I Pose - Stella Benson

I know some people are very keen to end a reading year on a high, but for me it is more important that the first book of a new year is good.  Of course, I would love every book I read to be good, but somehow it feels as though a bad first book sets off a bad tone for the whole year.  So I deliberately finished off a book which I was already halfway through, and knew was brilliant... I Pose (1915) by Stella Benson, reprinted by Michael Walmer and sent to me as a review copy (more on this exciting new reprint publisher here).

I had read one book by Stella Benson before - Living Alone, about witches living in a boarding house - and I liked it, but would have preferred Benson to keep her feet more firmly on the ground.  The opening pages, satirising a council meeting, were entirely delicious.  Well - I Pose more than answered my request, and I found it very amusing.  The style is so fresh, lively, and not for a moment taking itself remotely seriously.

I Pose is set up as an allegory - the main characters are referred to solely as 'the gardener' and 'the suffragette'.  The idea of an allegory rather terrifies me, as it does suggest earnestness (which I'm allergic to in fiction), but Benson has the same feelings as me.  She definitely has some important things to say - I'll come on to those later - but she uses these characters chiefly to lampoon the notion of allegory.

Both gardener and suffragette - but particularly gardener - live life through epithets.  They are continually posing; the title refers to the mixture of sincerity and insincerity with which they adopt their stances.  For, yes, the suffragette cares deeply about suffrage - but when she claims not to care about life or limb, or to be unlovable and unloving, then it is decidedly a pose.  The gardener, too, is forever choosing poses which permit him to speak in riddles and epigrams.  Some might find it wearying, but I loved every moment.  When the gardener meets the suffragette, he instantly knows that she is one - she has, after all, the stereotypical appearance of the militant suffragette...

The woman was quite plain, and therefore worthy only of invisibility in the eyes of a self-respecting young man.  She had the sort of hair that plays truant over the ears, but has not vitality enough to do it prettily.  Her complexion was not worthy of the name.  Her eyes made no attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes in fiction.  Her only outward virtue was that she did not attempt to dress as if she were pretty.  And even this is not a very attractive virtue.

He doesn't agree with her methods (she intends to blow up a church) and Benson is at her satirical best on the topic:

The gardener, of course, shared the views of all decent men on this subject.  One may virtuously destroy life in a good cause, but to destroy property is a heinous crime, whatever its motive.(Yes, I know that made you tremble, but there are not many more paragraphs of it.)

There are plenty of moments where Benson addresses the reader, always tongue-in-cheek and often defending her choices as a novelist, against imagined criticisms.  She freely admits that the suffragette is not a typical heroine...

I quite admit that the suffragette was an infuriating person.  I yield to none in my admiration for any one who could manage to keep their temper with her.

The suffragette and gardener end up on a boat sailing abroad, posing as a married couple (albeit briefly), and they dash madly around various foreign climes, meeting some extraordinary people along the way.  My favourite was probably the always-antagonistic Mrs. Rust...

"I don't agree with you at all," said Mrs. Rust, who now made this remark mechanically in any pause in the conversation.

Earthquakes and suffrage clubs come and go, as do the adventures of an obnoxious young boy and an adorable Scottie dog, but the plot is certainly not the most important aspect of I Pose.  I loved it almost entirely for Benson's style.  It reminded me a little of P.G. Wodehouse - certainly she has his affinity for the pleasures of understatement ('She was not in the least miserly of a certain cheap smell of violets') alongside just enough of Oscar Wilde to make the prose frothy and delightful, and not enough to make it tiring (to me).  Her way with words is astonishing, and shows a confidence which no début author deserves to possess - but it is a confidence which is, at the same time, entirely well-deserved.  This sort of novel is so difficult to do well - it could have very easily felt self-indulgent and overdone - but I think it is a wonder.

And, while I spent most of the novel thrilling to the writing and not caring too much about plot and character, I surprised myself by growing to care considerably about the possible romance between the gardener and the suffragette... now, making the reader care about characters with no names, when the narrator is openly and proudly dismissing their suitability to lead a novel, where nothing is said with a serious tone... well, Miss Benson, that is an achievement indeed.

The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford

Of all the books to speed-read, The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford was a poor choice.  I had to, because it was for book group and I started it only a day before the meeting, but I should have lingered, and savoured every paragraph, to get the full stylistic experience.

Most of the books I like, as I've mentioned before, I like primarily for style and character, rather than what happens.  The exception is Agatha Christie.  But it could hardly be more the case than in the present instance - there is a certain amount of things happening, but they are largely incidental to the way it is told.  Oh, and it's not at all about war, as I had imagined it was.

You might be familiar with its (fairly) famous opening line: 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard.'  Apparently Ford wanted to call the novel The Saddest Story, but the publishers thought it would be inappropriate given the onset of World War One, and so it became The Good Soldier - the 'good soldier' in question is Captain Edward Ashburnham, although it quickly becomes clear to the reader that the narrator's (John Dowell) opinion of him is flawed, and a bit changeable.

Have I conveyed to you the splendid fellow that he was—the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character? I suppose I have not conveyed it to you.

Indeed he hasn't, because at other times his opinion of Edward is very low.  I shall come on to that...

