A delightful reread for #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

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I read Ashcombe (1949) by Cecil Beaton back in 2012, sitting in the Bodleian Library. I quickly knew I needed my own copy – and this beautiful edition arrived. Here we are, 12 years later, and I have re-read and re-loved Beaton’s tale of finding, renovating and loving a beautiful countryside home in Wiltshire. Will I still feel the same as when I first wrote about it?

I think I must have been drawn the book initially because of its inclusion of Edith Olivier – I certainly read it during my DPhil, which included a chapter on her novel The Love-Child. It was while staying with Olivier in 1930 that Beaton made the decision to go and visit Ashcombe – a sizeable house left in some disrepair, hidden at near-inaccessible lengths in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside. (It is clearly a mansion, however homely Beaton tries to make it sound.)

I do not know if the others spoke during the trek up the hill. I was perhaps vaguely conscious of their eulogoies, but I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand. Some people may grow to love their homes: my reaction was instantaneous. It was love at first sight, and from the moment that I stood under the archway, I knew that this place was destined to be mine. No matter what the difficulites, I would overcome them all; considerations of money, suitability, or availability, were all superficial. This house must belong to me.

As it happened, the house never did belong to Beaton. The subtitle to Ashcombe is ‘the story of a fifteen-year lease’ – and Beaton did indeed lease the house and its significant grounds from its owner, who hadn’t thought it quite habitable. And indeed it wasn’t. The nominal rent of £50 per year was so low because Beaton would spend so much money on restoring the house – and, in the days before listing restrictions (or maybe even planning permission?), he went much further than restoring. Ashcombe has lots of (black and white) photographs included, and some of these are before and after sets – where he’s clearly extended windows, added walls and doors, and knocked things about at whim, as well as extensive landscaping. The landlord certainly got good value, but also seems incredibly tolerant for Beaton to pursue any whim at all. How many of our landlords would let a tenant have every visitor sketch their hand on the bathroom wall?

The photographs also show many of the people who came to stay. While Beaton leased Ashcombe for 15 years, he never lived there full-time. It was a retreat from a week in London, and he was often away abroad for months at a time. But while he was there, he brought packs of the great and the good from London (and even, before he was sure of the cook’s ability, all the catering from London too). We get to sneak into their lives, which seem to be a whirlwind of costume parties, charades, artistry and camaraderie. Quite what the locals thought we never discover – these are privileged, wealthy, often titled men and women who have seemingly endless energy and opportunity for antics. Many are names you’ll probably recoginse – Augustus John, Salvador Dali, Rex Whistler, Siegfried Sassoon. Even Tom Mitford gets a look-in, which he seldom does in books about his sisters. Naturally, I relished the times he spoke of Edith Olivier – older than most of her famous friends, and relatively new to this world, having been oppressively sheltered until her father died when Olivier was already firmly middle-aged, if not old.

Of the neighbours on whom I grew to rely more and more, Edith Olivier was perhaps the most cherished. It was she who, by bringing me into contact with so many new friends, was so largely responsible for my having blossomed into a happy adult life: and it was she who continued, without effort on her part, to discover your people of promise and bring them to her house. So many of the young writers, painters and poets came to her with problems about their work and their life, and they knew that after she had listened intently to their outpourings, her advice would be unprejudiced, wise and Christian. Edith’s youthfulness and spirit were of all time: she had unlimited energy, vitality and zest for life. Interested in every strata of humanity, she had never been known to be bored. After a strenuous day she would retire to bed, not to sleep, but to read at least three books, one of which she was to review, in addition to writing a most detailed journal of all that had happened to her during the previous twenty-four hours.

Having sat in Wiltshire Record Office with volumes of the journal, I can attest that it is ‘most detailed’. She wrote at enormous length and in horrendous handwriting.

