Cluny Brown by Margery Sharp

It's not quite true to say that I didn't join in Margery Sharp Day (so ably organised by Fleur Fisher; see her round-up post for more details), because I started Cluny Brown on the day in question. What I did not do was either finish the book or write a review, but I have now done so - encouraged by the dictum that it is better late than never.

Actually, according to the cover of my edition (by the Reprint Society in 1945, a year after the novel was original published) I was joining in Marjorie Sharp Day. Despite getting her name right inside the book and printed on the book itself, the dustjacket spells it incorrectly. What a thing to overlook!

I read my first Sharp, The Foolish Gentlewoman, back in 2002, encouraged by seeing it recommended in the letters of P.G. Wodehouse. In the intervening dozen years I've bought quite a few of her novels (this one in 2005), but I needed this encouragement from Fleur Fisher to make the obvious next step and read one of them. And thank goodness I did. Cluny Brown is an absolute delight, and establishes Sharp in my mind not simply as a first rate middlebrow novelist but also (which I had forgotten) a wry and witty one.

Cluny Brown is a young woman whose abiding fault (according, at least, to her guardian Uncle Arn) is not knowing her place. Although he is content and humble to be a plumber, she doesn't see any reason why she should not take tea at the Ritz, if she can muster together the money. She is not beautiful; she is inordinately plain (which was refreshing), but she has Presence. And that presence disconcerts her uncle; he decides that it would be much for the best if she were taken away from London and put into service. And so she goes to Devon to be a maid.

If this were simply a knockabout comedy about the ineptitude of an inexperienced maid in a large house, that would frankly be enough for me - but there is plenty else going on. Down in that house are Lady Carmel and her hunting-shooting-fishing husband, and (occasionally) their adult son Andrew. He has seen fit to invite a Polish intellectual to live with them during the war, under the impression that is in grave danger throughout Europe. Completing the party (upstairs at least) is Betty, a young lady with whom every young man is in love, and who is divinely unmoved by these attentions.

We must pause for a moment to appreciate the wonder of Lady Carmel. She manages the household beautifully. Everybody thinks her sweet and ineffectual, whereas she is sweet and effectual; never a busybody or ogre, she simply knows how to treat everybody and persuade everybody to behave properly. And she could not be considered the most politically devoted:

Lady Carmel looked troubled. It was the thing to do, just then, at any mention of Europe, and indeed there had been moments, with Andrew still abroad, when she felt very troubled indeed. But now the expression was purely automatic, like looking reverent in church. Picking up a bough of rhododendron she tried its effect in a white crackle jar, and at once her brow cleared.

And she appears again in a quotation I wanted to give to show the humour in Sharp's writing:

For a moment mother and son stared at each other in mutual surprise. Lady Carmel in particular presented an odd appearance: the lilac in her hand gave her a vaguely allegorical look, like a figure strayed out of a pageant.

You will be getting the impression that the novel is nothing by Lady Carmel wandering about holding plants; in truth, she is quite a minor character, I just happened to love her. The title of the novel is Cluny Brown and it is indisputably she who is the main focus. Cluny is brazenly honest, with an honesty born of ingenuousness rather than anything else. Her answers to questions are often curiously at odds with expectations, and perhaps the reason she does not 'know her place' is that she doesn't really have one. Equally happy in the Ritz and up to her elbows in water fixing somebody's sink, she is also fluid between the upstairs and downstairs of the Carmels' house. She is happiest of all with the neighbour's golden retriever - and begins an engaging relationship with the local chemist - a serious, level-headed, but poetic gentleman.

Sharp takes the maid-with-prospects narrative (which has been around since Pamela and before) and completely changes it. Her charming ingenue is not a beauty or an upper-class girl; she does not hide a cynical soul or a caustic wit. Those elements are as enjoyably present as could be wished, but in the mouths of other characters (and occasionally the narrator); Cluny Brown is not fey or soppy.

I've spent quite a lot of time saying what Cluny Brown is not, because that's the best way of saying that Sharp isn't quite like any other writer I've read. But, basically, any lover of domestic fiction and witty, wry fiction will find them combined beautifully in this novel. Thanks, Fleur Fisher, for encouraging me to pick up my copy.

A ghost story for Christmas...

....but perhaps the least scary ghost story you will ever read! It's R.A. Dick's The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) which I read for Shiny New Books. Here's the beginning of my review...

Nobody loves a good reprint better than I do, and so I was quite excited to see a series from Vintage called ‘Vintage Movie Classics’, wherein they republish the books that were adapted into great films. (This series may only be available in the US; I have to confess that my conversations with Vintage did not entirely illuminate the matter.) I expected to see Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Godfather, and those sorts of texts – it was a surprise to see entirely books and films I’d never heard of (Back Street, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Cimarron etc.) which doubtless says more about my filmic knowledge than anything else. It was a lovely surprise, though – what better than reprints that will be unknown gems?

The one title I had come across before was R.A. Dick’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir, as I had had my eye on it during doctoral research – and found it too difficult to track down. So I was certainly grateful that a new copy was forthcoming – and The Ghost and Mrs Muir was every bit as enjoyable, silly, and entertaining as I’d have hoped.

Read the rest of the review here...

Pigeon Pie by Nancy Mitford

Apparently I bought Pigeon Pie (1940) by Nancy Mitford in Clun on 15th August 2011. I have no idea where Clun is and no recollection of having gone there, but I suppose I must have done! I read the novel quite a few months ago, so forgive any patchy memory (I'm linking to some great reviews at the end!)

For all my Mitfordmania, I have actually only read one Nancy Mitford novel (The Pursuit of Love); despite very much enjoying it, and having lots of others on hand, I still haven't actually read any more. So I picked up this purchase from mysterious Clun, and started. The first thing I noticed was the author's note:

I hope that anybody who is kind enough to read it in a second edition will remember that it was written before Christmas 1939. Published on 6 May 1940 it was an early and unimportant casualty of the real war which was then beginning - Nancy Mitford, Paris, 1951

Well! That's quite the start, isn't it? As Nancy warns, this novel is about the phoney war - that bit at the beginning of war where everyone prepared themselves for an onslaught, and not very much happened. And so she is able to be rather casual about the war, in a way that would look rather scandalous even by the time of publication. And the heroine of Pigeon Pie is nothing if not casual. Lady Sophia Garfield is a flippant socialite who has married for money, finds her husband a bore, and lives for the petty squabbles she has with the other doyennes of London society.

I do rather love this compact description of the phoney war:

Rather soon after the war had been declared, it became obvious that nobody intended it to begin. The belligerent countries were behaving like children in a round game, picking up sides, and until the sides had been picked up the game could not start.

England picked up France, Germany picked up Italy. England beckoned to Poland, Germany answered with Russia. Then Italy's Nanny said she had fallen down and grazed her knee, running, and mustn't play. England picked up Turkey, Germany picked up Spain, but Spain's Nanny said she had internal troubles, and must sit this one out. England looked towards the Oslo group, but they had never played before, except like Belgium, who had hated it, and the others felt shy. America, of course, was too much of a baby for such a grown-up game, but she was just longing to see it played. And still it would not begin.

The things that do begin, in Pigeon Pie, are rather extraordinary. A much-loved singer is killed, and Sophia finds herself swept up in an unlikely espionage and kidnap plot. None of it is treated particularly seriously - it is definitely silly rather than tense, and a wry eye is never far from the narrative. The denouement is just as unlikely as all the rest, and treads an awkward line between satire and failure...

I love Mitford's tone, and I love her observations about the in-fighting of the upper classes. In another novel, Sophia could have been great fun.  But I'm not sure that Pigeon Pie (for me) is ever more than quite good. And that isn't particularly because of insensitivity (although that warning was perhaps more pertinent in 1951) but because Mitford is turning her hand to a genre at which she is not an expert.

Others who got Stuck into this book

"The tone is maybe a little uneven, but when the wit works it really does sparkle." - Jane, Fleur Fisher in Her World

"It feels unreal and flippant; the language makes it seem a little like Enid Blyton for adults." - Karyn, A Penguin A Week

"A very enjoyable tale, filled with the usual Mitford acerbic wit, ridiculous characters and finely observed minutiae of upper class inter war life." - Rachel, Book Snob

A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain - A.C. Ward

Back in April I read A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain (1943) by A.C. Ward, very kindly given to me by the always wonderful Karen/Kaggsy, but I have only just got around to reading it. I can't remember where this first came up (maybe in person; before her lovely review anyway) but I was extremely happy to be presented with a copy. What a fascinating little book it is, and so perfect for somebody with an interest in the early 20th century.

