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Should offensive books be republished?

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When I reviewed Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons earlier in the year, I said that it was one of my favourite reads of 2021 so far – but that I couldn’t recommend it to the British Library for republishing, because there are racist elements to it that couldn’t easily be excised. They weren’t the main gist of the novel, by any means, and some of the antisemitism could probably be neatly cut away – but there is one secondary character whose racism towards another secondary character is tangled up in the plot.

I mentioned in that review that I might try to write more about the ethics of reprinting racist and other discriminatory works from the past, and a couple of people said they’d be interested in that discussion – and quite a few people said they thought any novel from the past should be eligible to be reprinted, with caveats in an introduction if necessary.

I want to give my own two caveats at the beginning: firstly, I am a white man and thus certainly not the person to be talking about how racism and sexism affect individuals, and I won’t be trying to do that today. If this becomes mansplaining or whitesplaining, please shout me down. Secondly, I think we should all have an awareness that there are opinions we all unthinkingly hold today that will be considered appalling by future generations. We don’t know what those opinions are, and that’s kind of the point.

Books that have been turned down

This hasn’t been something I’ve had to think about until relatively recently – in my very privileged position of being able to recommend books for the British Library Women Writers series. I emphasise that I am recommending rather than deciding, and they can say (and have said) no to my suggestions. (A third caveat: I am, of course, speaking for myself in this post – not for the British Library.)

They’ve turned down books for several reasons. Some simply didn’t fit the criteria of the series – I really wanted to include an Ivy Compton-Burnett, but all her novels are set in some fanciful past, and so don’t comment on life for women of the decade they’re published. I tried to emphasise the ‘fictionalised’ half of ‘fictionalised autobiography” for Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Corneila Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, deep down knowing it was really just autobiography. One novel the editor at the British Library simply didn’t like, which is fair enough. Another novel was really promising throughout, but had a bad, confusing, and sudden ending – and we agreed that, sadly, this ruled it out. And a final novel couldn’t be used because of an aspect of it that, while not overt racism, would be uncomfortable to read. It’s by an author who has recently been republished by more than one reprint publisher – but, notably, they haven’t included this particular book of hers either.

That’s not a bad batting average, considering how many of my recommendations have been accepted and are coming out in the future – and, of course, that’s why the editor is there (and she’s wonderful). But it’s that last one that particularly ties into the question of ‘should we reprint questionable books’.

Argument 1: We shouldn’t erase the past

A lot of people come from the position that the past is the past, and we shouldn’t try to doctor it to make it palatable for modern eyes. And this is largely what happens when books are reprinted. I know that sometimes offensive words are changed (the reprint of O, The Brave Music takes out an n-word, for instance, without changing the overall meaning of the scene), but broadly the world of Bowdlerised editions is a thing of the past. I don’t know how long that will last – Bowdler and his ilk changed things to make them fit with the morals and sensitivities of his age, and I can envisage 2021 doing the same. But it hasn’t happened yet.

I am generally pro the idea of not editing the past – whether that is from prudery or from being woke (and I don’t use the term disparagingly). But sometimes that means not publishing at all.

Argument 2: The past can still hurt people

BUT not wanting to erase the past isn’t the same as insisting that it is glorified and sustained. We’ve seen that recently with statues. It seems a farcical argument to me that we shouldn’t remove statues because that is destroying history – as though the only way that we have ever learned about the past is by reading statues.

I am firmly against destroying existing books – burning books has never been a good look for any movement – but that’s not to say the content is innocuous. Again, I am keen not to Whitesplain, so I will just say this: racism in books makes me feel uncomfortable and unhappy, but it doesn’t chime with racism I have personally faced – which is, of course, none. I cannot speak for people who read (say) the n-word in a novel and have to re-live all the times they’ve had that word used at them. But it’s worth remembering that books from the past still have the power to cause pain to readers in the present.

