Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Vera

For years I’d heard three things about Vera (1921) – that it was Elizabeth von Arnim’s darkest novel, that it was autobiographical, and that it was possibly the inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. For some reason that made me think that it might be a bit of an outlier in von Arnim’s output – but Vera is very clearly from the same pen of Father, The Caravaners and many of von Arnim’s other novels that feature a terrible man to a greater or lesser extent.

As it opens, Lucy is mourning her father. Or, rather, she is feeling numb in the first shock of his death – it has only been three hours. She cannot quite believe that it has happened, or imagine a world without him. Lucy has cared for him for years – not just this final illness, but a lifetime of delicacy. ‘She had had no thought since she grew up for anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so completely did he fill her heart.’ We never truly get to know her father objectively – only through the deeply affectionate memories of his devoted daughter. And she is barely grown up herself, just a few years into adulthood.

It is in the midst of this grief that she meets Everard Wemyss. He, too, is in mourning – officially, at least. His wife has recently fallen to her death from their home, The Willows – and she, like du Maurier’s Rebecca, gives her name to the title. She has only been dead a fortnight.

Lucy sees someone who can be a companion in grief. Perhaps they can support each other as they face life without somebody they held so dear? But it quickly becomes clear that Everard has something else in mind. He has fallen for naïve, gentle Lucy and is determined to make her his wife. Lucy receives a charm offensive – he is lovable, loving, entirely confident that it is not too soon after Vera’s death – quashing her doubts on the subject. Von Arnim is very clever in the way she presents Everard. We get enough hints of his character to see that Lucy should probably run a thousand miles away – but also enough of his ability to charm that we can understand how Lucy, rocked by her loss, assents to his proposal of marriage.

It irked him that their engagement — Lucy demurred at first to the word engagement, but Wemyss, holding her tight in his arms, said he would very much like to know, then, by what word she would describe her position at that moment – it irked him that it had to be a secret. He wanted instantly to shout out to the whole world his glory and his pride. But this under the tragic circumstances of their mourning was even to Wemyss clearly impossible. Generally he brushed aside the word impossible if it tried to come between him and the smallest of his wishes, but that inquest was still too vividly in his mind, and the faces of his so-called friends. What the faces of his so-called friends would look like if he, before Vera had been dead a fortnight, should approach them with the news of his engagement even Wemyss, a person not greatly imaginative, could picture.

Everard gets his way – we are learning that he will always get his way – and they are not only engaged but married at incredible haste. This does take most of the first half of the novel, but it covers a very short time – and as soon as the marriage is complete, the veil starts to be lifted from Lucy’s eyes. Here they are, on honeymoon:

Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn’t realised how completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none. 

Everard thinks only of his own happiness, and at the moment his happiness revolves around being with his lovely young wife. We don’t see much behind the bedroom door, as it were – being 1921, this is unlikely to be a big topic – but he monopolises her throughout every waking hour. Perhaps this is something that honeymooning couples would usually be very pleased about. But Lucy has previously seen Everard in courtship mode, and that was forceful but charming. Married Everard is forceful without the charm.

Von Arnim is very good at infantilising her ogres. From what I’d heard about Vera, I’d imagined that the husband would be brutal, perhaps violent. But he is like many of her terrible man: monstrously selfish. So many of her male figures are like toddlers, but toddlers with the power to live out their self-centredness, sulkiness, demand for attention. Everard is particularly childlike in his determination that his birthday be a hallowed day. He cannot believe that anybody would cross him or refuse him anything on his birthday, even if some of the ‘refused’ things are things he hasn’t mentioned.

And they go back to The Willows. Lucy doesn’t want to live there. If she has to live there, she doesn’t want Vera’s old sitting room. If she has to have Vera’s old sitting room, she wants it redecorated. None of these things happen. Everard dismisses all her concerns and anxieties. He twists them to be antagonistic to him. Her wishes and feelings clearly mean nothing to him – and von Arnim is brilliant (as ever) at the man who sounds logical even while he is being appalling. Like Father in Father, Otto in The Caravaners, Jocelyn in Introduction to Sally and probably others I’ve forgotten, Everard manipulates what other people say – retaining his cold sense of being hard done by, pouncing on any weakness so that he can seem calmly affronted. He does it with Lucy; he does it with the servants (who have long learned to put up with it, because he is in London most of the week); he does it with Lucy’s aunt Miss Entwhistle who is clear-eyed about what a disastrous marriage this is.

Oh, Everard is brilliantly infuriating to read! And Lucy has gone into the lion’s den without any defences. She is intimidated by the lingering presence of Vera in her possessions and her portrait – but the reader quickly realises that Vera is a fellow-victim of this monster. It’s an interesting choice for von Arnim to make Vera the title. I’m not quite sure she earns it. The reader feels sympathy for Vera from the outset, so despite Lucy’s fear around her, she doesn’t have the sort of narrative presence or power that du Maurier’s Rebecca does. If she did steal that idea, she does it better.

I was surprised by what a short time period it covers, particularly the time at The Willows – which is only a week, most of which Everard isn’t there. We only see Everard and Lucy at home together for a couple of days, which means von Arnim has to escalate the horror of marriage to him quite quickly. His brattiness, his selfishness, his cruelty – he locks Lucy out in the rain for petty reasons, then gets angry with her for being wet. I think it is meant to be all the more horrifying as a snapshot of what Lucy will have to endure for much longer, but I do wonder if it is sped up a little too much. This sort of horror might have worked even better as a gradual dawning.

