1908

Crossriggs by Jane & Mary Findlater

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I read a review of Crossriggs (1908) by Jane and Mary Findlater back in my early days of blogging, and I now have no idea where – but I bought it in 2008, and it’s only taken me twelve years to take it off my Virago Modern Classics shelves and finally read it. And I loved it! (I have no idea how two authors go about writing a book together, so I’m going to quietly ignore that element of it. If anybody has any insight, do share.)

The novel is about the small Scottish village Crossriggs, which only has a handful of families, most of whom have known each other forever and can date back their family in the area through several generations.

We made at Crossriggs a right little society within a very small circle. True, the village was only an hour by train from a capital city; but our excursions there, and our returns, only made our independence the more marked. Crossriggs was no suburb – owed none of its life or interest to another place. Edinburgh was our shopping centre; some of us had business, and all of us had relatives there; our surgeons and our boot-makers lived there; but socially, Crossriggs hugged itself in a proud isolation from ‘town’. We didn’t want it; of course ‘town’ would never have believed that, but it is true all the same, and although the Scottish capital is at all seasons swept by sufficiently bracing airs, one of our customs was to draw a deep breath on alighting from the train at our own station, and remark with satisfaction, “How good the air tastes after being in town!”

Our heroine is Alexandra Hope, commonly Alex, who is a clever, witty, impetuous young woman living with a kind, unworldly father (‘Old Hopeful’) who is terrible at keeping money and excellent at having new interests and schemes. He is a fruitarian, and is usually to be found trying to get unsuspecting locals to try various vegetable pastes that he eats instead of proper meals. I loved him – think the kindness of Anthony Trollope’s Septimus Harding and the absent-mindedness of Mr Pim from A.A. Milne’s Mr Pim Passes By, rather than the self-centred eccentricity of Mr Woodhouse in Emma. He has a childlike wonder and delight in the world, and an equally childlike inability to manage responsibility and duty.

Alex tolerates him but has to do something to help the family finances – particularly when her widowed sister returns from living abroad, bringing five children with her. She refuses the help of Mr Maitland – a local man of some renown, who has moderate fame and riches, and a wife that nobody is particularly fond of. Some of my favourite scenes in the novel are when he is dealing bluffly with Alex, trying to educate or reason with her, while clearly very fond of her and a little in awe of her. There is something of the Emma/Knightley relationship.

Instead of his money, she starts reading for a local Admiral, whose sight is not up to reading for himself. And he has a smooth, handsome grandson in tow.

Crossriggs felt a lot like an Austen heroine in a Gaskell novel to me – all update a little for the Edwardian period. (In the writing, that is; it is set in the late-Victorian period). Alex is in the same mould as Elizabeth Bennett – very lovable and quite flawed. And not at all like the cover pic on the Virago Modern Classic, which I think is a rare poor choice from them. The story of romance is not simple, as there are a range of male candidates and none of them are quite suitable. But, like Austen’s novels, this is much more a book about the heroine’s development and dawning self-understanding than it is about romance.

I shan’t spoil the ending, but the plot develops in a way I didn’t at all expect – and very satisfyingly. I think I originally bought the novel because it was described as a comedy – well, it’s more a comedy of manners. Smiles rather than laughs, and not without sensationally tragic moments that are of their time, but a wonder set of characters and an enchantingly engaging setting. Perhaps Alex’s similarity to Austen heroines isn’t entirely accidental, but the novel succeeds in being entirely its own thing, however much it owes to a history of sister novelists.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“I could just say – find a copy, read it!” – HeavenAli

“It’s a good story, but I thought that Alex was a bit dense most of the time” – A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore

“I did love it. I can’t say that it’s a great book, but it is a lovely period piece.” – Beyond Eden Rock

Buried Alive by Arnold Bennett

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Another audiobook I’ve been listening to is Arnold Bennett’s 1908 novel Buried Alive, courtesy of Librivox (the free audiobook site). Each work is read by one or more volunteers, so the quality of the reader is pretty variable, but I will now be listening to more or less anything Simon Evers reads. He’s extraordinarily good – and I really enjoyed listening to Buried Alive.

If the title is bringing up your worst nightmare, then don’t worry – nobody is literally buried alive in the book. But it almost happens to the noted artist (and recluse) Priam Farll. His work is known and loved throughout the nation, but he has kept his face out of the press and doesn’t interact with the public. Not because he is obstreperous – he is simply very shy. And this is the sort of premise that leads almost inevitably to mistaken identity, isn’t it? When his valet, Henry Leek, suddenly dies – having taken ill to Farll’s own bed – it is natural that the policeman might believe that Farll has died. Partly out of awkwardness, partly seeing an opportunity to avoid the public glare, Farll goes along with it.