Argument 3: Publishing is a commercial venture

Acknowledging this pain – if a book shouldn’t be extensively edited to fit modern views (and I think it shouldn’t) then what next?

Many argue that books should just come out as is, and there are certain authors who are treated just like that. Joseph Conrad has a novel with the n-word in the title and, as far as I know, it’s still republished with that title. It certainly was in the English faculty under that title when I studied there, though perhaps it’s just called Narcissus now. Anyway, I shan’t be reading any more Conrad because I find him deathly dull, but there is certainly an echelon of writers who are so canonical that publishers have to make decisions about how they present them. There are words, themes, and perspectives in Wuthering Heights, To Kill a Mockingbird, Othello, and any number of other classic texts that wouldn’t be published as new books now – but these authors and books are too renowned to ignore.

The same is not true of reprint publishing. I think Miss Linsey and Pa is largely brilliant, but the cultural world will not notice if it never comes back into print. And publishers will only reprint a book if they think it will sell, and won’t damage their reputation or open them up to legal battles. These are all different variables, of course. But if you say ‘We should bring back books as they are’, you are also saying ‘This publisher should take a commercial and reputational risk on this product’. And, honestly, why should they?

Conclusion: it’s a moral and practical decision…

It’s not a surprising conclusion, but I do think the commercial/practical element is surprisingly often left out of conversations on this topic. Whatever my opinion of reprinting a book is, the ultimate opinion that matters is people with the capital and sway to bring a book back into print. I personally believe we shouldn’t reprint books that will damage others (and I am not qualified, as a white man, to determine what those things are – listening is always key), and that we shouldn’t extensively edit books to make them fit our sensibilities (though I think removing the odd word is fine), but my opinion is pretty meaningless on its own because nobody is asking me to put my money and name on the line.

And, again, it’s always worth remembering – lest we feel the temptation to be self-righteous against past writers and readers – that there are plenty of novels coming out at the moment that will be considered anathema to a future generation.

This post has felt rather a ramble, but hopefully some of it makes sense! I would love to know your thoughts on the topic…

The Privet Hedge by J.E. Buckrose

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A few weeks ago, I decided to do a mystery book haul – picking four books I knew absolutely nothing about, from mid-century female authors I’d never heard of, to see if I could find some hidden gems. It’s all part of scoping out for future British Library Women Writers titles – hard work, but someone has to do it(!!) If I were canny, I’d find a way to write these off in my taxes, but I don’t understand at all what that means. It is embarrassing how financially illiterate I am.

ANYWAY. Of the four, I decided to start with The Privet Hedge by J.E Buckrose, from 1922, depending whom you ask. The reason I chose this one to start with is because it opens with a description of a house, and books-about-houses are among my favourite things. Here’s the first paragraph:

At the far end of Thorhaven towards the north was a little square house surrounded by a privet hedge. It had a green door under a sort of wooden canopy with two flat windows on either side, and seemed to stand there defying the rows and rows of terraces, avenues and meanish semi-detached villas which were creeping up to it. Behind lay the flat fields under a wide sky just as they had lain for centuries, with the gulls screaming across them inland from the mud cliffs, and so the cottage formed a sort of outpost, facing along the hordes of jerry-built houses which threatened to sweep on and surround it.

In this house live Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, as the narrative tends to refer to them. They are sisters, past middle age, who have always lived with each other except for the brief two years while Mrs Bradford was married. Quickly widowed, she returned to their life together – and, though a gentler soul than her sister in many ways, also always makes clear her sense of superiority from having once been married. She gives the impression of having lived an awful lot of life in those couple of years, and it is a superiority that Miss Ethel recognises and accepts.

Those ‘jerry-built houses’ of the opening paragraph are causing a change. A distant relative of theirs owns the land separating their little house from the encroaching housing estates – and he has just sold it for development. Swathes of housing estates on greenbelt land in villages feels like a very contemporary concern, but it was clearly equally pressing in the 1920s. The sisters, particularly Miss Ethel, are horrified that new houses might crowd in the other side of their privacy-ensuring privet hedge – blocking out the view and destroying their tranquillity.

