Pin A Rose on Me by Josephine Blumenfeld

I was intrigued when I first read Scott’s review of Pin a Rose on Me (1958) by Josephine Blumenfeld, mostly by this line of his: “a bit like one of E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady diaries as penned by Morticia Addams, or perhaps it’s like one of Shirley Jackson’s wonderful humorous memoirs of domestic life, if Jackson had let loose all the more morbid gothic impulses of her fiction instead of keeping them fairly muted.”

Well, how could I resist?

I think it ended up being a cross between the Provincial Lady and Barbara Comyns, for me – the sardonic domestic memoir combined with a matter-of-fact observation of bizarre things. Very little is given any sense of being unusual, rather we rocket through her experiences without much pause for breath.

Mrs Appleby is the first-person narrator, who has a handful of adult children and doesn’t much care for them or their progeny. As the novel (let’s call it that, though I’m not sure it quite qualifies) opens, she is more focused on her dog Fanny and her coquettishness for dogs of the opposite sex. The line ‘Tarts don’t have Fannys’ on the first page might rather make this one impossible to reprint in England…

There isn’t a plot, really, it’s just Mrs Appleby’s life – which seems crammed with movement. At one point she rather suddenly goes off to America by sea (if I understood it properly), while elsewhere she embarks on a volunteering career in a hospital. Very little is forewarned, and the eccentricity of the structure matches the eccentricity of the character.

Essentially, it is an exercise in tone. Here are a couple of examples of it…

After dinner the others play bridge and say, ‘The rest are mine’, while I do my occupational therapy, a rather revolting piece of tapestry I am doing for my nephew and his wife who don’t want it but who daren’t say ‘no’. It has gone wrong somewhere, it rises to a tight peak in the middle and is lopsided.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” people say sadly. “But isn’t there something a wee bit wrong? Haven’t you pulled the wool too tight? You’ll have to have it stretched, won’t you?”

I shan’t have it stretched, I shall throw it into the sea the day we leave. But now while the others are writing their log books and we are drifting about between the islands, it is infinitely soothing to push coloured wools in and out of any old holes I feel inclined, and it keeps my mind off the rough seas.

And another…

Sad friend sends white hand-knitted shawl for my birthday.

“It will go well with your dark hair, my dear,” she writes. “It was originally meant for Derek’s wife, but things didn’t turn out to plan as you know, so I feel that you should have it for your birthday.” She goes on to say she has arthritis in all her fingers and is finding it more and more difficult to get through her tea cosy orders. “The doctor says I should winter abroad. What wild ideas they have.”

The shawl is beautiful, wide, long, soft and miraculously woven in the shapes of giant cobwebs and open roses. In a shop it would cost a lot. Sad friend wouldn’t get a lot from a shop, but she will get nothing from me as it is my birthday present and I can’t pay for my birthday present.”

Sometimes the tone worked really well – sometimes the deliberate inconsequential nature of Mrs Appleby’s descriptions of life were, well, too inconsequential. Overall, it is exuberant and odd, and it doesn’t quite cohere into a full novel, but perhaps Blumenfeld is trying something completely different. It certainly felt pretty dizzying to read, and there were plenty of moments that made me laugh – as well as times I had no clue what was going on or where we were. Mrs Appleby’s determined forthrightness, and total absence of anything resembling etiquette or regard for others, made her an enjoyably eccentric protagonist to spend time with. She would be a nightmare in real life, but some of the best protagonists would be.

I think I’ll re-read one day and see if I can work out what’s going on a bit better. But it’s great fun and very unusual – not quite consistent enough to warrant becoming a classic, but a tour de force that may have influences of Delafield, or even Comyns, but ends up being its own strange little thing.