A.C. Ward has a special place in my heart because of his book The Nineteen-Twenties (published, I think, in 1930 - so a very immediate retrospective). I was reading it at the beginning of my DPhil, just to get a sense of how somebody contemporary might have characterised the period. Lo and behold, he had a chapter on 'The Refuge of Form and Fantasy', where he discussed the vogue for the fantastic in the period. Since I'd already decided to write my thesis on this, it was wonderful confirmation that it had been significant in the 1920s - as well as providing an invaluable quotation from a talk by Sylvia Townsend Warner that doesn't appear to have been quoted anywhere else. Research mad skillz.

Anyway, in A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain Ward does exactly that, whether figuratively or not - he takes the reader on a journey through Britain, showing the literary sites that have been saved from bombing, or those that have been irrevocably changed by war. I can only imagine how poignant and moving this would have been in 1943; it is certainly moving enough now.

Plenty of his narration takes place in London, unsurprisingly - it was undoubtedly the area of Britain most physically affected by war - and in between commemorating Keats in Hampstead and Dickens in Doughty Street, he turns his attention to pre-war Bloomsbury (in a passage, incidentally, which would have been very useful in my first chapter):

After the last war 'Bloomsbury' became a synonym for intellectualist inbreeding and highbrow snobbery. But it is as difficult to define (or even to find) the pure 'Bloomsbury' type as it is to define or isolate 'Victorianism.' There is an old Punch joke, '"You can always tell a Kensington girl." "Yes; but you can't tell her much."' his, if given an intellectualist twist, might be applied to Bloomsbury in the nineteen-twenties. The authors who wrote and/or published their books in Bloomsbury then were not susceptible to instruction. They instructed. The hallmark of 'Bloomsbury' was a tart intellectual arrogance; and in their literary style Bloomsbury writers affected a dryness which was intended to have the vitrue of dry champagne, yet the product was, often, sandy on the palate. The Mother Superior of 'Bloomsbury' was Virginia Woolf, but, beside her, the rest were mostly novices lacking a vocation. Her one vice was preciosity; her virtues were legion.

I don't think I've ever read a more incisive and concise depiction of the Bloomsbury group.

Along with the text (and I should re-emphasise that he does sweep through other counties, and not just southern ones either) there are two types of illustration - pencil sketches and photographs. The photos are amazing. We see Westminster Abbey with rubble, Milton's statue knocked off a plinth, Canterbury ruins, etc. A trove of poignant (yes, that word again) images which bring to life a period that even the greatest description inevitably keeps at some distance.

Thanks, Karen, for sending this my way! A unique perspective on wartime Britain that I will really treasure.

Delight - J.B. Priestley

In 2009 I read a fun book called Modern Delight, in which various authors and others talked about the things that most bring them delight. I mentioned it in a Weekend Miscellany, but don't think I ever got around to a proper post about it.  It was enjoyable and fun, and for a good cause.  Also published at that point was a reprint of the book that inspired it - Delight (1949) by J.B. Priestley.

Somehow I didn't get a copy of it then, but when I was in Malvern recently I stumbled across an original edition of Delight and couldn't resist it - it became my dipping-in-and-out-of book. And (yes, this mini-review writes itself), it was a delight!

I haven't read any of Priestley's novels, although I've read one play and seen another - and read a fair bit of his journalism as part of my DPhil research. Delight shows quite a different side to him. Basically, it is short pieces on 114 things which delight him. Why this number, I don't know.

Priestley claims to be an old grumbler (he was actually only in his mid-50s, and would live 'til a month shy of 90) and this was his way of making up to those around him.  And the things that delight him are truly delightful - covering the silly (charades, playing with small children, fantastic theories), the moving (coming home), the scholarly (Shakespeare re-discovered, discovering Vermeer), and the bizarre (mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels).  Above all, they are wonderfully engaging, often very amusing, and show a writer who knew how to put together a book that is at once utterly unnecessary and wholly (yes, again) a delight.  Here's an excerpt from Delight no.1, about fountains:

And I believe my delight in these magical jets of water, the invention of which does credit to our whole species, is shared by ninety-nine persons out of every hundred.  But where are they, these fountains we love?  We hunger for them and are not fed.  A definite issue could be made out of this, beginning with letters to the Times, continuing with meetings and unanimous resolutions and deputations to Downing Street, and ending if necessary with processions and mass demonstrations and some rather ugly scenes.  What is the use of our being told that we live in a democracy if we want fountains and have no fountains?

Well - as someone who once traipsed around Torquay trying to find the precise fountain that my friend had seen in her youth, I can empathise.  But you need not worry about wanting Delight and not finding a copy - there are plenty around, particularly the 2009 reprint.  I can think of a few dozen bloggers and blog readers who would love this... it's just the sort of gem that deserves to be on a reader's shelves.

Every Good Deed - Dorothy Whipple

It wasn't until I listed Every Good Deed among my purchases at the Bookbarn that I realised how scarce it was - as a couple of commenters pointed out.  That made me feel duty-bound to read it asap, despite having only read some of the Persephone Whipples available (Someone at a Distance, They Knew Mr Knight, Greenbanks, High Wages, and The Closed Door - more than I'd thought, now I come to list them).  Well, judging by Persephone's love for Dorothy Whipple, I predict that Every Good Deed (1946) will one day join that number - but perhaps they needn't rush.  It was enjoyable and interesting, but it wasn't Whipple on top form...

They general idea is that a couple of oldish spinster sisters adopt a child from a local sort of orphanage, and all does not go well.  Susan and Emily Topham are shy, caring, worried about what society thinks of them, and above all not ready for a trickster.  Their cook (Cook, if you will) is a little more worldly-wise, but just barely.  Enter Gwen.

She steals, she talks back, she lies, she is (when a little older) no better than she ought to be.  She abuses their care and runs amok - and runs away.  She's not even an orphan; her wily mother uses the situation to exact cash from the Topham sisters.

There were hundreds of children who, in the same circumstances, would have responded to their care, would have loved them and been grateful; but by mischance they had hit upon Gwen.

That's Whipple's slightly half-hearted attempt to make sure we know Every Good Deed isn't supposed to be a universal cautionary tale.  The classism of the book did make me a little uneasy, and I'm not sure that sentence saved things...

There are a few more ins and outs in the narrative than this, but not many.  Although I enjoyed reading it, and Whipple is an expert at writing a very readable book, it did feel a lot like a short story which had got a bit long.  There is only one arc of the narrative - subplots not welcome - and the moments of crisis feel like the climaxes of a short story, not multifaceted moments in a novella.  Every Good Deed is only just over a hundred pages long, but I reckon it would have made more sense at, say, forty pages, in one of Whipple's short story collections.  An enjoyable enough read, but if you're struggling to find a copy anywhere... well, don't feel too distraught about it.

As For Me And My House - Sinclair Ross

Well, I hope you'll still be having a wander around Shiny New Books, but that won't (of course) stop me writing reviews here on Stuck-in-a-Book - although they may quieten down a bit when Issue 2 starts to loom!  (Incidentally, we're keen to get lots of bloggers writing pieces for us - contact me on simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk, or all of us at info[at]shinynewbooks.co.uk if you're interested.)

And onto a book that I've been reading for about six months - As For Me and My House by Sinclair Ross, kindly given to me by... someone.  I think Thomas at My Porch - certainly he is a huge fan.  Am I?  Hmm.  I don't know.  This is one of those cases where I know the book is very good... but I didn't very much enjoy reading it.

As For Me and My House (1941) takes the form of a woman's diary from provincial Canada - but Diary of a Provincial Lady this is not.  True, Our Vicar and Our Vicar's Wife are the central characters - Philip Bentley and his (anonymous?) narrator wife - but that's where the similarities end.  Basically, the narrator's life is miserable.  The small town is rude and ungrateful for the hard work her husband does.  He, in turn, has lost his faith and wishes he were a painter.  They are poor, their marriage is rocky, and dissatisfaction soaks every word of the novel.