But this is a quibble for a very good book. If someone came to this after only having read the charm of The Enchanted April, it must feel like a huge gearshift. But if you’ve read more widely in von Arnim’s oeuvre, this is very much in her wheelhouse. It’s bleak, though with trademark ironically funny moments and the amusingly detached narrator. Above all, it’s a brilliant character study.

Unnecessary Rankings! R.C. Sherriff

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It was my birthday yesterday and I’ll my bookish gifts at some point (it will surprise nobody to know I got a few), but for today let’s do some more Unnecessary Ranking! This time I’ve picked R.C. Sherriff – famous initially for Journey’s End (which I haven’t read or seen) but brought back more broadly by reprints from Persephone Books. He isn’t the most prolific writer, and I haven’t read all of his novels, so it’s not the longest list.

As ever, I’d love to know your own rankings…

6. Chedworth (1944)

The only book of his that I wouldn’t consider a success. Wing Commander Derek Chedworth marries a vaudeville dancer and she comes to live at his ancestral home – a promising premise that never really comes off. Sherriff is usually so brilliant at character, setting, and pace – so I don’t know why Chedworth fell flat.

5. The Hopkin’s Manuscript (1939)

All his other books (that I’ve read) are brilliant, so don’t read this low ranking as a negative. It’s a very domestic spin on an apocalypse, and the only reason I prefer other Sherriff novels is that this has a science fiction starting point that isn’t necessarily my most-loved genre.

4. The Fortnight in September (1931)

When I first read this, I wouldn’t have believed there’d be three Sherriff books I’d like even more – because it is sheer perfection, on its own terms. A family plan for, and then take, their annual holiday to the seaside. The family are growing up, and their usual lodgings are growing old. An astonishingly good book about nothing and everything.

3. The Wells of St. Mary’s (1962)

If The Hopkins Manuscript isn’t my favourite genre, then The Wells of St. Mary’s is – the domestic novel that incorporates the fantastic. Or does it? When some abandoned wells start curing people’s illnesses, it becomes a huge tourist attractions. The reader is left trying to work out how much is magical…

2. No Leading Lady (1968)

R.C. Sherriff’s autobiography is that rare example of an author really telling you about their craft, in delightful detail. Half the book is about the genesis, writing, production, success, and aftermath of his break-out play Journey’s End. He glosses over his private life, and even some of his work, but I’ve read very few autobiographies that I enjoyed anywhere near as much.

1. Greengates (1936)

The most similar to The Fortnight in September, in terms of being a narrow lens on a very domestic set up. When Mr Baldwin retires, he and his wife decide to move to a new housing estate – and this gentle novel is simply about that process. In almost any author’s hands it would be nothing – in Sherriff’s, it is a masterpiece.

I’d love to hear your Sherriff rankings, or which of his books you’d like to try next!

Nocturne by Helen Humphreys

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Nocturne: on The Life And Death Of My Brother : Humphreys, Helen: Amazon.co.uk: Books

One of the authors I’d been advised to look out for in Canada was Helen Humphreys. I did find a few of her novels, but they were almost all set in England, and I’d much rather read a Canadian writer writing about Canada. So I decided to buy some of her non-fiction instead – Nocturne (2013) from ABC Book Store in Toronto, which looked a little unpromising from the outside but had an amazing stock inside. The book itself is beautiful – a lovely covered, and deckled edges. It is just under 200 pages, and something rather special.

The subtitle tells you what the book is going to be about – ‘on the life and death of my brother’. I’m not going to write a very long review, but I do want to communicated what a wonderfully written book Nocturne is – both as a tribute to a brother and best friend, and as an examination of love and loss that perfectly combines the poetic and the grounded.

Fairly late in the book, Humphreys shares the short obituary she wrote for her brother, Martin – saying she never chose words more carefully. And it is evident from the writing in Nocturne that choosing words carefully is at the core of her being. I’m quoting the obituary first because it really tells you who Martin was, and what happened to him:

Brilliant, talented, passionate and compassionate, kind, handsome, disciplined, elusive, and stubborn, Martin loved music, art, new places and experiences, his friends, the West Coast, connecting with life in all its forms, having a beer, and watching the Maple Leafs (even this season). He hated cruelty, intolerance, stupidity, and Toronto winters.

He died too soon, from pancreatic cancer, and is deeply missed by his parents, Frances and Anthony; his sisters, Helen and Cathy; his many friends in Vancouver, Toronto, England, and Paris. We are lost without his beautiful spirit.

Through Nocturne, Humphreys moves between present and various pasts. She tells us about Martin’s life and his illness – the talent he had for music from an early age, and his triumphs and limits as a composer. His friendships, and his movements around the world, and his flawed relationships. And then his diagnosis and the cruelties of cancer. And, winding through it all, the grief and shock of losing your brother and closest ally. I think what I found most moving in Nocturne is the portrait of how you can know someone deeply and still not know everything about them. How you can live in different parts of the world and be deeply close, and be in the same room and not know how to communicate. But what comes across most is the great depths of love Humphreys has for her brother. Not enough fiction and non-fiction talks about this bond between siblings, and Humphreys honours it so beautifully.