So much of Ashcombe is joyful: the joy of home and the joy of friends. Beaton writes brilliantly about the pull of a beautiful place, and about the frenetic happiness that a group of carefree people can bring out of each other. They are unafraid of simple silliness. But the book does have its mournful edge. Nine years after the lease began, the Second World War started.

I remember I was about to step into a hot bath when I was informed that Poland had been invaded. The news was like a death knell. We had to wait one endless day more before we heard, from a calm but tired voice on the radio, that Hitler had refused the last request for a peaceful solution to his demands.

At Ashcombe, as we sat listening to the Prime Minister in the small parlour, my mother wept a little. The speech was soon over. We were now at war.

Beaton writes with sensitivity about the impact on war – mostly on fatalities among his friends, particularly Rex Whistler, since Beaton’s own wartime experience was clearly easier than others. Ashcombe is something of a retreat from the worst of the bombing and devastation in London, but is not left unaffected.

Almost equally sombre is the end of the lease. Beaton hoped to continue living there (at least for some of the year) for the rest of his life – but, after the lease had been extended a few times, I finally came to an end. The landlord wanted it back and there was nothing Beaton could do. Houses are often important in fact and fiction, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a better account of the heartbreak of leaving a home you have truly loved, against your will. It only happened to me once (when all my housemates rather suddenly chose to leave Oxford), but it is devastating and takes a long time to get over.

Beaton may have had other homes and I daresay they were palatial and beautiful – but Ashcombe clearly caught and kept his heart. In this delightful, poignant, effervescent book, he has given the house an excellent tribute.

The Camomile by Catherine Carswell #ABookADayInMay – Day 3

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Off to 1920s Scotland for the latest in my A Book A Day In May journey – and The Camomile by Catherine Carswell. The narrator is Ellen Carstairs, a clever, slightly cynical woman in her early 20s. She is a gifted musician – though currently using this talent to teach reluctant children – and lives in a slightly bleak flat in order to escape the oppressive attentions of her religious aunt. Deep down, and growing steadily less deep, is her ambition to write professionally rather than play the piano.

I say she is the narrator – this is sort of an epistolary novel, though Ellen seldom seems to pay any attention to any letters she might get from her correspondent, long-term friend Ruby. We learn very little about Ruby, and I do wish she was less of a shadowy construct. The letters that Ellen sends her are intentionally in the style of a detailed journal – so it’s really just a conceit for Ellen to share her reflections on the people and events she encounters, not quite at the openness that a diary would reveal, though not far off. (And, indeed, the latter part of the novel becomes a diary instead of these letters.)

The novel gets off to a slightly slow start. Well, a very slow one initially, with a reminiscence of a long-ago music lesson – it’s a bizarrely anticlimactic way to open a novel. Luckily it’s tidied away quickly, and we get into the novel proper. Ellen is clearly very naive and immature in some ways, still in the hinterland between childhood and adulthood, but it is impossible not to warm to her. Carswell has created a heroine with tried-and-true traits that will endear her to most readers: Ellen is bookish, more familiar with life from literature than experience; she is slightly stubborn and judgemental but quick to repent and try to do better; she has high standards and expectations, and we want her to achieve them. I suppose it is a coming-of-age novel, even though she is older than the usual age for such heroines.

I am for ever straining after Reality with a capital R, and life seems to fob me off continually […] I don’t of course know what reality is, but I do hope some day I shall. I suppose getting married and having children would bring one face to face with it. But then that may never happen to me. Anyhow not for years and years.

As the novel progresses, this reality comes closer to home. What starts as wry observations and gradually emerging ambitions becomes more about the genuine prospect of marriage – and whether or not it is possible to pursue her hopes of being an author with the particular man who has proposed.

The title of the novel comes from Shakespeare – ‘The camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows’ (1 Henry IV). Carswell makes it overt that the camomile in question is Ellen’s aim to become a successful, published writer. But it is also broader than that: Ellen is herself the camomile. The way she responds to being trodden on by repressive relatives and acquaintances is treated comically – but the prospect that she will be more permanently trodden down by marriage, and whether or not she will have the resilience to grow despite this, becomes a more serious theme in the novel.

