A ghost story for Christmas...

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

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

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

Read the rest of the review here...

Abbie - Dane Chandos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hetty Dorval - Ethel Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Others who got Stuck into this Book:

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

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

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

Of Love and Hunger - Julian Maclaren-Ross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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