Blooming Smith

Following your recent advice and comments, tonight I'm going to blog about a novel which is very difficult to find at an affordable price, or indeed to find at all. Having re-read I Capture the Castle a while ago, I was intrigued to see what else Dodie Smith had to offer. I asked around, and general consensus was to look out for The New Moon with the Old or, failing that, The Town in Bloom. I can't afford £20-£30 for novels I know nothing about, and Oxfordshire libraries didn't have The New Moon with the Old, so I went for The Town in Bloom (1965).


The novel kicks off with a reunion between friends known as the Mouse, Moll Byblow, Madam Lily de Luxe and Zelle, reminiscing about their days living in a 'club' together in the 1920s, going through turbulent youthful events and trying to find work in the theatre. It's now over four decades later. But... Zelle is absent, as she has been at all their five-yearly reunions. But is the shabby old woman across the road, who reminds 'Mouse' (the otherwise unnamed narrator) 'of the crones said to have sat knitting round the guillotine during the Reign of Terror', actually Zelle? And, if so, has she donned a disguise, or have 45 years apart led her to destitution?

And suddenly the novel flings us back those 45 years, to Mouse leaving her aunt's house and arriving in London, at that club. We see her first experiences through the lens of her journal, which feels like we're in familiar I Capture the Castle territory...

I am here at last! I arrived this afternoon, at Marylebone Station so I only had a short taxi drive - I wished it could have been longer as it was thrilling to be driving through London on my own. And it was such a lovely day. The trees here are further out than they are at home. Home! I haven't one any more. That thought doesn't make me feel sad. It makes me feel wonderfully free.

Mouse, despite her nickname, isn't particularly timid, and isn't all that different from Cassandra of Smith's more famous novel. Both are young and inexperienced, but oddly confident and more worldly than they seem. Both are incredibly introspective, yet manage not to be annoyingly so - although Mouse gets rather closer to 'annoying' than Cassandra does. But while Cassandra is isolated in a highly romanticised setting in rural Suffolk, Mouse is flung into the maelstrom of the theatre. Oh, and the journal fades away after a few pages - being replaced with first-person narrative (so she is hardly ever called 'Mouse' in the book) but from the distance of 45 years.

I love books about the theatre, fact or fiction, especially if it's about theatre of the 1920s or 1930s. So I lapped up the first half of The Town in Bloom - which is set in a theatre run by actor-manager Rex Crossway, last in a line of theatrical Crossways. Dodie Smith was herself both an actress and playwright (it was as pseudonymous playwright C. L. Anthony that she first found fame) so she writes this section in an informed and entertaining manner. Mouse launches herself into his world through an impromptu audition for The School for Scandal, playing both Sir Peter and Lady Teazle.

I played both of them. First, as Sir Peter, I looked to my right and used a deep, rich voice. Then, looking left, I became Lazy Teazle and used a lighter voice than was natural to me. Backwards and forwards from right to left I went, speaking fast because I feared Mr. Crossway would stop me. I particularly wanted to reach what was, for me, the high moment of the scene, when Sir Peter tells Lady Teazle she had no taste when she married him. Lady T. then goes into fits of laughter - that is, she did in my interpretation. And never had I laughed better, louder or longer than I did for Mr. Crossway. I checked my laughter with some very amusing gasps and continued the scene. Still Mr. Crossway did not interrupt me. So I went on until Lady Teazle's exit when I sketched a pert curtsy to Sir Peter - and then made a very deep one to Mr. Crossway.

It was a brave, and a delicious, decision on Dodie Smith's part to make Mouse no prodigy - she is an appalling actress, and no amount of advice from Crossway can make her anything else. So, instead, she starts working in one of the theatre offices with Eve Lester, a kind, sensible, and wise woman in an environment of those who are often kind, but rarely the rest.

The backstage goings-on of a theatre fascinate me, and I loved all the minutiae of rehearsals, editing, understudies etc. - and a very amusing scene where Mouse takes it upon herself to replace the ill leading lady halfway through a play, completely changing the interpretation, and rather ruining the whole affair. All written rather cleverly, and Mouse's combination of naivety and knowingness make for a fun read.

But then...

Yes, Mouse falls in love with Mr. Crossway. Of course she does. At which point The Town in Bloom becomes significantly less interesting, while she repeatedly tries to seduce Mr. Crossway into an affair. I know there are plenty of real life relationships with big age gaps which work well, but I find them almost universally disturbing in novels - even up to and including Emma and Mr. Knightley. This is the sort of affair where Mr. Crossway laughingly calls her 'my dear' a lot, and she pontificates on how she will never love anybody else, not as long as she lives. And so on and so forth.

There are a few more twists to the tale, and her flatmates do play more significant roles than this review suggests, but I'm afraid The Town in Bloom turned into a rather tedious novel. There is enough momentum from the first half - and the lingering question from the prologue of what happened to Zelle - but the re-focus upon a rather tawdry romantic storyline is significantly duller than the theatrical focus of the earlier section to the novel.

In this respect, as in several others, The Town in Bloom is something of a pale shadow of I Capture the Castle, and I can quite see why nobody has bothered to reprint it for a while. I wish Smith had had the courage to leave out the romance/affair/adultery storyline altogether - this would have been an infinitely better novel without it, and would also have been rather further away from I Capture the Castle territory, and thus easier to appraise on its merits, not judged on its comparative demerits.


And not a dalmatian in sight.

Footnotes

I'm currently reading two different volumes of letters, and have recently finished another - Sylvia & David: The Townsend Warner/Garnett Letters edited by Richard Garnett; Dearest Jean: Rose Macaulay's Letters to a Cousin edited by Martin Ferguson Smith; The Element of Lavishness: The Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner edited by Michael Steinman. Gosh, writing out titles, subtitles, authors, and editors is quite a lengthy process.

Anyway, it got me thinking about footnotes. Never let be said that I avoid the high-octane topics here at Stuck-in-a-Book. I have a love/hate relationship with footnotes and endnotes. If they're not there - as they weren't in the otherwise wonderful A Truth Universally Acknowledged collection of essays about Jane Austen - then I get frustrated. If they are there, I get easily annoyed. Something like Hermione Lee's biography Virginia Woolf went so hugely over the top with footnotes that reading it was exhausting. For scholarly works, they are essential. But often biographies or collections of letters have both scholarly potential and the possibility of being read for pleasure - so, what to do with the paraphenalia of academia?

(you might have to click on the sketch and enlarge it, to read it all!)
(and spot the deliberate mistake... oops.)

I'll write proper reviews of all those letter collections at some point, probably after I've actually read them, but I've been intrigued by the way they've approached footnotes. The Garnett/Warner letters have very few, and those only when significant reference is made to someone so vaguely that a footnote is absolutely necessary to make sense of an anecdote or opinion. The Maxwell/Warner letters had scarcely more, although they did often fill in the gap when a story was being discussed. Martin Ferguson Smith, on the other hand, has so many footnotes - and such thorough footnotes - in his collection of Rose Macaulay's letters that he actually has written more than Macaulay has in the book.