Things get more complicated when he has to leave his own home quickly, as it (and all his wealth) has been distributed in his will – some to a distant relative, but a large chunk to build a picture gallery in his honour. Which all feels a bit of a poor decision when he discovers he only has a few pounds to his name (and those few pounds are more than he was expecting Mr Leek to possess… he turns out to have been a bit of a ne’erdowell). The buried bit? Well, ‘Farll’ – actually Leek – is buried in Westminster Abbey.

We watch Farll try to live an ordinary life, having never been unwealthy – and witness the nation’s apparent response to his death. Bennett is very funny about this, even while we recognise the tumult of emotions that come with such an unusual experience.

Special large type! Titles stretching across two columns! Black borders round the pages! “Death of England’s greatest painter.” “Sudden death of Priam Farll.” “Sad death of a great genius.” “Puzzling career prematurely closed.” “Europe in mourning.” “Irreparable loss to the world’s art.” “It is with the most profound regret.” “Our readers will be shocked.” “The news will come as a personal blow to every lover of great painting.” So the papers went on, outvying each other in enthusiastic grief.

He ceased to be careless and condescending to them. The skin crept along his spine. There he lay, solitary, under the crimson glow, locked in his castle, human, with the outward semblance of a man like other men, and yet the cities of Europe were weeping for him. He heard them weeping. Every lover of great painting was under a sense of personal bereavement. The very voice of the world was hushed. After all, it was something to have done your best; after all, good stuff was appreciated by the mass of the race. The phenomena presented by the evening papers was certainly prodigious, and prodigiously affecting. Mankind was unpleasantly stunned by the report of his decease. He forgot that Mrs. Challice, for instance, had perfectly succeeded in hiding her grief for the irreparable loss, and that her questions about Priam Farll had been almost perfunctory. He forgot that he had witnessed absolutely no sign of overwhelming sorrow, or of any degree of sorrow, in the thoroughfares of the teeming capital, and that the hotels did not resound to sobbing. He knew only that all Europe was in mourning!

Isn’t that great? It’s passages like that, where Bennett shows his firm hold of irony, dry humour, and an underlying poignancy that show how Virginia Woolf was too sweeping in her condemnation of him. He is not a pompous writer at all, at least not in Buried Alive – it’s delicious stuff.

Wonderful in rather a different way is Alice. By a series of unlikely coincidences, which we will allow him, Farll ends up meeting Alice – whom Leek had arranged to marry. And, by a further series of unlikely steps, they do end up married. I shan’t spoil any more of the plot, but I had to talk about Alice. She is extremely fond of Farll, but completely no-nonsense. The world can no longer surprise her, and she takes everything in her stride – while also being kind and affectionate, and tolerant of her husband’s shyness and eccentricities. She’s a brilliant character, entirely lovable and mildly intimidating. Simon Evers voices her dialogue perfectly, but I think I’d have loved her even without that. Here she is on Farll’s legacy going towards a picture gallery:

“I call it just silly. It isn’t as if there wasn’t enough picture-galleries already. When what there are are so full that you can’t get in–then it will be time enough to think about fresh ones. I’ve been to the National Gallery twice, and upon my word I was almost the only person there! And it’s free too! People don’t want picture-galleries. If they did they’d go. Who ever saw a public-house empty, or Peter Robinson’s? And you have to pay there! Silly, I call it! Why couldn’t he have left his money to you, or at any rate to the hospitals or something of that? No, it isn’t silly. It’s scandalous! It ought to be stopped!”

This is the fourth book I’ve read by Bennett, and the second novel. Since Evers has narrated quite a few of his novels, I think I’ll be listening to quite a few more – hopefully they’re all as fun as this one was.

The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett

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The Old Wive's TaleIt’s not long since I read my first book by Arnold Bennett – his detailed advice about how to acquire literary taste – and all of a sudden I’ve read two. I’ve voracious right now.

Actually, The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) – which I have been erroneously calling The Old Wife’s Tale since forever – was the choice of somebody at my book group. I was quite enthusiastic to read a Bennett novel because of what a significant name he was in the early 20th century, and only a little less enthusiastic when I saw that it was over 600 pages of quite small font. And, boy, does he fill those pages. (In a great way, for the most part.)

