The World My Wilderness - Rose Macaulay

I hope this will turn out coherent.  I wrote most of it a while ago, sent the book away to a friend, and am now trying to complete a review sans book and sans health.  Here goes...

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is my first overlap of A Century of Books.  Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness was published in 1950, a spot which is already occupied on my list by Margaret Kennedy's Jane Austen.  First come, first reviewed, so it's Kennedy who's on the century list.  But I'm still going to talk about Rose Macaulay, naturally...

This is the fifth novel (and eighth book) that I've read by Rose Macaulay, and she is becoming one of those reliable writers I know I can pick up and enjoy; the only dud I've encountered was Staying With Relations.  Wikipedia tells me that her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond (which I have not read) is 'widely regarded as her masterpiece'.  I am edging ever closer to it, since The World My Wilderness is her penultimate book, and the other one which people tend to have heard of, if they've heard of Macaulay at all.

'Reliable' is just another word for 'consistent', really, and Macaulay does seem to write in a consistently dry, almost satirical style, pursuing a similar theme in each novel - albeit a theme so broad that she could have written two thousand novels and never needed to approach it from the same angle twice.  It is dangerous to summarise thus (and others may have said this before me - indeed, now I see that Karyn has) but I believe Macaulay's broad theme across her novels is: 'What does it mean to be civilised?'  In Keeping Up Appearances this is addressed through literary eschelons; in Crewe Train through the 'civilised savage'; in Dangerous Ages through psychoanalysis, and so on and so forth.  In The World My Wilderness, the title alludes to this debate - and the setting, postwar France and England, offers the physical destruction and moral weariness that the word 'wilderness' suggests.  Macaulay includes an anonymous epigraph, from which she draws the title:

The world my wilderness, its caves my home,

Its weedy wastes the garden where I roam,

Its chasm'd cliffs my castle and my tomb...

The cast of characters is initially broad and confusing (or at least it was to me) and I pesevered by ignoring those who weren't dominant in the narrative at any one time, then slotting them all together later.  There are so many children and stepchildren and half-siblings that I had to throw my hands up in the air in defeat.  Ok.  Stiffen the sinews, summon the blood.  Here goes.

Helen and Gulliver had Barbary and Richie.  Helen and Gulliver divorced; Helen moved to France with Barbary (leaving Richie behind) and married Maurice, while Gulliver married Pamela.  Helen and Maurice had Roland.  Maurice was drowned in mysterious circumstances, leaving Helen with a stepson Raoul.  Gulliver and Pamela had David, and Pamela is pregnant again.  Phew.  That will do - I'm leaving out mother-in-law and uncle, who make cameo appearances.

There are so many characters, but I'm only going to focus on the two I thought most important.

The novel begins with Barbary and Raoul moving to England (Richie visits his mother in France) and these two form the chief interest of the novel.  Macaulay is often quite playful with names, and I don't think it's any coincidence that 'Barbary' is so close to 'barbarous'.  She is used to running amok with the French maquis, a group whose aim was to resist the invading Germans, but who extend this resistance to all forms of authority.  She has the same attitude in England, except now her companions are deserters and thieves, living their lawless lives in the bombed out old churches and houses of London.  Her old nurse warns her against being too trusting:

"And I ask, Miss Barbary, that on no account will you ever trust those young men, for of trust they will never be deserving."

Barbary, experienced in discredited young men, had never thought of trusting any of them.  Lend them something, and you never had it back; leave anything about near them, and you did not see it again.  If they could derive advantage from betraying you, betray you they would; these were the simple laws of their lives, the simple, easy laws of the bad, who had not to reckon with the complication of scruples, but only with gain and loss, comfort and hardship, safety and risk.
[...]
"Oh no, Coxy," Barbary said, in surprise at the eccentric idea suggested to her.  "I should never trust them.  I mean, trust them with what?  Or to do what?  There couldn't be anything..."

Barbary is a very Macaulayan character, if you'll excuse me coining the term: she is something of an outsider, straight-talking, independent, but uncertain of her place in the world.  And the apple hasn't fallen too far from the tree - but while Barbary's inability to cohere with society turns her into a restless, waif-like exile from civilisation, her mother Helen is the selfish, self-absorbed type whose callousness hides behind a veneer of grace and elegance.  She claims to have a 'phobia of being bored', and very little breaks through to her heart.  Helen is overtly uncivilised, as Barbary is, but she respects none of the values of civilisation - preferring, instead, a reckless and ambiguous love for beauty.