I suppose they're not actually footnotes - not sure what the correct terminology is, but his notes come after each individual letter. Macaulay will write 1.5 pages to Ferguson Smith's 2, perhaps. Which I thoguht would irritate me, but actually - and unusually for me - I love it! I am not reading them all; I just read the letters as though there were no footnotes - and if I'm interested or intrigued or confused by one of Macaulay's comments, then I'll look at the footnote. Which is a much more liberating reading experience than feeling obliged to read each note laboriously - I think I've found the perfect reading compromise.

Perhaps notes feel more helpful here because only one half of the correspondence is present? Or perhaps Macaulay is just more off-at-tangents than Maxwell, Warner, or Garnett in her writing, and needs Ferguson Smith's guiding hand. Either way, he has done an astonishing amount of research. Every reference is tracked down; often he doesn't merely give the details of a mentioned book, but an outline of the plot - or, rather than just fill in the name of a figure alluded to, he will pop in an anecdote or two. It's a truly humbling amount of research - and I love it when Ferguson Smith's personality sneaks into the footnotes, usually in the form of an exclamation mark in brackets; which is one of my own favourite modes of punctuation(!)

Over to you. Do you like editorial notes to abound or, erm, not abound? Footnotes, endnotes, or end-of-section notes? I know it's a small thing, but I bet quite a few of you have opinions on the topic. In fact, I know Lyn does, for a start...

Whether a dove or a seagull

I thought I'd pop out a quick post, to test your knowledge (/actually I have no idea, and hoped someone else would.) I've been reading a bit about Sylvia Townsend Warner of late, mostly letters, and footnotes in a couple of different volumes have mentioned Whether a Dove or a Seagull. It's a poetry collection she published in 1934 with her partner Valentine Ackland - a joint-collection, but none of the poems were signed, so the authorship of each was left unknown. Which is an intriguing thought - and a brilliant title.

But in the footnotes it has simply said 'This experiment was not a success'. And no more info. Does anybody know any more about the collection, and in what manner it failed to succeed? Simply in terms of sales? Or was it critically panned? Or was one poet so evidently inferior to the other that anonymity was pointless? Anybody in the know, do shout!

Journey through a book

I've just finished reading Edith Olivier's The Triumphant Footman and was pondering whether or not to write a review of it here. I love Edith Olivier's novel The Love-Child, as you might know, and thanks to various reprints (including one by Virago in the 1980s) it's quite easy to find at an affordable price. So I don't feel bad telling everyone that they really should read it, cos it's brilliant. The Triumphant Footman, on the other hand, isn't as good - but it is worth reading - more importantly, it is impossible to find in England. In the US there are a handful of copies available surprisingly cheaply (my edition was printed in the US, actually) but it's still fairly scarce.

So, instead of telling you much about The Triumphant Footman (although do ask if you'd like to know!) I shall merely tell you that it includes the wonderful character description of someone being "invincibly vague". And instead this will be a meandery post on obscure books, and such-like. I love these sorts of posts on other people's blogs (Rachel and Simon are especially good at them), so I hope you'll indulge me. Whenever I go off the book-review beaten-track, you lovely folk never fail to provide with great comments, so... now you're under some pressure!


Having a look through the books I've read in the past couple of years, there are quite a few which I deliberately decided not to write about on S-i-a-B because of their scarcity. There are also quite a few I simply forgot to write about, but that's a different matter. I'm never one to shy away from a list, so here they are:

Nothing is Safe by E.M. Delafield
Flower Phantoms by Ronald Fraser
A Harp in Lowndes Square by Rachel Ferguson
The Seraphim Room by Edith Olivier
Dwarf's Blood by Edith Olivier
Economy Must Be Our Watchword by Joyce Dennys
Birds in Tiny Cages by Barbara Comyns
The House in the Country by Bernadette Murphy
An Unexpected Guest by Bernadette Murphy
Which Way? by Theodora Benson.

Some were brilliant (Dennys); some were pretty poor (Fraser); some were disappointing (Comyns) and some were so-so (most of the rest) but nearly all of them are more interesting to me than the latest hardback or shortlisted issue-novel. But I don't see the point in telling you about a book that you then won't be able to find for less than £50... hmm. (If you do want to know about any of them, just let me know in the comments!)

Every now and then I get the urge to sideline all the esoteric, slightly eccentric reading choices I make, and settle down with the classics. While I find I have read a surprisingly high number of classic authors, I certainly read more non-classic authors. Of course, we could get tied in knots trying to work out the difference between 'classic' and 'non-classic', but even by the most generous criteria, only about twenty of the 115 books I read last year could be considered classics. Nobody is ever going to come up to me and say "Oh, just wondering, have you read An Unexpected Guest?" nor would I really have felt the lack from my reading life had I never done so. The opposite is true of, say, Middlemarch.


And yet... how unpersonal it would be to read only Austen, Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence... how uninteresting it would be to have a conversation with (or read a blog by) someone who never veered from the paths of canonical literature! I think most blog-readers agree that it's far more enticing to find a little-known gem uncovered, or even less popular Virago Modern Classics etc. Which can work alongside reviews of classics too, of course - as bloggers we tend not to discriminate that much in how a review is written, do we? My review of Howards End by E.M. Forster, for instance, appeared in between posts on Gay Life by E.M. Delafield and Saplings by Noel Streatfeild. As with most things, a mixture is the most interesting - but I'd always rather a blog leaned to the eccentric...

When I asked people on Twitter (I know, I know...) whether they'd ever chosen not to post about a book because it was scarce, all the respondents said no - because they might be able to revive interest, which in turn might help encourage publishers to reprint. I can see the logic of that for fantastic scarce novels - which is why, in retrospect, I really should have written about Joyce Dennys' Economy Must Be Our Watchword - but I probably wouldn't think it worthwhile to write about a book which nobody would be able to find if it was only mediocre, or even just 'quite good'.



This post has got even more meandering than I intended, since I've written it in instalments on different days. And the heat has addled my brain, so I'm not entirely sure what it was I wanted to say when I started this post. But do enjoy pictures of the lovely edition I have of The Triumphant Footman - and I thought it might be fun to include a sample of what happens when I read books. I tend to just write page numbers, in miniscule pencil writing, on the reverse of the title page - and then indicate the bit I'm interesting in on the page in question. If the book is too lovely to desecrate too many pages, I'll just make notes on that one page. Usually it's for review purposes, but these are actually in case the novel can be useful for my thesis. Make of them what you will....


Right. I'm off to write some of that thesis... or collapse in a melting heap on the floor. Undecided.

Song for a Sunday

First things first, I've only gone and added a 'follow me on Twitter' thing over on the left. To be honest, I haven't quite got to grips with Twitter, but I seem to be using it a bit more than before, so it would lovely to see you there. And I end up following more or less everyone who follows me, just out of interest (that makes me think about Pooh and Piglet tracking the Heffalump, round and round in a circle...)

