Sharp

When Madame Bibi and I realised we both had In Pious Memory (1967) by Margery Sharp on our shelves, we decided to put it down for the same day of Novella a Day in May – the only forward-planning I’ve done. I haven’t read Madame Bibi’s review yet, but you can do so (and I will do so as soon as I’ve finished writing this).

I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Sharp, and find her such an interestingly diverse writer. Going into this novella, I didn’t know whether she’d be in serious or comic mode. It’s a book about death, but definitely leans more towards the latter. With some surreality thrown in, for good measure.

In Pious Memory comes later in Sharp’s long writing career, and I wasn’t sure whether she’d still have the lightness of touch which makes her dry, sparkling sense of humour work so well. I needn’t have worried. There was something so piercingly wonderful about the opening lines that I knew I was back in safe company with Sharp:

After some thirty years of marriage, Mrs Prelude’s sole manifestation of independence was always, when travelling by plane, to sit in the tail. She and her husband flew a good deal; he was an authority on international banking, much in demand wherever his European colleagues gathered in conference, and though austerely avoiding all attendant junketings – receptions, or visits to historic monuments – invariably took Mrs Prelude along to look after him at the hotel. He suffered from asthma. His giant intellect was housed in but an average body – indeed rather below average; average only in the sense of being unremarkable: all the more startling therefore was the effect when on rostrum or at banquet board he suddenly rose to his feet and let his intellect loose like a line from a mouse-trap. Mrs Prelude naturally never witnessed this transformation herself, she was always at home in the hotel bedroom sterilising his inhaling-apparatus with water boiled over a portable methylated-spirit stove; but other wives told her about it.

Mrs Prelude feels safer sat in the tail of a plane, and chooses it even when her husband can’t get a seat next to her. We are just preparing to smile at her silly foibles when, on the second page, we learn that her precautions are justified. Mr and Mrs Prelude are in a plane crash: ‘Mrs Prelude, in the tail, was but shocked and bruised, whereas of her husband there remained but the remains.’

The Preludes had two adult children (Elizabeth and William) and a daughter on the cusp of adulthood (Lydia). None of them were particularly close to their father, who had more time for economic academics than for his flesh and blood – but they speedily begin recreating him in false memories, giving him attributes that they wish he’d had, and recalling things that it would have been convenient for him to say.

But then… Mrs Prelude announces that she thinks her husband might still be alive.

Quite a lot of the rest of In Pious Memory focuses on the impetuous Lydia and her cousin Toby going to France, to see if they can find their missing father/uncle. We dart back to England often, to see how unaffected William and Elizabeth are – and how Mrs Prelude is choosing the next stage of her life. This isn’t a novel about grief, but about how a big change in a family will set off other changes – and how much will remain the same.

Unlike other Sharp novels I’ve read, this one doesn’t feel meticulously planned. Particularly in the French sections, the plot spirals off into such unexpected and disconnected directions that it felt a bit like Sharp was making it up as she went along. But that made it feel irrepressible rather than incoherent. It was odd but great fun – or perhaps I should say odd and great fun.

I really enjoyed In Pious Memory, and I think Sharp was wise to make this one a short book (my edition coming in at 160 pages). A longer novel with this plot might have required the reader to feel stronger emotions than amusement, and occasionally exasperation. As it is, Sharp guides the reader through the strange experience and we come out the other side having had a delightful, unusual time.

Gosh, I love Margery Sharp. The more I read by her, the more I think she is one of the great underrated novelists of the twentieth century.

I first read her fifteen or sixteen years ago, buying The Foolish Gentlewoman because P.G. Wodehouse mentioned it as a book he loved in a letter somewhere. It wasn’t for a good number of years that I read more by her, but I’ve yet to read a dud – with Cluny Brown and The Gipsy in the Parlour being my favourite. She does funny, she does serious, she sometimes combines them. And we can add The Nutmeg Tree (1937) to the funny shelf, though it’s not without its moments of poignancy.

I don’t really understand why she chose this title. There is a nutmeg tree but it’s not particularly dominant, and I think the title of the film is much better: Julia Misbehaves. I haven’t seen the film, but am told that it is a very loose adaptation.

Julia is misbehaving in the first scene we see her – a glorious opening, where she is in the bath, surrounded by her few possessions. How’s this for an opening line:

Julia, by marriage Mrs Packett, by courtesy Mrs Macdermot, lay in her bath singing the Marseillaise.

We can already guess a little about her character from that ‘by courtesy’. But it takes a few more lines before we realise why her bathroom is filled with a table, a clock, and other potentially valuable items: it’s because the bailiffs are in, and she’s pretty sure they won’t intrude on a lady in the bath.

Julia is a chancer, and has had to be. As we see throughout the novel, she has had to spend much of her life seeking the next source of income – and that has involved a bit of deceit, a bit of flirtation, and a crowd of friends who wouldn’t be received in polite society and, though loyal, are sometimes necessarily fleeting. As she describes herself, she is ‘the sort of woman any one talks to about anything’. Which has its ups and downs.

And, yes, the reader loves her. This one did, anyway.

She is Mrs Packett by name, but the marriage lasted rather less than a year – a war bride, her husband was killed not long after their hasty wedding. Hasty because of war, but also because of Susan: the daughter they had. Her parents-in-law are affluent and kind, if not accustomed to women like Julia, and housed both daughter-in-law and granddaughter. But ultimately Julia decided she would be better off away from them, and that Susan would be better off – financially and otherwise – being raised by her paternal grandparents.

As The Nutmeg Tree opens, she has received an unexpected letter from Susan, now on the cusp of adulthood. She wants to get married, and her grandparents don’t approve of the speed with which she and Bryan wish to wed. Can Julia come and persuade them otherwise? And, with one eye on the bailiffs, Julia decides to go. She hasn’t seen her daughter for sixteen years.

It may be that ‘someone goes on a journey’ and ‘a stranger comes to town’ are the only plots in the world, but I think Sharp is very good at putting a cuckoo in the nest – with either comic or unsettling results. In The Nutmeg Tree, there is a lot of comedy to be got from Julia trying to behave, while not being completely able to keep her true nature hidden. She is the sort of person, for instance, who accidentally joins a circus on the way. But there is always an undercurrent of poignancy here too. Julia is trying to improve herself. She is not an unkind or dishonest person. She has simply had to do what she has to do. And she’s tired.

Once she arrives, she gets tangled in all the relationships there, and a handful of others yet to emerge. It’s just wonderful. Julia is drawn so consistently and with impressive nuance for a character that could have been simply bombast and delight. If the glorious initial scene isn’t matched by a series of equally delicious set pieces, the novel becomes more thoughtful than that opening might leave one to infer – without losing the humour.

Basically, Sharp is brilliant. She should be a household name, in my opinion, and it’s rare to find an author who is so varied and so good at different things. Julia, I’ll miss you, and it was a joy.