Charlotte Mew and Her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald

46. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends by Penelope Fitzgerald

The first of my reviews I'm going to point towards, over at Shiny New Books, was the most unexpected treat. Indeed, it's going on my 50 Books list - which is coming towards a close now, and that makes me nervous. (What if I read something superlatively brilliant just after putting the 50th book on the list?)

I had thought Penelope Fitzgerald was already represented, as I've loved The Bookshop and At Freddie's - but apparently neither quite made the list. Charlotte Mew and Her Friends is a little more outside the box - being a biography of a turn-of-the-century poet - but has just as wide an appeal, honest. It's one of the few biographies I've read where the subject mattered less than the writer - not ostentatiously in the writing, but in my response to it.

Do head over to my Shiny New Books review for the complete picture...

Mr. Fox by Barbara Comyns

One of the many lovely things about being at home in Somerset is that most of my books are down here. Although I have several hundred unread books in Oxford, I have many more in Somerset that I don't get to run my eyes over everyday - and so there are some fun surprises on the shelves here.  Not so much books I'd forgotten about, but certainly books I hadn't expected to be able to read soon.  Saturday was so sunny and lovely that I wanted to pick up something that perfectly matched my mood.  And what better than to treat myself with a long-awaited Barbara Comyns?

Oh, how did you get into the picture, Sherpa?

I've read nearly all of Comyns' novels now (saving just A Touch of Mistletoe) and I'd thought that the styles divided neatly into two - the seven novels of the 1940s-'60s, and the three which she published in the 1980s after being rediscovered by those bastions of rediscovery, Virago Modern Classics.  Well, if I'd read Mr. Fox blindfolded (...as it were) then I would have placed it in the first group.  Which is a very good thing, in my book - Mr. Fox (1987) is up there with Comyns' best books, in terms of tone, character, and sheer calm madness.

The setting is World War Two, and the heroine (of sorts) is typically Comyns territory - Caroline Seymore has a young daughter (Jenny) but is quite like a child herself.  As she narrates her life - running from flat to house to flat, avoiding bombs, selling pianos, cleaning for a neurotic vegetarian - she is that wonderfully Comynsian combination of naive and fatalistic and optimistic:

I still had a feeling something wonderful was going to happen, although it was taking a long time.  Perhaps it was just as well to get all the sad part of my life over at one go and have all the good things to look forward to.

I don't think any sentence could encapsulate the outlook of a Comyns heroine better than that.  As always, we have the surreal told in a matter-of-fact way, and the novel reminded me most of The Skin Chairs.  It is like someone telling their life story in one long breath, slightly muddled, with emphasis falling equally on the significant and insignificant.  It makes reading the novel a bit disorientating, but in a lovely way - you just go along for the ride, and wait to see what will happen.  And it makes it all feel so believable, because surely no novelist could craft something so detailed and yet so arbitrary?

And the Mr. Fox of the title?  He is that wartime speciality, the spiv.  There never seems to be any romance between Caroline and Mr. Fox, but they live together to save money and conduct their curious operations together - whether on the black market or, as mentioned, selling grand pianos.  He is a charming man, and Caroline seems curiously drawn to his ginger beard, but he also has a ferocious temper - and Caroline is often happier when he's not around.  The pairing is bizarre - a marriage of convenience that isn't actually a marriage.  It adds to the surreality of the novel, and I can't really work out why he gets the title to himself, since Mr. Fox seems to be so much more about Caroline.  Or even, indeed, about the Second World War.  With air raids and rationing and evacuees, Comyns uses the recognisable elements of every wartime novel or memoir, but distorts them with her unusual style and choice of focus.  How many times have we seen films or read novels with a scene of anxious villagers gathered in church to hear war declared?  Compare that with the way in which Comyns shows it:

On Sunday I could stay at home because the men from the Council took a holiday; so the Sunday following my visit to Straws I was washing and ironing all the curtains so that they would be fresh for the new house.  I listened to the wireless as I ironed, but I was thinking of other things and was not listening very carefully; then suddenly I heard Mr Chamberlain telling everyone the war had come, it was really here although outside the sun was shining.  It didn't seem suitable to iron now the war had really come, so I disconnected the iron and stood by the window biting my nails and wondering what to do next.

Mr. Fox, like all her novels, is also very funny.  Mostly that is because of the naive but unshockable voice which is cumulatively built up, but I also loved lines like this:

I hoped they liked warmth, because I had an idea vegetarians thought it unhealthy to be warm or comfortable and usually lived in a howling draught

The novel has such an authenticity that I wonder if Comyns kept it in a drawer for decades.  I wish somebody would hurry up and write a biography of her, because I'd dearly love to know more about her life - if it is a tenth as bizarre and captivating as her novels, then it'd make for a splendid biography.

If you've never read any of Barbara Comyns' work before, I'd still recommend starting with Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead or The Vet's Daughter (and probably not Our Spoons Came From Woolworths, which is her most well-known and my least favourite), but you wouldn't be doing badly if Mr. Fox was your first encounter with her.  And if you already know and love Comyns, make sure you find yourself a copy of this one - you're in for a treat.

The Fifth Child - Doris Lessing

Whenever I've mentioned to people that my book group is reading The Fifth Child (1988) by Doris Lessing, they have shuddered and told me that I'd better make sure I don't read it late at night or when I'm on my own, etc. etc.  Apparently it's notoriously scary.  Well, I found it chilling in places, but ultimately not the horror book it is marketed as.  But it is altogether more interesting than that...

Harriet and David Lovatt are unconventional in their conventionality.  While all their 1960s companions are taking drugs, going to wild parties, and refusing to settle down, all they want is marriage, a big home, and a big family.  This is precisely what they achieve - luckily David's father is very rich (lucky both for them and for Doris Lessing, who is able to use this a lot to get out of narrative holes), and he offers to pay the mortgage on an enormous house.  Harriet and David promptly get onto filling it, and have four children in the space of very few years, and not that many pages.

I think Lessing rather shot herself in the foot with her title, so far as sustaining interest for the first section of the novel is concerned, because we know what's coming.  It's the fifth child which is going to be the important one.

From the first months of her pregnancy, Harriet feels dislike and fear of her unborn child. When he is born, Ben is instantly violent - grinding his gums together cruelly (it seems to Harriet) when he is breastfeeding.  As he grows older, it seems that he has killed a cat; he is bigger and stronger than he ought to be for his age; he cannot communicate in the way their other children did.  Harriet's dislike grows to a sort of hatred, albeit one tempered with a maternal instinct she cannot quash.

The Fifth Child is an interesting mixture of the gothic horror and domestic realism.  Aspects reminded me of horror film tropes (not that I've seen many at all), but still more aspects reminded me of the melancholy-portrait-of-marriage novels Nina Bawden and Margaret Drabble have written.

It made for an interesting combination - but perhaps not an entirely successful one.  Part of the reader's mind wants to find a logical explanation of some kind (does Ben have severe Autism?  Is Harriet experiencing post-natal depression?) and another part looks towards a fictive horror explanation (is Ben a demon?  A troll, or goblin?)  The influences of two genres can come together in a sophisticated and nuanced manner, but the central crux of the novel can't really straddle both.  So Lessing picks one - I won't say which - and this tips the balance of the narrative.  Leaving everything from the other side of the scale a bit out in the cold...

And what of Lessing's writing style?  I really liked it.  Some people at book group thought it was too basic - the word 'patronising' was used - but I'm rather a fan of simple prose.  This might even have been deceptively simple - if it was, I was deceived(!)

This is my second Lessing novel, after Memoirs of a Survivor years and years ago, and I can't say that I feel I have a strong handle on what she does.  Nor am I hugely keen to read any more, actually, despite thinking The Fifth Child was good.  But, having said that, I would welcome any burning suggestions if you think there is something by our Doris which I should really read...


Others who got Stuck in this Book:

"Although the story is disturbing, Lessing is an amazing writer and it is no wonder she won the Nobel Prize for Literature." - Thomas, My Porch

"I found the narrative immediately gripping although the fast pace left me breathless at times." - Kim, Reading Matters

"The book raises many important issues, including whether ‘bad’ children are born that way." - Jackie, Farm Lane Books

Floater - Calvin Trillin

One of the books I bought when I was in Washington DC, and read immediately within one day, was the unfortunately-named Floater (1980) by Calvin Trillin.  I didn't realise when I picked it up, but it's about journalists living in Washington DC - extremely apt, since I was staying with journalists living in Washington DC.