This Sunday's song is 'I Didn't Know I Was Looking For Love' by Everything but The Girl - UK readers about my age might remember Karen Ramirez's remixed version from 1998, which is more popular than the 1993 original but not, in my opinion, as good...



For all previous Sunday Songs, click here.

The Two Towers

I stole the idea for this title from Elaine who was one of the bloggers who joined me at two venues two days ago, courtesy of the lovely people at Harper Collins. Or possibly HarperCollins, I'm not sure which is de rigueur. Nor am I entirely sure what de rigueur means. Let's move on swiftly.

The two towers in question were the Oxo Tower and the Tower of London - neither of which had I been to before. I met Elaine and Claire outside the lifts to the Oxo Tower, and we went up to the top floor and the brasserie, to be greeted by some friendly folk from Harper (let's settle on that for now - sorry Mr. Collins, I do appreciate your work) and introduced to the authors whom we were meeting. Step forward Fanny Blake and David Nobbs, both of whom were funny, charming, and great fun to chat with. Fanny Blake's first novel What Women Want is out soon (or possibly out now) more info here - and I was fascinated by her previous career as a literary editor. I think the editor's job is remarkable - I could read a novel and say which bits I did or didn't like, but the ability to suggest how to reshape a novel or a character is far beyond me.

David Nobbs (famous for TV writing, as well as novels - he wrote for The Two Ronnies, Reginald Perrin, etc.) has a book out now called It Had To Be You - more info here - spot their deliberate mistake; they refer to the novel by its working title Life After Deborah(!) David is a great conversationalist, and I was mostly delighted to meet someone else who loves Stephen Leacock and Saki. In fact, both of us find that we never meet others who love Leacock (although I think he is still 'known' in Canada?) so we raised a glass to him.

Oh, yes, the food and drink! Cocktails were cunningly matched to trays of delicious individual desserts - photos on Talli's blog here, Talli being another author/blogger whom I met for the first time. I also met Amanda (we discovered we knew lots of people in common, since we'd both been library trainees at the Bodleian) and Mel, and saw Jackie again, which was lovely.

And then on to the Tower of London! Sarah Gristwood was talking about her latest book, The Girl in the Mirror - a telling of Elizabeth I and Essex. I would have been tempted to call it The Only Way of Essex, but that's probably why I'm not a publisher. I almost never read historical fiction, but Gristwood's talk (which was more of general historical interest than specific to her novel) was entertaining and might lead me to try it out... The canapes served afterwards included quails' eggs, so that was another first for me. As was travelling solo in a taxi! Take this boy out of the provinces, and everything changes.

(photo credit)

It was a great day out - always a joy and a surprise that publishers know about bloggers, and want to get us involved. Lovely to meet the authors, publishers, and other bloggers, and to do more than Essex managed: go to the Tower of London, and leave it alive.

A Confederacy of Covers

I think most of us are fairly interested in cover choices, especially if one book gets a lot of different ones. So I thought I'd turn this post over to various A Confederacy of Dunces covers -









The one I really like was actually from a competition to make Polish covers for favourite books; I don't think it was every published in this edition. More details here.


Which is your favourite and least favourite? My least favourite, by a country mile, is the hideous neon one which seems to abound in bookshops currently - the fifth one down in this post.

And now for something completely different

"That's the point of book groups, isn't it? To make you read something you wouldn't normally." When I hear those words at book group, it usually comes after everyone has declared that they loathed the book in question. But sometimes something can come out of nowhere and be a total joy. Well, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole wasn't a *total* joy, but it was near enough.

Ignatius J. Reilly is the biggest character of the book, in every sense of the word - he dominates the narrative, but his gargantuan size, fearsome dialogue, and sense of self-worth means he dominates more or less everything else too. He is a deliberately unattractive character - obese, flatulent, 'full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chips.' He is disgusting - and alarm bells were going off with me. I am a bit sensitive to these sorts of things. I could do without a character whose bodily functions are so uncontrolled, and whose preoccupation with his 'valve' is mentioned on more or less every page. To be honest, this was the aspect of the novel I could have done without even when I'd realised I loved the book - but it sets the scene for a completely over-the-top character.

Ignatius lives with his long-suffering widowed mother, Irene Reilly. I loved her. She mostly ignores Ignatius' intellectual ramblings, and simply implores him to behave and get a job. It is a delight to read their dialogue together - while he brings Boethius and Marx and whoever else into conversation, she'll reply about a cream cake and the need for a bottle of wine.

In an amazing opening scene, Ignatius is apprehended by a policeman, for looking suspicious. Somehow this is the catalyst for all manner of events - an old man with a Communist-obsession enters their life, as does the hapless policeman, Angelo Mancuso - who spends the rest of the novel being forced by his boss to don various costumes. Surreal. And then Mrs. Reilly accidentally drives her car into someones property, and gets the bill for it... meaning Ignatius has to get work. Ignatius explains to his mother how difficult he found it working at the New Orleans Public Library, since they employers 'sensed in him a denial of their values'. She replies:

'But, Ignatius, that was the only time you worked since you got out of college, and you was only there for two weeks.'

'That is exactly what I mean,' Ignatius replied, aiming a paper ball at the bowl of the milk glass chandelier.

'All you did was paste them little slips in the books.'

'Yes, but I had my own aesthetic about pasting those slips. On some days I could only paste in three or four slips and at the same time feel satisfied with the quality of my work. The library authorities resented my integrity about the whole thing.'

Nevertheless, he starts off working for Levy Pants, 'filing' (for which read: throwing all the files into the bin, and trying to organise a factory uprising - one of the best scenes in the book, which had me laughing aloud on the train.) The office brings some more wonderful characters to the narrative, my favourite being Miss Trixie - an 80 year old who spends her workdays sleeping at her desk, forbidden from retiring by the interfering of Mr. Levy's failed-psychologist wife.

And the plot winds on and on, incorporating Ignatius' job as a hotdog-salesman; the efforts of a seedy club to bring in those customers who want to see a bird pulling a dress off a Southern belle; the flamboyant party of those in the 'French quarter'; Mancuso being stationed in a toilet... it gets increasingly bizarre, but is structured brilliantly by Toole - plotlines overlap and intertwine, and the whole thing relies heavily upon coincidence - but that's part of the delight.

But far and away the most delightful aspect of A Confederacy of Dunces is the language. It reminded me quite a bit of Evelyn Waugh, more especially Put Out More Flags and Decline and Fall. That is to say, selfish characters talking bombastically - hilarious put-downs or exaggerated philosophical ponderings. Here's a bit that made me laugh. Mrs. Reilly ends up dating the old man with the fear of the communiss [sic] and leaves a pamphlet for Ignatius to read:

'Yes, I saw one of those pamphlets in the hall this afternoon. You either dropped it there on purpose so that I could benefit from its message or you tossed it there accidentally during your regular afternoon wine orgy in the belief that it was a particularly elephantine bit of confetti. I imagine that your eyes have some trouble focusing at about two in the afternoon.'

