Potterism by Rose Macaulay #1920Club

If I were thinking about my favourite authors, there’s a strong possibility that Rose Macaulay would be bubbling under on that list. While none of her novels are my absolute favourites, she is consistently very good. She’s now best known for The Towers of Trebizond and The World My Wilderness, I think, and I do really like those accomplished books – but I prefer her ironic comedies of the 1920s. She was very prolific at that time, and books like Crewe Train, Keeping Up Appearances, and Dangerous Ages are total delights. Indeed, Dangerous Ages is one of my choices for the British Library Women Writers series.

Potterism was Macaulay’s first book of the decade and was also her first bestseller – which, given the subtitle ‘A tragi-farcical tract’, might be rather unexpected. If it’s a tract at all, it’s a stab at popular journalism of the day – and, equally, a stab at those who opposed it.

The title comes from the name Potter. This Potter (later Lord something) is a newspaper proprietor and a straight-forward, kind, hard-working man who is somehow rather simple-minded while possessing great business acumen. In fact, let’s let Macaulay describe him:

Both commonplace and common was Mr Percy Potter (according to some standards), but clever, with immense patience, a saving sense of humour, and that imaginative vision without which no newspaper owner, financier, general, politician, poet, or criminal can be great. He was, in fact, greater than the twins would ever be, because he was not at odds with his material: he found such stuff as his dreams were made of ready to his hand, in the great heart of the public – that last place where the twins would have thought of looking.

He has made his money writing for a lower class of public who want their news given without affectation – his wife, a sillier version of him, does similar things for the popular novel reading public, under the name Leila Yorke. She was writing the sort of book that was extremely popular in the ’20s, and which perhaps we’ll hear more about as the week goes on.

[How like Macaulay to include ‘criminal’ there!] But the people who make up the term ‘Potterism’ are close to home – among them, the Potters’ children. His twins, mentioned in that quote,  Jane and Johnny are part of the Anti-Potterism League. The League is created by Oxbridge intellectual types who despise the general public and the humbug that is handed to them. To the minds of Jane and Johnny, despising Potterism has nothing to do with the affection for their father – and he is generous enough to find it amusing rather than appalling. Everybody goes through that phase, perhaps.

Macaulay is excellent at making fun of everyone at the same time. There are more tragic characters, like one of the Potters’ other child, Clare, who is not clever or contented. But mostly, we see youthful arrogance and close-minded, middle-class settling for mediocrity, and doses of hypocrisy all on much of an even playing field. I certainly didn’t ever get the impression that Macaulay was siding strongly with anybody, or writing to proclaim the truth of one viewpoint against the falseness of another. Rather, she is looking around at the highbrow vs middlebrow battles of the period – and finding everyone absurd.

Among many impressive things in this impressive novel is that way that it segues into something of a murder mystery, or at least a death mystery, without seeming inconsistent. The only thing that does threaten the tone of the novel is that Macaulay gives different sections to different narrators, with the first and last of the five sections being in the third person. It’s a technique that is used a lot now, but I think Potterism would have been a better novel had it all been in the third person – not least because two of the three narrators are fairly negligible members of the Anti-Potterism League, and the section narrated by ‘Leila Yorke’ is mainly an exercise in Macaulay having fun at the expense of a certain sort of over-dramatic person. Macaulay’s narrative voice is the most amusing and the most satisfying, and I didn’t want to lose it.

A very strong start to the 1920 Club, and a reminder that I must read more of the Macaulay novels on my shelves – and hunt for those that remain elusive. And, happy news, Potterism will be reprinted by Handheld Press later in the year – I certainly recommend getting hold of a copy.