What isn't so clear is what the 'saddest story' is - or, indeed, why Dowell claims to have 'heard' it, rather than acknowledging that he is telling it, and has been a principle figure in it.  The leading cast, as it were, are Dowell and his wife Florence, Captain Ashburnham and his wife Leonora, and... no, that will do for now.  Dowell starts off telling us all about his 'poor wife' Florence, who has died, and narrates the various experiences the two couples have gone through - and it becomes clearer and clearer that Florence is far from the poor invalid Dowell initially conveys, and all manner of other marital strife affects all four people in these marriages.

What makes The Good Soldier masterful is the way in which Ford portrays a voice - and it reminded me a little of John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure; a narrator who is not so much unreliable as unsteady, whose shifting thoughts and reflections pull the tone of the novel back and forth.  The Good Soldier is all told at one remove, as something that has happened - indeed, a flaw (perhaps) of the novel is this sense of detachment, as though it never really 'gets going' - but Dowell's opinions are far from settled.  Depictions of the characters evolve; he is trapped in each changing increment of his opinions, even with the distance of time.

And, as I said at the beginning, it's all about style in The Good Soldier. I'd been put off reading it for years, mostly because it was the main text analysed in some incomprehensible book I read called 'Modernism and the Fragmented Self', or something like that, and because I'd heard it compared to the multi-claused horror that is Henry James.  Well, neither terror was warranted - Ford's writing has depth and rhythm, but certainly isn't alienating or unreadable. At times it is deceptively conversational, and perhaps its most significant characteristic is how calm and undramatic Dowell's tone always is.  Here's an example, picked almost at random, but which demonstrates that many clauses need not mean unreadable:

I have forgotten the aspect of many things, but I shall never forget the aspect of the dining-room of the Hotel Excelsior on that evening—and on so many other evenings. Whole castles have vanished from my memory, whole cities that I have never visited again, but that white room, festooned with papier-maché fruits and flowers; the tall windows; the many tables; the black screen round the door with three golden cranes flying upward on each panel; the palm-tree in the centre of the room; the swish of the waiter's feet; the cold expensive elegance; the mien of the diners as they came in every evening—their air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals—those things I shall not easily forget.

I expect that one day I will re-read The Good Soldier, more slowly and thoughtfully.  For now, I am impressed, and pleased that the choice of someone at book group finally made me read this.


Others who got Stuck into this Book:

"If you only ever read one more novel again in the course of your life, let it be this one." - Harriet, Harriet Devine's Blog

"That is what makes this book great – the characterization, the elegant prose and, most of all, the wonderfully clever structure." - Jane, Fleur in Her World

"I feel it's a rare and perfect thing that I am far from done with." - Hayley, Desperate Reader

A few little reviews...

It has come to my notice that it is December, and there are only 27 days left this year.  I have almost 20 reviews to write for A Century of Books... oops, didn't work this out very well, did I?  (Well, I still have 10 books to read - but I have 4 of them on the go already.)  So I'm going to rush through five of them today - books that, for one reason or another, I didn't want to write whole posts about.  But do still free to comment on them!

Daddy Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster
An orphaned girl is given a scholarship by a mysterious, anonymous man - she has only seen his back - and one of the conditions is that she must write updates to him, without getting any replies.  She nicknames him Daddy Long-Legs.  Can you guess what happens?  Well, I shan't give away the ending.  I was mostly surprised at how modern this children's book felt, despite being a hundred years old - a lot of it would have been at home in a Jacqueline Wilson story.  I enjoyed it, but did find it a little creepy, and rather repetitive, but these are probably signs of not having read it when I was the target age.

Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he is an enormous bug.  Which is going to make his job as a salesman somewhat difficult.  The reason I'm not giving this novella/short story its own review is that I don't feel I have anything new to say about it.  Kafka is famed for his matter-of-fact approach to the surreality in this story, and rightly so.  What surprised me here was how middlebrow it all felt.  It is definitely comparable to David Garnett's Lady Into Fox - which actually seems to have greater pretensions to literariness.

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Another one which surprised me - I'd always heard that Marie Stopes started a sexual revolution in the UK, offering knowledge about sex to the everywoman for the first time.  Turns out she is much more conservative, and less revelatory, than a lot of the other guides written around the same time, and earlier.  I read these guides for my current DPhil chapter, by the way - my favourite so far being the person who argued that sexual intercourse and reproduction were acceptable as separate impulses, because protozoa separated them.  Sure, why not?  (I wonder if I've just made all sorts of inappropriate search terms for this blog now...)

Miss Hargreaves: the play (1952) by Frank Hargreaves
This is something of a cheat, since it was never published - but it was performed, with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role.  Tanya tipped me off that copies of all performed plays were in the Lord Chamberlain's archives in the British Library - so I had the great privilege and pleasure of reading the play, with Baker's own penned changes.  It's pretty similar to the novel, only with the action restricted to a few settings.  Such fun!

V. Sackville West (1973) by Michael Stevens
I'm a sucker for a short biography, and I hadn't read one of VSW before, so I gave this one a whirl.  It's a critical biography, so Stevens discusses and analyses the work while giving an outline of VSW's life.  About halfway through I thought, "this feels way too much like a doctoral dissertation."  Turns out it was a doctoral dissertation.  I think I'll be turning to a more charismatic writer for my next biography of Vita, as this one was rather prosaic and charmless, although very thoroughly researched.

Right, well that's five down!  How are the other Century of Bookers getting on?