"As to one's country, why should one feel any more interest in its welfare than in that of other countries?  And as to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals - or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.  A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?"

"My dear Madame, not almost.  It is a religious ideal."  The abbe spoke dryly, and did not add anything about the Holy Family at Nazareth, for he never talked in such a manner to his worldly, unbelieving friends.

It is worth noting that Macaulay delights in giving her characters views that are not her own.  She signposts this with a motif running through her novels; that of looking down on writers and novels.  Some readers always want authors to be making a point, moral or otherwise, in their writing; I am happy if a writer can convey characters acting believably.  That is 'point' enough for me, and I think for Macaulay too - it would be a mistake to extrapolate too much from her writing, other than an examination of the way that certain characters behave in certain circumstances.  She extends beyond this, to questions as vast as the role of civilisations, but she doesn't attempt to answer these questions.  Nor could she.

Speaking of her writing... Macaulay has a dry, ironic tone which I've preferred in other of her novels.  Sometimes, in The World My Wilderness, she seemed to get a bit carried away with a romanticised, flowing, almost baroque writing style.  Perhaps that fits into the themes - but it did include this section, all of which is one sentence:

In this pursuit he was impelled sometimes beyond his reasoning self, to grasp at the rich, trailing panoplies, the swinging censors,of churches from whose creeds and uses he was alien, because at least they embodied some cintuance, some tradition; while cities and buildings, lovely emblems of history, fell shattered, or lost shape and line in a sprawl of common mass newness, while pastoral beauty was overrun and spoilt, while ancient communities were engulfed in the gaping maw of the beast of prey, and Europe dissolved into wavering anonymities, bitter of tongue, servile of deed, faint of heart, always treading the frail plank over the abyss, rotten-ripe for destruction, turning a slanting, doomed eye on death that waited round the corner - during all this frightening evanesence and dissolution, the historic churches kept their strange courses, kept their improbably, incommunicable secret, linking the dim past with the disrupted present and intimidating future, frail, tough chain of legend, myth, and mystery, stronghold of reaction and preserved values.

This isn't particularly representative of The World My Wilderness - 200 pages of this would have driven me crazy - but it does pop up now and then, and adds to the richness of Macaulay's writing, if you can cope with this sort of thing.

I'm afraid this review is going to peter out rather, because I seem to be heading towards semi-consciousness... so, in summary... I liked it, but I think Macaulay newbies might be better off with Crewe Train or Keeping Up Appearances.  Let's hand over to some other folk, who might have been more conscious whilst writing their reviews...


Others who got Stuck in this Book:

"[...]it is despairing, and unrelentingly sombre and pessimistic." - Karyn, A Penguin A Week 

"It's a beautifully written and nuanced story that's filled with amazing (in the fantastic sense) imagery of a post-war London" - Danielle, A Work in Progress

"It’s a stunning, well-written novel." - Katherine, A Girl Walks into a Bookstore

Personal Pleasures

I'm currently, and slowly, reading Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay, one of the books I bought under Project 24. It's a collection of paeans to the m
any and various delights Macaulay encounters in life - from believing to disbelieving, from doves in the chimney to improving the dictionary. It's a hodge-podge, or perhaps a hotch-potch, and certainly good fun. It does feel a little over-written compared to Macaulay's novels, with elaborate expressions and fanciful imagery. You can imagine Philip Sidney penning it, whilst not musing on Astrophel and Stella. Having said that, Macaulay delights in pulling the rug from under your feet, and each section has a little turning-point where she considers the flip-side.

This isn't really a review of the book - that would be foolish, since I'm not even halfway yet - but I thought I'd treat you to one of the sections which tickled me. AND this prepares you for some Macaulay news coming later in the week...

'Departure of Visitors'

An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors, like trodden herbs. A peace for gods, a divine emptiness.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy Sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy Companies of Men. . . .
Society is all but rude
To this delicious Solitude.

The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books of gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the hairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand. "I am afraid the room is rather littered...." The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.

What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One's life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.

To-night we shall sleep deep. We need no more hope that you "have everything you want"; we know that you have, for you are safely home, and can get it from your kitchen if you haven't. We send you blessing and God speed, and sink into our idle peace as into floods of down.

But you have unfortunately left behind you, besides peace, a fountain pen, a toothbrush, and a bottle of eye lotion with eye bath.