If that weren’t all, their maid has also just left to get married. Luckily her younger relative Caroline has been put up for the role. She is a teenager, recently out of school, and has been ‘promised’ to Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford ever since their maid announced she was leaving. But Caroline has a last-minute change of heart. Like many young women of her generation and class, domestic service no longer looked so promising. “I’d starve before I’d ask permission to go to the pillar-box, and spend my nights in that old kitchen by myself,” she says. Instead, she can earn money by manning the box on the promenade – for Thorhaven is a seaside town.

In the end she compromises by working there and helping out the sisters, though not as a live-in maid. It’s a really interesting look at the new job prospects of the 1920s for a certain type of young woman – and I particularly enjoyed all the details of life by the coast, and the society that lives there together out of season (and moves out of their house during season, to get some tourist income). Caroline’s main story is something of a love triangle, though, between the reliable but dull Wilf – and a man who is engaged to another woman. I tend not to find romance storylines very interesting in books, and this one did lean a bit into love-at-first-sight territory. It isn’t badly handled, but for me it was the least interesting element of an otherwise very interesting novel.

What helps The Privet Hedge rise above other novels of its type is Buckroses’s writing. The initial scene-setting paragraphs are rather lovely, showing a good eye for detail that brings the town and its inhabitants alive. Here is a dance scene, for instance:

Still the evening came with no sign of rain; the band stationed at the edge of the green played cheerful dances with a will, and it was no fault of theirs that the music sounded so lost and futile amid the roaring of the sea – rather as if a penny whistle were to be played in a cathedral while the organ was bombing out solemn music among the springing arches. Perhaps the visitors and the Thorhaven people felt something of this themselves, for they put no real zest into their attempts at carnival, but they danced rather grimly in the cold wind, with little tussocks in the grass catching their toes and the fairy lamps which edged the lawn blowing out one after the other.

Overall, I really liked The Privet Hedge. If it had predominantly been about Miss Ethel and Mrs Bradford, I would have wholeheartedly loved it – but as the novel progresses, their story becomes less prominent than Caroline’s. I suppose that was the market for this sort of book at the time – and it’s certainly enjoyable. But the older couple of sisters, anxiously watching modernity come literally and figuratively closer to their door, is what really sold this novel to me – and they are its greatest success.

I went back to a bookshop!

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Since the pandemic hit the UK, I have only been in one bookshop – a quick look around Barter Books in Alnwick, as I was there for a wedding and couldn’t miss the opportunity. Other than that, I didn’t want to risk it – knowing I could buy books online. Obviously this is very small fry in the things that people have experienced this past year, but I have really missed being in one.

And yesterday, I went to Waterstones in Oxford! I was spending a day with a friend, and decided it was time to brave it. Mostly because I have yet to see the British Library Women Writers series in a bookshop, and I was very excited to see them ‘in the flesh’ – you can probably see how delighted I was, even behind a mask:

As series consultant, I get copies of these – so I didn’t need to buy any. But I did buy a small handful of books to celebrate being back in a bookshop…

The Bear by Marian Engel

If you follow Dorian of Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau on Twitter, chances are you’ve heard about The Bear by Marian Engel. It has recently been republished by the ever-reliable Daunt Books, so I’ve decided to give it a go – despite being called ‘the most controversial novel ever published in Canada'(!) I probably won’t actually read it for a few months – because it was published in 1976, making it perfect for October’s 1976 Club.

Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

A couple of years ago I loved Pigs in Heaven by Kingsolver so much that it made me want to read much more by her. It was actually the third of her books that I’d read, but far and away my favourite. She does tend to write enormous books, and we all know how I feel about them – but now it’s on the shelf, it’s more of a possibility.