He also starts a letter 'Beloved Myrna. I have received your offensive communication. Do you seriously think that I am interested in your tawdry encounters with such sub-humans as folksingers?' Genius. Each character has their verbal tics, which come back time and again (in the way that Dickens' wonderful characters have their iterated phrases) - so that even Irene Reilly's 'honey' and 'precious' could have me laughing; or Lana's 'investment'. And I haven't even told you who Lana is. A Confederacy of Dunces is so rich in characters.

This is all a million miles away from the Provincial Lady or Jane Austen, or the usual stables of my literary loves. But it isn't that far from the sort of silly things I say with my friends, especially my friend Clare - we talk nonsense to one another, hyperbolically, and teasingly. Not with Ignatius' bile, I hope, but... I still find it hilarious, even if my views are (of course) far from being his. John Kennedy Toole, presumably, does not envision Ignatius as some sort of anti-hero - he must be being held up for pillory. Or rather you don't stop to evaluate who is right or wrong, because you're being swept along on a tidal wave of the bombastic, absurd, and exaggerated.

I can understand if this review doesn't appeal. I don't think there is anything I could have read which would persuade me that I'd enjoy A Confederacy of Dunces - except for the novel itself. It could easily have been dreadful, and if I were the author I'd have toned down a few of the more bodily elements, but I think it is a work of extraordinary energy, exaggeration, and creativity. Some people at book group were arguing that it showed genuine insight too - perhaps it did; I didn't really want to know. I'm much happier taking the novel as a breathless, mad tour de force, writ large.

There is a sad story behind it. Toole finished writing the novel in the 1960s, and killed himself in 1969, partly because he couldn't find a publisher for it. Only his mother's perseverance and belief in him led to its eventual publication. She eventually persuaded author and college instructor Walker Percy to read it. He writes in the Preface:

There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained—that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good.

Thus, in my own humbler way, did I approach A Confederacy of Dunces, certain - even determined - that I would hate it. And my reaction ended up being precisely the same.

Song for a Sunday

I've had a couple of days in London, seeing (count 'em) fourteen different people, in six different groupings - including Sakura (Chasing Bawa) today for a blitz of Notting Hill Book & Comic Exchange. I'll share my spoils with you another time - for now let's have a Sunday Song, shall we? This week it's 'Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us' from Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, on their quirky duet album Raising Sand.



For all previous Sunday Songs, click here.

My Reading... Your Reading

Sorry posts have been brief this week, will try and write some proper reviews soon - my reading this month has mostly been re-reading, as I have re-read some of the central novels for my research. And more books with titles like Unmarried But Happy and The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems - interesting books from the first half of the 20th century about 'surplus women'. In the name of research, but I can't help enjoying reading those lovely old hardbacks, whatever might be inside them.

But I have also been reading for book group - and I thought I'd confirm to you all that (as a few of you guessed) A Confederacy of Dunces is the book I'm currently reading (as well as Great Expectations, Wise Children, The Element of Lavishness, A Reader on Reading, Singled Out, A Town in Bloom... yes, I do multitask when it comes to reading!)

Will report back on Confederacy of Dunces as soon as I can, since it'll be due back at the library soon. Have a lovely Friday - I'm off to London to see some friends, and now just have to decide which to take of the seven books I'm reading...

So, to fill the gap where my inspiration is not (and because it's always a fascinating question) - what are you reading at the moment?

Thursday Painting

After all that cerebral activity, I thought I'd just put up a painting today - I love a lot of Stanley Spencer's work, including this: Swan Upping at Cookham (1915-9) which is in the Tate (more info here).

Hope you're having a good week! I'm finding reading a bit slow, but today read (as well as some interesting books about childlessness from the 1920s - did you know that a lack of commonsense could be to blame?[!]) two-thirds of a bizarre, funny, grotesque American novel published in 1980, but written in the 1960s by an author who killed himself in 1969. Any guesses?

Naipaul Quiz: answers

Thank you for all your entries to the Male/Female quiz - I hope you all enjoyed it! Here are the answers, quickly - I've copied them down to the bottom with the quotations, in case you want to compare. Intriguingly, Dwarf's Blood by Edith Olivier seemed to attract the most interest from you all - and now I feel a bit guilty, since it's pretty scarce. From my own perspective, numbers 1 and 3 appealed to me most.

1.) Told By An Idiot - Rose Macaulay
2.) The Present and the Past - Ivy Compton-Burnett
3.) Time Will Darken It - William Maxwell
4.) Nothing is Safe - E.M. Delafield
5.) Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
6.) Before I Go Hence - Frank Baker
7.) The Harvest - Christopher Hart
8.) The To-Let House - Daisy Hasan
9.) Growth of the Soil - Knut Hamsun
10.) Dwarf's Blood - Edith Olivier

So... nobody got everything right. The lowest score was 4 (Sakura, Sue, and Laura!) and the highest score was 8 - a title shared between June, Colin, Karen K, Gill, Cynica, Deb, Claire, and Ruth. Well done, guys!

Here's an interesting fact - every author's was correctly identified more than incorrectly, except for Frank Baker - 16 out of 24 of you thought he was a woman.

Here's a little table of the answers - I don't know whether you can make it big enough to read by clicking on it, but it's worth a shot...



Here are those quotations again, with the titles.

Told By An Idiot - Rose Macaulay
1.) One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, - in brief, in the year 1879, - Mrs. Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr. Garden's study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, "Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again."


The Present and the Past - Ivy Compton-Burnett
2.) "Oh, dear, oh, dear!" said Henry Clare.

His sister glanced in his direction.

"They are pecking the sick one. They are angry because it is ill."

"Perhaps it is because they are anxious," said Megan, looking at the hens in the hope of discerning this feeling.


Time Will Darken It - William Maxwell
3.) In order to pay off an old debt that someone else had contracted, Austin King had said yes when he knew that he ought to have said no, and now at five o'clock of a July afternoon he saw the grinning face of trouble everywhere he turned. The house was full of strangers from Mississippi; within an hour the friends and neighbors he had invited to an evening party would begin ringing the doorbell; and his wife (whom he loved) was not speaking to him.


Nothing Is Safe - E.M. Delafield
4.) Even in what Julia now thought of as "the old days" - a year ago, and more - Terry had always minded things.

Whenever anything went even a little bit wrong he was almost certain to be fearfully upset. Sometimes he cried, even at twelve years old.

Daddy said Terry was a neurotic little ass.

Mummie said he was highly-strung, and that she'd been the same herself as a child.


5.) Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
Click!... Here it was again! He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again... Click!...

Or would the word 'snap' or 'crack' describe it better?


Before I Go Hence - Frank Baker
6.) "You'd like you tea up here, father?"