I think The Camomile gets better and better as it keeps going. For a while it’s not clear what the point of the book is, but once that becomes clear, the fine writing and perceptive character study have something firm to cling to. And, throughout, it is funny in the slightly barbed way that an Austen heroine can be. For example:

My other new pupil is Sheila Dudgeon, who wants a course of ‘finishing lessons’. The only difficulty about her ‘finishing’ is that she has omitted the formality of beginning.

This was a re-read for me, and I’ll leave you to guess why I might be re-reading a 1920s novel. It’s an interesting, deceptively deep read, and I’d love to hear more people’s opinions on it.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“No surprise that this novel was chosen by feminist press Virago for republication in the 1980s, for it is all about female self-determination in the face of almost universal societal disapproval.” – Leaves and Pages

“Sometimes I read a book and think ‘How dare the author assume that I want to know what is going on in her head in such detail?’ – and I can think this while simultaneously enjoying the book.” – Clothes in Books

“I wasn’t really able to whip up any sympathy for her and was glad when this book was finished.” – Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home

Valentino by Natalia Ginzburg #ABookADayInMay Day 2

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Happily, day two of A Book A Day in May was much more successful – and, somehow, even shorter. Only 62 pages! And yet Ginzburg gets a whole world into Valentino (1957), translated by Avril Bardoni. It contains a great deal, both in terms of character and plot, and yet doesn’t feel like it should have been any longer. It’s a miracle of concision.

The narrator is Caterina, writing with love and yet some detachment about her brother, Valentino. He is a young, selfish man who has been brought up to believe that he will become an exceptional man. He has been given an expensive education and most whims have been answered by his parents – even while Caterina and Clara, his sisters, have been expected to get by on scraps. Caterina sets off to a distant market early every morning, to get marginally cheaper vegetables, while Valentino takes exams in a half-hearted way and obsesses with his appearance. As the novel opens, Valentino is doing something he apparently does often: bringing a fiancée to meet the family:

Many times he had become engaged and then broken it off and my mother had had to clean the dining room specially and dress for the occasion. It had happened so often already that when he announced he was getting married within the month nobody believed him, and my mother cleaned the dining room wearily and put on the grey silk dress reserved for her pupils’ examinations at the Conservatory and for meeting Valentino’s prospective brides.

But Maddelena is different from the line of pretty young students that Valentino brings home. She is at least a decade older than Valentino, very wealthy, and not at all attractive. On meeting her, Valentino’s mother bursts into tears.

As the novella continues, this curious mix of characters go through months of their lives in not many lines. Ginzburg shows us Clara’s thawing resentment, Maddelena’s generosity and her subdued pride, Valentino’s much less subdued pride, the mother’s stubbornness, and the enchanting new character – a cousin of Maddelena who starts to charm Caterina. She is perhaps the only character we aren’t able to observe properly – because she is primarily the observer. The other characters are drawn with their competing emotions, while Caterina’s motives and feelings are a little less clear. She is a substitute for the reader and, being a daughter or sister to most of the characters, makes us feel fully immersed in the family dynamics.

Ginzburg is so good at families, at least in the two novellas I’ve read by her (the other being Sagittarius). And she is very funny too, with a wry humour that is exentuated by the sparseness of the prose. For example…

My father said he would go to have a talk with Valentino’s fiancée, but my mother was opposed to this, partly because my father had a weak heart and was supposed to avoid any excitement, partly because she thought his arguments would be completely ineffectual. My father never said anything sensible; perhaps what he meant to say was sensible enough, but he never managed to express what he meant, getting bogged down in empty words, digressions and childhood memories, stumbling and gesticulating. So at home he was never allowed to finish what he was saying because we were all too impatient, and he would hark back wistfully to his teaching days when he could talk as much as he wanted and nobody humiliated him.