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

There is a definite irony that I can never remember the author’s name of a book called In Memory of Memory… this is a Fitzcarraldo Edition from their non-fiction series, and I cannot resist those. I’ve had a slightly mixed success with them, as some are a bit too clever for me, but at their best they are incredible. And their best is This Little Art by Kate Briggs, FYI.

There you go – a mini haul, because I tend to go bigger in secondhand bookshops where the books are cheaper. And, let’s face it, months spent surrounded by my unread books has reminded me that I don’t really need to buy more. But it felt so good to be back, supporting a bookshop and having a browse.

The Unexpected Professor by John Carey

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My friends Lorna and Will gave me a copy of The Unexpected Professor by John Carey in 2014, the year it came out – fast forward seven years and its time has finally come. I took it away on holiday with me, and it was somehow the perfect read – such a wonderful book.

It’s an autobiography, I suppose, but the subtitle tells you what the main gist of The Unexpected Professor is about – ‘An Oxford life in books’. He does talk a bit about his childhood, and a bit more about his time in the army, but those are not the selling point of the book for me. I couldn’t wait to get to Oxford with him – and even though that doesn’t happen for about a hundred pages, please excuse me glossing over the first chunk of the book to get to the bit that I loved most. (I should say – he writes very well about school life and various experiences during national service in the army, including wondering whether he’d accidentally shot a fellow soldier during an ill-advised demonstration with a gun – an incident that clearly stayed with him vividly. But naturally Oxford and books won me over more.)

Carey goes to Oxford as an undergraduate in the ’50s – following his stint of national service, as was expected then. Despite studying English literature, his interview had involved Latin, Greek, and French – and the course he was set to study ended somewhere before the Victorian period. He would later be instrumental in extending the course to include Victorian and 20th-century literature, and making Old English optional – by the time I arrived as an undergraduate in 2004, we spent a term on ‘1900-present’, though very few people chose to do anything after mid-century. And Old English was technically optional, but nobody ever seemed to present me with the option not to.

Much of what I enjoyed about reading about Carey’s time as a student was comparing what it was like for me, fifty years later. Some of it hadn’t changed at all. He defines things like ‘collections’ – when you sit with the head of your college and he/she talks to you about your studies and your future – which is still exactly the same, subfusc and all. On the other hand, there were no male-only colleges by the time I was studying, and only one female-only college – which is now also mixed.

Carey was at St. John’s College, which is where one of my two closest friends at uni was, so I spent a lot of time there. She lived in a building that is described as a beautiful garden in The Unexpected Professor – for it didn’t exist at the time. He glosses over the ’50s and ’60s desecration of colleges, building hideous concrete blocks in almost all of the beautiful college settings.

What he doesn’t gloss over at all, thankfully, is reading and writing. While he doesn’t mention a female author in any depth under towards the end of the book, Carey does write insightfully and engagingly about many different authors – Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Orwell. When they come up, he spends pages and pages analysing, exploring, talking about their shifting critical reception and the passages that most interest him. It would all be very self-indulgent if it weren’t also so enthralling for the reader. In these sections, autobiography fades away and literary criticism comes in – though in a style different from most books in that genre, which Carey openly derides. More on that shortly…

Carey seems to have lived a very charmed academic life in the next half century in Oxford. Time after time, he was given multiple job offers or funding pots. He even gets offered a job as a Fellow at Keble before he has finished his DPhil! I’m not sure if this is a sign of times changing or Carey’s particular talent, but it is unheard of now for an English academic to walk into a job – or even, for most of us, to get any funding. Carey misses out the years of scarcely-paid part-time work, scrabbling for any chance of a permanent gig. While he and his wife – their romance is dwelt on briefly but touchingly – aren’t exactly rich, they are certainly doing better than most of my academic contemporaries were at that stage. They also got to live on St John’s Street, one of the most lovely streets in Oxford – though apparently rather run-down at the time. His various academic posts and involvement with the English department are a fascinating overview of the changing ethos, and I found his genuine engagement with his students’ work, undergraduate and postgraduate, very admirable.