And, my goodness, this woman can write. I’m keener than ever to read her fiction, particularly the one or two that are set in Canada. I noted this down on p.8, but there are so many examples of the same exceptional, reflective writing:

I come to the cemetery in a kind of ad hoc fashion. Sometimes I pick up a coffee and drink it out there, standing with my back to your gravestone. I like how the sun warms the stone and how the stone keeps the heat a little way into the evening, keeps it longer than the air. It’s strange, but when you died and the heat started leaking from your body, it left you at exactly the pace that a stone cools after being in the sun all day. It makes me think that we are made of the natural world after all, attached to it more securely than I had realized.

I am often drawn to books about grief – perhaps because they are the purest way of describing love. Nocturne is up there among the best I’ve read.

The Jasmine Farm by Elizabeth von Arnim

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The Jasmine Farm (1934) isn’t one of Elizabeth von Arnim’s novels that I see discussed very often. It was her penultimate novel, and I will say at the outset that it is far from her best – but even in the worst von Arnims there is a lot to love, isn’t there?

The novel opens with a dinner party in which there are enormous number of characters. I had to start making notes in the front of the book, trying to work out how everyone related. It doesn’t help that she often gives us a stray surname or first name, then later tells us how they relate to other people there. It’s almost wilfully confusing, and quite a lot of them never appear again – but we quickly learn that the most significant character is Lady Daisy Midhurst.

Lady Midhurst is that classic von Arnim creation – a combination of the forceful and the absent. She has been a widow for a long time and her marriage doesn’t appear to have been at all enjoyable. Widowhood suits her much more, despite the opinions of some of the male characters, whom von Arnim spears:

Mr Torrens was certain that only by Midhurst had the poor dear woman ever been kissed, and seeing that fifteen solid years had passed since his death, and that of the eleven years of his marriage ten and three quarters were spent by him in steady unfaithfulness, he considered such a state of things a pity.

She has social cache and money, and is very fond of her daughter (bizarrely called Terence, or Terry) and seemingly satisfied with where she has now ended up. Some people are envious are her, and she seems divinely unaware of it. Certainly she isn’t desperate for a man, as so many single women are in novels of the period, and could perhaps have survived into her dotage without anything upsetting happening.

But… Terry has other plans. We learn fairly early in the novel that she has been having an adulterous affair with a Mr Andrew Leigh, who seems rather too dull to have inspired one woman to want to be with him, let alone two. But such things are – and Mrs Andrew Leigh, Rosie, discovers the fact. Rosie has married ‘above her’, and sees this as an opportunity to unsettle the dignified, unkind, subtly sneering world into which marriage has brought her. (One brilliant moment describing her antagonism to Terry is: ‘she would have told her, too, if she hadn’t been so high and mighty, with her nails like reproaches and her clothes so many sermons’.)

Lady Midhurst is disbelieving – until she quizzes Terry, who is unrepentant. Terry is a flighty ‘free love’ sort of woman, seemingly conjured from the worst anxieties of late-Victorian male columnists. She doesn’t really see the problem, and it’s hard to know exactly what the reader is meant to make of her. Is she meant to be refreshingly amoral? If so, she comes across instead as extremely selfish and rather stupid. I don’t think she’s the most successful character in The Jasmine Farm.

But Lady Midhurst is a triumphantly drawn figure – and meets her match in the novel’s other brilliant creation. Enter: Mumsie. Mumsie, or Mrs de Lacy, is Rosie’s mother – and the background of which she is slightly ashamed. Mumsie speaks her mind with admirable candour and occasional incomprehension. The two, when they meet, are perfect foils for one another. Mumsie is affectionate and impulsive to Lady Midhurst’s reserve. I loved every scene of them together.

And she was reaching out to the bowl when her hand was intercepted, and grasped firmly in a warm grip.

At once her divided attention was startled into an extreme concentration. She turned and looked at her visitor with the rebuke of surprise. At no time did Daisy like being touched, and to be touched by strangers, other than in the formality of arrival or departure, had not yet come within her experience. Fortunately the hand grasping hers was gloved. She didn’t like skins.

“We must be friends, Lady Midhurst,” Mumsie said, holding on hard. “Real, true friends.”

“It is exceedingly kind of you,” said Daisy, slightly raising her eyebrows. They wouldn’t rise much, because of technical difficulties; but, as far as they would go, they went.

But what, you will be asking, about the jasmine farm of the title?

Well, that’s where we go in the second half of the novel.

In the hills that ripple between Grasse and Draguignan, hills only a few miles away from the animations of the Riviera, but as dead quiet and unvisited as if the few miles were hundreds, is a little Provencal house, pale-faced and pale-shuttered among pale olive trees, with one immense cypress slashing the sky apart at the top of its steps.

This house Midhurst, on his honeymoon, had bought Daisy, simply because she admired it, and he was in love. As easily as if it had been a trinket out of a shop window the rich young man bought it for her, and almost with as little personal exertion. All he had to do, and did, was to mention it to their hotel proprietor in Cannes, and for what seemed to him a small sum, and to the owner and go-betweens a big one, the tiny farm because Daisy’s.

Yes, we have disappeared to an idyll in a European country – a theme that von Arnim returns to surprisingly often. While Lady Midhurst hasn’t thought about the jasmine farm for a long time, it is still hers and one lucky Frenchman has been tending to it through all the years of her marriage and widowhood. He harvests and sells the jasmine, and he keeps the house safe and tidy, and his is paid and nothing else is needed from him.

