I promise not all of the authors I’ve chosen for the 1920 Club begin with ‘Mac’ – but I’ve been meaning to read a few more Denis Mackail novels that I’ve had around for a while. His name is probably familiar to you from Greenery Street, the sweet story of early married life that Persephone republished – but he was prolific and there are plenty of other novels to explore, though most of them are pretty difficult to find. What Next? was his first.
What Next? is set over the course of three days, and it’s rather a dizzying novel in terms of what happens and it terms of how it’s written. The hero, for want of a better word, is Jim. He’s a young, affable, wealthy, rather hopeless young man who is immersed in club life, spends his days doing little of value, and frequently proposes to a young woman called Mary who is very fond of him and refuses to take him seriously. In other words, they’re the sort of young pair familiar to any Edwardian reader of Punch, and who more or less survived the First World War as archetypes, slowly petering out in the decades to follow.
Jim continues to affable but very soon ceases to be wealthy – as the rich relative who had kept him living luxury dies, leaving behind a bankrupt and ruined company. Jim learns in the first pages of the novel that he has been left with practically no money, and must learn to economise. Which he does by going to his club and having dinner, and unloading his cares onto his manservant, Lush.
Lush proves not just to be good at serving drinks and listening – he is also something of a financial mastermind, and needs only capital in order to accumulate enormous riches. And it’s here that we come across the first of the many times that Mackail gives a character an enormously long, expository speech. Lush explains in great detail what he intends to do, but it’s the sort of detail that is more confusing than none – somehow still very abstract, and I left with no real clue what Lush intended to do to re-secure the riches. Luckily Jim seems to be convinced, and lends Lush his last remaining money to give it a go – and Lush disappears.
Jim believes that Lush has absconded with his cash – but no, of course not, he returns and has trebled it! He even explains how, in a long, expository speech – that doesn’t seem even remotely related to what he said he’d do in the first place. Never mind.
Around this point, the novel shifts into being much more about a road trip, unveiling a corrupt fellow, and reuniting Mary and Jim. There’s precious little connection between the first half and the second half – except a fondness for monologues that last several pages. It becomes a sort of romantic moral caper at the end, and the financial stuff that dominated the first half of the novel is quietly forgotten.
So, What Next? shows a great deal of writerly immaturity when it comes to plotting, structure, and exposition. Here’s the weird paradox – I really liked it. Mackail might be weak at those things here, and I’ve seen similar issues in novels he wrote nearly thirty years later, but what he’s so great at is tone. He is great at creating something sprightly, whimsical, joyful. There are hints of A.A. Milne’s ‘Rabbits’, or of a toned-down Wodehouse. Very much of its era, it’s the sort of atmosphere I lap up in a novel – and totally reflective of its era, as is befitting for a club readalong.
And I had to single out this bit to quote…
Of the literary contents of his not inconsiderable library he had a fair but by no means exhaustive knowledge, finding, as many have found, that a book which while still lying unbought and uncut in the monastic odour of a bookseller’s shop cannot be put down, has yet an unaccountable habit of losing its interest when removed to one’s own fireside; and having also fallen a victim to the weakness, only to be indulged in by the rich, which does so much to keep the literary world on its legs, of always ordering the whole of an author’s output whenever he had derived pleasure from a single example of it.