While teaching, Carey was also writing. Some of his best-received books were anthologies – the Faber Book of Reportage and the Faber Book of Science, the latter of which my father loves. To get his head around centuries and centuries of thought in these areas, and selecting innovative and compelling examples, sounds like a daunting task – but he makes it sound almost a pleasure. He also writes some literary criticism and other cultural texts, including the only one I’d previously read: The Intellectuals and the Masses. It is while compiling critical thought on Milton that Carey realises he thinks most literary criticism is drivel – not quite his word, but not far off.

I’m sure he’s right, but I am coming onto my only qualm about this book. He is very disparaging about his colleagues in the literary field, and not particularly gracious when they don’t like his work. I suppose that’s understandable – but it definitely became clear that when he is critical of someone, their book is bad; when someone is critical of his book, they are wrong – and probably histrionic. Sadly, this does become very sexist at one point – he writes of his former supervisor’s review of his book: ‘when I dipped into Helen’s Encounter review its bossy tone reminded me so forcibly of my mother’s shrill, bigoted denunciations of my teenage relationship with Heather that I never finished it’. Setting aside the fact that he definitely finished reading it, calling a woman’s review ‘bossy’ and ‘shrill’ is not a good look, and I wish his editor had spoken to him about it. Perhaps they did.

It’s a small quibble in a book I otherwise totally loved and relished reading. I might have suggested cutting off the beginning and making this entirely a book about Oxford and books, but also recognise that is because I love those things myself. Part of my pleasure was in thinking of the streets and remembering my time as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Oxford – but I think The Unexpected Professor would delight you even if you’ve never stepped foot in Oxford. Because we all, after all, love books.

BookTube Spin #2: My List

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You might remember Rick MacDonnell’s BookTube Spin earlier in the year – in brief, make a list of 20 books you want to read – he’ll get a random number from one to twenty, and you have a couple months to read the book. The first one went really well for me, and I thought Helen Oyeyemi’s The Opposite House was really good. The spin is happening every few months, and it’s time for round two…

This time, I’ve gone through my unread books list on LibraryThing, picking the first book from each page of titles… Now, I have 83 pages of unread books, so I allowed myself to skip to the ones I particularly wanted to read. Here’s the list…

1. The Adventures of Elizabeth in Ruegen by Elizabeth von Arnim

2. The Enchanter by Lila Azam Zanganeh

3. The Brandon Papers by Quentin Bell

4. An Autumn Sowing by E.F. Benson

5. Caroline by Richmal Crompton

6. The Drunken Forest by Gerald Durrell

7. Doctor’s Children by Josephine Elder

8. Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald

9. Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets by Jessica Fox

10. The Familiar Faces by David Garnett

11. Don’t Open the Door by Anthony Gilbert

12. The Brickfield by L.P. Hartley

13. Sun City by Tove Jansson

14. Ignorance by Milan Kundera

15. My Remarkable Uncle by Stephen Leacock

16. Free Air by Sinclair Lewis

17. The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell

18. Mr Beluncle by V.S. Pritchett

19. The White Shield by Myrtle Reed

20. Migraine by Oliver Sacks

 

Announcing the next club!

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What a fun week it has been! The 1936 Club has been so fruitful – fascinating to see what the world was reading on the cusp of war, and what variety there is, as always.

For the next club in October, we’re jumping forward a few decades. Get searching your bookshelves – and here is your six-month warning for the 1976 Club!

Two final #1936Club titles

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I’ve never read more books for a club year – for the first time, I’ve read more than there are days in the club week. (Or, indeed, in any week.) So I’m going to double up with a couple of reads that I don’t really have that much to say about… sorry to end on an anti-climax, but do check out the links round up for lots more suggestions. My favourites from my reading week were Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons and Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse. I won’t be blogging for a week, but will update with any links I missed when I’m back – and have scheduled a post for tomorrow saying what the next club year will be!

