The Innocent Traveller by Ethel Wilson – #1949Club

When I was in Canada earlier this year, I was keen to add more books by Ethel Wilson to my shelves. I’d enjoyed her writing for a while, but was fully bowled over by how brilliant The Equations of Love was, which I read for another club year. One of the books I bought was her second novel, The Innocent Traveller, which fortuitously fits into the 1949 Club.

The Innocent Traveller covers the lifespan of Topaz, and it is a long life – about a century, from the 1840s through to around the time of writing. And what a wonderful character Topaz is. Barb wrote about this novel and called her ‘irrepressible’, and it is the perfect word. I would add ‘exuberant’. From our first sightings of her – crawling under the table, amidst the familiar knees, while Matthew Arnold is visiting – through to her final hours, Topaz is in love with life and allergic to conventionality. Here, for instance, she meets a young playwright:

Topaz was frightfully excited. She had never before sat on a log with someone who was writing a play. Memories of Sir Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and the Lyceum Theatre in general romped through her mind and she did not know where to begin.
[…]
“What are you calling your play, Eustace?” asked Aunty when she recovered.

“Break, Break, Break,” said the young man. “Who is this uncommonly plain little girl standing in front of us? How very wet she is!”

“That?” said Aunt Topaz, suddenly seeing Rose. “Oh, there you are. How do you do, Rose? That is my great-niece. Yes, she is plain, isn’t she? When wet. When dry she looks better, because her hair curls.”

But I am getting away from myself. Let’s start earlier. Topaz grows up in a properous house in London among many and various relatives. Her mother dies in childbirth when Topaz is still very young, and her father remarries – specifically, he marries his late wife’s sister, Jane.

While Topaz is undeniably the star of the novel, Wilson does tell us about everyone else too – the brothers and sisters, their children, the other relatives. Often she tells us in speedy shorthand, which gives the novel an unpredictable and rather amusing tone – particularly when it is counterpointed by her loquaciousness on vaguer topics. We might hear someone’s entire future in a couple of sentences, and then get something as delightfully and unnecessary lengthy as this chapter-opener, on the topic of time:

Of all the inventions human or divine which have been bestowed upon civilised peoples the one most taken for granted, yet the one most practical, is the division of Eternity – or is it of Time – into seven days of the week. Uncivilized persons, one supposed, do not feel the lack of this arbitrary division. The passage of Time is marked for them by such signs as the seasons if any, by day and night if any, by the lunar and solar changes at all events, and by the occurrence and duration of other physical phenomena such as hunger and gestation. These changes are enough; and to some indolent civilized people that is a very enviable kind of existence which they would willingly exchanged for their own. For our exitence which we call civilized becomes increasingly complex; so that 3pm next Wednesday week has an entity and form and prognosis before ever it arrives; and instead of living in polar time and space like free Eskimos, we make for prisoners of ourselves by appointments which we arrange for ourselves for 10am on Tuesday week and 5pm on Thursday forgnith, and the first two weeks in July, and thus, between us, we murder our peace. The only thing in our changing world that we can now regard as being safe and sure is that next Monday will certainly be Monday, next Tuesday will be Tuesday and nothing else, and that Saturday afternoon will always be Saturday afternoon; and for this much stability we should be thankful.

I loved Wilson’s tone, which combines dryness and whimsy so well. And yet she presents Topaz without even the smallest hint of authorial sneering. We see Topaz fail to find a husband, support her ageing parents fairly inadequately, and become in control of the household – all as joyfully and vaguely and poorly as ever. Nothing can dampen her excitement at the world. Nothing could make her think she had missed life’s adventures by failing to find a husband or have children. She is an eternal optimist – and I like that the title brings out her innocence, because her naivety is really innocence rather than ignorance.

Her family find her eccentric, of course, but there is no real antagonism there. And it is with a makeshift family unit that she starts the next adventure: Topaz moves to Canada, along with her widowed sister Annie and her unmarried cousin Rachel. She is already middle-aged, and has a further 50 years in this new land – which she embraces with enthusiasm.

I’ll be honest – a lot of The Innocent Traveller felt quite spontaneous. You’d struggle to find anything resembling plotting – it is just one person’s life, and the lives of those around her, told jubilantly and eccentrically. And perhaps that is because life is, of course, unpredictable and unplotted, and the novel is apparently based on a real person. The author’s note includes:

This is the story – part truth and part invention – of a lively woman who lived for a hundred years and died triumphant in Vancouver and is nearly forgotten after her small commotion of living.

The metaphors are not mixed. The drop of water, the bird, the water-glider, the dancer, the wind on the canal, and Topaz, are all different and all the same…

And the ‘plain’ Rose referred to in the first quotation? That is Ethel herself, or a version of her, appearing on the scene.

Because Wilson covers a century over the course of the novel, she can also cover the shifting social norms and expectations. She often does this in an amusing way, with a sort of heightened tone aping the language of the historian and amplifying it. For instance…

Great-Grandfather Edgeworth was a kind and just employer, but he accepted without question what he saw, and he saw a world become at last static. His imagination, which flew beyond the bright blue sky to the invisible, did not pierce the squalor of the Poor so near at hand in the grim town. The Poor took their familiar deplorable place in squalor, and it would have seemed a novel and disturbing idea to Great-Grandfather Edgeworth that the Poor should reasonably aspire to eat well, drink well, live well and die well. Not wrong, of course, but chimerical. Each age, like our own, has its large blind spots. The social conscience was stirring but not awake. Great-Grandfather Edgeworth was a product of the ages which preceded the young Victoria. Here he was, sleeping in the garden, ninety years old, an upright old man in a world which he really thought was upright.

Isn’t it delicious? Her writing is always a joy, and ‘joy’ is the right word for this book. I might prefer her more tightly plotted novels, and have a special place in my heart for the dry sharpness of Equations of Love, but you can’t go wrong with The Innocent Traveller – and, above all, spending time with the irrepressible, exhuberant Aunt Topaz.