Until… Lady Midhurst escapes the confusion and scandal of her daughter’s affair, and turns to this place where she was, briefly, happy. For while widowhood has been contented, and her marriage bearable, this was the only place where she truly knew joy.

And I knew joy in the second half of The Jasmine Farm! If the first half was a little over-stuffed and over-complicated, with any number of extraneous characters, the second half is a delight. Because yes, of course, Mumsie follows Lady M to this farm. And I shan’t spoil the other people who turn up, but there is a lightness and openness to the second half of the novel that gives it space to breathe. It means Elizabeth von Arnim can use her customary witty sentences, and the brilliant way that she can give characters depth even while everything is frothy.

I try not to give away too many spoilers, which means I haven’t said much about the jasmine farm section of The Jasmine Farm, but is what saved the novel for me. I wish she’d managed to set the entire book there. But we got there eventually, and it reminded me what a marvel von Arnim was.

A while ago, I ranked all of the von Arnim novels I’d read. I’d probably slot this one in about 10th or 11th on the list. But is it worth reading? It’s Elizabeth von Arnim: of course it’s worth reading.

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

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This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial: Amazon.co.uk: Garner, Helen, Weinman, Sarah: 9780553387438: Books

I hadn’t heard of Robert Farquharson or Cindy Gambino, or their children Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, before I started Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (2014). I suspect the same wouldn’t be true of most Australians. They were at the centre of a tragedy that led to a trial, and a retrial, for murder. This much was clear from the outset: Robert Farquharson drove his three young children into a farm dam and all three drowned. He managed to get out of the car. But was it murder or was it a tragic accident, caused by Farquharson blacking out during a coughing fit?

The initial trial took place in 2007, and Garner was there throughout as a journalist – as she was at the second trial, in 2010. I listened to the audiobook, after hearing Garner’s non-fiction praised repeatedly on the Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast – I’d previously read her novel The Spare Room but hadn’t tried any of the non-fiction. And it is absolutely masterful.

This is the sort of case that would make a compelling newspaper article, or perhaps a podcast episode or hour-long documentary. In Garner’s hands, it becomes something much more granular. Since she is able to devote so much space to the trial, it feels like we are in the courtroom with her. The initial trial took seven weeks, so of course it isn’t in real time, but it sometimes feels that way. Periods of questioning are detailed so thoroughly – say, for instance, the doctor who is brought in to answer questions about whether or not Farquharson could black out from a coughing fit in something called ‘cough syncope’. We go back and forth, back and forth – an aggressive cross-examination, the attempts to discredit his medical credentials, the reactions from the jury. The actual evidence the doctor relates is a small part of Garner’s presentation of the scene. Her eyes are everywhere.

Garner notices things other people wouldn’t – and probably wouldn’t mention, if they did. How often a witness bites their lip, or the look on the face of a juror, or even how bored some people seem during the more technical sections of evidence – ‘the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom’:

The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns.

This certainly isn’t an objective book. One of many ways in which Garner’s writing reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s is that the writer is fully present in the reading experience. Garner relates how she takes the trial home with her, how she desperately wants to believe that Farquharson is innocent but is very unsure, and the mental exhaustion of going back and forth. She writes about camardarie (and the reverse) with other journalists, including being berated by some for her supposed light-heartedness.

Her detailed observation does slip into needless cruelty at times. I was startled by one moment – she bumps into a lawyer she used to know, and he says one line. In that time, she manages to say he is looking bad for his age, has lines on his face, is wearing an ill-fitting suit and hasn’t polished his shoes. It’s all so unnecessarily unkind. Like Janet Malcolm, she doesn’t have any sense of what is kind or unkind to say. She is merciless in the way she presents any of the people she sees. Even the grieving mother is described as having put on too much weight. She censors none of her thoughts.

That’s not to say she always highlights negative things. They are just more shocking, in a context where we might expect a certain generosity of empathy. She applauds a female witness whenever she outwits the unpleasant machismo of the cross-examiner, or describes ‘that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie’ when Cindy Gambino’s new husband takes to the stand. Indeed, he sparks one of the asides which make Garner herself such a dominant figure in the reporting:

But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard, I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed, strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect.

Somehow, the tragic deaths of the three boys do not get lost in the maelstrom and minutaie of the court proceedings. Garner manages to keep the emotion of their deaths central, without being maudlin, even while we are preoccupied with the minute-by-minute trial. And it is that clash of the absurdities – and some mundanities – of the legal system with the searing emotional pain of a grieving mother that makes this book so extraordinary. To the everyman, it feels ridiculous that this tragic event can become, for instance, hours and hours of analysing photographs of wheel marks, and disputing over whether or not the police officer’s yellow lines next to them are accurate. Garner is too subtle a writer to spell out this disparity. But it is key to what makes her analytical eye work so well.

And her writing can be beautiful, without being self-conscious. Sentences like this tread the tightrope of poeticism and journalism so well: “Judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.” ([sic] to ‘men’, please!)

I didn’t think I’d find a non-fiction writer as curiously brilliant as Janet Malcolm – but I think Helen Garner is in the same league. If you’re looking for reportage or dry facts or even a kind, considerate piece about a tragedy – this isn’t the place for you. But if you’re looking for something sharp, odd, poetic and haunting – This House of Grief is a masterpiece.