So, what is a floater, I hear you ask?  The floater in question is Fred Becker, and the title means that he has no permanent position in the office of the national newsmagazine for which he works, but moves from section to section, filling in for holiday, illness, or whatever.  Becker steadfastly resists any attempts to tie him down to a single section, preferring the peripatetic life, even if it leaves him jack of all trades and master of none...

As a back-of-the-book floater, he had accumulated a store of knowledge on all sorts of subjects - a knowledge of millenarian sects from his bondage in Religion, familiarity with the workings of hot-air balloons from a summer week in Sports, more than he wanted to know about New Math from a period spent in Education when Milt Silvers went to the hospital with an alligator bite.  One of the problems with a floater's knowledge, though, was its spottiness.  He knew a lot about millenarian sects, but he had no idea what, say, Methodists believe.  From several weeks in the Business section at one time or another, he happened to have learned a lot about Asian currency manipulation and the speculative market in bull semen, but he wouldn't have had the first notion about how to go about obtaining a mortgage.  He knew practically nothing about French impressionism, but he could have delivered an after-dinner speech on the work of one abstract expressionist who happened to die when the regular Art writer was on vacation.

Lovely!  Trillin has a way with words which I love, never quite tipping over into ba-dum-crash joke territory, but with a light absurdity which is just the sort of thing I love.  Take, for example, the incident where Becker tries to get off the Religion page by writing 'allegedly' after everything mentioned - 'the alleged birth of Christ', for instance.  And then there is the Lifestyles piece on '2/3 stockings'.  Becker can find nobody who has a clue what this means, but plenty of people willing to pretend.  Floater reminded me a lot of Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, which is no bad thing, but without nearly Waugh's level of meanness.  Like Tepper Isn't Going Out, this novel (which was Trillin's first) is often about the stupidity and irrationality of the workplace, but never with the menace of Magnus Mills or the dark claustrophobia of Kafka - rather, again like Tepper, there is an amiability about it all.

That, I think, is the novel's main achievement: the amiability of Becker.  There is a managing editor who isn't pleasant, and an officious staff member desperate to be offended by everything that is said, but ultimately everybody is a little bit selfish but essentially amiable.  I'm using that word again, because it is the one which fits best - the characters are not good, except in the way that a sort of weary inertia prevents anybody doing anything outright bad.  But to make a character as unwittingly charming as Becker is an impressive feat, one replicated two decades later in Tepper.  One of my favourite characters - or, rather, my favourite lampoon - is Silvers.  He is that self-conscious eccentric we all know (particularly in Oxford); the sort of person who describes themselves as 'a bit mad', and makes sure they are surrounded by props to back it up.

"The deal on the London taxi is closed," Silvers said.  "Of course, you should have heard my insurance man's voice when I called to switch the insurance over from the John Deere tractor.  He thinks I'm a little unusual."

Becker had never figured out how to reply to Silvers in a way that did not provoke more stories.  Usually, he just stood there nodding dumbly while using the Thai's concentration methods or glancing around for escape routes.

"One of the great advantages of a London taxi, of course, is that if you happen to have a unicycle, which I just happen to have, the unicycle will fit snugly in the luggage area right next to the driver.  Of course, when your average New York traffic cop sees a London taxi drive by with a unicycle right..."

Becker briefly considered pretending to have a heart attack.

There is a narrative threaded through it all, concerning rumours about the President's wife, with all manner of intrigue, plot, and counter-plot, but (although rather satisfying when it all comes together) it is largely incidental to Floater, which is primarily successful because of the creation of Becker and the tone Trillin achieves.

I've only found one other blog review - Teresa's - and she wasn't a huge fan, so there's fair warning.  I found it a quick, wryly amusing, delight; a send-up of an environment for which Trillin obviously feels a great deal of affection.

Q's Legacy - Helene Hanff

Amongst those of us who write or read book blogs, there are two varieties: those who love Helene Hanff's 84, Charing Cross Road, and those who have yet to read it.  In case you have yet to have that pleasure, it's the (true) letters between Hanff in America and Frank Doel, who worked in a London bookshop.  It's charming and bookish, and a slightly can't-believe-how-stereotypical-they're-being encounter between brash American and restrained Brit.  I've bought a few Hanff books since I read 84, Charing Cross Road (and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, published together) eight or so years ago, but the first I've read was Q's Legacy (1985) on the train home to Somerset.  And it was fab.

For some reason, I had believed that Q's Legacy was Hanff's first book, and settled down to it for that reason.  I was, at it turns out, wrong - most of this book is about the writing, success, and aftermath of 84, Charing Cross Road - but before I get to that, I'll address the title.  You might, or might not, know that 'Q' is the author, essayist, poet, and anthologist Arthur Quiller-Couch (which rhymes with pooch).  I believe 'Q' dates from the time when writers in periodicals, particularly Punch, appeared under initials (hence A.A. Milne being known as AAM for some of his publications) - but Arthur Quiller-Couch could get by with just 'Q'.  Although he pops up quite a lot in biographies I've read about other people, the only work I've read by Q is his poem 'Upon Eckington Bridge, River Avon' - because I grew up in the small Worcestershire village which boasts this bridge.  Barbara recently visited in on her travels, so you can see it here.

His legacy to Hanff came about by writing On The Art of Writing, which she stumbles across while trying to educate herself in literature.  In his five-volume collection of lectures, he covers the grand scope of literature, and inspires Hanff to go off hunting:

In the first chapter of On The Art of Writing he threw so many marvellous quotes at me - from Walton's Angler, Newman's Idea of a University, and Milton's Paradise Lost - that I rushed back to the library and brought home all three, determined to read them all before going on to Q's second lecture.  Which would have been perfectly possible if I hadn't included Paradise Lost.  In Paradise Lost I ran into Satan, Lucifer, the Infernal Serpent, and a Fiend, all of whom seemed to be lurking around the Garden of Eden and none of whom my teachers at Rodeph Shalom Sunday School had ever mentioned to me.  I consulted my Confirmation Bible, but I couldn't find Milton's fearsome personages in Genesis.  I concluded that Lucifer and the Fiend weren't Jewish and I would have to look in the New Testament for them, and since this was an entirely new book to me, Q had to wait while I read that one, too.

When she wants to source some out of print books mentioned by Q, can you guess where she goes for help?  Yes, that's right - Marks & Co. Bookshop, at 84, Charing Cross Road - that's how their acquaintance starts.

Alongside this autodidacticism, Hanff is trying to make it by writing.  She manages to eke out a non-lucrative career, slowly writing poorly paid history books for children.  She tries her hand at various other types of writing, with very little success - a lovely publisher called Genevieve encourages her along the way, with a mixture of blunt honesty and unrealistic optimism.

And eventually, while going through old boxes of letters, Hanff stumbles across the letters she received from Frank Doel, some twenty years later.  She thinks that they might, if edited, make a fun magazine article - and sends them to Genevieve.  She loves them, and passes them onto a niche publisher - and, without ever having intended to make a book out of them, Hanff finds that she will be published.  (She entirely glosses over how she got her half of the correspondence - perhaps she kept carbon copies, or perhaps Frank Doel's then-widow sent them to her.)  Either way - a book was made.

For those of us who love 84, Charing Cross Road, this book is the equivalent of a Behind The Scenes clip on a DVD.  We get to see the creation, but we also get to see the aftermath.  Hanff writes self-deprecatingly and amusingly about being catapulted to fame (albeit the sort of fame a literary author gets; she's no Lady Gaga) and having fans.  As she points out, including her current address in a book probably wasn't the wisest move for anybody who wants any privacy - and, sure enough, many strangers phone or write, although none seem to turn up in the middle of the night with a horse's head, so... that's something.

But things do not finish there!  Hanff continues to document her experiences as 84, Charing Cross Road is turned into a 1975 TV programme and a 1981 stage play.  Had Hanff waited a couple of years to publish Q's Legacy, she might have been able to include the film adaptation (which is very good, and even has a small role for Judi Dench, back when she didn't really do films.)  Seeing the TV and stage adaptations behind the scenes, from someone tangentially involved but still wowed by the whole process, was a real treat.  I much enjoyed a lot of it very, very much - although when Q's Legacy turned into diary entries, for Hanff's trip to London, it lost some of its charm and momentum, in my eyes.)