He's a failure now, a preacher instead of a painter, and every minute of the day he's mindful of it.  I'm a failure too, a small-town preacher's wife instead of what I so faithfully set out to be - but I have to stop deliberately like this to remember.  To have him notice me, speak to me as if I really mattered in his life, after twelve years with him that's all I want or need.  It arranges my world for me, strengthens and quickens it, makes it immune to all worlds.

Well, as you can see, the writing is beautiful.  There is a deep and emotional richness to the way Ross writes.  I'm not sure it benefited from being in the diary format - it would have worked equally well, and probably rather more convincingly, simply as a first person narrative - but he certainly offers a fully-realised voice.  Just as convincing are the husband and (later) sort-of-adopted son, although I wonder if Ross intends us to believe the narrator to be as perceptive as she seems.

Here's another beautiful, dispiriting passage:

The sand and dust drifts everywhere.  It's in the food, the bed-clothes, a film on the book you're reading before you can turn the page.  In the morning it's half an inch deep on the window sills.  Half an inch again by noon. Half an inch again by evening.  It begins to make an important place for itself in the routine of the day.  I watch the little drifts form.  If at dusting time they're not quite high enough I'm disappointed, put off the dusting sometimes half an hour to let them grow.  But if the wind has been high and they have outdrifted themselves, then I look at them incredulous, and feel a strange kind of satisfaction, as if such height were an achievement for which credit was coming to me.

That rather aptly describes how it felt reading the novel.  Melancholy piled on melancholy.  It swept through all the pages, in every sentence, almost in every word.  The more I read, the more I felt outdrifted by it.  I don't demand novels of unswerving cheeriness, but... surely life isn't as bad as all this?  ("But a man's tragedy is himself, not the events that overtake him.")  It was wearying.  Beautiful, but wearying.

Of course, I read As For Me and My House as someone who has lived in a vicarage for many years, and whose father is still a working vicar (and mother a working vicar's wife).  I am well aware that it isn't always easy - that some parishioners can be difficult or aggressive or ungrateful.  In this novel it is the purportedly faith-filled whose hypocrisy stands out; in real life, it is just as likely to be the thoughtless atheist who tells you he'd like the church to burn down, or the teenager who thinks the vicar's sons are fair game to shout abuse at in the street.  But Ross gives only the tiniest mention (in Mrs Bird) of the positivity that comes with the profession.  The strangers who are kind to you as soon as you arrive in a new village, the people who selflessly give up their time to help with kids' events and so forth.  There is a world of literature bemoaning the claustrophobia of the small town - which needs to be balanced by how really lovely it is when people all know each other, care for each other, and let nobody go lonely.

Part of this seems like I just wish that Ross had written a different book.  But I think I could have really loved this one if there were a bit more balance - something more to alleviate the melancholy and hopelessness.  As it is, I do admire As or Me and My House.  Ross is unarguably a brilliant writer.  One I'd definitely recommend to sturdier souls.  And maybe my soul will be sturdier next time I try this one.

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor by Gertrude Stein

If Swallows and Amazons is a great book to be reading while the brain is a bit confuzzled, then Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948) probably isn't.  But it came to mind the other day when Dorothy Richardson was mentioned - simply because I'd mixed up who wrote it - but by then I'd pulled it off the shelf, and the fab Picasso cover, combined with the book's brevity, meant I thought I'd give it a whirl.

Every great writer has, I imagine, been called a fraud - and many frauds have been called great writers.  Which is Gertrude Stein?  I haven't read anything else by her, and the introduction to this edition more or less says that Blood on the Dining-Room Floor wasn't a success, but I spent the whole time thinking 'Emperor's New Clothes'.  But then I thought... there are plenty of people who say that about Virginia Woolf's fiction, which I think is sublimely brilliant - so it's just as likely that this novella is brilliant and I simply don't get it.  Here's a sample sentence:

A little come they which they can they will they can be married to a man, a young enough man an old man and a young enough man.

Well, sure, Gertrude, why not?  Not all the novella is that obfuscatory, but it's also far from unique in the narrative.  In theory, I'm not anti experimental writing - but as I get further and further from my undergraduate days, my tolerance for unconventional grammar and deliberately cloaked meaning gets lower and lower.

And what's it about?  Well, the writer of the blurb optimistically calls Blood on the Dining-Room Floor a detective novel, but since it's more or less impossible to work out who any of the characters are, up to and including the person whose blood is on the dining-room floor (a more prominent death in the book is the maybe-sleepwalker who fell out a window), then it can only be called a detective novel in the loosest sense conceivable.

An interesting experiment to read, and it's always possible that my cold-ridden delirium played its part, but... I can't call myself a Stein fan as of yet.  Anybody read this, or any of Stein's more famous work?  Could I be yet persuaded?

Abbie - Dane Chandos

A friend from my book group kindly lent me Abbie (1947) by Dane Chandos about a million years ago, and I've somehow only recently got around to reading it.  I think it looked almost too inviting - it seemed a delicious treat of a book that I didn't think I quite deserved.  And I thought it might be a sweet, old-fashioned children's book, which isn't something for which I'm always in the mood.

Well, I was right and I was wrong.  It isn't remotely sweet or a children's book, but it is wonderful.

You (like my friend) are probably aware of my penchant for characterful old ladies in books, and Abbie does not disappoint.  The episodic novel is narrated by Dane (I thought it might even be a sort of autobiography, until I discovered that Dane Chandos was actually the pseudonym for two authors, Peter Lilley and Nigel Millett) who, from his schooldays onwards, has a close and amusing relationship with his Aunt Abbie.

Abbie is composed of interspersed letters and narrative - the letters being from Abbie, who jaunts off around the world (she hires camels in Algeria, haggles in French markets, skis in Switzerland) but always returns to her East Anglian garden.  Gardening is perhaps the least exotic of her hobbies, but it is also her most passionate.  She judges everyone on their gardening abilities, she is willing to steal and deceive for her art, and this piece of dialogue (which I choose more or less at random) is from one of the chapters on gardening:

"Drat the regatta. We're too late now, anyway.  I have to get those camellias put in.  Now please take care of them, Arthur.  Do not make an impetuous gesture.  Cotoneaster twigs are very delicate.  Prenez garde!  These old gaffers should not be allowed on the roads, especially when there are such handsome almshouses at Upper Dovercourt."

Abbie is an interesting creation.  Battleaxe types are always a joy to read in some measure, but the author's (or, in this case, authors') task is to keep them on the right side of sympathy - or open them entirely to ridicule.  It is that which separates the Lady Catherine de Bourghs from the Miss Hargreaveses of this world.  Abbie is certainly not a figure of fun - much depends on the reader developing the fondness for her that Dane (the character) clearly has for his aunt.  How successful is this?

Well, the negatives.  She is unabashedly xenophobic - but not racist in particular, because every non-British person (indeed, every non-British non-upper-class person) meets with her disdain.  She is quite selfish.  She is rude, abrupt, and tells everyone to 'Prenez garde!' all the time.

And the positives.  She is very funny - sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.  She loves her nephew and her husband.  He is called Arthur, is calm and sensible, and balances out her forthright sense of purpose.  He is also, along with Dane, capable of quietening her down. The authors give us enough examples of Abbie being bested (my favourite being in the garden theft incident, by a confident neighbour) that we can afford to like her.

Make no mistake, she would be a horror to know as a person - and her xenophobia is only understandable as a product of her time - but I couldn't help loving reading about her energetic exploits and astonishing self-confidence.  The more low-key her social battles (arguing with a waiter, or going for a dress-fitting) the more I loved it - things got a bit out of hand with runaway camels and the like. But my taste always leans to the domestic and social minutiae.

Any fan of slightly silly, very funny, early twentieth-century novels will find a lot to like and laugh at in Abbie.  And, even better, I've just discovered that there is a sequel, Abbie and Arthur!  Thanks Caroline for lending this to me, sorry it's taken an age to read it...

Hetty Dorval - Ethel Wilson

Somehow I'd forgotten, when noting down books to read for my Reading Presently project, that quite a few of my unread Persephones had originally been gifts.  So there might be a little flurry of them as I come to the end of the year... and first up is the shortest, which accompanied me on my trip to the Lake District (and which I read in its entirety on the train): Hetty Dorval (1947) by Ethel Wilson. (Thanks, Becca!)