William’s Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan

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William's Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan

I’m delighted that Recovered Books is making G.E. Trevelyan’s novels available again, because they have been so very difficult to get hold of. The next (after they published Two Thousand Million Man-Power) is William’s Wife (1938), a novel that is perhaps less ambitious, but I think even more successful.

As the novel opens, Jane has just married William Chirp. We don’t see any of their courtship or really get to understand what ended up with these two fairly unsuited people coming together in marriage. But perhaps we can guess – William is a widower who runs a grocer’s in the town and probably wants somebody at home to make his life comfortable again. Jane is a lady’s maid who is moving up in the world by marrying a man who owns a business and a home. No matter that they have little in common and even less to talk about.

Quickly, Jane learns the dominant characteristic of William: miserliness. He might call it prudence, or living within his means. But he begrudges every penny spent. And he is willing to live in almost any condition, so long as he avoids expenditure. The hints of this come steadily, though at first it’s minor matters about the home (I am borrowing some of the same quotes that Brad included in his review – Brad being the mastermind behind the Recovered Books series.)

“How about that window cord,” she said in a low, Sunday voice, straight forward into her collar. “Did you tell someone about it?”

“Cord? Eh?” He shut the gate behind them and they went on around the drive, still talking in low voices in case one of the neighbours should hear, or someone in the road.

“Yes,” she said. “What I told you. It’s gone in the lower sash.”

“Don’t want to open the lower sash.” He fitted his key in the door. “That don’t matter.”

William is not a violent person by any means, but he has a certainty and a determination that Jane seems unequal to combat. Nor does she try especially hard – any attempts to get money from him, beyond the meagre housekeeping allowance, are met with his rigid logic or by references to the angelic, unquestioning nature of his first wife. Jane, meanwhile, is ashamed of her wearing-out clothes or what people from the town would think if they knew how poorly they lived.

And he wasn’t even looking round. Pointing with his pipe. “Waste not, want not.”

“I know, William, but it’s the best part of two years and….”

“Save something for a rainy day.”

He drew at his pipe for some minutes, then he looked round at her. “My poor wife….” He cleared his throat. “My first wife didn’t go spending on new gowns, not once in ten, no, fifteen years.” He put the pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire.

Eventually, the worm turns. Jane begins to find ways to save a little money herself. She buys slightly cheaper products and keeps the difference. She drops less in the church collection than William gives her, and keeps the change. Slowly but surely she amasses enough to buy a new dress – relying on his masculine ignorance of women’s clothing to pass it off as a mere adjustment to her previous dress. And then saving begins again. She moves her stash every day, fearful that it be unearthed and her whole scheme tumble to the ground. The reader doesn’t think that William would be violent or throw her out or anything – but somehow Trevelyan builds up the tension so that we are equally afraid of its discovery.

Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know something that happens midway through the novel – but I think it’s important to an understanding of the novel to mention it (and it’s on the back of the book, so I don’t feel too bad about mentioning it). Eventually William dies. Jane, you would think, is free from his oppression. And yet… somehow she has become too mired in his worldview. The second half of the novel is even more powerful than the first. Her miserliness gets worse and worse – her cutting corners and making savings leaves in a terrible, haunting way to her losing everything that gives her status and dignity. She has truly, in every sense, become ‘William’s wife’. It is horrifying but ineluctable, and masterfully done by Trevelyan.

What makes William’s Wife such a success is Trevelyan’s ingenious pacing. The reader isn’t spared anything. Day by day, month by month, we follow Jane’s decline. There is little that is dramatic or surprising – instead, she sets up her premise and follows it steadily to its natural climax. The blurb calls it ‘the most normal horror story ever written’, and while blurbs that call their book the ‘most’ anything are to be distrusted, it’s not an inaccurate description. It isn’t scary, in the usual sense of scary. But it is haunting. It is a horror story in the sense that it is horribly believable – perhaps the sort of miserable world behind any number of closed doors. Interestingly, it really reminded me of an ostensibly very different Recovered Books novel – Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. Both take an awful situation and play it out slowly, painstakingly to its end.

It’s not the most fun book to read, but there is an awful lot to admire here. Trevelyan chooses different canvases and subjects for the three novels of hers I’ve read so far – this one has the narrowest subject in mind, and perhaps that is why it is the most successful novel. It does what she sets out to do with terrible brilliance. It certainly deserves its republication, and I recommend getting a copy – when you can stomach the experience. (Incidentally, at the time of writing it is on sale from the publisher.)

Announcing the next club…

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Thank you so much for all your 1962 Club reviews! What a fun year it has been, and with such variety. I only managed to read three books, but I got a lot out of them, with the bonus that two of them had been on my shelves for a very long time. I’ll keep updating the reviews page, so hopefully won’t miss any that you’d told me about. And glad that we got most of our usuals – Georgette Heyer, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon – though we seem to have picked one of the very few years where P.G. Wodehouse didn’t have anything new published.

Of course, as ever, we are thinking six months ahead for the next club year – drum roll – see you in April for the 1937 Club!

A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye – #1962Club

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Cat in the Window - Tangye, Derek: 9780722183960 - AbeBooksWow, there are so many 1962 Club reviews coming in! I am behind with updating the page and not even managing to read all the reviews at the moment, but will go back and explore them. And I did manage to read one more, very short, book for my own 1962 Club contributions – A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye.