Hanff admits that she struggles to create memorable or apt titles, and I can't imagine there are many souls who leapt at the title Q's Legacy (although some certainly do - like me), but I am glad that she chose it.  It's fun to trace one's literary tastes and career successes to a single decision - and generous of her to dedicate her writing, as it were, to a man who could never know anything about it.  Although Hanff is really only known for 84, Charing Cross Road, Q's Legacy suggests that she should be known for rather more - and anybody who wishes that 84, Charing Cross Road were much longer will be happy to discover, in Q's Legacy, that, if the correspondence cannot be extended, at least the tale of Hanff and Doel is.

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson

I don't read many living authors, certainly not as a percentage of my overall reading, but I think there is only one whom I consider to be a 'great' - and that is Marilynne Robinson.  This opinion was formed on the basis of her novel Gilead, and has been strengthened by reading her first novel, Housekeeping (1980).  I don't think it is as good as Gilead, but it is still a strikingly beautiful example of how astonishingly an author can use prose.  The opening lines are surprisingly stark, given the writing that follows:

My name is Ruth.  I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Forster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.

This opening, hovering between comedy and tragedy without any indication which side the balance might fall, is an indication of the absence of men in Housekeeping.  Indeed, the only man who has stuck around makes a dramatic exit in the first pages of the novel - in a manner which reminded me of the opening to Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, although Robinson's came first.  The man is Ruth's grandfather; the exit is on a train in the town where they live; the train derails from a bridge, and sinks through the ice to the depths of an enormous lake, drowning everyone on board and hiding their bodies from rescue.

Even this dramatic event, which reverberates slowly through the whole novel - (The derailment, though too bizarre in itself to have either significance or consequence, was nevertheless the most striking event in the town's history, and as such was prized.  Those who were in any way associated with it were somewhat revered.) - is depicted almost quietly.  There were no proper witnesses, and Robinson does not take on the mantle of omniscience - instead, this tragic and would-be grandiose event is presented through veils of supposition and uncertainty.  I don't think Robinson could be over-the-top if she tried.  See how calmly she depicts the aftermath, when describing the widow with her daughters (later to be Ruth's mother and aunts):

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace.  She knew a thousand songs.  Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce.  In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she putt hem in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon.  Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails fill with wind.  Of course they pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after an absence.  Not because they were afraid she would vanish as their father had done, but because his sudden vanishing had made them aware of her.

Occasionally there are moments of plot in Housekeeping, and they can be quite significant moments, but nobody could call this a plot-driven novel.  No, it is certainly character-driven - and the central character is Ruth.  Robinson doesn't capture her voice in quite the mesmeric way she captures John Ames's in Gilead - but that is a feat I consider unmatched by any recent novelist, so she shouldn't be judged too harshly on that.  We see the bleak, plain experience of young life through Ruth's eyes - as her sister Lucille grows apart from her, as she looks back on their mother's abandonment of them, as she tries to understand her increasingly eccentric aunt.  But mostly as she watches the world pass, and attempts to find her place in it.  There are certainly humorous elements to her observations, but perhaps the dominant note is poignancy: 'That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different.'

I am usually left unaffected by depictions of place and landscape in literature (it's probably the reason that I loathed Return of the Native, for instance) but even I found Robinson's depiction of Fingerbone - the atmospherically named small town - entirely consuming and impressive.  Whoever designed the cover for this edition did an exceptional job.  Maybe it's cold, vast places which affect me, since I felt the same about Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves.

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.

At book group, someone mentioned that Housekeeping couldn't have been set in the UK - we just don't have that sort of isolated vastness anywhere.  Having the enormous lake, holding unfindable bodies and untraceable secrets, and the equally enormous railway bridge running over it - it is such a clever way to create a dramatic, memorable landscape, and define the town in an unsettling manner.  A trainline should signify connection and communication, but here it just seems to connote distance and almost terrifying grandeur. And the bridge comes back into play at the end of the novel, encircling the narrative with the same all-encompassing dominance that the bridge and lake have over Fingerbone.

I've not mentioned much of the plot, because (as I said) it is pretty immaterial to the chief pleasure of reading Housekeeping.  The novel is really like a very long poem.  It meanders, in the best possible way; it is impossible to speed-read, or at least it would be an exercise in wasted time to do so.  Instead, one ought to wallow and wander through Robinson's prose.  Traditional storytelling has no place in Housekeeping - instead, a patchwork of moments is sewn together, creating a fabric which is unusual but beautifully captivating.

On Acting - Laurence Olivier

As if to act as an antidote to Emma's disdain for the theatre, in Margaret Drabble's The Garrick Year, I have just finished reading Laurence Olivier's On Acting (1986), lent to me by my friend Andrea.  Nobody could accuse Olivier of disdaining the theatre - indeed, his adulation for it far exceeds mine, and he has (of course) a much more experienced and wise eye to cast over it.

I was a little unsure about reading On Acting, because I'm not a huge fan of Olivier (he falls into the Kenneth Branagh category of just-too-actory for me) and thought it was his autobiography - but it turns out that he'd already published his autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, and this volume instead focused on the craft of the actor, particularly on playing Shakespeare on stage and screen.  Perfect!

Olivier starts off with a brief history of great actors of the past - Burbage, Kean et al - which isn't a very auspicious start to the book.  As I discovered throughout the book, Olivier delivers anecdotes appallingly.  In this section, he often suffixes them with the acknowledgement that they're probably false - and somehow he mismanages each anecdote so that it falls oddly flat.  I began to worry.  But once Olivier started writing about the craftsmanship of acting, he got much, much better.  The largest section of On Acting concerns various significant roles in Shakespeare, devoting a chapter to each.  Olivier writes of Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and more, with firsthand insight into playing the roles, and explaining how he developed and discovered the characters.  This stuff is like catnip to me.  Olivier's exploration of these characters is attached to specific performances and is very personal, it cannot and does not claim to be objective literary criticism, but it's fascinating.

How I love to read actors' theories about the theatre!  Olivier does not skimp on this.  Here's an excerpt I loved:

To achieve true theatre, you can't have one man up front and the acolytes with their backs to the audience feeding the great star with lines as dull as dishwater.  What you must have is every character believing in himself and, therefore, contributing to the piece as a whole, placing and pushing the play in the right direction.  The third spear carrier on the left should believe that the play is all about the third spear carrier on the left.  I've always believed that.  If the character is nameless, the actor should give himself a name.  He should give himself a family, a background, a past.  Where was he born, what did he have for breakfast?  Perhaps he had troubles at home, perhaps his wife has left him, perhaps his wife has just presented him with a new baby, perhaps he is saving for something - and so on.  If the actor brings on with him a true belief in himself, we should be able to look at him at any moment during the action and see a complete three-dimensional figure and not a cardboard cut-out.  To transport an audience, they must see life and not paste.

It is, though, one of the few times that he acknowledges the need for a united company.  One of the things that did irk me in On Acting is the isolation in which Olivier prepares his roles - there seemed no sense that other actors' decision might affect his performances, or even that he was aware of them.  He is also monumentally egotistical (he claims all actors must be) and often congratulates himself on brilliant work - which is perhaps the prerogative of the aging actor, looking back over a long and successful career.  When writing about film, he is a little less self-confident, and I gained a lot of respect for Olivier when he acknowledged the failings of his version of Pride and Prejudice:

I was very unhappy with the picture.  It was difficult to make Darcy into anything more than an unattractive-looking prig, and darling Greer seemed to me all wrong as Elizabeth.  To me, Jane Austen had made Elizabeth different from her affected, idiotic sister; she was the only down-to-earth one, but Greer played her as the most affected and silly of the lot.  I also thought that the best points in the book were missed, although apparently no one else did.

You're not alone, Olivier!  I didn't think it worked at all...

This isn't the place to come if you want gossip about Olivier's life.  Perhaps Confessions of an Actor has that, but I rather imagine it doesn't.  On Acting isn't just for the aspiring actor, either - goodness knows I have no ambitions in that direction - but it is a fascinating look behind the red curtain, and an authoritative examination of the acting profession.  Coming at it from another direction, it has unusual and interesting readings of Shakespeare's plays.  Olivier is not a very gifted writer, although a mostly competent one, but his acting talent and vast experience excuse his mediocrity in that regard - and make On Acting a very engaging read.  It would seem an inexcusable boast from most actors, to cover so broad a topic as acting, but somehow Laurence Olivier seems (and certainly believes himself to be) the man allowed to do it.