Anyway, onto my final two reads…

Houses as Friends by Dorothy Pym

I didn’t know much about Dorothy Pym – no relation of Barbara – but I bought this in a little bookshop in Fowey because the title intrigued me. I thought it might be about houses in fiction, or houses in general, but it is basically Pym’s autobiography through the different houses she lived in. Edwin Lutyens even wrote the introduction.

The houses are all rather grand and wonderful, and she was certainly brought up in privilege, married someone equally rich, and lived bountifully. I ended up knowing quite a lot of anecdotes, but still didn’t know a lot about who she was in essentials. And all the anecdotes were told rather plainly, without the sprinkle of magic that brings them alive, or makes them sound more exciting than they truly are. All in all, I enjoyed it as a period piece, but I found it lent a little too close to dullness. And I don’t really remember anything in it, already. Not one to rush to.

No Place Like Home by Beverley Nichols

I adore Bev, though have been a bit up and down with his non-fiction. The ups are VERY up, and I love the Merry Hall series to distraction, but others – like his investigation into spiritualism – didn’t really work for me. I’d assumed No Place Like Home would be one of his books about his house, but it turned out to be the opposite: it’s travel literature. Specifically of one long trip through Eastern Europe, to Egypt, to Israel, to Turkey and Greece. Not in that order. Rather than write a full review, I’ve come up with some pros and cons. And please head to Karen’s 1936 Club review of it for more detail – and also less uncertain enthusiasm for it!

Pros

  • Beverley is always pretty funny – depending, of course, on what you find funny. I really enjoyed his grumpy take on the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
  • It’s a great snapshot of 1936 across Europe, at least from one man’s perspective – he makes reference to Hitler that show his views were no secret at the time, though Nichols doesn’t seem to realise it’s the last time for a while that this sort of trip would be possible
  • His perspective on being in the Holy Land is very moving, and he does experience genuine connection with Jesus by seeing the places that He went (and railing against those areas that haven’t been upheld)
  • His vehemence against animal cruelty is welcome to me, and some of his views were probably very ahead of their time

Cons

  • …and some of his views weren’t. He is rather xenophobic at times. He is very against antisemitism, and then is antisemitic himself a few pages later… in general, the people of other countries are not as good as the Brits, in his eyes, and it made for some uneasy reading
  • The ‘Irate Reader’ he introduces to have a duologue with every now and then didn’t really work for me. In another mood it might have done, but I found it a little irritating
  • I just don’t love travel writing that much! I find it often leans towards the visual, which I find hard to translate in my head, and I also prefer people writing about their own countries and times – to give a deeper authenticity and grounding to their writing.

SO there you go. Neither of these are my favourite reads for the 1936 Club, but this club has been my favourite one, I think. So many interesting titles, so much going on in the world, and a brilliant cross-section shared from across the blogging community. Thanks, as ever, for reading, reviewing, commenting and sharing in the fun!

Begin Again by Ursula Orange – #1936Club

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Of all the authors Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow has talked about over the years, Ursula Orange is the one who appealed most. So it was very exciting when he got three of her novels reprinted through his Dean Street Press series – and Begin Again is the third of those I’ve read. Orange is a wonderfully witty writer, and this novel is no different.

The novel opens with Leslie (early 20s) explaining to her mother why she feels she must move to London, where her schoolfriends Jane and Florence are living a lifestyle that Leslie considers ideal. Leslie wants to spend all the money she has on an art school – though it will not cover tuition and expenses for all that long – and also thinks she should probably have her own little studio, to be taken seriously. Whatever happens, she has to get away from the privileged and calm life she is currently living with her parents:

She knew, not only from Jane and Florence’s conversation (it had been some time since she had had a really good talk with them) but also from the pages of modern novels exactly the way in which young people living their own lives in London talk together – an attractive mixture of an extreme intensity and a quite remarkable casualness. “Henri says Marcovitch’s new poems are the finest things he’s ever read – will certainly found a school of their own. By the way – hand me the marmalade – Elissa is living with Henri now. He says he needs her for his work at present.” Clearly the sort of person who talked like this lived a much freer, a much wider, a much better life than the sort of person who merely said, “Good morning, mummy. Did you sleep well? When Alice brought my tea this morning she said a tree was blown down in the orchard last night.”