I picked this up in a brilliant bookshop in Whitehaven earlier this year – they had an awful lot of books by Derek Tangye and I foolishly only bought this one. They all seem to be about his life in Minack, Cornwall, with his wife and a series of different animals. In the previous book in the series, A Gull on the Roof, he apparently introduced Monty the cat. And A Cat in the Window takes us back to tell us about Monty in more detail.

Novels about cats are very hit-and-miss in my experience, often being too fey or leaning into a kind of kooky magical realism that isn’t my cup of tea. But non-fiction about cats, like Tangye’s, are almost always wonderful in my experience. Because they are written by people who love and know cats – who appreciate their character, their dignity, their independence. And who form loving friendships with cats, knowing that the cat isn’t slavishly desperate to please them but, rather, any affection is earned.

But Derek was not such a man at the outset, as he confesses in this book:

Dogs, then, had been entities in my life. Cats, as if they were wasps with four legs, had been there to shoo away. They did not belong in my life nor in my family’s life. All of us were united that whenever we saw a cat the most important thing to do was to see it out of sight.

But as I moved slowly out of the environment of my family, I found naturally enough people and homes who accepted cats as we accepted dogs. Cats were not vulgar as, in some mysterious way, I had been led to believe. I began to note that cats were able to bestow a subtle accolade upon their apparent owners which made these owners rapturous with delight.

One such cat-lover was Jeannie – the woman that Derek fell in love with. And she, with the cunning of all of us who adore cats, introduced a little kitten to the household – saying that living with them was his only chance of survival. Derek is reluctant. He has never known the charm of a cat. He allows the kitten only if it stays outside and in the kitchen. Certainly Monty will not be allowed upstairs.

We all know what’s going to happen don’t we?

My capitulation was complete, and within a few weeks there was no pretence that Monty was a kitchen cat. Every room in the cottage was his kingdom; and at night, if his fancy was to sleep on the bed, I would lie with legs stiff so as not to disturb him while he curled in a ball at the bottom. I endlessly wanted to play with him, and felt put in my place when he was not in the mood, stalking away from me tail in the air showing he had something more important to do, like a vigorous if temporary wash of the underparts.

Nobody has the zeal of the convert. The rest of this slim volume is about the joy of living with a cat (one cannot say ‘ownership’). He understands Monty’s character beautifully, not fabricating things that are not feline. He also understands Monty’s place in the food chain – killing rodents, but also under threat from neighbourhood foxes.

Perhaps only a cat lover would love this book, but I heartily recommend it to anybody who understands the majesty of cats and the privilege it is to share a home with one or more. I certainly felt more affected by Monty’s death (thankfully at the end of a long and happy cat life) than by most human deaths in the books I read.

Reading for club years is always enjoyable for seeing how times have changed and what’s stayed the same. Most of the 1962 choices I’ve seen mentioned (including my other two reads for this week) couldn’t be written in the same way today. But A Cat in the Window could. Cats are happily unchangeable – and the way a felinophile would write about cats hasn’t changed at all either.

The Double Heart by Lettice Cooper – #1962Club

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I didn’t manage to read a huge amount for the 1962 Club, and I seem to have specialised in authors better remembered for other books. After Lynne Reid Banks, I’ve turned my attention to Lettice Cooper and The Double Heart, a book I picked up in a little sale box outside a church in about 2005. Its moment has come!

Lettice Cooper is best remembered for The New House, once a Virago Modern Classic and now a Persephone book. She had an astonishingly long publishing career, spanning 1925 to 1994 – so while The Double Heart came 26 years after The New House, it was far from a swansong in her bibliography. But she is not a early-century writer still turning out the same books after they have ceased to be fashionable: this feels very 1960s, and even a bit startlingly modern at times.

The novel didn’t open super promisingly, in my opinion. Hervey is a failing playwright (my second failing playwright for the 1962 Club!) and meets a beautiful young woman called Bell, short for Belinda. This is their moment of encounter:

Then Jonathan moved and beyond him Hervey saw a girl, who turned round on her stool and glanced towards him. She was very young, with smooth fair hair falling round her long neck, with large, light grey eyes under heavily painted lids. She wore a close-fitting black jersey and a green tartan skirt that belled out round her stool. She was half listening to Jonathan, obviously bored. She looked full at Hervey. He felt he jolting shock of a collision. He stood still returning her stare. Her lips just parted, hardly smiling. It was as though she had lowered a gangway for him. He walked towards her across the room.

Love at first sight might happen in real life sometimes, but it’s very tedious in a novel. More tedious still is the sort of things they say to each other almost immediately. Because there is a pesky little obstacle to their era-defining romance: Bell is married with a young son. She decides that she isn’t happy in her marriage with Lucas, and starts to psychoanalyse herself in the bar.

“I still can’t partly because a person that Lucas expects me to be. I know now that I don’t want to, and so I do it badly. I’m neither one thing nor the other, and it makes me half hate Lucas, though it’s not his fault. And I don’t want to hate him, he’s not a person to hate. And then there’s Toby, my baby. I’m very fond of him, but he’s something tying me down to this life that isn’t really mine.”

It was at this point, on p.17, that I considered giving up on the novel. Nobody speaks like this outside of novels, and Bell and Hervey are tiresome, unpleasant people whose love affair I couldn’t care less about.