The humour gradually ebbs from Valentino as the tone becomes more serious – and there is a development in the plot that is hardly given any space to grow, but works its way backwards through the story so that it transforms everything we’ve read.

Valentino is a brilliant little book, showing what a master of economy Ginzburg was. I’m keen to keep reading her, and glad to have at least one more book (Family Lexicon) on the shelves to try.

#ABookADayInMay is back! And I didn’t like the first one!

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It’s May again, and that can only mean one thing – I’m doing A Book A Day in May again! I don’t know if Madame Bibi is planning to do a novella a day in May again, as I am merely following her lead with this challenge.

To refresh memories – my aim is to finish a book every day in May. I say ‘book’ rather than ‘novella’ because it’ll almost certainly include some non-fiction, and it’s ‘finish’ rather than ‘read a full book’ because I have a whole pile of half-read books that will come into play. Besides those, I haven’t made any specific reading plans. Part of the fun is choosing the book each morning, spontaneously, matching the mood of the day. (And the number of pages I think I’ll have time to read.)

And I started with Antwerp by the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño – written in 1980, finally published in 2002, and translated into English by Natasha Wimmer in 2010. I think my copy was actually a review copy in 2010, thinking about it. The cover boldly quotes Bolaño saying, “The only novel that doesn’t embarrass me is Antwerp“, which is bold for a publisher who was also issuing a bunch of his other stuff. And also because it’s not really a novel?

Antwerp: Amazon.co.uk: Roberto Bolano: 9780330510585: Books

Antwerp is a series of 56 short vignettes. I’m quite drawn to this sort of fragmented way of crafting a book, as some of my favourite reads of last year demonstrate – though In The Dream House and The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer are both non-fiction. Antwerp is fiction, whatever else it might be, and these vignettes do paint some sort of collective picture – albeit one with such porous edges that the only really safe thing you can say about it, formally, is that it is made of words.

Actually, before we get onto the main part, there is a quick preface by the author – which starts like this:

I wrote this book for myself, and even that I can’t be sure of. For a long time these were just loose pages that I reread and maybe tinkered with, convinced I had no time. But time for what? I couldn’t say exactly. I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn’t the only thing that matters, time isn’t the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

I think that can help us know what we’re dealing with. It’s the sort of experimentalist think-speak that I had a lot more time for when I was 19 than I do now. So I entered the novel (?) proper fearing I might not know what was going on, and so it proved to be. The 55 vignettes take up less than 80 pages in my edition, and many of those pages are only half-filled. Certain characters recur, such as a nameless woman, a pornstar (?), various police officers, and Roberto Bolaño himself, or at least an author of the same name. There are clear themes: police investigation, violence, circuses, rather grubby sex. Maybe there’s even the detective of an actual crime, though I rather failed to pick up the pieces.

I started treating each vignette as a tiny short story, without trying too hard to connect it with what went before and after. And considering they’re things like this, you can perhaps see why:

10. THERE WAS NOTHING

There are no police stations, no hospitals, nothing. At least there’s nothing money can buy. “We act on instantaneous impulses” … “This is the kind of thing that destroys the unconscious, and then we’ll be left hanging” … “Remember that joke about the bullfighter who steps out into the ring and then there’s no bull, no ring, nothing?” … The policeman drank anarchic breezes. Someone started to clap.

But there were some parts that I loved and went back and re-read, like a poem. I noted down this opening to a vignette:

Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we’ll later call the work. Silence reads letters sitting on a balcony. Birds like a a rasp in the throat, like women with deep voices. I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors. Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird. And no work could justify the slowness of movements and obstacles.

I keep using the word ‘vignette’, though I have no idea if Bolaño would like it. I got to the end having really appreciated some of the writing, and not at all knowing what the point of Antwerp was. (The city is mentioned, finally, in the 49th of the 55 vignettes – with an anecdote about a man in Antwerp being killed when his car was run over by a truck full of pigs.)