One of the things I like a lot about Orange is that she doesn’t have any throwaway characters. While four young women are at the centre of this novel, the secondary characters are not simply there to serve them. I loved the sardonic dryness of Leslie’s mother – which Leslie totally misses, since she expects her mother to be humourless. The reader is quite like Leslie’s mum – we have a definite affection for all the women at the heart of Begin Again, but also recognise they are young and silly.

The others are the aforementioned Jane and Florence, who work in offices and just about earn enough to pay for their unorthodox food and tiny flat – and Sylvia, who still lives in her parents’ grand home, thinking herself very modern with her thoughts on sexual and social liberation. All the women are very earnest, and their problems are real problems inasmuch as they genuinely feel anxiety about them, but Orange is also very funny about them. It’s also a joy to read about arguments over who used the hot water when you no longer have to house-share.

My favourite story of the four was Florence’s – who works as a typist, despite being pretty bad at it, and longs to be recognised as something more valuable. The other typist has fewer ambitions and class hang-ups, and is also much better at her job. The whole set-up of the office was believably unnerving for Florence, while also a joy to read about. That joy continues when the whole bunch travel over to Sylvia’s house for a party, and things get more dramatic and just as absurd.

This was a delightful 1936 read – enough genuine angst to make you take it seriously, and good-heartedness not to mind laughing at the characters. I’m not sure why Furrowed Middlebrow stopped after reprinting three of her novels, but I have my fingers crossed that they bring out the other three at some point…

Little G by E.M. Channon – #1936Club

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Little G is a terrible title but rather a lovely book. It is a 1936 title from E.M. Channon who is apparently well-known as a children’s writer and a detective novelist – this was one of her few adult non-detective novels, or possibly her only one, and was reprinted by Greyladies in 2012. It found its way onto my shelves in 2014, and the 1936 Club has been a great opportunity to finally read it.

In the opening chapter, Furnival is being told that he needs to rest by a doctor. He is a maths lecturer at Cambridge, and the doctor is worried that he is stressed and unhealthy – and prescribes him some relaxation in a little village. Furnival is very keen not to see any women there, as he is horrified by any company that isn’t adult male, child, or animal – and the doctor assures him that the village is bereft of adult women. This, of course, turns out not to be the case.

In case you’re starting to rather dislike Furnival, Channon lays on heavily his good attributes. Installed in his new cottage, he befriends three young siblings who live next door – offering them cakes and goodies that their aunt doesn’t believe they should eat. Holding even more sway with me, he likes cats – and is given one when he passes a house and is concerned for its welfare. Here he is, having slipped it in his coat pocket:

The kitten, though of tender age, had claws like steel hooks, a voice like a bat’s and enough determination for ten full-grown Toms. He objected strongly to imprisonment, and fought with determination to work his way out. Furnival had to keep a tight hand on him, making personal discovery that the needle-like teeth matched the claws for sharpness; but he cared little for that. The warm, fierce, furry little body, wriggling ragefully under his fingers, gave him a pleasant thrill of affection and ownership, such as he had not felt since the acquisition of his first guinea pig, more years ago than he cared to count. He quickened his steps: not half so much for the sake of getting rid of a troublesome pocketful, as because he wanted to take out his purchase and play with it.

The kitten, true to its feline nature, finding that its new owner cared not a jot for all its fury, gave up the unequal contest, curled itself up in a concise ball, and slumbered profoundly. The pocket was warm. Struggling was, obviously, a useless waste of energy; and there is no more profound philosopher in the animal kingdom than Felis Domestica.