BUT – it turned out that Cooper was doing something much cleverer than I’d given her credit for. This sort of talk takes up the first chapter, and then the rest of the novel is really about the fall-out. How does it impact relatives and friends when two young people make a selfish decision? What are the knock-on effects?

First, of course, is Lucas. He is a slightly dull but dependable young man who is unbelieving and angry that Bell has left him in the most casual way possible. Despite the anger, he wants her to come home and quietly forget the whole thing. This all makes him sound like the staid villain of the piece, but Lucas really has out sympathy. He and Bell have had a fairly happy marriage so far, from his perspective at least, and he is ready to forgive and forget her curious blip. But he has a job and can’t look after baby Toby – and so he gets shepherded off initially to a lady in another flat (who is indignant) and next to Lucas’s mother.

Lucas’s widowed mother, Dorothy Marsden, is perhaps my favourite character. She is one of the few who could have stepped out of The New House. An eminently sensible woman, we meet her coming in from the garden with a dripping bunch of chrysanthemums to answer the telephone – couldn’t that be in any interwar middlebrow novel? She takes Lucas in with a mix of grandmotherly happiness and, as a person with her own life, a certain reluctance. We hardly get to know Lucas at all – he is a burden to outsource rather than a character on the page – but he certainly disrupts Dorothy’s life. The fall-out of Hervey and Bell’s decision even covers Dorothy’s dear friend Hatty – there are intriguing suggestions that their relationship might be more than friends, and Hatty is furious to be cast aside.

We also see Hervey’s mother – a fluttery, nervous woman who feels very overwhelmed by the situation. Then there’s Bell’s parents – an emotionless man whose main regret is marrying the beautiful young woman who fell pregnant with his baby and thus had to get an engagement ring. He resents Bell for being too like her mother (even though the pregnancy in question turned out to be a son, much more like himself than his wife.)

I’m racing through characters because there are an awful lot of people we get to know well – Lucas, Hervey and Bell also each have friends, some of whom have spouses and children to meet too. I think Cooper spread her net perhaps a little too wide, and sometimes I struggled to remember who people were or if we’d met them before. She is great at getting deep into someone’s personality, but slightly fewer people would have made this trait pay off a little better, in my opinion.

As for Hervey and Bell themselves – the lustre doesn’t last super long on their relationship, as anyone could tell. Hervey is monstrously selfish. He thinks it ‘makes sense’ for him to finish his play first rather than get a menial job, because then he will be a rich and successful playwright. But he hasn’t actually started the play yet, nor does he have any ideas for it. He lets Bell believe that her son will come and live with them, but secretly will refuse to allow this. He has, essentially, no redeeming qualities. Bell, on the other hand, is more floaty than selfish. She seems to live on another plane, where consequences of actions don’t quite exist. She means nobody any malice, but also doesn’t seem to walk with her feet on the ground. Perhaps the most touching relationship in this novel of flawed relationships is the platonic one she forms with a workman who shouts her a full English breakfast (because she has no money for meals) and they form an extraordinary friendship. It becomes the main plot of the latter section of The Double Heart, but I won’t say any more on that.

How representative of 1962 is this maelstrom of characters and storylines? It comes across when they talk about marriage:

“Your idea is what it [marriage] used to be. When our parents were young they could believe in things lasting. How can we, when it’s obvious that we shall probably all be blown up in a year or two?”

“I think the only to take that situation is to go on living as if it wasn’t going to happen. Just as a solider must behave as if he wasn’t going to be killed.”

Perhaps every generation thinks that the previous generation had more stability – and every generation thinks that theirs is more liberal in marriage. But only a handful would have had that genuine fear that they could be ‘blown up in a year or two’. I suppose that might be the sort of thing that would make someone abandon their family on a whim?

Whether or not the catalysing moment for The Double Heart is plausible, I really enjoyed what Cooper did with it. It’s an interesting way of looking at sudden romance that throws caution to the wind. Following all the people left hurt and disoriented by this caution-throwing gives opportunity for a compelling plot and a wide range of characters – and Cooper shows that she is every bit as adept at writing about 1960s society as she is at 1930s. Hopefully more of her books will be read and discovered – she’s far from a one-trick, or even a one-decade, pony.

An End To Running by Lynne Reid Banks #1962Club

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(I wrote this review before the recent shocking violence in Israel and Gaza, and that’s why it isn’t mentioned.)

One of my favourite books is Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room, which was also one of the first adult novels I discovered for myself. I’d loved her children’s books and it was a great step from one world of reading to another. I read the two sequels, but didn’t read all that many of her other novels for a long while – despite buying An End To Running back in 2002. (I should say – I got a bit of déjà vu reading it, but I think that’s because it has similarities to her children’s book One More River.)

This was Lynne Reid Banks’ second novel and there are elements that could remind you of her first. The male lead is a Jewish writer, for instance – but the female protagonist, Martha, is nothing like The L-Shaped Room‘s Jane. Martha is a no-nonsense, articulate, intelligent young woman looking for work as a secretary – preferably something literature-adjacent. As the novel opens, she is being interviewed for a job with Aaron Franks. She instantly dislikes him. He has a cruelty to his demeanour and a self-importance as a writer that comes across as childishly arrogant. But he is supported in this by his sister – the real power behind the throne – who believes Aaron to be a genius, and takes against Martha immediately.