It’s probably the sort of book that would reward a year’s careful studying. Each line could be debated and played with and appreciated. Certainly Bolaño has his admirers. I don’t think I’m likely to become one of them.

Summer Half by Angela Thirkell – belated #1937Club guest post!

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I normally don’t post ‘club’ reviews after the week has finished – but we all make exceptions for our mothers, and here is my Mum (Anne – also known as Our Vicar’s Wife, for longterm blog readers) writing about Angela Thirkell’s Summer Half. Over to you, Mum!

This taste of 1937 is a typical example of Thirkell’s work – the Barsetshire setting, restricted to a few houses and a boys’ school, gives scope for Thirkell’s themes of domestic management (the problems with ‘staff’) boys (and their tendency to do ridiculous things) masters (either shackled to teaching or biding their time before entering a ‘real’ profession) romance (and ‘being engaged’ almost before the first kiss) and the ridiculousness of life. Mothers are depicted as slightly dotty, schoolboys and schoolgirls, awkward and annoying, men (either in one of the professions or in the military – preferably the Navy) and Fathers as slightly distanced figures, whose powers are seldom domestic and usually connected with committees, dinners, pipe-smoking, and clubs.

At least one figure must be tormented by love, another by pride, and yet another by unfulfilled ambition. All this with the witty, droll, and occasionally what we would judge as prejudiced and offensive attitudes, expressed in the vocabulary of that time.

There is a clear social structure in the book – those who dress for dinner v those who make it. The Young People appear privileged and indulged by parents who, at times, seem to have lost the upper hand. They both annoy and amuse the reader – as do the themes and plot twists. However, it is worth reading, if only for things like this:

‘I say,’ said Lydia, ‘you know it’s summer time tomorrow. Has anyone put the clocks wrong?’

Mrs Keith looked conscience-stricken.

‘I did speak to cook this morning,’ she said, ‘just after I had read it up in The Times, but I don’t know if I said put them backward or forward. I must have known at the time, because I had just read it, but I can’t think now. It’s forward, isn’t it?’

‘Backward, I think,’ said Mr Keith.

‘I know it breaks my watch to do it one way and not the other way,’ said Mr Merton, ‘but I can’t remember if it breaks it in spring and doesn’t break it in autumn, or the other way round.’

‘If you go to China you keep on gaining a day,’ said Colin. ‘Or is it losing it?’

 Having not long since changed the clocks, and felt weird for weeks afterwards, this was very soothing.

Thirkell may not hit all the ‘spots’ for a good read, but as light relief from duller reading, makes for a pleasant afternoon – with tea, of course – and cakes.

Tea or Books? #127: Do We Have Guilty Pleasures? and A Clergyman’s Daughter vs The Vicar’s Daughter

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George Orwell, E.H. Young, guilty pleasures – welcome to episode 127!

In the first half of the episode, we ask: what is our guiltiest reading pleasure? Has that changed over time? Do we feel guilty about anything connected with reading? In the second half, we compare two similarly titled novels: The Vicar’s Daughter by E.H. Young and A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Wifedom by Anna Funder
Burmese Days by George Orwell
A Bullet in the Ballet by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon
I Would Be Private by Rose Macaulay
Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham
Miss Read
Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary by Ruby Ferguson
Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton
The Love-Child by Edith Olivier
The Plant Hunter by T.L. Mogford
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Jane Austen
Charles Dickens
He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope
The Rector’s Daughter by F.M. Mayor
Chatterton Square by E.H. Young
The Misses Mallett by E.H. Young
Miss Mole by E.H. Young
William by E.H. Young
Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

No Peace for the Wicked by Ursula Torday – #1937Club

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In the final afternoon of the 1937 Club, I’m writing about the most obscure of my choices this week – Ursula Torday’s No Peace for the Wicked. It’s one of three novels that Torday wrote under her own name in the 1930s – and she started writing again the 1950s, turning then to gothic romances and mysteries under the pseudonyms Paula Allardyce, Charity Blackstock, Lee Blackstock and Charlotte Keppel. Having gleaned that from Wikipedia, I wondered what her early novels would be like – particularly with a title like No Peace for the Wicked.