Sadly, for me, we don’t see anywhere near enough of the kitten again. But that might be a relief if kittens aren’t your thing. Instead, we see Furnival interact with various villagers – his gardener, the vicar, the women who do turn out to exist, and particularly the three children. He softens over time, but he wasn’t really that un-soft in the first place. The stakes are low, but Channon stays decidedly on the right side of charming – the only part I thought was a little fey was when Furnival starts enthralling the children with stories about gravity, calling it Little G. But it is not the only Little G who turns up…

All in all, this novel was always a delight to read, and is exactly the right sort of book for many occasions when you need something fun, sweet, and very 1930s.

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse – #1936Club

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When I wrote about Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes, a body-swap comedy, I was wondering which others there were. Malie and Constance both mentioned Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse which, as luck would have it, turns out to be have been published in 1936. I have zillions of unread Wodehouses, but I decided to add another – or, rather, to listen to the audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil. And what a wonderful book it is.

The narrator is Reggie Swithin, the third Earl of Havershot. He is 28, has a face that he often compares to a gorilla, and has been sent off to Hollywood by an aunt to rescue his cousin Eggy from getting engaged to a gold-digger. This is all just a way of getting an earl to America, and specifically to Hollywood. Wodehouse himself worked on Hollywood scripts a good deal, I believe, and comes to the movie plot with a great amount of good-natured cynicism. Reggie is the sort of affable and daft hero of almost any of Wodehouse characters – indeed, as he introduces himself, he is ‘just one of those chaps’.

Eggy is engaged, as it turns out, not to the gold-digger but to Ann Bannister – who was previously engaged to Reggie. And Reggie, in turn, falls in love instantly on the train on the way to Hollywood – with April June, the wonderfully named and very beautiful film actress. He is in love devotedly almost before they’ve spoken, but Wodehouse fans know to distrust the sort Wodehouse woman who speaks affectedly of how she is only ever happy in the company of books and flowers, and thinks nothing of money.

Anyway, all of Reggie’s plans are put on hold by bad toothache, and he goes to a dentist. In the waiting room, he meets Joey Cooley – a golden-haired child who is considered the idol of American motherhood. Michigan mothers are en route to lavish praise on him as they speak.

Both go into their respective dentists for their respective operations, apparently of the sort that require being knocked out by gas. And, while under gas… they swap bodies.

The first Reggie knows of it is when he comes to, and his chair is surrounded by eager journalists. And so set in motion his life as a child star – with a strictly controlled routine, domineering protectors, and (most chillingly) diet of prunes for almost every meal.

We don’t see much as Joey-as-Reggie for the rest of Laughing Gas, but follow Reggie-as-Joey. Being Wodehouse, the stakes are hilariously low. He takes the metaphysical anomaly pretty well, and doesn’t waste too much time philosophising. Instead, he is chiefly anxious about having to kiss someone at the unveiling of a statue, and where he can procure some substantial food (leading to perhaps my favourite line – ‘I had had a rotten lunch, at which the spinach motif had been almost farcically stressed’).

Then, of course, there are various love entanglements – he has the opportunity to see April June in a less flattering light, and may just fall in someone else along the way…

Wodehouse is always wonderful, but some novels are better than others. For my money, this is one of the best I’ve read. He is so consistently brilliant in turn of phrase – the sort of thing he does that nobody else can do; a brilliant mix of hyperbole, litotes, inversion, and all manner of other linguistic tricks that somehow never get old. He was a comic genius.

It’s hard to remember exact quotes from an audiobook, but here are three that bat about online a lot:

  • If Eggy wanted to get spliced, let him, was the way I looked at it. Marriage might improve him. It was difficult to think of anything that wouldn’t.
  • I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves.
  • It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill.

One I liked was along the lines of ‘It would have been alright if things were other than they were, but that is just what they, in fact, weren’t’. But line after line are brilliant, and I laughed my way through this. The plot is really just decoration for his unparalleled turn of phrase, and I’m delighted that the 1936 club has given me the opportunity to read another of his masterpieces.