear on the furniture and the family is dispersed…

15. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead – Barbara Comyns

The early stream of books to include in my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About has slowed to a gradual flow, and that was sort of deliberate. I suppose I didn’t want to overwhelm people. This site mentions a lot of books – as you might expect on a literary blog – and also suggest a great deal as being worth reading. I suppose I want to say “Even if you ignore everything else I mention, pay attention to this list.” Of course, you’re perfectly welcome to ignore the list too, but I’d like you to pay special attention to them if you so wish(!) They’re all there for a reason – because they’re touching or hilarious or brilliantly written or just very indicative of my taste, and I know that you’re unlikely to hear about them unless I mention them.

So, after that little preamble, step forward no. 15 on the list – Barbara Comyns’ Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead. Those of you who are more knowledgeable than I will have spotted that the title is from The Fire of Drift-Wood by Longfellow.

We spake of many a vanished scene,
Of what we once had thought and said,
Of what had been, and might have been,
And who was changed, and who was dead;

The only other Comyns I’ve read was Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, so she certainly has a way with titles. I bought Who Was Changed… a few years ago, partly because I’d quite enjoyed Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, partly because the mix of a Virago paperback and an interesting cover piqued my interest. Had I turned to the first sentence, I daresay I’d have read the novel much sooner: ‘The ducks swan through the drawing-room windows.’ How can you not want to read on?

The novel opens with a flood, and things get stranger and stranger. If I were to choose one word to describe this novel it would be “surreal” – but surreal in a very grounded manner. Exactly like the cover illustration, actually; part of ‘Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta: Dinner on the Hotel Lawn’ by Stanley Spencer. Throughout the events (which I don’t want to spoil for you) Comyns weaves a very real, earthy, witty portrait of a village – especially the Willoweed family. A cantankerous old lady who won’t step on land she doesn’t own, Grandmother Willoweed, rules over her docile son, Ebin, and his young children Emma, Hattie and Dennis. Grandmother W is a truly brilliant creation – without the slightest feeling for anybody around her, she is still amusing rather than demonic. For some reason this novel was banned in Ireland upon publication in 1954 – perhaps for the occasional unblenching descriptions, but these are easily skipped if you, like me, can be a bit squeamish.

Though quite a slim novel – my copy is 146 pages of large type – Comyns writes a book which lingers in the mind, one that is vivid and funny and absurd and a must read for anyone interested in off-the-wall literature with human nature at its heart.

And it’s cheap on Amazon.co.uk…

(please do go and read a rather better review on John Self’s Asylum blog here.)