As it turns out, the title doesn’t seem to have any particular significance for the characters. The heroine is Lynn. As the novel opens, she is 16 years old and living with her Aunt Beatrice and cousin Stephen, who is not her contemporary (he’s 29) but behaves rather like a slightly resentful older brother. Lynn has been there for many years, because her parents were killed in an accident. Beatrice has provided for her material needs, and offered some affection – but strictly on her own terms, which are laden with expectations that Lynn will be ladylike, respectful, and grateful.

Stephen and Beatrice often squabble, but they are united in ridiculing Beatrice. She has pretensions to art patronage, forever inviting promising young musicians to the house whose promise never seems to come to much. Beatrice gathers the local great and good to concert parties, which nobody besides herself seem particularly to enjoy. Torday is often a very funny writer, and I enjoyed the close observation she uses in highlighting the absurdities of Beatrice and her circle.

Aunt Beatrice sat still and upright, her hands folded on her lap. There was a faint smile on her mouth; once perhaps it had really been a smile of pleasure, now it was merely an expressionless elongation of the lips. Miss Martin also clasped her hands, but her head was thrown back, displaying her corded throat and flat breasts to the utmost disadvantage. She always tossed her head back when listening to music; Stephen once remarked that she seemed as if she were gargling with melody. Colonel Ingelby had shut his eyes. This looked like concentration, but was actually acute boredom. On one memorable occasion he had fallen asleep, and a Chopin nocturne had been cut short by a huge snore. Lynn had laughed so immoderately at this that she had been sent up to her room in disgrace. The Colonel’s wife, a plump little woman whose main interest lay in bridge parties, cared as little for music as he did, but to show that she knew how to appreciate it beat an audible tattoo on the arm of her chair, in the wrong tempo.

Lynn is at an age where she is starting to push against the bounds that Aunt Beatrice has put on her life. In this, she is sometimes aided and sometimes thwarted by Stephen. One of the main things I wish Torday had done differently in No Peace for the Wicked is Stephen’s age. He is 13 years older than Lynn, and it’s important for the dynamic that he is older and has more independence – but he could have done that at 21. It’s not clear how he has spent his 20s, living with his mother and not developing very much – and he acts so much like Lynn is a contemporary that the disparity in their ages feels a very odd decision.

The first half of the novel is a lot about the dynamics between this three characters – usually with a comic tone, and occasionally a bit more melodramatic. The melodrama overtakes the comedy around the halfway mark: it is the eve of Lynn’s interview to study at Oxford (where Torday studied herself), and… Stephen has run away with a vampish young woman.

One thing leads to another, and Lynn (now 21) and Aunt Beatrice move unhappily to a boarding house. Beatrice is hurt and angry, but continues so determinedly to idolise Stephen that she turns her ire on Lynn. Everything she does is wrong and wicked. And Lynn continues to push against these restrictions – particularly when she meets an egotistical young pianist, Richard, and falls suddenly in love with him. Much of the second half of the novel is about the on-again-off-again of their relationship, which is tempestuous and slightly ridiculous, in the way of many romances for 21-year-olds.

Melodrama again takes over, and the dialogue and responses sometimes feel a bit borrowed from the more hysterical reaches of 1930s cinema. It makes sense because they are so young, and I don’t think the reader is expected to think either Lynn or Richard is behaving very well. I read the whole novel on the train to and from London, so I think it would have felt less repetitive if I’d read it over a longer period.