Dangerous Ages

I've got half a review saved away in my draft posts, but it's late and I'm heading bedwards, so instead I thought I'd share this delicious quotation from Rose Macaulay's Dangerous Ages (1921). It's a conversation between Gerda and Neville (who are, confusingly, mother and daughter. Or perhaps aunt and niece - I got a little confused.) I think it's a fun little satire on thoughtless 1920s Bohemianism...

“Marriage,” said Gerda, “is so Victorian. It’s like antimacassars.”

“Now, my dear, do you mean anything by either of those statements? Marriage wasn’t invented in Victoria’s reign. Nor did it occur more frequently in that reign than it did before or does now. Why Victorian then? And why antimacassars? Think it out. How can a legal contract be like a doily on the back of a chair? Where is the resemblance? It sounds like a riddle, only there’s no answer. No, you know you’ve got no answer. That kind of remark is sheer sentimentality and muddle headedness. Why are people in their twenties so often sentimental? That’s another riddle.”

Not a Bucket in Sight

It's always nice to feel oneself in like-minded company, so I was pleased (and not entirely surprised) to see that a lot of you felt the same way that I do about Catcher in the Rye. I rather think today's book will be more up your street...

Although I read Keeping Up Appearances (1928) by Rose Macaulay back in December (around the time I reviewed Crewe Train) I've recently been using it as part of an essay, so hopefully it'll be fresh in my mind... Those of you familiar with a certain BBC sitcom of the same name may recognise the reference in today's subject title - but while Hyacinth doesn't make an appearance, Macaulay's novel has similar ideas of class and how pretending to be above one's station will only end in complications...

The central characters of the novel are half-sisters Daisy and Daphne, who are worlds apart in character. Daphne is 25, a cultured intellectual who is never put-off by any situations, and moves through high society with ease and grace. Daisy, 30, is plagued by self-doubt and comes from rather commoner stock. Though she tries to engage in the same social circles as Daphne, and is far more snobbish and class-conscious, she has none of Daphne's confidence, bravery, and charm. She also lives in constant fear that her secret life as popular novelist Marjorie Wynne will be unearthed by the highbrows and intellectuals amongst whom she moves. But she realises that this isn't likely, as (when she tests the water) they seem completely unaware of Marjorie Wynne's existence. Macaulay uses these bits to satirise her own position as popular novelist (though one read by middlebrow and highbrow alike, I believe). In fact, throughout Macaulay's writings (including the novel of hers I've recently started, Staying With Relations) she is very teasing of novelists, and quite amusingly so. This, for instance, is in a collection of her essays called A Casual Commentary:

Novels are among the queerest things in a queer world. Chunks out of the imagined life of a set of imagined persons, set down for others to read. For this is what you have to produce if you are a novelist. You will find it quite easy. Anyone can write novels, and most people, at one time or another, do so. One novel is much like another, so you need not worry very much about what kind of novel to write.[…] The great advantage of writing novels is that some people read novels. They are not, on the whole, very clever people, so yours need not be clever novels, and, indeed, had better not be.

I read the Keeping Up Appearances as part of my research about the development of the concept of 'middlebrow', and it is a very interesting look at the interaction of different social strata, especially when it comes to literary circles and their inability to understand each other. It's also a lot about perspective - for example, Daisy considers her role from two different vantages:

Mother’s clever girl, earning her living by writing for the London papers, writing such bright, clever pieces, that people always liked to read. One of those vulgar little journalists who write popular feminine chit-chat in that kind of paper that caters for mob taste. Oh, what matter? She was either, according to her environment. Go to East Sheen, be Mother’s clever girl, petted and admired; go to the newspaper office, be one of the smart young women journalists, writing good live articles; move along Folyots and highbrows, and be as one not realised by nice highbrows, and only recognised by less nice highbrows as a target for unkindly jests.

Though Keeping Up Appearances isn't as funny as Crewe Train, nor quite as memorable, it does present a clever idea. Because, dear reader, I haven't told you the central concept which surprises the reader and twists the interpretation completely, which comes about halfway through the novel. And I'm not going to, you'll have to read it yourself (carefully avoiding reading the blurb on the inside, if you have my edition - which is that pictured above. I don't know about you, but it reminded me of Picasso's The Three Dancers, left.)