Martha is offered the job, and takes it because she needs the money – and because she is undeniably intrigued by this man. She thinks the writing his sister most prizes is pretentious, meaningless waffle – but there is a novel about his father’s experience as a Jewish immigrant that seems clearer and deeper. In all honesty, Banks takes us from their initial mistrust and disdain for each other to a friendship rather quickly and slightly unconvincingly, but perhaps it is necessary for the plot.

Somewhere along the way, Aaron comes up with a ‘brilliant’ idea. Sick of his sister’s bullying and misguided views on literature, he decides to write a play entirely in the style that she likes. It is meaningless nonsense, and Banks clearly enjoys giving us excerpts from it. And it is an admirable pastiche of a certain sort of play. This is 1962, and presumably the stage of the day was suffering from an influx of playwrights trying to emulate works like Waiting for Godot (1953 in French; 1955 in English) and Harold Pinter’s (The Birthday Party was 1957; The Caretaker was 1959 etc.) Actually, two of the novels I’ve read for the 1962 Club have would-be playwrights as lead characters, so it was clearly in the air.

Meanwhile, Aaron is preoccupied with his Jewish identity. That’s a common theme of Banks’ work – and we mustn’t forget, of course, that this is only 17 years after the end of the Second World War. Characters like Aaron grew up with the most violent anti-Semitism being loud and clear across Europe. Early on, his sister rejects Martha’s suggestion that he write a play about Jewish people:

“Why not Jews? I want to understand this.” 

“Primarily because we want the play to be a success.”

“Why should Jewish characters hinder that?”

“Because it’s esoteric. It’s all right to put shaggy old East End pawnbrokers or sharp-nosed shysters or hand-spreading fat crooks into a play for laughs or a gentle tear or two. But you can’t write a serious play exploring Jewish feelings and expect anybody but Jews to understand it.”

Anti-Semitism is sadly all too present in 2023, but I hope no novelist would feel that the above dialogue was an accurate reflection of the arts today. As a sidenote, I can’t find out whether Lynne Reid Banks is Jewish or not, and it does make a difference to how I respond to her writing. She so often returns to ‘Jewishness’ as a theme, particularly people who are ashamed of being Jewish – which feels like a vulnerable thing to explore if she is Jewish, and… well, opinions vary on whether or not it’s appropriate if she isn’t Jewish.

Aaron writes his play and it is put on by a small theatre group – and, twist, it becomes a big success. Aaron at first finds this amusing – but Martha points out that his reputation as a writer is now settled. He can’t become a new novelist without this reputation. One thing leads to another, and they decide to move together to a kibbutz in Israel – a sort of communal living compound. They are able to move there under the then-rule that any Jewish person around the world could move to Israel (I believe it’s a bit more stringent now).

It was one thing not to be wanted in the place you were born in. That might not be enough to make you get out – it might only make you more stubbornly determined to dig in. But if there was a place that did want you – wanted you so badly it didn’t even ask whether you had tuberculosis or a criminal record, let alone whether you were popular in the place you came from or whether you liked yourself or whether you had the guts to stand on your own two feet – then what sort of a bloody fool would you have to be not to go there? Surely there, if anywhere, you could start again with nothing chalked up against you, even in your own mind.

Yes, it is a bit of a jump! But somehow it feels plausible in the novel. What works slightly less well is jumping to another country and another voice – because the first half has been in Martha’s first-person perspective, and the second half (such as that quote above) is from Aaron’s first-person perspective. By changing all the parameters in one fell swoop, it does feel like two very different novels.

Though Martha is not Jewish, they are accepted onto the kibbutz because they lie that they’re married. From the start, it doesn’t go well. Aaron is not built for physical labour, and finds the hours in baking heat harvesting vegetables both exhausting and mindless. He doesn’t particularly like the communal way of eating, or having other people’s children everywhere. Perhaps because he is escaping somewhere rather than being excited about the arrival, he resists everything. Even though we are in his mind, he is not a sympathetic character. It is evident that he considers himself too good for this.

Martha, meanwhile, is a better fit. She seems to have changed a lot from the first half – perhaps a convincing contrast of the way she sees herself, versus how Aaron sees her. She is more compliant, more liked. Banks lived on a kibbutz herself for a while, and she certainly conveys it very well. I can see why it’s a setting she returns to in several of her books.

I shan’t give any more of the plot – but I will say I liked An End To Running very much. Lynne Reid Banks is brilliant at enveloping you in a world and making it deeply familiar to you – bringing across both the pain and the discomfort of familiarity. My qualms about the novel are really that it is two novels, barely hinged together. If one were the sequel to the other, I think it could have worked. But as it is, the leap of perspective and setting, and the concomitant change of tone, means it’s hard to think of An End To Running as one whole.

And how representative of 1962 is this club choice? There are certain things that could only be from this period – from the vogue for a certain form of highbrow theatre to the relatively recent re-creation of Israel as an independent country. The cover does its best to seem racy, but this is a fairly minor part of the plot – it would have been shocking three decades earlier, but is pretty tame for 1962.

I’d never recommend this as the best place to start with Lynne Reid Banks, and it certainly won’t dislodge The L-Shaped Room in my affections – but I do think, beside that novel, she is not as widely read as she deserves. Perhaps her interest in Jewishness means her novels are more vulnerable to dating poorly, but she is an exceptionally good writer and I hope more people read her.