I think the plot and character development could have done with a bit of finessing, but I still really enjoyed reading No Peace for the Wicked because of Torday’s style. It reminded me a bit of Stella Gibbons non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels. It’s often very amusing and wry. Here, for example, is a funny bit about an incidental character who only appears for a couple of pages:

Mr Crane had fed his imagination for many years on the kind of novel where the hero beats the heroine with a sjambok, and after he has so dealt with her, covers her face with passionate kisses. He was a vehement preacher of the creed that all women like to be ill-treated. (At the age of forty-six he was still unmarried.)

Alongside the humour and melodrama is also a certain darkness. Lynn is often occupied with the limits of her own morality, and what wicked acts she might consider doing (and perhaps that is where the title comes in). Whether or not that comes to anything, I shan’t spoil – but it introduced a note of tension that it’s unusual in a 1930s domestic novel.

My 1937 Club reading has been a bit sub-par overall – but I’ve ended on a high note. I think Ursula Torday is an interesting and enjoyable novelist, and it’s a shame that her novels under her own name have disappeared so much. If you spot one in a bookshop, grab it and give it a chance.

Two #1937Club murder mysteries

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I am so behind with gathering up and reading 1937 Club posts – what else is new for a club week? – but I’m loving seeing them flood in, and will catch up. For today, I am writing about two golden age detective novels – how golden are they?

502: The Door Between (1937) by Ellery Queen | The Invisible Event

The Door Between by Ellery Queen

It’s only in typing out the title and author that I realise they rhyme. Anyway, this novel by ‘Ellery Queen’ (a pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, as well as the name of the detective) is my second by him – and I was intrigued by the title, because I love anything that centres domestic detail.

At the heart of the book is Eva – a young woman who is courageous and stubborn, but also given to the occasional damsel-in-distress flare up. Her father, a famous cancer researcher Dr John MacClure, is engaged to be married to Karen Leith. Leith is an American living in Manhattan, but obsessed with Japan – she has lived there for a long time, and writes novels that are heavily influenced by all things Japanese. Her study has Japanese furniture and art all around it, and her servant is an older Japanese woman. I don’t know how much research the authors did into Japanese culture, but I suspect they relied more on vibes than accuracy. (Incidentally, Wikipedia tells me that Ellery Queen remained the most popular mystery writer in Japan until the 1970s.)

Eva is herself in a deepening romantic relationship with a doctor – I quite enjoyed the spirited way they go from despising each other to love over the course of the first few chapters. It felt very knockabout-comedy, and I could see that section of the book being turned into a fun Golden Age of Hollywood movie.

Eva goes to see Karen, to build some bridges with her future mother-in-law. The servant comes out of Karen’s study with a piece of paper, and says that Eva can go in later. Eva is sat outside the only exit to the room. And… yes, you guessed it. Karen is found dead – and nobody could have gone in or out. Her throat is cut, but there is no sign of a knife – just a small hole in the window where a stone has come through, and an empty birdcage.

Enter the detective, Ellery Queen, a fairly louche and whimsical character. Something I enjoy about the Ellery Queen books is the dynamic between Queen and his father, who is an Inspector. They have a sweet, squabbling repartee – enough respect on each side to plough on together, and enough cynicism towards the other’s role to make it fun.

As for the plot… it’s my second Ellery Queen novel, and I am beginning to think he’ll make up any old nonsense. There are so many coincidences and unlikely scenarios strung together, with nobody asking the right questions until Ellery swans in and pieces everything together with seemingly very little time between cluelessness and absolute certainty. It’s overly complex and very unconvincing. Obviously the author was and is extremely popular, but these novels make me think that Ellery Queen would have been rather better at enjoyably silly romances than murder mysteries.

I quite enjoyed both Ellery Queens I’ve read, but ultimately I don’t think the pay-off is worth it, and I probably won’t be reading any more.