Hetty Dorval isn't really the heroine of the book, and she certainly isn't its narrator - that title goes to Frankie (Frances) Burnaby - but she is perhaps its leading figure.  Frankie first sees her on her arrival in their small British Columbian community, and is enchanted (and a little intimidated) by Hetty's beauty and lack of convention:

We walked our horses side by side, I feeling at the same time diffident and important.  Mrs. Dorval did not 'make conversation'.  I discovered that she never did.  It began to seem so easy and natural riding beside her there and no one making an effort at conversation that I was able to steal a few looks at her side face.  This was especially easy because she hardly seemed to know that I was beside her; she just took me for granted in a natural fashion.  Through the years in the various times and places in which I came to know Mrs. Dorval, I never failed to have the same faint shock of delight as I saw her profile in repose, as it nearly always was.  I can only describe it by saying that it was very pure.  Pure is perhaps the best word, or spiritual, shall I say, and I came to think that what gave her profile this touching purity was just the soft curve of her high cheek-bone, and the faint hollow below it.

Frankie is only a child, and does not understand the mystery of the woman - but agrees to keep coming to visit her secretly, flattered because Hetty Dorval refuses to have any other people call.  And, of course, it all ends rather calamitously.

The novel follows the various different times that the paths of Frankie and Hetty overlap, as the narrator realises and mentions, when she is a young adult:

But this is not a story of me [...] but of the places and ways known to me in which Hetty Dorval has appeared.  It is not even Hetty Dorval's whole story because to this day I do not know Hetty's whole story and she does not tell.  I only knew the story of Hetty by inference and by strange chance.  Circumstances sometimes make it possible to know people with sureness and therefore with joy or some other emotion, because continuous association with them makes them as known and predictable as the familiar beloved contours of home, or else the place where one merely waits for the street car, or else the dentist's drill.  Take your choice.  But one cannot invade and discover the closed or hidden places of a person like Hetty Dorval with whom one's associations, though significant, are fragmentary, and for the added reason that Hetty does not speak - of herself.  And therefore her gently impervious and deliberately concealing exterior does not permit her to be known.

It is a curious and interesting way to structure a novel, because it leaves the reader with a sense of incompleteness and an obviously skewed sequence of events.  Both factors enhance the mystery and complexity of Hetty, seen through the narrator's evolving eyes.  The early enchantment becomes, inevitably, disenchantment - as Hetty's past is revealed to show her not only disliked, but dislikeable.  Hetty Dorval is a intriguing counterpart to another Persephone book, Susan Glaspell's Fidelity, and all others of its reactionary ilk which sought, George Bernard Shaw style, to show that the fallen woman need not be immoral.  That was so much the dominant narrative of interwar fiction that a 'conservative' viewpoint would be more revolutionary than a liberal one - or so it seems to me.

Not that Wilson is making any grandiose point about sexual morality - rather, she is depicting one woman's sexual morality, and the impact this has on another young girl growing up.  Hetty Dorval is psychologically so subtle that the narrative can read deceptively simply - but it is an impressively measured and restrained portrait of two women.  Well, restrained, that is, until the final section where things get suddenly melodramatic - but somehow it doesn't feel out of place; it is as though emotion had been repressed or held back for so much of the novel, that it has to burst out at some point.

The Persephone edition has an afterword by Northrop Frye, of all people, and an amusing and interesting letter from Ethel Wilson to her publisher, obviously in response to various corrections and suggestions - largely asking for them all to revert to her initial wording.  It's always great to see 'behind the scenes', and this is the sort of thing to which the reader all too seldom has access.


Others who got Stuck into this Book:

"This is a “small” story of ordinary dramas, but it illustrates a big truth that is easy to forget in a world that prizes the independent spirit." - Teresa, Shelf Love

"This is a book definitely worthy of its dove-grey cover and beautiful endpapers!" - Jane, Fleur in Her World

"This small book so captures the wild joy I feel in the wind, in nature, in prairies, hills and mountains." - Carolyn, A Few of My Favourite Books

Time Will Darken It - William Maxwell

William Maxwell is an exceptionally good writer; I think that would be difficult to dispute.  Famously he was an editor of the New Yorker (editing, amongst many things, Sylvia Townsend Warner's short stories - leading to the miracle of wonderfulness that is their collected letters), and it is those skills which he carries over into his fiction writing.  A close eye to detail, an observing nature, and a delicate precision in his prose that makes reading his novels a lengthy exercise in perception and patience.

All of which means that I have to be in the right mood to read Maxwell.  When I am, nothing is more glorious.  I can luxuriate in his sentences and his precise (that word again) cataloguing of human emotion.  If I'm not in the right mood, it wearies me - it requires proper attention, and sometimes I am not a good enough reader to give it.  This, incidentally, is how I feel about many of Elizabeth Taylor's novels, too - and, like A Game of Hide and Seek (for instance), I started, shelved, continued, shelved, repeat as needed, and eventually finished Time Will Darken It (1948).  It took the best part of four months, but it was worth doing it like this - had I rushed it, I would have resented it.  As it is, I think it was wonderful.  (Thank you, Barbara, for giving it to me back in 2009!)

The focus of the novel is on Austin King and his family in Draperville, as his cousin's family come to visit, and the aftermath they leave behind them.  There are broken hearts, accidents, threats, arguments - but these make up a patchwork which portrays a community, rather than being of utmost importance themselves.  And the highlight of this community is Austin King himself.  He is a very Maxwellian character - patient, kind, uncertain, and never entirely able.  He lives in the shadow of his great (late) father, having taken on his partnership in a law firm; he lives his wife Martha who seems cold and distant, but is really (as Maxwell scrapes away the layers) confused and unhappy.  And then he lives with his boisterous cousin Mr Potter, his chatty wife, caddish son, and besotted daughter.

One part of King's life which is largely satisfactory is his relationship with his daughter Abbey, or Ab.  Many Maxwellian characters are good fathers, and even though I am not a father of any variety, I love reading his portraits of these relationships - which always remind me of Maxwell's lovely relationship with his own daughters, as shown through his letters.  He is always a sensitive writer, but perhaps most of all when it comes to Ab.

The world (including Draperville) is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances.  They cannot be watched over, twenty-four hours a day.  At what moment, from what hiding place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling.  And when it does, the result is not always disastrous.  Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives.  Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure.  You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their forehead after a fall.

There are some many characters and events that I can't begin to list them all, so I'll just quote one incident I thought rather lovely.  Here Miss Ewing - Austin's aging legal secretary - is talking to him about his father:

"I'll never forget how good your father was to me when I first came to work here.  I was just a girl and I didn't know anything about law or office work.  He used to get impatient and lose his temper and shout at other people, but with me he was always so considerate.  He was more like a friend than an employer."

Austin nodded sympathetically.  What she said was not strictly true and Miss Ewing must know that it was not true.  His father had often lost his temper at Miss Ewing.  Her high-handed manner with people that she considered unimportant, and her old-mad ways had annoyed Judge King so that he had, a number of times, been on the point of firing her.  He couldn't fire her because she was indispensable to the firm, and what they had between them was more like marriage than like friendship.  But there is always a kind of truth in those fictions which people create in order to describe something too complicated and too subtle to fit into any conventional pattern.

Maxwell often does this, and does it so well - a specific event will lead into generalised maxim, but one with such heart and such insight that all my wariness of generalisations is washed away.

The only times this approach doesn't work very well (in my opinion) is when Maxwell gets too homiletic for too long.  There is the odd chapter which might as well be the third act of an Ibsen play, and sometimes he forgets to give us enough of the specifics before he gets onto the reflections.  But they are small flaws in a novel which is extraordinarily insightful and complex.  No character's action or reaction is careless or implausible - sometimes they are extreme, but only where extremity is believable.  He is truly an astonishing writer - I just wish I were always as capable and adept a reader.

Oh, and the cartoon... a while ago I said I'd start doing pun covers, as a bit of silliness, and promptly forgot all about it.  Well... they're back!


