I Would Be Private by Rose Macaulay – #1937Club

For a long time, I tended to see Rose Macaulay only mentioned in relation to her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond. That shifted a bit when Vintage brought back some of her novels, and other publishers (including the British Library Women Writers) have reprinted some of the more obscure ones. But, my gosh, Macaulay was prolific. I’ve read a couple of biographies of her and 12 of her books, and I still keep coming across titles I’d forgotten existed. I don’t remember anyone ever talking about I Would Be Private, but apparently I bought it ten years – and the 1937 Club has got it down from my shelves.

You could guess for hours and not come up with the premise of the novel. It’s… an ordinary couple having quintuplets, and being so beset by the press and the public that they move to a Caribbean island. Sure, Rose, why not?

Ronald is an honest, kind policeman and his wife, Win, is about to have a baby. In these days before ultrasounds and the like, they don’t know how many – but suspect it may be twins. As it happens… she has five. Ronald, standing safely outside the bedroom where this is happening, in the manner of a 1930s husband, is perturbed. His emotional mother-in-law is on hand to reassure…

Mrs Grig was wiping her streaming eyes.

“Don’t you get fussed, son. That’s the lot now. Doctor says so.”

Ronald, who thought he should have said so at least three babies back, felt suspicious.

The central conceit of the novel is perhaps rather flawed. Yes, people sometimes have five babies at once. It would probably make the local news and then be quietly forgotten. In Macaulay’s world – and in the words of the doctor – ‘My dear fellow, you can’t keep quintuplets private. It’s a public event.’

It does require some suspension of disbelief that they would be beset by paparazzi outside their house, quoted at length (in fabricated quotes) by the press, and used as the testimonies for advertising anything from baby food to furniture polish. I don’t mind suspending some disbelief, but so much of the motivation in I Would Be Private rests on this rather unlikely scenario, and it rather weakens the narrative.

The new father doesn’t feel very attached to his offspring. He and his wife debate sending at least three of them off for adoption, and it doesn’t seem to be a decision with any emotional ramifications. Macaulay often writes on the edge of satire, but I Would Be Private dances a little uneasily between emotionless satire and real human behaviour. But she is at her best (for me, at least) when she is using the narrative voice to undermine her characters. I love the word ‘observed’ here, for instance, as the babies are addressed:

“Cheepy cheep,” Mrs Grig observed. “Five ickle dicky-birds all in a row. Was they, then, was they, yum yum yum.”

“Wee wee wee,” the nurse added.

The main pair are rather lovely creations. Despite his unfatherliness (at least at first), Ronald is a simple and upstanding young man, and his wife is kind and slightly overwhelmed by her mother and sister. She’s also, mostly, exhausted. Her mother, Mrs Grig, is obsessed with the quintuplets but doesn’t let her cherishing of them stand in the way of potentials to make money. Win’s sister, meanwhile, is even more after cash – and has the rather brilliant profession of getting payments by finding companies who are breaking Sunday working laws. Only Macaulay would put in a character like that.

Anyway, after seeing no future in which they can be private, Ronald and Win set off with their offspring to a Caribbean island… and part two of the novel begins, with a whole heap of new characters.

We don’t see all that much of the island’s inhabitants, but there is a British immigrant community there – a minister and his two adult daughters, and various fairly interchangeable highbrow artists and writers. Macaulay has a lot of fun at their expense – e.g. John the painter:

John was not sure how good his technique was, but his subjects – or rather his objects – he thought superb, and his particular school of art put the choice of objects and their arrangement definitely above the mere technique of brushwork.

There’s a very funny scene where John is trying to make a seaside scene as abstract as possible, and one of the vicar’s daughters insists on trying to translate it literally. Later there’s another very-Macaulay conversation between Francis, a writer, and Ronald, who tolerates this community without feeling any affinity with it:

“Good writers and bad may sell well; bad writers and good may sell badly. People will sometimes tell you that a bad literary style and a lack of any quality but sentimental ardour will make a best-seller. That’s just second-hand middlebrow cant. Don’t believe them.”

“No one,” said Ronald, “has ever told me that.”

“It’s no truer than that literary merit will either sell a book, or make it unpopular. Or that publishers’ advertising, or reviewers’ puffing, will necessarily sell it. It’s all a fluke, a fortune, a gift of the capricious gods, and no one knows on what it depends.”

Ronald and Win are still prominent, and discovering that even a Caribbean island isn’t really a place for privacy – but there are probably too many characters and plotlines introduced in this half. It’s all a bit dizzying, and it’s not clear where the heart of the novel is, or even if it’s meant to have one.

There is a lot to enjoy, nonetheless, for people (like me) who love Macaulay’s very distinctive style. Who but Macaulay could write the sentence ‘Dorothea took the path up the hill to the lunatic asylum, to see if Lindy was there, annoying, as usual, the young men’? And who but Macaulay would use the words technorrea, pleontecny, and tertologise – none of which seem to exist, at least according to a Google search.

And then there’s the title! It’s taken from this epigraph, allegedly from Roger Rampole’s Cheaping, though I can find no evidence of what that is, or if it even exists. Macaulay made up the quote that ‘The World My Wilderness’ comes from, so she may well have made this up too:

Press me not, throng me not, by your leave I would be private. Jupiter Ammon is a man not then free? What a pox, may he not choose his road, is he to be bethronged, beset, commanded, as he were a beast in a drover’s herd, or a zany in a fairman’s show? Stand back, you knaves, you buzzing flapdragons, give me leave to be private, by Cock’s death I’ll walk free or I’ll walk not at all.

The only place I can find this online is from a mention in the Houses of Parliament, when The Lord Bishop of Hereford quoted it in 1973, saying that Macaulay had, in turn, quoted it. With amusing delicacy, he admitted ‘by Cock’s death’.

Would I recommend I Would Be Private? Honestly, I think it should be a long way down the list of Macaulay novels you seek out. Something I haven’t mentioned yet, but should, is that it is rigorously racist throughout – which obviously makes it harder to read or enjoy. It’s also a premise that doesn’t really work – or, to work, needed to be played with a bit more surrealism, perhaps. There are too many characters introduced too late in the book, and too little momentum. It’s a shame, because a lot of the writing (particularly at the beginning) is really ironically funny, and the main two characters are delightful. It was a quick read, but not a book that I’d say anybody needs to go to major lengths to find.

EDIT: see the comments for a real set of quintuplets in the 1930s, whose experience may make this novel less far-fetched than I’d imagined! And maybe was the model for Macaulay’s novel.