There was a moment before the old man replied. Then he turned in his chair by the open window and stared bewilderedly at his daughter. She stood in the low doorway to the small study which overlooked the orchard, a thin, black-haired woman whose ringed hands were red and coarse from years of housework. Fenner's thoughts had wandered very far and he could not immediately relate the woman to his own life. It seemed to him that she was not his daughter, only one other individual in a haphazard dream world of unrelated human beings.


The Harvest - Christopher Hart
7.) The sun shone down on a beautiful morning, edging the beech trunks copper and the beech leaves gold. The paddock lay like virgin land, the thin frost lay on it unbroken by human footfall, the grass only darkened here and there by delicate hoofprints where the deer had passed by when the mist still lay sorrelhigh, their sandy bellies brushing drops of dew from thistles, and had passed on and left the paddock still and silent as before in deep dreaming sleep.


The To-Let House - Daisy Hasan
8.) Kulay, a fair, skinny, whip-wielding boy with grey, stony eyes, guards the border between a Shillong mansion, once home to a British tea planter, and its drab tenants' quarters. A forget-me-not hedge separates the drab houses from the magnificent mansion.

He is twelve and is wearing a red polo-neck sweater. He dances in circles like a ribbon of stony sunlight.


Growth of the Soil - Knut Hamsun
9.) The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest - who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came. Afterward, some beast or other, following the faint tracks over marsh and moorland, wearing them deeper; after these again some Lapp gained scent of the path, and took that way from field to field, looking to his reindeer. Thus was made the track through the great Almenning - the common tracts without an owner; no-man's land.


Dwarf's Blood - Edith Olivier
10.) Sir Henry Roxerby was dead. As far as Brokeyates was concerned, he might well have died years earlier, for the place had begun to go to rack and ruin long before he took to his bed. During those last five years, the main drive had never been used. Sir Henry had no visitors, and the butcher and the baker preferred to reach the house by the stable entrance, near the churchyard. It was thus possible almost to avoid the Park altogether, and none of the village people cared about going further into that than was absolutely necessary. It had a haunted look.

Oh, Blogger...

Apparently people are having trouble leaving comments on any Blogger blog at the moment... fun. So, if you want to enter the (possibly be-prized) Male/Female author competition, but can't leave a comment, just email your answers to simondavidthomas[at]yahoo.co.uk

So far nobody has got everything right, and at least two people have got 8/10 (I haven't checked thoroughly, but I think that's right.) V.S. Naipaul has yet to pop by.

Keep guessing!

I'm going to give you another day to keep guessing on the male/female authors - I wonder if a guess for both genders has been made for every quotation? I might get making a spreadsheet...

Also, just thought I'd mention that there is now a link to the My Life in Books series I ran on here in March/April - click on the icon in the right-hand column to see 14 bloggers and blog-readers talk about their favourite books through their lives. It made me remember how great all the participants were, and ponder on a second series...

Naipaul's agender...

V.S. Naipaul hit headlines recently for claiming that all female writers were inferior to him, and "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not." Well, Naipaul, put your money where your mouth is - and, on the offchance that you don't read my blog, some of you others can have a go.

Here are the openings of ten novels - five of them are by men, five of them are by women. I'm hoping you won't know what they are... they've been picked more or less at random off my shelves.

Pop your guesses in the comments box! There might be a prize... but I'm rather hoping that we can prove Naipaul wrong, and that nobody gets them all right. But bonus points if you can guess the authors... and also let me know which makes you most keen to read the book!


1.) One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, - in brief, in the year 1879, - Mrs. Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr. Garden's study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, "Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again."


2.) "Oh, dear, oh, dear!" said Henry Clare.

His sister glanced in his direction.

"They are pecking the sick one. They are angry because it is ill."

"Perhaps it is because they are anxious," said Megan, looking at the hens in the hope of discerning this feeling.


3.) In order to pay off an old debt that someone else had contracted, Austin King had said yes when he knew that he ought to have said no, and now at five o'clock of a July afternoon he saw the grinning face of trouble everywhere he turned. The house was full of strangers from Mississippi; within an hour the friends and neighbors he had invited to an evening party would begin ringing the doorbell; and his wife (whom he loved) was not speaking to him.


4.) Even in what Julia now thought of as "the old days" - a year ago, and more - Terry had always minded things.

Whenever anything went even a little bit wrong he was almost certain to be fearfully upset. Sometimes he cried, even at twelve years old.

Daddy said Terry was a neurotic little ass.

Mummie said he was highly-strung, and that she'd been the same herself as a child.


5.) Click!... Here it was again! He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again... Click!...

Or would the word 'snap' or 'crack' describe it better?


6.) "You'd like you tea up here, father?"

There was a moment before the old man replied. Then he turned in his chair by the open window and stared bewilderedly at his daughter. She stood in the low doorway to the small study which overlooked the orchard, a thin, black-haired woman whose ringed hands were red and coarse from years of housework. Fenner's thoughts had wandered very far and he could not immediately relate the woman to his own life. It seemed to him that she was not his daughter, only one other individual in a haphazard dream world of unrelated human beings.


7.) The sun shone down on a beautiful morning, edging the beech trunks copper and the beech leaves gold. The paddock lay like virgin land, the thin frost lay on it unbroken by human footfall, the grass only darkened here and there by delicate hoofprints where the deer had passed by when the mist still lay sorrelhigh, their sandy bellies brushing drops of dew from thistles, and had passed on and left the paddock still and silent as before in deep dreaming sleep.


8.) Kulay, a fair, skinny, whip-wielding boy with grey, stony eyes, guards the border between a Shillong mansion, once home to a British tea planter, and its drab tenants' quarters. A forget-me-not hedge separates the drab houses from the magnificent mansion.

He is twelve and is wearing a red polo-neck sweater. He dances in circles like a ribbon of stony sunlight.


9.) The long, long road over the moors and up into the forest - who trod it into being first of all? Man, a human being, the first that came here. There was no path before he came. Afterward, some beast or other, following the faint tracks over marsh and moorland, wearing them deeper; after these again some Lapp gained scent of the path, and took that way from field to field, looking to his reindeer. Thus was made the track through the great Almenning - the common tracts without an owner; no-man's land.


10.) Sir Henry Roxerby was dead. As far as Brokeyates was concerned, he might well have died years earlier, for the place had begun to go to rack and ruin long before he took to his bed. During those last five years, the main drive had never been used. Sir Henry had no visitors, and the butcher and the baker preferred to reach the house by the stable entrance, near the churchyard. It was thus possible almost to avoid the Park altogether, and none of the village people cared about going further into that than was absolutely necessary. It had a haunted look.

Song for a Sunday

This week, an inspiring song by my favourite Christian singer-songwriter Jennifer Knapp - my favourite song of hers because it uses my favourite Bible verse as its inspiration. The song is called 'His Grace is Sufficient'; the Bible verse is 2 Corinthians 12:9 - But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”



Click here for all previous Sunday Songs.

Thank goodness it's the Weekend!