Blue Remembered Hills - Rosemary Sutcliff

There must have been a time - a dark, bleak time - before I was introduced to the Slightly Foxed Editions.  I love the Slightly Foxed journal when I get my hands on a copy, but that doesn't compare to the bottomless affection I have for all the memoirs I've read in their Slightly Foxed Editions series.  Which is, I realise, only five or six - I still have a long way to go.  But the one I finished recently is battling it out with Dodie Smith's Look Back With Love not only for my favourite SF, but for my second favourite book read this year (Guard Your Daughters has secured first place.)

I need to start condensing my preambles, don't I?  The book is Blue Remembered Hills (1983) by Rosemary Sutcliff, and it is heartwarmingly wonderful.  The original run of 2000 hardback copies has sold out and, due to its popularity, Slightly Foxed have produced this paperback edition.  Unlike most of the people I've spoken to about this book, I've never read anything by Rosemary Sutcliff.  My allergy to historical fiction has been lifelong, and her Eagle of the Ninth series has never got nearer than the peripheries of my awareness.  That doesn't matter in the slightest, in terms of enjoying this book, believe me.

Born in 1920, Sutcliff was quite isolated in her childhood - she was an only child, and (after suffering Still's Disease when very young) had varying levels of disability, and spent a great deal of time in and out of hospitals and nursing homes.  Yet this couldn't be further from a misery memoir.  Everything is coated with a fascination for life, and a joy for the possibilities of observing and experiencing.

Like Smith's childhood memoir, Sutcliff has great fun describing all her relatives - how blessed these memoirists seem to have been with comic uncles and aunts! - and especially her parents.  Her mother seems to have had undiagnosed bipolar disorder - Sutcliff describes times when her mood would change for days without warning - and this understandably made her unpredictable to live with.  This was coupled with a difficult personality, and Sutcliff (though generous to her) clearly didn't have an entirely easy mother/daughter relationship.  Her father (a sailor) spent long periods away from home - all in all, not a simple childhood for young Rosemary.

But, as I say, she finds the beauty and joy in this all - not by ignoring her difficulties, but by maintaining an optimistic attitude.  Indeed, it wasn't until I sat back and put together the information Sutcliff gives about her parents that I realised the difficulties she faced.  In Blue Remembered Hills this sort of excerpt represents the tone with which Sutcliff recalls them:

He was a lieutenant when he and my mother were married.  The had first met when they were both fourteen, at a mixed hockey match, and he always claimed that the first word he ever heard her say was 'Damn', which I suppose, to judge from her vehemence in protesting that it was the first time she had ever said it, was quite a word in those days.  My father's invariable retort - oh, the lovely ritual changlessness of family hokes and traditions! - was that for a first time, she said it with remarkable fluency.

I think my favourite thing about childhood memoirs is the revelation of family jokes.  It makes the reader feel, at least for a page or two, that they've been inducted into the family.  We all have these, don't we?  And they're usually senseless and silly, and oh so precious!

Among Sutcliff's many memories, the ones which most warmed my heart were about Miss Beck's school.  Education reform has doubtless done much for children's welfare, but as a side-effect it was removed the possibility of anything as joyful as this:

In a small back room with peeling wallpaper, under the eye of a gaunt elderly maid, I was stripped of my coat, leggings and tam-o'-shanter, in company with twelve or fourteen others of my kind.  And with them, all on my own, so grown up, I filed through into the schoolroom, to be receive, as Royalty receives, by Miss Beck herself, who sat, upright as Royalty sits, in a heavily carved Victorian armchair.

My schooldays proper had begun.

Looking back with warm affection at that first school of mine, I can hardly believe that it was real, and not something dreamed up out of the pages of Cranford or Quality Street.  I suppose nowadays it would not be allowed to exist at all.  Miss Amelia Beck had no teaching qualifications whatsoever, save the qualifications of long experience and love.  She was the daughter of a colonel of Marines, in her eighty-sixth year when I became one of her pupils; and for more than sixty years, in her narrow house overlooking the Lines at Chatham, she had taught the children of the dockyard and the barracks.  She accepted only the children of service families.  Oh, the gentle snobbery of a bygone age; bygone even then, and having less to do with class than totem.  It was her frequent boast that she had smacked, in their early days, most of the senior officers of both services.  Both, not all three, for the RAF was too young as yet to count for much in Miss Beck's scheme of things.  But I do not think that it can have been true, unless she had gentled greatly with the passing of her years.  For I never knew her to smack anybody during the year that I sat at her feet.

Isn't that blissful?  There is quite a bit about this school and Miss Beck, who stayed in touch with every pupil she taught (or so Sutcliff claims!) - it is all fairly ordinary, but made extraordinary through Sutcliff's lovely writing and engaging personality.

In fact, it is the ordinariness of Sutcliff's life that makes Blue Remembered Hills so difficult to write about.  It is oddly similar to The Outward Room, reviewed yesterday, in being significant not for its incidents, but for the beautiful way in which they are related.  After relaying the activities, thoughts, people and pets of her childhood, Sutcliff relays her early career as a miniaturist (not, she notes sadly, a form likely to win any major notice in the art world) and her first infatuation.  Those are the two important strands in the second half of the book, I suppose, and it continues up to her first literary commissions.  But the events are so much less vital than the tone.

So, yes, it's another book you have to read to appreciate... but, oh, what a warm, engaging, beautiful book it is.  One of the very few where I cannot bear the lessening pages as I read on - and which I am certain I shall return to time and again.  Slightly Foxed - I don't know how you do it.  You are my new addiction.  Long may you continue to find memoirs as spectacularly lovely as this!


Others who got Stuck into this:

"Perfect. My only complaint is that it is too short." - Leaves and Pages

"The tone of the book is one of gratitude for life’s blessings & joy at the natural world, her friends, her dogs & her love for her parents." - Lyn, I Prefer Reading

At Freddie's - Penelope Fitzgerald

One of my undergraduate friends at university spent seminars comparing everything - everything - to either King Lear or Ulysses.  It got a little wearying, bless him.  But I seem to have developed the same affliction with Muriel Spark.  So many writers I read seem to have the same slightly stylised dialogue and deadpan narrative, or unusual characters who refuse to comply fully with the accepted norms of conversation and life. Never has a novel felt more Sparkian (yes) to me than Penelope Fitzgerald's At Freddie's (1982) - to the point that I kept forgetting that it wasn't Spark in my hands whilst I was reading.  Oh, and this is no bad thing - quite apart from destabilising my grasp on authorship (Barthes would be proud), it's a fantastic novel.

In my post on The Railway Children the other day, I mentioned Penelope Fitzgerald as an author I'd intended to include in A Century of Books, and it reminded me that I've been wanting to read At Freddie's since I bought it last November.  I have quite a few unread Fitzgeralds, actually, having only read two (Human Voices and The Bookshop), but the theatrical setting of At Freddie's meant it was an obvious candidate for the next one I'd pick up.

When I say 'theatrical setting', I actually mean 'children's theatre school' - Freddie (doyenne of The Temple School, or 'Freddie's') trains children in a haphazard manner, ignoring the brave new world of television (for it is the 1960s) and doing whatever would best please Shakespeare.  The children are taught egotism and self-importance, and shipped off to play emotive parts in Dombey and Son or King John.  Freddie herself seems to have minimal dealings with them, developing instead the cult of her own personality - for Freddie is a woman.  And a wonderful woman at that - one of the most characterful characters I've met for a while, if you know what I mean.

Everyone who knew the Temple School will remember the distinctive smell of Freddie's office.  Not precisely disagreeable, it suggested a church vestry where old clothes hang and flowers moulder in the sink, but respect is called for just the same.  It was not a place for seeing clearly.  Light, in the morning, entered at an angle, through a quantity of dust.  When the desk lamp was switched on at length the circle of light, although it repelled outsiders, was weak.  Freddie herself, to anyone who was summoned into the room, appeared in the shadow of her armchair as a more solid piece of darkness.  Only a chance glint struck from her spectacles and the rim of great semi-precious brooches, pinned on at random.  Even her extent was uncertain, since the material of her skirts and the chair seemed much the same.