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A Bullet in the Ballet by Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon

Another detective whose name begins with Q! This time it is Adam Quill, who gets involved when a ballet dancer is shot in the middle of a performance of Petroushka – in a death scene, no less. The aftermath of the death is one of the msot 1937 moments I’ve come across in the 1937 Club:

It was perhaps as well that Palook could not remain alive to read his own obituaries, for he would not have been at all pleased with the manner in which these were framed. By an unfortunate coincidence Hitler had selected the day of his death to threaten the world with peace, collaring the greater part of the front pages and every first leader in the country. This left a mere double column for Palook’s sensational end, and much of this had been used up by the sob-sisters with graphic descriptions of everybody’s reactions to the event, except, of course, Palook’s.

A Bullet in the Ballet was the first of the collaborations between Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon. Brahms was a critic and journalist as well as novelist, and she specialised in the ballet – so brings a lot of knowledge to the novel, often rather at the expense of the reader if (like me) they know nothing about ballet. I’d never heard of Petroushka and had to play catch up to understand any significance in it.

The novel is very arch, and Vladimir Stroganoff (!), who runs the ballet company, is openly more concerned with the ongoing performances than he is about poor Palook’s murder. Murder isn’t taken particularly seriously by anybody in the novel, and there is a heightened unreality to it that didn’t quite work for me. Many moments were enjoyable, but tonally it felt a bit of an unsuccessful reach.

It’s a very self-aware piece of detective fiction. Quill is very Tired Of These Hysterical Foreigners (and at one point reads a murder mystery and is annoyed at its French detective) – and Brahms and Simon include quite a few fourth-wall-breaking references to how detectives should behave. And there are things like this…

“Now,” said Stanely comfortably as the waitress departed with the order, “I realise, of course, that everyboyd connected with the crime is under suspicion. As I’m anxious to help you, it is necessary that I should be elimiated at once from your list. I will therefore give you my alibi.”

The astute reader at this point will immediately jump to the conclusion that Stanley must be criminal and that this ingeniousness is merely low cunning designed to mislead. Even Quill had read enough detective stories to feel vaguely suspicious.

I did find all the rivalries, jealousies and other motives a bit hard to keep track of, though thankfully Brahms and Simon have a couple of times they recap everything that went before in a handy list, with motives and opportunities for each person.

And the solution? It comes so late in the day, in a chaotic rush, and it sort of makes sense, but there’s no earthly reason that any reader would have picked it any more than any other explanation picked out of the sky. But I don’t think Brahms and Simon are in this for the plot. They’ve definitely prioritised atmosphere and humour. It didn’t quite work for me, but it could for you.

So there you go – two detective novels by two-author-writing-teams, and neither of them especially successful for me! I’ll admit that the 1937 Club hasn’t had my biggest success rate – but I have one book left to finish, so fingers crossed.

The 1937 Club – This Reading Life

Virginia Woolf – 14 March 1937

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Today’s contribution to the 1937 Club is something I used to often do with the club years, where relevant – find out what Virginia Woolf was writing in her diary that year. I flicked through the entries, and I loved this, from 14 March 1937, about The Years. Woolf’s penultimate novel was published in early 1937, and here she is reflecting on praise for it:

I am in such a twitter owing to two columns in the Observer praising The Years that I can’t, as I foretold, go on with Three Guineas. Why I even sat back just now and thought with pleasure of people reading that review. And when I think of the agony I went through in this room, just over a year ago … when it dawned on me that the whole of three years’ work was a complete failure: and then when I think of the mornings here when I used to stumble out and cut up those proofs and write three lines and then go back and lie on my bed—the worst summer in my life, but at the same time the most illuminating—it’s no wonder my hand trembles. What most pleases me though is the obvious chance now since de Selincourt sees it, that my intention in The Years may be not so entirely muted and obscured as I feared. The T.L.S. spoke as if it were merely the death song of the middle classes: a series of exquisite impressions: but he sees that it is a creative, a constructive book. Not that I’ve yet altogether read him: but he has pounced on some of the key sentences. And this means that it will be debated; and this means that Three Guineas will strike very sharp and clear on a hot iron: so that my immensely careful planning won’t be baulked by time of life etc. as I had made certain. Making certain however was an enormous discovery for me, though.