This isn't quite a Weekend Miscellany, since it's more a cheer of joy that this week is over! For this week, on consecutive days, I gave my first lecture and my first conference paper. Both went well, and the Oxford University English Graduate Conference was actually surprisingly fun - very relaxed and friendly; not scary and full of career-driven people as I'd feared it might be. And it came with a keynote speech from Penelope Lively about reading and writing and memory etc. It was deliciously wonderful - a bit like Howards End is on the Landing turned into a talk, albeit from a different author - and I'm keen to rectify my lack of Lively reading.

Oh, in case you were wondering - my lecture was on genre and reception theory, for first-year undergraduates; my conference paper was entitled '"If it were less, it would be gossip - if it were more, it would be genius": Placing the Middlebrow and the Middlebrow Place 1918-1939' - people seemed appreciative, and there were lots of fascinating talks given during the day.

So, since a week's worth of nervous energy has left me exhausted (some people take these things in their stride, I'm sure, but I am not one of them) I am retiring to bed - and will just give you three links to reviews which have come up on other blogs this week, since they're all wonderful thoughts about some of my favourite books.

- Thomas (My Porch) reads his first Tove Jansson short story collection, Travelling Light

- Daniel (Hiberian Homme) finally reads the wonderful Diary of a Provincial Lady

- Claire (Captive Reader) experiences the bookish joy that is Howards End is on the Landing

Hope you're having a good weekend - I'll be spending a lot of mine asleep!

Abandoned Books

Mrs. B at The Literary Stew has come up with a great idea for a little meme about abandoned books, and I'm delighted to be joining in. Pop over to her blog post (on the link above) to see the Nancy Pearl quotation which set her off thinking - and here are my answers to her questions:

1.) What would cause you to stop reading a book?
I used never to give up on books, but in recent years I have done so more often - there are two, very different reasons. Some I am hating, and know I shan't get any pleasure or edification from, and so give up. I don't admit defeat easily, but it happens sometimes (hello, Tarr by Wyndham Lewis, the most recent culprit). Others simply get sidelined, and although I don't deliberately choose to stop reading them, I realise months later that they've been neglected. It's because I read so many books at once, I think.

2.) Name a book you've abandoned in the past that you ended up loving later on.
I can only think of one - Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. That was one I stopped because I was reading it for a first-year class and simply ran out of time - when I returned to it last year, I loved it. Aside from that, you could count Pride and Prejudice, which I tried when I was ten, but couldn't cope with - now, of course, I love it.

3.) Name a book you've abandoned in the past that you hope to finish one day.
The Chateau by William Maxwell. I can't really believe I've only read one novel by him - I loved They Came Like Swallows so much that I bought lots of others, but somehow put The Chateau aside after a hundred pages. Just wasn't in the mood, perhaps - but I'm pretty confident I'll love it when I return to it. Now I just have to decide whether to carry on from p.101, or start again at p.1.

Oh, and the first Eye of the World book, which my brother lent me, er, quite a long time ago... I read 550pp over one weekend, in March 2010, and have only read fifty pages or so since... but I definitely will finish that one. I didn't put in all that effort for nothing...

Thanks Mrs. B for the meme! Do have a go on your own blogs, and link back to Mrs. B's original post when you do, so she knows who's picked up the baton.

Recapturing

Wow, thanks for all your comments yesterday - that was quite impressive, and every single author was recommended to me... well, thanks for that! Someone (anonymous) did say that they suspected I'd only read Brideshead Revisited by Waugh - but, in fact, I have not read that, and I have read The Loved One, Decline and Fall, and Put Out More Flags - so there you go! I must confess, composing this list did make me realise how many authors I have sampled. But that would be a rather more self-congratulatory list to make. Instead I shall challenge you COWARDS who weren't going to make your own lists - hie to it! (Heehee...!)

I'm having a mini-reader's-block at the moment, and seem to be mostly re-reading books for the past few weeks. Not sure quite what the cause is, but I daresay the remedy is Jane Austen - but for now I'm content going over some familiar ground.

I've been meaning to re-read Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle (1949) for ages and, as I mentioned the other day, my book group has been reading it this month. It catapaulted it up my must-reread list, and I'm delighted that I did - since I was a bit worried that it might not work now that I am much older than Cassandra. I was 17 or 18 when I originally read it - so perhaps not the age at which most people become life-long-lovers of this delightful novel - but it was Cassandra's age.

For those who don't know the story, Cassandra lives in a castle with her older sister Rose, younger brother Thomas, father known as Mortmain (their surname), stepmother Topaz, and sort-of-servant Stephen. She famously opens the novel "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink" - for this is where she starts recording her life in a diary, trying to capture the people around her. There is an atmosphere of a fairy-tale permeating the book - not surprisingly, given the family live in a castle. Cassandra thinks back to the first time the family saw it:

All of a sudden we saw a high, round tower in the distance, on a little hill. Father instantly decided that we must explore it, though Mother wasn't enthusiastic. It was difficult to find because the little roads twisted and woods and villages kept hiding it from us, but every few minutes we caught a glimpse of it and Father and Rose and I got very excited. Mother kept saying that Thomas would be up too late; he was asleep, wobbling about between Rose and me.

At last we came to a neglected signpost with TO BELMOTTE AND THE CASTLE ONLY on it, pointing down a narrow, overgrown lane. Father turned in it at once and we crawled along with the brambles clawing at the car as if trying to hold it back - I remember thinking of the Prince fighting his way through the wood to the Sleeping Beauty. The hedges were so high and the lane turned so often that we could only see a few yards ahead of us; Mother kept saying we ought to go back out before we got stuck and that the castle was probably miles away. Then suddenly we drove out into the open and there it was - but not the lonely tower on a hill we had been searching for; what we saw was quite a large castle, built on level ground. Father gave a shout and the next minute we were out of the car and staring in amazement.

But it's now a rather tumble-down castle, falling apart, and from which most of the furniture has been sold. Mortmain wrote a critically acclaimed novel called Jacob Wrestling (think Ulysses, in terms of being experimental and avant-garde) but the proceeds have dwindled after fourteen years (including a little spate in jail, for having threatened his - now dead - wife with a cake knife). The family thus live in poverty - but although they bemoan and bewail this, it never feels quite real - it is never meant to. They have to share towels, and can barely afford to eat - but that fairy-tale feeling prevents anything feeling too serious.

Cassandra does her job of 'capturing the castle' so well that I'm going to find it tricky to detail the characters quickly... but I'll do my best. Mortmain is absent-minded and idle; Topaz idolises him and communes with nature a lot; Topaz hankers after finer things in life, and will do much to achieve them; Stephen is subservient and besotted with Cassandra; Thomas more or less loiters in the background.

Of course they are all rather more complex than that, but you have to meet them first-hand to appreciate them, so we'll move on to Cassandra, the narrator. And what a wonderful narrator she is. Through her eyes, we see all the events of family life - especially the arrival of American brothers Simon and Neil to the large nearby house, the estate of which includes the castle. Their arrival is the catalyst for change at the castle, as Rose determines to marry Simon, whether or not she loves him (and she hopes she does) to help her family escape their destitution. Only after Simon and Rose have got engaged does Cassandra realise she has fallen in love with Simon herself...

