Storm Bird by Mollie Panter-Downes – #1929Club

For years, the only novel by Mollie Panter-Downes that was available was her last – One Fine Day – which is also her masterpiece. By comparison, her earlier novels were extremely scarce. The British Library Women Writers series has reprinted My Husband Simon, and there must be question marks out there about her others. Are they worth reprinting? Well, I am in the fortunate position of owning all her novels, and Storm Bird happens to be a perfect candidate for the 1929 Club.

I was quite surprised when the main character of Storm Bird turned out to be a man who has recently been widowed. Martin Thorpe is old for 1929, though wouldn’t be considered so now – in his sixties. Florence is the wife who has recently died, and she immediately fades into the background. We don’t learn a lot about her along the way, and it seems that Martin began forgetting her long before she died. For the most part, the narrative isn’t particularly interested in her either, but I did think this passage was beautifully done:

It was a little cruel that when Martin Thorpe thought of his dead wife it was only as a woman who had made the last twenty-five years extraordinarily comfortable, for she had been a creature of quite a few memorable moments and much talent for a sturdy kind of companionship. Although she had never understood him, he had loved her deeply, yet when he tried to conjure up her fine dusky looks he found only a blurred impression of good food and a quiet skill in handling servants. Her ringing laugh was becoming increasingly difficult to remember, though the culinary triumphs of her dinners were as vivid in his mind as ever. He could even recall the clothes she wore better than the body which had once turned his feet from Mexico to Broad Street. Plunging into the chilly waters of death, she had left surprisingly few and trivial garments on the bank.

Florence’s real purpose is to have provided Martin with a daughter, Leslie, now an adult and rather dependent on her father financially and socially. We are not far into the novel when Martin spots Sara across the room at a party that is too bohemian and self-congratulatory for his liking. She is young and striking, and Martin is struck.

He stopped in the middle of his talk to ask her with startling suddenness how old she was. She told him ‘twenty-four’. He stared at the years separating them, and thought how hot, dusty, and jaded he must seem to her, glowing with that magic which he envied with an envy almost like hate.

The reader can see what is coming from the outset, though I have to admit I was rather hoping it wouldn’t. Perhaps there are good relationships in real life with around a 40-year age gap, but they just seem icky on the page. To me, at least. There is something so uncomfortable about an old man romancing a young woman, particularly with this wealth imbalance. Sara has been an artists’ model to make money, and her nude form can be found in paintings in exhibitions and homes. Martin is wealthy in a way that means non-wealth has barely appeared on his radar.

The marriage of Martin and Sara is dealt with cleverly by Panter-Downes. We don’t see much of the development of the relationship. It is sprung on us with suddenness – in the same way that it is sprung on Martin’s daughter Leslie. Unsurprisingly, she is not particular won over by the idea. If the reader is reacting the same, then one line of dialogue might be intended to chastise us:

“If only she wasn’t so young! That’s what makes it -“

“If only,” said her father softly, “your objections weren’t so distressingly conventional.”

After this, it’s a novel about what happens when two people from different worlds marry, with clearly few people on their side. One of the things I found interesting about it, as so often in club years, is how certain societal trends are considered to be at an extreme – when we know, from our 21st-century vantage, that it was simply the tip of the ice-berg. In this instance, I’m thinking about this line:

Divorce was so easy in these days; all her friends slipped in and out of marriage as though it were a shoe which pinched here or was too loose there.

As you’ll have seen from some of these lines, I think Panter-Downes’ writing is often very good in Storm Bird. You can certainly see signs of the observational, detailed prose writer she’d become. I think where the novel falls down a little is in character and plot. It often feels quite cartoonish, or derived from melodramas and penny romances. That is to say, people behave like characters in a book, rather than people.

I looked up how old Panter-Downes was when she wrote this – 22. About the age of Sara, but choosing to focalise the novel through Martin. And what does a 22-year-old know about being widowed after a long marriage? It’s clear that, at this stage of her writing career, Panter-Downes was learning from books rather than from life. And it shows. There is no psychological depth to Storm Bird; it is more histrionic than moving.

It’s interesting as a way of seeing what Panter-Downes would become – and only two years later she would write a rather better book in My Husband Simon, perhaps because it is so clearly autobiographical. In Storm Bird, she was trying to put herself into another life – as great writers always have – but simply wasn’t good enough to that yet.