This is how we first approach her, but it doesn't do her justice.  She is not the sort to fade into the background - more to lure people in, unawares, and charmingly get whatever she wants from them - often in the name of Shakespeare, or following a 'Word' she feels she has been given.  A Word of the non-theological variety, you understand - it could be something she overheard, or saw in an advertisement, or not traceable at all, and she shows some dexterity in the way she interprets these Words.

Here are a couple of quotations which do her better justice:

She knew that she was one of those few people, to be found in every walk of life, whom society has mysteriously decided to support at all costs.

and

Freddie herself had fulfilled the one sure condition of being loved by the English nation, that is, she had been going on a very long time.  She had done so much for Shakespeare, one institution, it seemed, befriending another.  Her ruffianly behaviour had become 'known eccentricities'.  Like Buckingham Palace, Lyons teashops, the British Museum Reading Room, or the market at Covent Garden, she could never be allowed to disappear.

She is indomitable, a little vague, self-aware to an extent - an extent which relies on nobody else reaching quite her level of awareness.  Freddie is a joy - and it's rather a shame that we don't spend more time in her company.  She is the pivot of the school, but she shares centre stage with various other characters in At Freddie's.  Chief amongst these are the two new teachers, Hannah Graves and Pierce Carroll.  Hannah is besotted with the theatre and the mystique of backstage life - although she does not wish to be an actress, she wants to live in proximity to that world.  I could empathise entirely with her!  Carroll is a different matter - and a preposterous, but inspired, character.  He, essentially, is incapable of self-delusion or self-aggrandisement.  He has no ambition or drive.  Carroll recognises - and openly admits to Freddie - that he is not a good teacher, has no gift with children, and would be unlikely to find a job anywhere else.  Freddie takes him on as a teacher simply out of curiosity - and he makes no attempt to educate the children at all, except once, in a glorious paragraph:

For the first time since his appointment he was correcting some exercise books.  He had not asked for the exercises to be done, but the children left behind, those who hadn't got work in the theatre, had decided, for a day or so at least, to do an imitation of good pupils.  How they could tell what to do was a mystery, and as to the books, he hadn't even known that they'd got any.

And then there are the children.  Primarily Mattie and Jonathan.  Mattie is as self-absorbed as any of the other actors in the novel, given to pranks, lies, and overdramatics, but also with something of Freddie's gift for being able to talk anybody around.  Jonathan is different.  He is a gifted mimic and a thoughtful actor, often quietly in Mattie's shadow, but the final, curious words of the novel (you will find) are about him...

Penelope Fitzgerald's writing style seems to be rather different in each novel I read.  I found her rather stilted in Human Voices, although perhaps I'd changed my mind on reacquaintance; The Bookshop was poignant and quietly devastating. At Freddie's has that Sparkian sparseness, coupled with a sly wit best shown in the ironic twist to her characterisations.  It's devastating in a whole different way - an assassination of a character's foibles in very few words, for example:

He then said he was obliged to be going, for, as a busy man, a necessary condition of his being anywhere was to be on the way somewhere else.  He picked up his coat and brief-case, and then, although he knew that he had brought nothing else with him, looked round, as though he were not quite sure.

Curiously, self-delusion and self-importance are censured from this man (Freddie's businessman brother) but accepted from those connected with the theatre.  It is, of course, a separate world.  What Fitzgerald does so wonderfully - and it does seem to me quite a remarkable achievement - is to combine two opposing views of the theatre.  She is simultaneously cynical and awed - recognising both the glory and the absurdity of the second oldest profession.

Ed was listening for the immediate and irrepressible gap and murmur from the house which is like the darkness talking to itself.  He caught, alas, only the faintest snatch of it.  Most of the audience, faced with an unfamiliar play, were bent over their programmes.  They could have read them more easily earlier on, but chose to do so now.  They accepted the presence on the stage of the Lords Salisbury and Pembroke, because the play was by Shakespeare and that was what Shakespeare was like.  But they did not expect to be asked to distinguish between one lord and another, unless there was a war or a quarrel, and it was this that was causing them anxiety.

I adore the theatre - watching plays, yes, but above that the idea of the theatre.  It is for that reason that I love reading theatrical actors' biographies, or novels set in that environment.  Wouldn't it be wonderful, in an unworldly way, to be in one of those acting dynasties?  Or - like the boys - to grow up in that sphere of extreme emotions and spectacles?  Fitzgerald concedes that - she gives us Hannah, who feels that way without having any aspiration actually to be an actress - but she permits no rosy-eyed or glassy-eyed view of the theatre and its people.  She gives us wonderful characters, she gives us the adorable, inimitable, formidable Freddie, but she knocks over their pedestals and shows how foolish Freddie's school is - and, yet, how timelessly glorious too.

Gossip From Thrush Green - Miss Read

The first four or five days I was at home, I had a headache.  It's related to a tooth problem, which hopefully will get sorted out, and I've become a cheerleader for various painkillers and antibiotics this week - but, more to the point, I needed something to read.  I couldn't cope with anything stylistically sophisticated or experimental, or even anything which could be considered demanding in any sense of the word.  What could I choose?  Well, I'd never read anything by Miss Read, and she seemed to fit the bill.  I have three on my shelf, picked up cheaply somewhere, and so I chose one from the middle of her writing - Gossip from Thrush Green (1981).

Although I had never previously read a word by Miss Read, it was exactly what I expected.  Thoroughly enjoyable, and utterly forgettable.  It's a little village where everyone knows each other, and cares for each other - the only differences being that some show this care, and some hide it.  Everyone gossips, especially the men, and a mischievous cat is about as traumatic as a burnt down vicarage (incidentally, not the most restful scenario to read whilst sitting in a vicarage!)

It's been less than a week, and already all the characters and events are fading from my mind... I think the characters recur throughout the series of Thrush Green novels, so other readers might already be fond of blunt Ella, dotty Dotty, kind vicar's wife Dimity etc.  I liked them all, but - differently though they were described - all of them spoke in the same warm, sensible way.  Miss Read (or Dora Saint, as she was called) writes in a very workmanlike way, getting the job done - which is perfectly good enough, because she clearly isn't trying to be experimental.  With my headache, I was grateful.  Although set around 1981, when it was published, this was only clear because they talked about decimalisation.  Apart from that, it could easily have been 1950 or 1930 or even earlier.  It's all bathed in nostalgia.  Villages still have these sorts of friendships and acquaintances - everyone is interested in each other - but they're not quite so cut off from the rest of the world.

But how could I not warm to a novelist who takes it for granted that we know who the Provincial Lady is?

"'When in doubt, don't', is my motto," said Ella forthrightly.  "And as for love, well, you know what the Provincial Lady maintained.  She reckoned that a sound bank balance and good teeth far outweighed it in value."

And how could I not nod my head to this?

"A quarter past three," she exclaimed, catching sight of the bedside clock. "What a time to be drinking tea!""Anytime," Harold told her, "is time to be drinking tea."

All in all, this was the perfect book for me to read this week, but I think I'll be keeping Miss Read to days when I can't cope with anything else.  I know she has her besotted fans - Our Vicar's Wife has read them all several times, I believe - but when I'm after comfort reading I'd rather run back to the 1920s.

The Other Garden - Francis Wyndham

I had a lovely day at Chatsworth, even though all didn't go entirely to plan.  I'll fill you in on all that soon!  (WHAT a cliffhanger!)  For today, let's fill up one of those surprisingly-less-tricky-than-expected 1980s slots in A Century of Books.

I picked up The Other Garden (1987) by Francis Wyndham because I thought I'd heard of the author (and because it was short, cheap, and sounded interesting) but I must have been thinking of someone else, since this seems to have been Wyndham's only novel, although he also wrote (writes?) short stories.  It won the Whitbread First Novel Award, and various luminaries are printed on the cover saying that it 'Comes as close to perfection as you'll get in an imperfect world' (Hilary Bailey); 'Perfectly judged... wry, exact, poised' (Harold Pinter); 'A completely faultless piece of writing' (Susan Hill).  Well... it left me a little nonplussed.  Yes, this is going to be one of those rather uninspiring reviews where I am forced to say "It's fine, but that's about it."