Others who got Stuck into this Book:

"This is probably one of the best books I’ve ever read; beautiful, maddening and thought provoking" - Rachel, Book Snob

"The greatness of Maxwell's writing is that he looks deep inside each character, and he looks with humanity, without judgement, indeed with what I can only call love." - Harriet, Harriet Devine's Blog

"I liked the way the town and its characters came to life, as a sepia-tinted photograph does. There is an old-fashioned, autumnal feel to this novel." - Sarah, Semi-fictional

Six Fools and a Fairy - Mary Essex

I forgot to take a photo...
This one is from here,
where you can buy a copy

You may remember that, back in November 2011, I wrote about Mary Essex's The Amorous Bicycle, which was very witty and fun and delightfully middlebrow - and I puzzled over the fact that Essex (in fact Ursula Bloom) had managed to write so many novels (over 500) and still put out quality.  Sometime before that, Jodie (known to us as Geranium Cat) kindly sent me her copy of Six Fools and a Fairy (1948), saying that she'd tried it a couple of times and couldn't get into it... fast forward a couple of years, and my Reading Presently project has propelled me into finally getting it down from my shelves.  How would I find it compared to The Amorous Bicycle and another Essex novel I'd loved, Tea Is So Intoxicating?

Well, I'm afraid it's not as good... That sounds like a very ungrateful way to start a Reading Presently review, so I shall also say that it was a fun read, and just what I wanted for relaxing in the evenings after working away ferociously on my thesis, but it's an idea which doesn't quite get off the ground.

And that idea is a school reunion where each of the six men recounts a story, relating to each course, about... well, I'll let Charles Delamere explain:

"I should enjoy it immensely if we each told our own story.  About the woman, the one woman who meant something out of the rut to us.  The one each of us remembers most forcefully."

The courses are Consomme Paysanne, Sole a la bonne femme, Vol-au-vent, Roast Lamb, Gooseberry fool, and Angels on horseback.  Give or take a few accents that I'm too lazy to find.  I'll confess, I was already unsure about how things would go when this premise was set up.  Surely it would lead to a great deal of disjointedness?

It's essentially a series of short stories, each of which relate all-too-appropriately to the course in question, and each of which recounts a lost love.  At one point a character makes a caustic reference to the stereotypical heroes and heroines of an Ethel M. Dell novel, but Essex isn't far behind - her heroes aren't swarthy silent types, but they do all fall into much the same mould as each other.  I usually hate the criticism that "He can't write women" or "She can't write men", because it is (usually) silly and reductive, suggesting there are only two types of people - but Essex does seem, in Six Fools and a Fairy, to be under the impression that all men fall in love instantly, are proud, and are quite keen to hop into bed as soon as poss.  And throw into that stereotype that they're all generally a bit hopeless.  She spends a while delineating her characters at the beginning, but it's pretty impossible to tell the difference between them when they start talking.

Each chapter tells a difference character's story, only occasionally returning to reunion dinner, and since they have only about thirty pages to do, we whip through fairly stereotypical tales of misadventure and the-ones-that-got-away without building the characters up enough for the reader to care.  And then the story is over, and we're onto the next.  The chapters aren't even structured as anecdotes, but instead are shown through an omniscient narrator.  It's all a little bit bewildering and unnecessary.

Mary Essex is certainly an engaging writer, though, and it's easy enough to whip through the chapters.  She has that ability to write a page-turner, even if (once turned) one has no particular wish to mull over what one has read.  For a novelist renowned chiefly now for romance literature, though, this book - the first of the three I've read which prioritises romance - is surprisingly less interesting than Tea Is So Intoxicating and The Amorous Bicycle, which are about gossipy villagers and amusing incidents.  For wit has absented itself from Six Fools and a Fairy, creeping only into the odd line, then slinking out again quickly.

So, diverting enough for a quick read, if one doesn't want to feel at all challenged or invested.  But while her other novels made me think she was approaching the middlebrow joys of Richmal Crompton or even E.M. Delafield, had I read Six Fools and a Fairy first, I'd never have bothered with another.  Thanks very much for giving me a copy, Jodie, but ultimately I'm not too far from your assessment of it - and I think I'll be passing it on again.

Mr. Skeffington - Elizabeth von Arnim

A couple of times I have had the pleasure of staying with bloggers, who have kindly put me up (and put up with me) when I've needed a bed to crash in while in London.  One of those times I stayed chez Rachel/Book Snob, which was lovely - and even lovelier was that she sent me away with Mr. Skeffington (1940) by Elizabeth von Arnim as a present.  (I did give her a book to say thank you for having me, I should perhaps add, if I ever want bloggers to let me stay with them again.)

Elizabeth von Arnim is one of the most varied writers I've read, and there is little to link (say) the fairytale niceness of The Enchanted April with the deliciously biting satire of The Caravaners.  And then there is my current favourite, Christopher and Columbus, which has elements of both.  Where would Mr. Skeffington fit into the von Arnim spectrum?  Well, it turns out I've now read one of her more sombre, reflective novels... and, indeed, her last.

The novel is called Mr. Skeffington, but the central character is his ex-wife Lady Skeffington (Fanny to her friends) who divorced him over his affairs when she was still in her twenties, and is now approaching the grand old age of fifty.  In order to get on board with the novel, we have to accept the premise that fifty is terrifyingly old (although, since von Arnim was in her mid-seventies when she wrote the novel, she ought to have known better.)  But for Fanny it is a dreaded landmark, principally because - having been a renowned beauty all her life - a recent illness has taken her beauty from her, and quite a lot of her hair, and a tactless doctor tells her that she may soon be an eyesore.

An eyesore?  Was he suggesting that she was an eyesore?  She, Fanny Skeffington, for years almost the most beautiful person everywhere, and for about five glorious years quite the most beautiful person anywhere?  She?  When the faces of the very strangers she passed in the street lit up when they saw her coming?  She, Noble, lovely little Fanny, as poor Jim Conderley used to say, gazing at her fondly - quoting, she supposed; and nobody quoted things like that to eyesores.

I've got to say, reading Mr. Skeffington made me quite grateful that I have never been handsome - it must be very difficult to lose something like that, but especially so for Fanny, who doesn't have many other character traits to offer - or, at least, hasn't had to rely on them.

But that isn't all.  The reason she consults the doctor in the first place is because she keeps having hallucinations of Job Skeffington, her estranged husband.  She can't think why, since she has barely thought of him for years and years... but he won't stop appearing before her eyes.

And then the novel takes us back through the men who have courted her since her divorce.  The novel is oh-so-chaste, so none of them have done more than fling themselves adoringly at her feet, and she has done little than laugh politely and ignore them - but she determines to go and find them, to make herself feel young and beautiful again, and reassure herself that she isn't an eyesore.

So, in succession we see Fanny visit... New College, Oxford, to see an undergraduate who was recently (and somewhat inappropriately) besotted with her - only to see him busy with a much younger woman.  Then off to an older man who once loved her deeply, and still cherishes the letter she writes to him, but is shocked by her appearance after a decade or two (while she, in turn, is shocked by his) - and he, after all, is married to a young woman by now.  And then off to a vicar, living with his sister, who loved her when he was but a promising young curate, and now lives abstemiously on starvation rations.  And possibly more.

It's an interesting conceit for a novel, but it does end up making everything feel rather disjointed, somehow.  Somehow the different meetings don't hold together, so Mr. Skeffington is more like a series of similar short stories than a single narrative - and, although there are some interesting or delightful characters (I particularly enjoyed the vicar's sister, who remained certain that Fanny was a prostitute, but steadfastly determined to look after her charitably, when Fanny is mega-rich) they aren't given the opportunity to grow or impact the novel much.

And the end... well, I shan't give it away, but it is so emphatically a tribute to a famous Victorian novel that, if it isn't deliberate, it's plagiarism.

This is Elizabeth von Arnim, so of course the novel is good - she is always an excellent writer - but I think it might be a novel I'd be better off reading in about fifty years' time.  Perhaps then it would feel like a paean to youth and a empathetic mixture of nostalgia and regret... but, though I enjoyed it, and appreciated von Arnim's writing, I missed the raucous humour of her satires.  I've now encountered another facet of von Arnim's myriad writing talents... and I'm not sure I'm quite ready for it.

Of Love and Hunger - Julian Maclaren-Ross

It's no secret that the novels I tend to like are by women, about women, and (some would say) for women - just think of the Provincial Lady, the novels of Jane Austen, and any number of other examples.  Of course, my favourite novel is by a man (Miss Hargreaves) but I don't think anybody would guess that from reading it.  And yet, dear reader, I seem to be developing an affection for a new variety of British literature: men of the 1940s.