Without giving that away, I can say little more - except that Rose Macaulay deserves a wider audience. Capuchin Classics have recently republished one of her novels, I believe, and perhaps other publishers will take up the baton. But there are plenty of secondhand copies available of Keeping Up Appearances and Crewe Train, and I daresay that libraries will have them - for a funny, clever, and well-written view of 1920s class issues and literary society, you can do no better.

Oh, Mr. Porter...

Rose Macaulay first hoved onto my horizons when I read Nicola Beauman's wonderful book A Very Great Profession (which I discover, rather to my horror, I've never blogged about - it's essential reading for anyone remotely interested in Persephone books or any interwar domestic novels). On the strength of that, I bought Told By An Idiot in Pershore market, and... I still haven't read it. This is the story of so many of my books, of course, but Told By An Idiot (like, for some reason, Rosamund Lehmann's Dusty Answer) has been close to the top of the tbr pile on numerous occasions. It's come away on holiday with me, been placed by the bed, somehow never quite been read...

And I still haven't read it - but I have read a Rose Macaulay novel. While researching my middlebrow stuff, Crewe Train by RM was mentioned a lot, especially in an interesting and newish book by Wendy Gan called Women, Privacy, and Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century British Writing. My curiosity piqued, I got hold of the novel and read it, and isn't it good? I don't know if I'm last to the party on Rose Macaulay. I had read some of her letters, but that was it, so forgive me if everyone else has read everything she ever wrote. Those whom I've asked seem to have been almost universally put off by The Towers of Trebizond...

Crewe Train (1926) takes its name from the popular rhyme:

Oh, Mr. Porter, whatever shall I do?
I want to go to Birmingham, but they've sent me on to Crewe!

and is about Denham, who has got onto the wrong path in life. Brought up by her clergyman father in Andorra, she has instincts and a lifestyle which are fairly primitive. Or so they seem when her father dies, and she must move to live with relatives in London, the Greshams, who live in high society and all write or publish or at least read books. That sort. In Denham's view:

Books were mostly dull enough, but criticisms of books were quite unreadable. The Greshams all read them, but then they appeared to be so constituted as to be able to read anything. It was nearly a disease with them.

Imagine! Denham is mystified by most of their activities, which seem to her to make no sense - the solemn dancing, the table manners, most of all the need to visit each other and hold conversation all the time. She is at a loss to either initiate or join the sorts of conversations that her relatives' circle expects of her - the only successful topic she lands upon is puddings - and she believes that people should stay in their own home, and not bother each other all the time.

But nothing is simple, of course, and Denham finds herself in love with (thankfully distant) relative Arnold - and they marry. The tidal wave of first love is enough to get them through a lot, but then the differences start to spring up. She is desperate not to live in London, and he can think of nowhere else to live. She never reads anything but maps, he writes stream-of-consciousness novels (one, Lone Jane, is a cruelly funny pastiche of Joyce et al, to which comes the response: "I suppose," said Denham doubtfully, "Jane did think like that. I suppose she was a little queer in the head.") Though never openly antagonistic, their marriage becomes a struggle - whose lifestyle and wishes will be sacrificed for the other, or will they reach an unhappy compromise?

If this sounds bleak, then it's only really bleak for the characters. The author and the reader are mostly having a whale of a time - Rose Macaulay has that affectionate, ironic voice which is so characteristic of the time, able to expose the ridiculous aspects of her characters without making them wholly ridiculous people. She uses the extremes of society to comment wryly on all of it, and uses Denham's unusual perspective on good manners and protocol for good comic effect. For example, when Denham's mother-in-law is instructing her on good house-management:

"It’s the only way of getting everything done in order. Monday morning clean the silver, Tuesday the knives, Wednesday, the paint, Thursday, the taps – and so on through the week. No day without something cleaned. And one room thoroughly turned out each day, too – that’s most important.”

“Turned out…” Denham repeated it vaguely.

“Yes, turned out. The things all taken out of the room and put back again, you know.”

What for, Denham silently wondered. The same result would surely be achieved, with less effort, by leaving the things where they were. But the maids would not then have done a morning’s work; that was of course important.

All in all, as well as being useful for my research, I found this a really fun novel, and I'll definitely be reading more. In fact, I like Keeping Up Appearances even more so far, it's very clever. If you haven't read any RM yet, do give Crewe Train a go. Of course, it's not in print... but there are plenty of 1p copies available on Amazon. And, who knows, Rose Macaulay might make a last minute addition to my Best Books of 2009, which I drafted the other day....