I was, though, rather struck by the opening:

"How soon will lunch be ready?" my father would ask.  Assuming that hunger had made him impatient, my mother would answer with eager apology, "Oh, any minute now - it must be nearly one."  But she had misinterpreted him.  He had really wanted to know if he still had time for a further look at the other garden before sitting down to the meal.  In dismay, she would watch him put on an old grey trilby hat, choose a stick, pass purposefully through the front entrance, then walk serenely down the short drive and vanish into the open road.  Almost immediately opposite, a painted white wooden door in a red brick wall admitted him to this beloved extension of his property, subtly but certainly separate from the house and its bland surrounding lawns.  Once in the other garden he was safely out of earshot - but a few minutes later I would be sent in search of him with a summons to return, the serving of our good having been innocently hastened by his ambiguous question when what he had hoped for was delay.

This opening paragraph, and the title of the novel (novella?  It's super short) led me to think that The Other Garden might, indeed, be about this other garden.  Well, perhaps it was a metaphor for something (give me a moment) because it only turned up at the beginning and the end.  In between, it focuses mainly on the Demarest family, acquaintances of the narrator's family, albeit rather more well-to-do.  Kay and Sandy are the children, Sybil and Charlie are the Demarest parents.  The narrator (who may or may not be named) is focused chiefly on Kay, a young woman who is rather captivating and wilful.

And... I don't think I can remember much else.  There is a sweet dog at one point.  And Denis (a rather eccentric schoolfriend of the narrator) is shipped off to Switzerland for TB treatment.  He's odd.  What else?  Oh dear, oh dear.  I only read it recently, and all the details have faded.  It was that sort of book.  If I weren't recording all my books for A Century of Books, I'd have quietly slipped this back on the shelf, and never mentioned it...  But I did jot down one quotation which I liked.  Sybil generally isn't a very sympathetic character, but I think a lot of us would raise a glass to this:

"I do believe," Sybil continued, "that when the history books come to be written it will emerge that the great unsung heroine of these times we're living through will be none other than that much maligned creature, the British Housewife!  I'm thinking, in fact, of writing a letter to the Daily Telegraph to propose that some promising young sculptor - or perhaps a sculptress would be a better choice - should be officially commissioned to design a statue in her honour, and that the result should be prominently erected in some public place.  I don't know about you, but I for one am getting sick and tired of looking at monuments portraying middle-aged men on horseback!"

The details of The Other Garden escape me, but I do remember the effect it had upon me.  It's no secret that I love short books, and I really admire authors who can use 100-200 pages effectively.  But a novella demands its own structure.  The 'rules' for that aren't obvious - indeed, they don't exist, do they? - but I don't think a novella should be simply a truncated novel.  It felt like Wyndham's training at the short story had made him unable to structure a whole novel - I don't know, it just felt incomplete.  Not terminated too early, but as though it were the skeleton of a different, longer novel.  Somehow not satisfying. Hmm.  My post started fairly vaguely, and it'll end inconclusively.  It's probably a warning sign that, a week or two after I finished The Other Garden, I don't really remember anything about it.  But... don't forget that Hilary Bailey things it 'comes as close to perfection as you'll get in an imperfect world.'  So what do I know?

Nervous Conditions - Tsitsi Dangarembga

A friend lent me Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) an embarrassingly long time ago (we're talking years) and a combination of the appalling cover and the vague, uninviting title meant that I put it off for ages, and then forgot about it.  I finally remembered that I still had it a couple of weeks ago, flicked it open with some trepidation... and was almost immediately hooked.  What is it they say about judging books by their covers - do it or don't do it?  I forget.

The striking opening line is 'I was not sorry when my brother died.'  The 'I' in question is Tambudzai, who lives with her family in 1960s what-was-then Rhodesia.  They're in a poor rural community, the poorest members of a large family - they can only afford to send one child to school, and it is Tambudzai's brother Nhamo who gets this honour.  Tambudzai is desperate to attend school, even growing and selling her own maize to get the fees, but Nhamo tries to assert his masculine superiority at every turn, making Tambudzai miserable.  The reader doesn't mourn much when Nhamo dies - and nor, it seems, does Tambudzai.  His death takes place in 'the mission', where Tambudzai's rich uncle lives with his wife, son, and daughter Nyasha - and it is here where Tambudzai is herself later taken:

Thus began the period of my reincarnation.  I liked to think of my transfer to the mission as my reincarnation. With the egotistical faith of fourteen short years, during which my life had progressed very much according to plan, I expected this era to be significantly profound and broadening in terms of adding wisdom to my nature, clarity to my vision, glamour to my person.  In short, I expected my sojourn to fulfil all my fourteen-year-old fantasies, and on the whole I was not disappointed.  Freed from the constraints of the necessary and the squalid that defined and delimited our activity at home, I invested a lot of robust energy in approximating to my idea of a young woman of the world.  I was clean now, not only on special occasions but every day of the week.  

Nyasha is about the same age as Tambudzai, but had spent some time in England and adjusted to 1960s English culture, before having to re-adjust back to 1960s Rhodesian expectations.  One of the most interesting aspects of the Nervous Conditions is the contrast (and friendship) between these cousins.  Nyasha (although only fourteen) is considered loose and immoral for wearing short skirts and talking to boys; Tambudzai is keen to adhere to her uncle's instructions, but is developing her own conscience and personality at the same time.  There is another storyline relating to Nyasha's well-being which appears rather too suddenly at the end, and doesn't really work - indeed, the whole ending is surprisingly rushed - but before that, this contrast of characters is really fascinating.  Alongside, there is an equally well-drawn juxtaposition of Tambudzai's old life and her new life.  Although her parents want the best future for her, they are also clearly a little confused and jealous when she visits with a developing outlook on life.  It's done very subtly, for the most part, and you can tell that the novel is semi-autobiographical.

Indeed, this is probably one of the reasons I enjoyed Nervous Conditions so much.  If you've been reading SiaB for a while, you probably know that I don't like books set in countries which the author isn't from, or doesn't know well.  So if a British author wrote a novel set in Zimbabwe, but had never been nearer than Portugal, or had only been for a fortnight on a package holiday, then I wouldn't be interested.  Since Dangarembga's childhood was in fact in some respects like Nyasha's (it seems), I'm very willing to read her views of her country and people.  Here's a good example of why:

We waved and shouted and danced.  Then came Babamukuru, his car large and impressive, all sparkling metal and polished dark green.  It was too much for me.  I could have clambered on to the bonnet but, with Shupi in my arms, had to be content with a song: "Mauya, mauya.  Mauya, mauya.  Mauya, Babamukuru!"  Netsai picked up the melody.  Our vocal cords vibrating through wide arcs, we made an unbelievable racket.  Singing and dancing we ushered Babamukuru on to the homestead, hardly noticing Babamunini Thomas, who brought up the rear, not noticing Mainini Patience, who was with him, at all.

Had this been written by an author who had never lived in Africa, it could never have been as natural.  The greeting - so normal and expected of Tambudzai - would have become some sort of spectacle, where the dancing and singing would have been relayed as a piece of research.  I much prefer the sort of novel Nervous Conditions is, where the reader - wherever they live - is immersed in the non-artificial perspective of a local.

Primarily, of course, I valued Nervous Conditions for Dangarembga's writing.  It is lilting and beautiful, but not overly stylised.  It flows naturally, and gives Tambudzai's voice perfectly.  My only reservation with the novel, aside from the aforementioned rushed ending, was that it occasionally lost the subtlety which mostly made it special.  I'm all for a feminist message, but sometimes Dangarembga didn't trust to the show-don't-tell method (and she should have trusted it, because she excels at it for the most part.  Excerpts like this just felt as though they'd been included for cutting and pasting into high school essays:

[...]Babamukuru condemning Nyasha to whoredom, making her a victim of femaleness, just as I had felt victimised at home in the days when Nhamo went to school and I grew my maize.  The victimisation, I saw, was universal.  It didn't depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition.  It didn't depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on.  Men took it everywhere with them.

Not to mention how reductive that it.  Never mind.  Nervous Conditions is a novel, not a treatise, and for the most part Dangarembga achieves this wonderfully.  Not for nothing did it win the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989.  It's always a treat when I enjoy a book much more than I thought I would, and I can only apologise to my friend that it took me so long to get around to reading this one.

For Sylvia by Valentine Ackland

When I started reading For Sylvia: An Honest Account by Valentine Ackland (published posthumously, in 1985) I was rather prepared to loathe the author.  I've recently read Sylvia Townsend Warner's Diaries, and I haven't come across more heartbreaking diary entries than those concerning the period when Ackland (STW's partner for decades) decided to move her lover Elizabeth Wade White into their home, while Sylvia Townsend Warner moved out to a hotel, as some sort of experiment.  Although Warner is devoted to Ackland until Ackland's death, and indeed until her own, she comes across as a selfish, cruel person.  It is perhaps unsurprising that when writing about herself, a more sympathetic portrait is drawn - and the fact that Ackland writes so well swept me along for a lot of it.  Although I have to say, a more miserable portrait than the cover photo I do not think I have ever seen.  I'm not sure a more miserable portrait is possible.  It didn't make me immediately warm to her.