The first Proper Grown Up novel I ever read (besides teenage books and the odd Agatha Christie) was Nineteen Eighty-Four, at the relatively late age of 13.  I loved it then, and I loved it on re-reading it a few years ago.  It's entirely plausible that my tastes would have developed along Orwellian lines first, rather than wavering off - but better late than never, I have discovered a deep admiration for quite a few novels of the downtrodden, 1940s, lower-middle-class-hero[ine] variety. Most notably Patrick Hamilton's extremely brilliant The Slaves of Solitude - and it was my love of this novel which led Dee (from LibraryThing's Virago Modern Classics group) to send me a distinctly non-Virago novel: Of Love and Hunger (1947) by Julian Maclaren-Ross.

A long intro to a short book - Of Love and Hunger (which takes its title from Auden and MacNeice's Letters From Ireland) concerns Richard Fanshawe, a vacuum cleaner salesman who is always in debt and never in luck.  I don't believe the novel has a 'message' (it's too sophisticated for that) but this quotation does rather set the tone:

Straker said: "Doesn't seem much place for fellows like us, does there?""No.""What I mean, we're kind of out of things.  Nobody seems to want us much.  Fellows who've been out east, I mean.  We don't seem to belong any more."

Fanshawe has spent some time 'out east', and found that the return home is not a welcome for heroes.  He is stuck in a dead end job, behind with the rent on his flat, and without any particularly close friends - but, before you vow never to read a word of Of Love and Hunger, this isn't a particularly despondent novel.  Maclaren-Ross was a few years too early to be an Angry Young Man, and instead is one who embraces the bohemian, and shows the fundamental ordinariness of man.  Not the fundamental goodness - Fanshawe is not good - but nor is he bad.  He lives day to day, trying to earn his keep (and, if possible, keep his keep), and being friendly with people when he gets the chance.

One of the people he befriends is Sukie, who is (I quote the blurb) 'dark, desirable - and married to his friend'.  Which makes the novel sound a bit like a love triangle - and, although it is a bit, it's not pivotal.  More important, to my mind, are the men he meets through work.  There are some very amusing depictions of the bureaucracy and farce of vacuum selling that reminded me of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (albeit rather less hyperbolic) and I had a soft spot for Heliotrope - larger than life and twice as crooked - who is full of gusto and deceit, but a friendly face (and prolific offerer of raw onions.)

For the most part, nothing momentous happens.  Maclaren-Ross depicts an ordinary life that can't get much better and won't get much worse - the daily trundle to keep the wolf from the door, and the lack of ambition or drive that means Fanshawe will never be a rags-to-riches story (not least because he's never been as low as 'rags' implies).  But somehow Of Love and Hunger isn't hopeless.  It isn't a celebration of the everyday, or raging against it, but simply a depiction of it - and it is the truly great writers who can show us the ordinary, and wish to do no more.  I'm used to many exceptionally good (and not so good) writers doing that when 'the ordinary' is a tea table in a drawing room - I've only recently started finding them elsewhere.

It's always nice, not to mention a little ego-boosting, to read an introduction and discover that one has had the same thoughts as the Noted Expert (in this case, D.J. Taylor, who writes cogently and informatively, all too rare in introductions). I read it after I'd finished the novel, of course, and was pleased to see that he also mentioned Patrick Hamilton and George Orwell.  Of course, it was really Dee who spotted the connection, and she was right.  And fans of those writers will find much to admire in Of Love and Hunger.

Agatha Agatha

Sometimes you just need to read an Agatha Christie, don't you?  Well, I do.  When I was getting bad headaches still (they seem to have worn off now, for the moment at least) I needed something that didn't require much thought, but which still would be good - and so I picked up Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie.  You may remember, from my report of a talk at Folio HQ, that Christie's biographer Laura Thompson considered Five Little Pigs her best novel, and so I had to give it a go.

I shan't write that much about the novel, because I really want to use this post to find out which one you think I should read next, but I'll give you a quick response to Five Little Pigs (1942).  Well, for starters, I don't think it's her best.  Laura Thompson admired the way in which character and plot progressed together, and depended upon one another.  I agree with that in the abstract - but not in the way that the novel actually reads.

Poirot is investigating a murder that took place 16 years previously - on the commission of the daughter of the woman who was convicted.  Carla is the daughter, Caroline is the supposed murderer, and Amyas - Caroline's husband; Carla's father - is the artist who died of poisoning.  Shortly before she died in prison, Caroline wrote to her daughter to say that she was innocent... Carla, although only a young child at the time, believes her mother is telling the truth.  Poirot agrees to investigate... and narrows down the search to five people.  

The title Five Little Pigs is based on a nursery rhyme.  To quote Wikipedia: "Poirot labels the five alternative suspects “the five little pigs”: they comprise Phillip Blake ("went to the market"); Philip's brother, Meredith Blake ("stayed at home"); Elsa Greer (now Lady Dittisham, "had roast beef"); Cecilia Williams, the governess ("had none"); and Angela Warren, Caroline’s younger half-sister ("went 'Wee! Wee! Wee!' all the way home")."

The conclusion is clever and believable, and the characters well drawn (especially the contrasts between their present personalities, and the personalities shown in everyone's accounts of the fateful day.)  The big problem with the novel, for me, is how repetitive it is.  Poirot goes to interview each of these five in turn, and he then receives written accounts from each of them (which are given in full).  That means we get ten accounts of the day, one after another.  Ten.  Five felt like it was pushing it; ten was simply dull by the end.  I get that Agatha Christie wanted to show how perspective can shed different lights on events.  But... too much.

Still, this is Agatha Christie.  It was still very enjoyable, and pretty compelling reading, but I don't usually want to skip chunks when I read her.  Contrary to what Laura Thompson said, this is probably one of my least favourite Christie novels...

...and now I want you to suggest which one to read next.  Whenever I read one Christie I want to read more straight away.  I asked on Twitter, and got some great recommendations which I'm definitely keeping in mind, but I want to see which one would be most popular - so do comment with a recommendation even if someone else has already mentioned it.  To help you out, the following are the novels by Christie I HAVE read, so you don't need to suggest these... oh, and I know the twist to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, so I don't really want to read that one just yet.  Over to you (thanks in advance!)

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Murder at the Vicarage

Peril at End House

Murder on the Orient Express

Why Didn't They Ask Evans?

The ABC Murders

And Then There Were None

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

The Body in the Library

Five Little Pigs

The Moving Finger

A Murder is Announced

They Do It With Mirrors

A Pocket Full of Rye

Hickory Dickory Dock

4.50 From Paddington

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side

A Caribbean Mystery

At Bertram's Hotel

Endless Night

Nemesis

Sleeping Murder

The Egg and I - Betty Macdonald

There are some authors, because of the influence of the online reading group I'm in, that I stockpile before I get around to reading them.  Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth von Arnim were among the number for years (and I love them now, of course) - on the other hand, so were Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch, and now I've tried them without success, I'm left with piles of their books to keep or give away...

Anyway, long-winded introduction to: Betty MacDonald.  I believe it was Barbara or Elaine who first mentioned Ms. MacDonald to me, and her books were definitely compared to E.M. Delafield's Provincial Lady novels - which is, of course, a surefire way to get me to try them.  It's taken me a few years, but I've finally read one - The Egg and I (1945), which I bought in Edinburgh in 2009.

You might be disappointed - but you'll probably be relieved - to learn that no supernaturally large egg features in the novel, but it does feature farming. Indeed, that is what The Egg and I is about - an account of being a farmer's wife in 1920s America. As with the Provincial Lady books, and my other favourites by Shirley Jackson, it's memoir thrown to the wolves of exaggeration - or fiction tempered by reality, depending on which side you see it.