In Cassandra, Dodie Smith has created someone quite extraordinary. The basic plot of I Capture the Castle is not the stuff of the finest literary mind - crossed wires; crossed lovers, and so forth. But because they are focalised through Cassandra, they are fascinating. Somehow Smith manages to present a teenage girl in love whose viewpoint is not remotely irritating - instead it is credible, and raises sympathy rather than annoyance in the reader. I was lucky enough not to fall in love until after I was a teenager, so I didn't experience all the woes of angsty, unrequited teenage love which Cassandra endures - so I cannot really empathise, nor say how realistic Cassandra's emotions are, but I do know that she is a wholly engaging heroine.

I love her for her slightly skewed view upon life, and the slightly odd, inexperienced things she says. Some examples: 'I know all about the facts of life. And I don't think much of them.' She labels champagne 'lovely, rather like very good ginger ale without the ginger.' And perhaps her wisest piece of advice - 'No bathroom on earth will make up for marrying a bearded man you hate.'

Dodie Smith is very clever, and she incorporates in the novel the criticism which might be directed at Cassandra - she overhears Simon telling Neil that he thinks her 'consciously naive'. It is the perfect description for part of her personality (she is mostly, however, unconsciously naive) - but by including it like this, Dodie Smith makes the reader leap to Cassandra's defence, and love her all the more. Spending the whole book in her company, it is important that we do love her - and I do.

I Capture the Castle is, incidentally, the only diary-style novel I've read which actually felt like a diary. Cassandra often breaks off entries because something has happened, or starts writing by saying she has something exciting to relate, but will try and contain herself. Much as I love books like Diary of a Provincial Lady and Diary of a Nobody, they both strike me as a little unrealistic - when on earth do they actually write their journals?

But that's just the icing on the cake. I Capture the Castle is almost perfect in every way - Dodie Smith is not a great prose stylist, perhaps, and it's interesting to see her write undisparagingly about Mortmain, who is essentially a Modernist author - which Smith obviously isn't. But I Capture the Castle is cosy, amusing, warm - and yet not dull or predictable or everyone-is-happy-all-the-time. It's like a fairy-tale brought into the 20th century, and not allowed to be either saccharine or gloomy. Instead, it is just right. Perhaps I should recommend it to Goldilocks...

P.S. the film is brilliant too. Perhaps I'll write about that properly someday.

There's a hole in my reading, dear Liza, dear Liza...

I'm going to halt you right there if you're going to say 'there's no such thing as books you must read'. There probably isn't, if one wants to stretch a point. But there are authors and novels I would feel, on my deathbed, lacking from my reading life, if I were not to try them. Ok? Ok. Lovely.

So, I'm getting into the literary confessional, and letting you know some of the authors I am a little or a lot ashamed not to have read anything at all by. (Feel free to rephrase that sentence in your head, so that it doesn't end with a preposition.) Some of these would be considered canonical - some are simply authors that people with my tastes love, and thus I feel I should have read. This is just, I think, British, Irish and American authors. If we started looking further afield than that, it would just get too embarrassing. Sorry if these authors are from elsewhere; blame my ignorance. And I'm sure I'll think of dozens more later - these are just the ones who come to mind first.

If you spot a name and think "Wow, he hasn't read anything by that author, he MUST read THIS RIGHT NOW" then do tell me with which title I should start.

Anthony Trollope
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
W.M. Thackeray
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Jonathan Swift
Wilkie Collins
L.M. Montgomery
Aldous Huxley
Mark Twain
V.S. Naipaul
Christopher Isherwood
Beryl Bainbridge
Kingsley Amis
Martin Amis
Paul Auster
William Golding
Toni Morrison
Robert Louis Stevenson [EDIT: oops, forgot about Dr. J & Mr. H, I have read that!]
Rosamund Lehmann
Beverley Nichols
Henry Green
Winifred Holtby
Vera Brittain
Margaret Forster
Margaret Drabble
Dorothy Parker
Salley Vickers
Anita Brookner
Anita Shreve
Salman Rushdie
E. Arnot Robertson
Radclyffe Hall
Penelope Mortimer
W. Somerset Maugham

Can you tell me about...

...any of the books I bought on Saturday? All of them appealed, as I was browsing the Oxfam bookshop after work, but I don't know anything about any of them, except what I was able to glean from the blurbs. I figured that Oxfam would benefit from my monies, even if I eventually decided not to read the books....


A Dark Strange by Julien Gracq

This one is the one which most intrigues me. It's a beautiful Pushkin Press edition, a translation of a French novel from 1945. Here is the blurb:

Two lovers arrive at a seaside hotel in 1920s Brittany; the other guests soon become obsessed with the man, the equivocal unsettling Allan. One by one they realise who he is - that death has come to spend the summer with them.

Amid the ceaseless thunder of the waves, the August heat and the wild and often surreal Breton landscape, the group that gravitates around Allan - an uncannily contemporary figure - gradually disintegrates.


My Phantom Husband by Marie Darrieussecq

I've just spotted that both those authors' names end with '-cq'. That can't be all that common. Another novel from the French, this 1998 work has an appalling title, but I was again pulled in by a surreal element. One more blurb, if you will:

What would you think if your husband, one day, with no word of explanation or warning, completely vanished? When would you begin to panic - the first hour, the first night? Or the moment you realise you cannot even remember his face?


Lucy Gayheart by Willa Cather

This one comes with no information at all! So I bought it because I've been meaning to read more Cather, and because I'm a sucker for tatty old green hardbacks - which once, if my eyes do not deceive me, had a Boots Book Club sticker on the front.


If you know anything about these, then get commentin'! And, if you don't, perhaps you'd like to comment anyway...

Slightly Foxed: Little Boy Lost

The kind people of the wonderful literary magazine Slightly Foxed offered me the chance to give you a sneak preview of their latest issue - and from the essays included (which range from Stendhal to visiting the last bookshop in Europe to Elizabeth Goudge) I decided to choose Annabel Walker's piece about Persephone's edition of Marghanita Laski's Little Boy Lost (which I wrote about myself here.)

Little Boys Lost
Annabel Walker

Being a lover of books and beautiful things, my teenage daughter usually discovers a Persephone paperback in the contents of her Christmas stocking. Last year, it was Little Boy Lost, by Marghanita Laski. She read it almost immediately and then, appraising it and me with shrewd enthusiasm, declared: ‘This is a very good book and you’ll love it.’ She was right on both counts.

Little Boy Lost is the story of an English poet who, having lost his Parisian wife and infant son in the Second World War, hears that the child may still be alive and returns to France afterwards in search of proof. An astute psychological study as well as a tale of secrets and searches, it was first published in 1949 and, thanks to Persephone, reprinted in 2002; but how such an accomplished and gripping novel managed to achieve ‘neglected’ status (the qualification for publication by Persephone) in the intervening fifty-three years is a mystery.