For Sylvia isn't wholly an autobiography - it is, as the title suggests, an account of Ackland's life, written for Sylvia. Having said that, the 'for Sylvia' bit doesn't particularly influence the style or structure - she isn't addressed as 'you' at any point, but remains 'Sylvia' - so perhaps it is safest to call For Sylvia a memoir.  In essentials it deals with two broad aspects of Ackland's life - one being her romantic life, and the other being her battle with alcoholism.

Ackland starts by addressing that which every memoir needs: the pivotal moment of its subject's life:

The 'crisis': it has been laid down that this should grip the reader's interest, grapple him to the author, and amke it impossible for him to put the book down until he has finished it, or at least impossible for him to return it to the lending library by the next post.  But the 'crisis' in this particular life is very difficult to describe; for one thing, it is hard to know whether it happened in a flash or whether, in point of fact, it matured rather slowly and broke, as it were, creamily and in silence.  This 'crisis', too, is not directly concerned with a sexual upheaval, which makes it perhaps less enthralling to the reader than it was to the author.  However; it happened, and it was undoubtedly the sharpest possible crisis any life can know, for all it was so quiet and did not so much as cause a ripple on the surface of domestic life.

She is writing of her alcoholism, which had dominated much of her life for 19 years.  More particularly, the crisis is actually the end of this domination.  I know they say you cannot cure alcoholism, but the night in question - 8th October 1947 - was the last time Ackland felt the need for alchol.  Although with very, very little Christian faith at this point (she wavered quite a lot) she prayed to God.  'There was no reply.'  And yet, the following evening, after being ill all day, 'I suddenly realised that I was walking in tranquility and with perfect confidence; and that tranquillity and assurance has never left me.'  I don't wish to undermine the battles faced by those with alcoholism when trying to stop drinking; I am merely recounting the 'crisis' with which Ackland opens her memoir.

It is quite a structurally peculiar way to start.  Although Ackland does mention alcoholism at many points throughout For Sylvia (which, by the way, is short - 135 pages, including a 24-page introduction by Bea Howe) the rest of the memoir is structured chronologically, and focuses upon her various relationships, especially those with the anonymous R and X. 

I shan't summarise Ackland's accounts of her various love affairs - they take up most of the book.  I will simply write that (a) it is astonishing the number of women who throw themselves upon Valentine without the slightest provocation, and without knowing that she was a lesbian - Valentine herself didn't know for the first few, and (b) that it can't have made for very charming reading for Sylvia.  Although Ackland writes very well about her life, and has a simple, calm, flowing style which I had not expected of her, she isn't being very kind to her intended audience.  I get the feeling that, just as I forgot that Sylvia had been apostrophised at the beginning, so Ackland forgot, and became too involved with the tangled webs of her love affairs.  And they are often very tangled.  Ackland got married to a poor, bewildered man after a lengthy engagement - saying, shortly beforehand, that she will either marry him tomorrow or not at all.  She refuses to consummate the marriage, but immediately commits adultery with her long-term female lover.  Indeed, there is barely a time when Ackland isn't being, or considering being, unfaithful.  'I wonder,' she writes at one point, 'if anyone in the world was ever so idiotically vile as I was, for the best part of my youth.'  Ah!  A moment of self-awareness! (one thinks).  But one would be wrong.  Despite devoting paragraphs at various junctures to praise of Warner's character and their love for one another, the reader then comes upon this:

I write this on a day when I have heard that I at any time now another one I love will come to live with me here, in this house where Sylvia and I have lived for twelve years together, through bitterness of private woe, through war, through my degradation and shame and throuhg the almost two years accomplished of my heavenly rescue and our increasing happiness and peace.  I do not know how this new thing has come about, nor whether it is the work of heaven of hell.  I cannot, for more than a moment at a time, realize what it will be like to be here without Sylvia - or anywhere without Sylvia.  But I have a conviction that this must be tried; although it is so dangerous that I can scarcely dare measure it even in my fancy.

I couldn't remember, whilst reading For Sylvia, whether it has been written before or after this crisis in their relationship (for it was not permanent; Ackland chose Warner, and Warner came back to her own home, her own possessions) and was quite shocked that Ackland could write the above excerpt in the midst of eulogising their love.  I daresay I shouldn't judge her, but it is difficult to read her wanton cruelty, having read Warner's diaries.  In a book which centres on a person's actions and motivations, it is impossible not to assess and respond to them.

Whilst I was reading For Sylvia, the genuine quality of Ackland's writing, and (for some reason) its merit as good prose, made me feel a little more sympathetic to her.  I remain, of course, sympathetic to her plight with alcohol.  But in remembering her unkindness, her cruelty to Sylvia, and her absurd belief that it 'must be' done, I lose patience altogether.  It should be possible to separate writer and person, and I do admire Ackland more as a writer than I thought I would, but For Sylvia is an exercise in self-delusion - interesting, involving, but also infuriating.

Books I Borrowed...

There are a few books I've borrowed from friends and libraries which have now been returned, and so I'm going to give each one a paragraph or two, instead of a proper review.  Partly so I can include them on my Century of Books list, but partly because it's fun to do things differently sometimes.  Of course, it's entirely possible that I'll get carried away, and write far too much... well, here are the four books, in date order.  Apologies for the accidental misquotation in the sketch today... I only noticed afterwards!

Canon in Residence - V.L. Whitechurch (1904)
This was surprisingly brilliant. Rev. John Smith on a continental holiday encounters a stranger who tells him that he'd see more of human life if he adopted layman's clothes.  Smith thinks the advice somewhat silly, but has no choice - as, during the night, the stranger swaps their outfits.  Smith goes through the rest of his holiday in somewhat garish clothing, meeting one of those ebullient, witty girls with which Edwardian novels abound.  A letter arrives telling him that he has been made canon of a cathedral town - where this girl also lives (of course!)  He makes good his escape, and hopes she won't recognise him...

Once in his position as canon, Smith's new outlook on life leads to a somewhat socialist theology - improving housing for the poor, and other similar principles which are definitely Biblical, but not approved of by the gossiping, snobbish inhabitants of the Cathedral Close.  As a Christian and the son of a vicar, I found this novel fascinating (you can tell that Whitechurch was himself a vicar) but I don't think one would need to have faith to love this.  It's very funny as well as sensitive and thoughtful; John Smith is a very endearing hero.  It all felt very relevant for 2012.  And there's even a bit of a criminal court case towards the end.

Three Marriages - E.M. Delafield (1939)
Delafield collects together three novellas, each telling the tale of a courtship and marriage, showing how things change across years: they are set in 1857, 1897, and 1937.  Each deals with people who fall in love too late, once they (or their loved one) has already got married to somebody else.  The surrounding issues are all pertinent to their respective periods.  In 1897, and 'Girl-of-the-Period', Violet Cumberledge believes herself to be a New Woman who is entirely above anything so sentimental as emotional attachments - and, of course, realises too late that she is wrnog.  In 1937 ('We Meant To Be Happy') Cathleen Christmas marries the first man who asks, because she fears becoming one of so many 'surplus women' - only later she falls in love with the doctor.  But the most interesting story is the first - 'The Marriage of Rose Barlow'.  It's rather brilliant, and completely unexpected from the pen of Delafield.  Rose Barlow is very young when she is betrothed to her much older cousin - the opening line of the novel is, to paraphrase without a copy to hand, 'The night before her wedding, Rose Barlow put her dolls to bed as she always had done.'  Once married, they go off to India together.   If you know a lot more about the history of India than I do, then the date 1857 might have alerted you to the main event of the novella - the Sepoy Rebellion.  A fairly calm tale of unequal marriage becomes a very dramatic, even gory, narrative about trying to escape a massacre.  A million miles from what I'd expect from Delafield - but incredibly well written and compelling.