And it is very amusing.  MacDonald realises the comic potential in the astonishing workload of running a small holding with an ambitious husband, and there is plenty to delight the reader in accounts of a recalcitrant stove, suicidal chickens, and uncooperative bread.  My chief reaction was gratitude that the shifting class system in Britain meant that my father and I could go to university and pick our careers, and that I didn't end up in the great tradition of Thomas farmers (which stretches back as far as anyone knows, I believe.)  Nothing wrong with being a farmer, of course, only I have always suspected that I would be totally hopeless at it - a suspicion confirmed by reading The Egg and I.  You have to assume that Betty MacDonald deeply loved her then-husband Bob, because nothing else could possibly persuade a sane woman to embark on this venture with him.  It is a mark of her exceptionally good nature that, even when she is being teasing about the chores Bob suggests, there appears to be no deep-seated malice (which would be entirely justifiable):

By the end of the summer the pullets were laying and Bob was culling the flocks.  With no encouragement from me, he decided that, as chicken prices were way down, I should can the culled hens.  It appeared to my warped mind that Bob went miles and miles out of his way to figure out things for me to put in jars; that he actively resented a single moment of my time which was not spent eye to pressure gauge, ear to steam cock; that he was for ever coming staggering into the kitchen under a bushel basket of something for me to can.  My first reaction was homicide, then suicide, and at last tearful resignation.

Did I mention that she has a baby in the middle of the four years spent on this farm?  Betty MacDonald basically IS superwoman - and with a sense of humour too.

Then there are her neighbours - on one side is a large, lazy couple with about a dozen children.  Mrs Kettle seems quite good-natured (if not wised-up to the etiquette of everyday living), but Mr Kettle and his progeny seem to have no object in life but getting other people to provide food and assistance - and they do charmingly awful things like burning down their barn and starting a forest fire.  On the other side is the direct opposite: a farm kept so spotless you could eat your food off the floor.  All these secondary characters seem like exaggerations, but that didn't stop the Macdonalds' old neighbours filing lawsuits, according to the Wikipedia page.

The Egg and I doesn't have the same laugh-every-page that I found in the Provincial Lady books, has a slightly slow start, and the workload is exhausting even to read about, but I still loved reading it.  Anybody drawn to self-deprecating, cynically optimistic accounts of a person's everyday life (albeit an everyday life few of us would recognise), then this is a great book.  As so often, reading about the author's real life changes things a bit - she was divorced from Bob, and remarried to Donald MacDonald, by the time the book was published (one wonders quite what her current husband thought about her achieving fame writing so fondly about her ex-husband) - but it's easier simply to let The Egg and I be the simplified, all-American tale it wants to be.  As I wrote before - it's neither fiction nor non-fiction, but a delightful amalgam of the two.

Books lost in the mind

Do you ever read a book so slowly, over so many breaks, that you sort of lose any sense of what you thought about it?

No?  Really?

Well, I do.  (And maybe you did say 'yes' too.)  This is a side effect of reading so many books at once - some will, inevitably, be lost along the way - and picked up later - and finally finished, some months after they were started.  Dozens of books will have been read in between, and even a short narrative will have had hundreds of other characters tangled into it.

It's a fascinating idea, actually - the narrative, which should ideally go from page to brain in a more or less straightforward matter of read-interpret-remember, actually encompasses many other characters and stories along the way (and is clever enough to separate them) - and that's not even thinking about the millions of other stimuli along the way.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I enjoyed The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, very kindly given to me by Nichola (an internet book friend, whom I have met a couple of times, but who seems to have disappeared - Nichola, are you out there?), but I didn't read it in ideal circumstances.

Which is to say that I didn't simply lose the book in my mind... I literally lost it.  For about 18 months, it disappeared - and turned up when I moved house, as things tend to.  I was about two thirds of the way through when it disappeared, so... I just finished it, without going back to the beginning.

The Saturdays is a children's book about a family of siblings who form a club, to pool their pocket money and do something exciting together with the proceeds each week, taking it in turns to decide.  It's good fun, very charming, and with all the over-the-top events and mixture of morals and cynicism which characterise the best children's books.  It's probably better read as a child, or to a child, but I certainly enjoyed it a lot.  I think I finished it off during one of my headachey periods, and it's the perfect sort of light book for that.

But I'm not equipped to write a proper review, so this is instead mostly a pondering on how the reading (and losing) process affects the way we take in a book.  And how each novel comes with the illusory promise of a narrative we can ingest - but that no reader is ever the ideal reader in that sense; stories and characters must weave their way around all the other narratives (real and fictional) in our lives, and cope with all the broken moments of reading, and distractions and forgetting.  And, out the other side, we usually still think of the book as a whole, entire and separate from our haphazard methods of reading.

All a ramble, and not put together with any forethought (I have broken up my blogging as well as my reading; I have been answering people on Facebook and writing a murder mystery party) but perhaps something interesting to think about and to discuss...?

Consider the Years - Virginia Graham

You'll see that I've tagged this as post as 'Persephone', for this Consider the Years (1946) by Virginia Graham is available in a dove grey volume - but my copy is the beautiful one you see below (and the gorgeous bookmark was made by my friend Sherry):

Having read, and loved, Virginia Graham's hilarious spoof etiquette and 'how to' books Say Please and Here's How (click on those titles to read my reviews - or here for an excerpt from the latter on 'How to sing'), I thought I'd branch out and read some of her poems.  Consider the Years is a collection of poems which were written between 1938 and 1946 and so, of course, primarily concern the Second World War.

Dear reader, what we have is a case of frustrated expectations.  Having read Graham in fine comic mode, I was hoping that Consider the Years would be a collection of comic verse.  And, goodness knows, many authors have found much to laugh at amidst the horrors of wartime.  Unfair as it is to judge an author by standards which they they didn't agree to, the only poems I really loved in this collection were those that were funny.  Here, for example, is one called 'Losing Face':

This is my doodle-bug face.  Do you like it?
It's supposed to look dreadfully brave.
Not jolly of course - that would hardly be tactful,
But... well, sort of loving and grave.

You are meant to believe that I simply don't care
And am filled with a knowledge superal,
Oh, well... about spiritual things, don't you know,
Such as man being frightfully eternal.

This is my doodle-bug voice.  Can you hear it?
It's thrillingly vibrant, yet calm.
If we weren't in the office, which isn't the place,
I'd read you a suitable psalm.

This is my doodle-bug place.  Can you see me?
It's really amazingly snug
Lying under the desk with my doodle-bug face
And my doodle-bug voice in the rug.

Would that the whole collection had been along these lines!  And I mean that both in tone and metre.  I know it's a terribly unscholarly thing to say, but I have to confess a fondness for poems with rhyme and scan.  (This is why I have only studied prose at graduate level, I suspect.)

When Graham wanders into free verse, or to scanning verse that doesn't rhyme (or, sometimes, rhyming verse that doesn't scan), I lose interest.  Her poems are never particularly experimental, I should add - her free verse isn't unduly free - but I, with my reluctance to read poetry, had come hoping for pages of poems like 'Losing Face', and Graham does not intend to provide that.

But... it's is a beautiful little book, isn't it?

Yours Sincerely - Monica Dickens & Beverley Nichols

When my e-friend Sarah mentioned that Monica Dickens and Beverley Nichols had co-authored a selection of light essays called Yours Sincerely (1949), can you really imagine me not immediately buying a copy?  If you answered 'yes' then you're either new around these parts, or you have a stronger sense of my self-control than is just.

So, back in autumn, it arrived - and I started reading it in a gradual way, such as befits this sort of book.  It is great fun.  I don't know quite where the articles came from - they're quite varying lengths, and don't seem to have been written specially for this volume, but cover topics in the same line as Rose Macaulay's Personal Pleasures.   Everything from 'Planting Bulbs' (reminiscent of Provincial Lady, no?) to 'Sensuality'; 'Talkative Women' to 'Coddled Men'; 'Losing Your Temper' to 'Brides in White.'  All the sort of topics of middle-class chatter in the 1940s - but feeling, somehow, old-fashioned even for the 1940s.

Indeed, Beverley Nichols has no qualms in describing himself as 'old-fashioned, out-of-date, and generally encrusted in lichen'.  Even when I agree with him, he's so curmudgeonly that I felt like I wanted to distance myself from him...  it's enjoyable to read, but not quite the laugh-out-loud, self-deprecating whimsy that I'd expected - and which Monica Dickens delivers in spades.  Sometimes he was just too saccharine and worthy for my taste...

You can't bruise a plant and feel aggrieved because it grows up stunted or deformed or "odd."  The slightest twist or wound, in it infancy, grows and swells, till in the end the plant is an ugly wretched thing that you have to throw onto the rubbish heap.

It is the same with children.  A lie, an injustice, a cruelty - these get under the skin.  And they too grow and swell, till at last a miserable man or a wretched woman is rejected by society.