Laski, born into a Jewish intellectual family in 1915 (her father was a barrister and judge, her uncle the political theorist Harold Laski), read English at Oxford and worked as a journalist, critic, novelist and broadcaster all her life. Her style mixes traditional storytelling techniques – a mysterious disappearance, a romance tragically concluded, an enigmatic night-time visitor and a superbly atmospheric setting – with a view of the affair almost entirely from the perspective of the protagonist, Hilary Wainwright. His state of mind, his mental debates, his private reactions to the people and situations he encounters,are part of the narrative. You might imagine that this would result in many slow, reflective passages but in Laski’s taut economical prose it creates an immediacy that drives the story along at a rattling pace.

Hilary is not a particularly likeable character. Having heard that Lisa, his wife of only a few years, has been murdered by the Gestapo for her work with an escape organization, he guards his grief and disappointment bitterly. He has convinced himself that he has been too badly wounded emotionally to risk exposure to further pain, and that pride and self-pity are a justifiable response to the blow Fate has dealt him. He believes his son to have been irretrievably lost in the process of being concealed shortly before Lisa’s arrest, and embarks on a search after the war primarily out of a sense of obligation to the Frenchman, Pierre, who has offered to help.

Pierre is the first of a number of characters in the book whose outlook and principles begin to undermine Hilary’s own priggish certitudes. A survivor of the French Resistance, he seems in many ways a suitable companion in Paris (though the Englishman believes him to be his intellectual inferior), just as, later on in the provincial town Hilary visits, the elderly Madame Mercatel and her schoolteacher son make him feel at ease in their cultured, elegant home. But his patronizing assumptions about their limitations are quickly shaken: Pierre has an optimism that Hilary envies, while Bernard Mercatel, a teacher at the Sorbonne before the war, is content despite living quietly in obscurity. Hilary’s reaction on hearing this is typical of the way in which Laski reveals the impact his experiences in France have on him:

This is followed by a conversation with the perceptive Madame Mercatel which leaves Hilary with the uneasy feeling not only that he has unwittingly revealed himself to be in some way morally inadequate but, even more troubling, that also he has never truly understood the relationship he had with his wife. He is a long way from the impregnable, arid safety of his London flat and his debates with himself become more urgent with each visit to the orphanage that is home to the boy who might be his son, as he runs the gauntlet of nuns whose priorities are so clear, and whose motives are so uncluttered by moral ambivalence. More than once, his encounters prompt the thought that this story is about more than one lost boy.

The impression of France that emerges from this story is not the charming, cultured, picturesque place in every Francophile’s mind. Hilary considers France the most civilized country in the world. But the Paris he finds on his return in 1945 is a place of shattered buildings, makeshift bridges, dilapidated horse-drawn taxis, hotels without hot water and cafés without butter and milk. The unidentified town, 50 miles from Paris, to which Hilary goes in search of his son, is vivid in its ruination:

The street curved away so that only its beginning could be seen from the square. He rounded the curve, and then found a wilderness of desolation. Save for a roofless church higher for the contrast of emptiness, there was not a building standing for half a mile in every direction. Red bricks and grey bricks, roof tiles and stucco, reinforced concrete spouting thick rusty wires, all lay huddled in destruction. Nothing seemed to have been cleared away save what was necessary to allow a few tracks to pass through. It was ruin more complete and desolate than Hilary had ever seen.

Marghanita Laski knew France well – she, like her protagonist, was married in Paris – and she is forthright about what she clearly felt to be the moral depravity of the black market that prospered at this time. The dilapidated hotel in which Hilary stays, shunned by people such as the Mercatels, is patronized by others who enjoy juicy steaks, buttery potatoes and real coffee while the orphanage struggles to provide its children with the most basic level of nutrition. Hilary is incredulous when the Mother Superior at the orphanage describes their situation and then mentions that there are tubercular children in the same dormitories as the others.

‘Yes,’ said the nun steadily. ‘We have tubercular children here. If you knew more of Europe, monsieur, you would know that to run the risk of being infected with tuberculosis in a home where you have a bed to sleep in and regular meals is today to have a fortunate childhood.’

Nonetheless, when Hilary returns to his hotel and sees the meagre offerings of the ‘official’ menu card, he heartily accepts the alternative, discreetly whispered to him by the waitress and the obsequious patron. ‘This is Black Market, Hilary told himself, it’s what we’ve all been so shocked about, what prevents the poor getting even enough, and then he asked, But what good does it do if I refuse it? It won’t go to those children, it will only go to other people rich enough to pay for it, and he ate it, and argued with himself, knowing that he should go hungry and that he would not.’

By now the reader has reached the third and main part of the book, entitled ‘The Ordeal’. Hilary’s selfishness and moral equivocation spar with his ability, albeit suppressed, to feel pity and, at a deeper and even more suppressed level, love. The focus of this debate is Jean, the 6 year-old boy in the orphanage who may or may not be his son, and the debate is all the more agonized for this reason: that no one can provide proof one way or the other. The boy was parted from his mother before he could form lasting memories of her, and has been in the orphanage for as long as he can remember.

The exchanges between Hilary and Jean are delicately observed and arouse an aching compassion. The man who has become used to caring only about himself must carefully consider every word he addresses to Jean, in order to gain the trust of this sensitive, deprived and institutionalized child and try to decide whether he is his son. Sometimes he strikes the right note, occasionally he is horribly cruel. He is attracted by the idea of becoming a father and receiving the affection of a child; then he is repelled by something the child does or says; and all the while he is terrified of pity catapulting him into a situation he may regret. When they first meet, he takes Jean to see the trains at the level crossing, and then to a café.

Jean seemed to have forgotten about the trains. His eyes were roving the room now with eager interest. ‘Look, monsieur,’ he cried suddenly, pointing to a dusty green plant in a pot, ‘Look, there’s a little palm tree.’ ‘How do you know it’s a palm tree?’ asked Hilary, interested. ‘I saw it in a book,’ Jean said casually. ‘Do you like reading?’ Hilary pursued. Jean said, ‘I like reading about Africa.’ ‘And what else?’ asked Hilary. Jean said, ‘I haven’t got a book about anything else.’ Hilary frowned. He resented his own inability to anticipate the to him unbelievable limitations of this child’s experience. Then again he remembered that he had a part to play in which a frown was a forbidden indulgence and asked quickly, ‘What do you learn about Africa?’

What the reader proceeds to learn is too enthralling to be revealed here and, though a re-reading of a novel can never capture the thrill of discovery the first time round, I’ve enjoyed re-reading Little Boy Lost so much for this article that I’m going to read it yet again right now.


Annabel Walker was a journalist in London in the last century.

Marghanita Laski, Little Boy Lost (1949) Persephone • Pb • 240pp • £9 • isbn 9781906462055

This extract is taken from the Summer 2011 edition of Slightly Foxed, a quarterly digest produced by, and for, readers. www.foxedquarterly.com