Miss Plum and Miss Penny - Dorothy Evelyn Smith (1959)
Miss Penny, a genteel spinster living with her cook/companion Ada, encounters Miss Plum in the act of (supposedly) attempting suicide in a duckpond.  Miss Penny 'rescues' Miss Plum and invites her into her home. (Pronouns are tricky; I assume you can work out what I mean.)  It looks rather as though Miss Plum might have her own devious motives for these actions... but I found the characters very inconsistent, and the plot rather scattergun.  There are three men circling these women, whose intentions and affections vary a fair bit; there are some terribly cringe-worthy, unrealistic scenes of a vicar trying to get closer to his teenage son. It was a fun read, and not badly written, but Dorothy Evelyn Smith doesn't seem to have put much effort into organising narrative arcs or creating any sort of continuity.  But diverting enough, and certainly worth an uncritical read.

The Shooting Party - Isabel Colegate (1980)
Oh dear.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, I rushed out to borrow a copy of The Shooting Party after reading Rachel's incredibly enthusiastic review.  Go and check it out for details of the premise and plot.  I shall just say that, sadly, I found it rather ho-hum... perhaps even a little boring.  The characters all seemed too similar to me, and I didn't much care what happened.  Even though it's a short novel, it dragged for me, and the climax was, erm, anti-climactic.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps my tolerance for historical novels (albeit looking back only sixty or seventy years) is too low.  Sorry, Rachel!

Two Sparks: The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Only Problem

Although I'm actually writing this in advance of Muriel Spark Reading Week, I'm confidently going to predict that we're all having a great time, and that you're all putting up brilliant, thought-provoking pieces on this wonderful novelist... yes?  Yes.

Since it's my day to post, I'm going to write fairly speedily about two Spark novels that I've read recently - and hopefully by the end of the week I'll have finished at least one more.  (There will be no shortage of Spark reviews around the blogosphere this week, but if you fancy reading all my archive posts on Spark, including this one, click here.)  I chose The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) because my supervisor said it might be a useful comparison to Lolly Willowes, and The Only Problem (1984) because it looked really interesting, and also one that I hadn't seen mentioned anywhere else in the blogosphere.  Cutting a long story short, I thought they were both brilliant - neither take the crown away from Loitering With Intent as my favourite Spark novel yet, but both add to my cumulative for Spark.  You'll be avidly reading Spark posts here, there, and everywhere, so I'll try to keep my reviews brief... and hopefully enough to intrigue you to read them!

The Ballad of Peckham Rye is centred, indeed, in Peckham Rye - and concerns the arrival and influence of one Dougal Douglas (sometimes going by the name of Douglas Dougal.)  The novel opens with the aftermath of a bride being jilted at the altar - indeed, with the bride's mother insulting the jilting groom.  It's all a little confusing (deliberately, one imagines) and it's difficult to get the story straight - especially since everyone is superimposing their views and imaginings over the facts.  The brief chapter concludes:

But, in any case, within a few weeks, everyone forgot the details.  The affair is a legend referred to from time to time in the pubs when conversation takes a matrimonial turn.  Some say the bridegroom came back repentant and married the girl in the end.  Some say, no, he married another girl, while the bride married the best man.  It is wondered if the bride had been carrying on with the best man for some time past.  It is sometimes told that the bride died of grief and the groom shot himself on the Rye.  It is generally agreed that he answered 'No' at his wedding, that he went away alone on his wedding day and turned up again later.

This is a great example of how Spark plays irreverently with the normalities of narrative.  And if the reader expects everything to be neatly unfolded by the end of the novel, then he/she clearly hasn't read much Spark before.  She obeys few authorial 'rules', and weaves her narratives with little concern for the reader's expectation.  If she were writing a play (and she has; I should read them) she would unveil Chekhov's gun in the first act, and nobody would ever lay a finger on it again.

But as someone notes on the first page of The Ballad of Peckham Rye, "It wouldn't have happened if Dougal Douglas hadn't come here."  She is quite right... although it is difficult to trace exactly how Dougal Douglas influences the community, his influence is undeniable.

He turns up somewhat out of the blue, and starts working at 'Meadows, Meade & Grindley, manufacturers of nylon textiles, a small but growing concern.'  His role is fairly vague.  Mr. Druce, the head of the company, is keen to hire 'an Arts man', and Mr. Druce places Douglas Douglas in charge of 'human research.'

"I shall have to do research," Dougal mused, "into their inner lives.  Research into the real Peckham.  It will be necessary to discover the spiritual well-spring, the glorious history of the place, before I am able to offer some impetus."

This research, it appears, chiefly constitutes attracting the workforce from their duties, calmly meddling in their lives, and undermining their confidences.  Dougal is all things to all people, and yet (although it is never asserted directly) it appears he might be an incarnation of the Devil.  He certainly has growths in his temple which rather resemble sawn-off horns - and the events which ensue from his presence have rather the hallmark of evil.

It is a fascinating concept, and one which has Spark written all over it.  She never gives us the certainty (as Sylvia Townsend Warner does in Lolly Willowes) that we are dealing with the Devil.  There isn't really certainty about much, for either the reader of the residents of Peckham Rye - but events spiral and, although the jilted bride is not the worst of the calamaties, it is a structural close to Dougal's presence and the circular narrative itself.  All is done with Spark's brilliant detached authorial voice, with doses of the surreal and strange interwoven with the commonplace and starkly observational.  Brilliant.

* * * * *

The Ballad of Peckham Rye was Spark's fourth novel; The Only Problem comes somewhere towards the end of her almost half-century of novelising - but they are unmistakably by the same author.  The concept is quite different, but the manner of approaching it is still very Sparkian.  I say that the concept is different, but thinking about it, these two novels both concern the nature of evil, in some way - though both rather skirt round the issue.

'The Only Problem' of the title is, according to Harvey Gotham, the problem of suffering.  Accordingly, he has taken himself off to the French countryside to write a monograph on the Book of Job, and his mind rarely wanders from this topic.  His own suffering seems to take the form of interfering relatives and his ex-wife Effie, whom he abandoned in Italy over a stolen chocolate bar.  The sort of premise which makes me know I'm in the delightfully odd world of Muriel Spark.

Amongst the cast are Effie's sister Ruth, and Ruth's husband (Harvey's old student friend) Edward.

Edward used to confide in Harvey, and he in Edward, during their student life together.  Harvey had never, to Edward's knowledge, broken any of these confidences in the sense of revealing them to other people; but he had a way of playing them back to Edward at inopportune moments; it was disconcerting, it made Edward uncomfortable, especially as Harvey chose to remind him of things he had said which he would rather have forgotten.

That is a very Sparkian relationship.  I can't think of any uncomplicated friendships in the eight Spark novels I've read - there is always some element of uneasiness or sharpness, or simply the failure to communicate naturally which characterises so many exchanges throughout her work.  I love conversations and plot expositions which subvert the normal rules in some way, or ignore the anticipated responses - it's on the reasons I love Ivy Compton-Burnett - and here is an example from The Only Problem.  There are some spoilers in it, so skim past if you want to avoid them:

Anne-Marie had put some soup on the table.  Harvey and Ruth were silent before her, now that she wasn't a maid but a police auxiliary.  When she had left, Ruth said, "I don't know if I'll be able to keep this down.  I'm pregnant."

"How did that happen?" Harvey said.

"The same as it always happens."

"How long have you known?"

"Three weeks."

"Nobody tells me anything," Harvey said.

"You don't want to know anything."

We aren't long in the cerebal world of theological exegesis.  Effie - it is claimed - has become involved in a terrorist organisation, and the police think that Harvey is also somehow implicated.  In vain does he protest (although never especially animatedly - Spark's characters tend towards the calm and detached) that he hasn't spoken to Effie for years.  The rest of The Only Problem follows this mad chain of events - Harvey calmly continuing to offer his readings of Job, while the police interrogate him and his wife's motives and actions remain mysterious.

Spark doesn't, however, permit the obvious parallels.  A lesser novelist (had they been able to think of the juxtaposition) would have used the wider action of the novel as an example of the problem of suffering.  Instead, like in all the novels I've read by her, Spark just lets things happen.  There isn't really any rhyme or reason, or grand overarching narrative point; there are no neat conclusions, just the brilliance of Spark's eccentric but observant writing.

So, two more gems to the Spark canon!  I'm so pleased Muriel Spark Reading Week gave me the encouragement to read more Spark.  Do continue to put links in the comments box, if you've reviewed a Spark novel or written anything about our Muriel - and I hope you're having a fun week!