Undeniably true, but... am I bad person for wishing that he'd been jollier?  I still haven't read any of his books, and now I'll be rushing towards them a little less eagerly.

Whereas Monica Dickens, after getting all serious in The Winds of Heaven, is on fine form in Yours Sincerely.  Lots of smiles all round, and never too earnest.  Just the sort of light essay which I adore, and which doesn't seem to happen any more.  Here she is on proposing...

We've all dreamed much the same dreams, I expect.  You know - you're in a diaphanous evening dress of unearthly beauty.  You're the belle of the ball.  You've danced like a disembodied fairy and now you drift out on to a moonlit terrace, mysterious with the scent of gardenias. 

He follows, in faultless evening dress, no doubt (mine sometimes used to be in white monkey jackets), and says - IT.

Or, he says IT on the boat-deck of a liner gliding through phosphorescent tropic seas, or on a Riviera beach, or sometimes at the crisis of some highly improbable adventure.  He's just rescued you - or you him - from a fire.  You're besieged in an attic firing your last round at the enemy now battering at the door below.  You're a beautiful nurse and he's a dying soldier - but not irretrievably dying.

There are endless variations but always the same theme song : "Will you marry me?"  The implication is that when one is very young the actual moment of proposal is one of the high-spots of marriage.

I used to pester my mother over and over again to tell me how my father proposed.  I couldn't believe she wasn't holding out on me when she swore that he never really had.  She couldn't remember when he started saying and writing : "When we're married we'll do so and so."

I have a small section of a shelf devoted to light essays - it is only a small section, because I haven't managed to find very many.  Alongside this and some by Rose Macaulay are Angela Milne's Jame and Genius, A.A. Milne's various offerings in this genre, J.B. Priestley's Delight, Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris, Christopher Morley's Safety Pins, and probably one or two others which have slipped my mind.  Any suggestions?

In the meantime, Yours Sincerely isn't groundbreaking or even exceptionally good, but it's a jolly, enjoyable contribution to that often-overlooked form of the familiar essay, and so steeped in the mores of the early 20th century that a flick through fills me with nostalgia for an age in which I never lived.

Elders and Betters - Ivy Compton-Burnett

"Dear, dear, what clever talk it all is!"
"It sounds so," said Jenney, on a puzzled note.  "And yet it is all about nothing, isn't it?"

It's canny of Ivy Compton-Burnett to incorporate into Elders and Betters (1944) the main criticism aimed at her novels - it shows a self-awareness, but somehow also deflates the common argument (from those who have read her unadmiringly) that her work is all surface and no depth.  I'm going to do my best to defend her, but... I do have to concede that a lot of what I love about Ivy Compton-Burnett's exceptional writing is the surface wit.  A lot, but not all.  

Elders and Betters starts off on moving day for the Donne family.  Anna has chosen a house for them, and the various members of the family are moving in, in dribs and drabs.  Since we started off with only three, I thought that Ivy Compton-Burnett had been uncharacteristically frugal with her cast - but more and more arrived, and then we were introduced to a second family.  I'll save you some time, and rattle through them.  Skip the next paragraph if you want to - it's deathly dull, but needs must.  Here goes.

Father: Benjamin, children: Bernard, Esmond, Anna, Reuben (ages about 30 to 13, in that order). Benjamin's cousin Clara Bell 'known as Claribel to the family, and to as many people outside it as she could contrive'; housekeeper Maria Jennings (Jenney to all), Cook (nobody seems to know her name) and Ethel, the maid.  Benjamin's sister Jessica lives nearby, along with her husband Thomas, adult children Terence and Tullia, and young children Dora and Julius. Benjamin's other sister, Sukey, also lives there - and is dying of a vague heart condition, without any apparent time-limit on its fatal nature.  Finishing things off are Miss Lacy (the young children's teacher) and her niece Florence.

Phew!  At one point I did sketch out a family tree, but they actually all have quite distinct personalities and affinities, and it wasn't too tricky to keep them all sorted in my mind.  Back to the plot.  As I say, we start with visiting a new house - the sort of scene I always warm too, especially when one character is trying to convince others that it's a great choice, and they remain firmly unconvinced.

"The drawing-room and dining-room are what we should expect," said Anna, throwing open the doors.  "The kitchens are below them.  The staircase leads to those above."

"A natural use for a staircase," murmured Claribel to Jenney, as she set foot upon it.  "I am glad we are to be allowed to put it to its purpose."

Oh, how I adore the witty pedantry which informs so much of Ivy Compton-Burnett's writing.  And the backtracks and change of tempo brought about by her authorial asides.  How can you not adore a writer who constructs so perfect a sentence as this? :

Ethel tried not to smile and entirely succeeded.

Round and round the conversations go, seemingly to lead nowhere, but actually forming brilliant portraits of family dynamics, and exposing the barbs and bitternesses behind people's facades - as well their occasional generosity or kindness.  For her characters so rarely have facades - they say what they think, or (more often) contradict what others think.  There is one utterly wonderful scene where nothing more complex happens than someone notices there are thirteen sitting down to dinner - and they deliberate who shall sit down first (or last; they cannot recall the superstition correctly.)  It is a scene which should be anthologised time and again.

But Elders and Betters is not a novel where nothing happens.  Ivy Compton-Burnett was always keen to stress that novels must have plots, and hated those which seemed not to.  In Elders and Betters, the pivotal point could be borrowed from any detective novelist, even if the treatment could not.  Aunt Sukey has written two wills - one inheriting her sister Jessica, one her niece Anna. She asks Anna to destroy the will which would benefit her; Anna destroys the other.  Sukey, of course, dies shortly afterwards of her heart condition.  And this propels the happenings, and (more importantly) the conversations, for the rest of the novel.

Recently, on my very positive review of Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris, Rachel commented "I'm sure you'll entice some more people to read Bowen - she's streets ahead of ICB!!!"  Those exclamation marks show me that she was teasing, but I do have to say - I still think Ivy Compton-Burnett is a better and more important writer than Elizabeth Bowen.  These author-vs.-author battles are probably rather silly, and will end up going in circles, but the reason I think ICB is more important is that Elizabeth Bowen does, very well, what a lot of other authors try to do; Ivy Compton-Burnett does brilliantly what nobody has really tried to imitate.

"It is a modest but pleasant house," said Reuben's voice, "and a home is where a family is gathered together."

"That is what makes family problems," said Bernard.

"We have none of those," said Benjamin, in a tone that defied contradiction.

"None," muttered Esmond. "Problems imply a solution."

"Jenney is proud of me for being able to talk like other people, though I cannot walk like them," said Reuben, rightly interpreting the expression on Jenney's face.

It is not true that Ivy Compton-Burnett's narrative voice is absent - although her novels are mostly dialogue, she very often gives speech this sting in the tail, offering a flash of insight into a character's mind, and darting away again just as quickly.  Hopefully I have given some examples of what makes her so special, so different, so important a novelist.

But, while musing about Ivy Compton-Burnett on the bus (for such is my glamorous life), I wondered why I believed her to be such a significant author, considering she seemed to inspire no one and take inspiration from no one.  There appears to be no distinct literary tradition that she adapted or futhered, besides the vague quantities of the domestic novel.  And then it struck me, the author she most reminded me of - which is, curiously perhaps, Shakespeare.

Characters who speak as no person would ever speak (for who ever spoke in blank verse?) but who perfectly represent how people feel and think.  Characters engaged in large-scale comedy and tragedy, but bound by the familial ties, and rarely missing the opportunity to philosophise in the midst of anguish or (more rarely) joy.  And of course, with all that dialogue, Ivy Compton-Burnett's books are as much plays as they are novels.  The deal was sealed when, in the final act (if you will) a flurry of unexpected engagements occurred.  Perhaps with these criteria I could compare Ivy Compton-Burnett to any playwright in a Shakespearean tradition, but it seemed to me that it was William S's particular mantle that Dame Ivy was seeking to inherit.  This only struck me towards the end - with my next venture in Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels, I shall keep it in mind from the outset, and see what it brings out of the text and reading experience.  Elders and Betters, to conclude, is not my favourite of the Ivy Compton-Burnett novels I've read (More Women Than Men retains that crown), nor is it in the top half, but she seems incapable of writing a novel that I will not thrive upon and relish - Elders and Betters is no exception.