Bennett’s thing is detail. I kind of knew that in advance, from Virginia Woolf’s famous essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown‘ – which I can’t now resist quoting, because it does set you up for the level that Bennett goes to:

He, indeed, would observe every detail with immense care. He would notice the advertisements; the pictures of Swanage and Portsmouth; the way in which the cushion bulged between the buttons; how Mrs. Brown wore a brooch which had cost three‐and‐ten‐three at Whitworth’s bazaar; and had mended both gloves—indeed the thumb of the left‐hand glove had been replaced. And he would observe, at length, how this was the non‐stop train from Windsor which calls at Richmond for the convenience of middle‐class residents, who can afford to go to the theatre but have not reached the social rank which can afford motor‐cars, though it is true, there are occasions (he would tell us what), when they hire them from a company (he would tell us which).

Now, Woolf was being rather snide about this. With her impressionistic style, it was inevitable that she would look down on this sort of Edwardian writing; she was of the generation that would break away from it. Fine. But I actually found I rather loved being immersed in this detail. The focus of it is two ordinary women: sisters, Constance and Sophia. They live in a house adjoining a shop run by their father, on a square in an ordinary Staffordshire town. During this upbringing, their whole lives are in these rooms and this town. They know everybody; everybody knows them. It is emphatically a novel of English life (at least at this juncture), and Bennett spares not the pen in writing about it:

Constance and Sophia, busy with the intense preoccupations of youth, recked not of such matters. They were surrounded by the county. On every side the fields and moors of Staffordshire, intersected by roads and lanes, railways, watercourses and telegraph-lines, patterned by hedges, ornamented and made respectable by halls and genteel parks, enlivened by villages at the intersections, and warmly surveyed by the sun, spread out undulating. And trains were rushing round curves in deep cuttings, and carts and waggons trotting and jingling on the yellow roads, and long, narrow boats passing in a leisure majestic and infinite over the surface of the stolid canals; the rivers had only themselves to support, for Staffordshire rivers have remained virgin of keels to this day. One could imagine the messages concerning prices, sudden death, and horses, in their flight through the wires under the feet of birds.

In this world, Bennett describes every detail of their life. Such detail that it seems impossible to summarise, and also someone seems impossible that it could be fiction. Were we only to hear about (say) the death of their father, their marriages, their turmoils and victories, then it would feel plotted. As it is, we hear about the way in which they walk from room to room, the customers whom the assistants respect and those for whom they will not stand up, the manner of the tea tray and the teacups. Everything is here; every moment.

There are, however, a few moments of major event in the novel – even of sensation. Somehow this doesn’t feel ill-measured alongside the tone of Bennett’s writing, though by rights it should – perhaps the occasional extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary is simply another element of realism. One I shan’t mention, but is very interestingly used. The first such moment is Sophia absconding.

She runs off with a local charmer – and leaves the pages of the novel maybe only a sixth of the way through (so I thought). We are left to watch Constance grow older, marry, have a son, and continue to live next to the shop. It was a beautifully told story – the emotions Bennett describes of mother, daughter, sister, and wife seem (to one who is admittedly none of these things) to be perfectly judged and very effectively portrayed. All of it feels real.

Bennett – I did not realise beforehand – is very amusing. In the hands of Hardy, The Old Wives’ Tale would be gut-wrenching. This is not a comic novel, but without the levity of his style, it would have become a tragedy. Constance and Sophia both suffer a fair amount, and yet Bennett doesn’t leave the reader miserable. And, of course, I forgot to note down any examples. He doesn’t go for bon mots or witticisms, per se, but takes an authorial step back to tease or raise an eyebrow at his characters. It’s wonderful, and made me laugh out loud a few times – the only instance I can find isn’t the finest, but it made me laugh. Mr Povey is shop manager, and his way with labels is not to be underestimated: ‘It is not too much to say that Mr Povey, to whom heaven had granted a minimum share of imagination, had nevertheless discovered his little parcel of imagination in the recesses of being, and brought it effectively to bear on tickets’.

I have said little of the second half of the novel. And that is because I would have advised to Bennett that he cut it altogether. Around the halfway mark, we are flung back to the moment Sophia departed the novel – and we follow her instead. We abandon the ageing Constance in favour of the once-again-young Sophia, and see her life in Paris. As a separate novel, it would be quite interesting – and the contrast between the sisters’ destinies is doubtless well orchestrated – but I should have much preferred it to be summarised in a page or two. I don’t think I have much patience with novels which cover the same timespan more than once, and I certainly prefer a short novel to a long one – had The Old Wive’s Tale *actually* been The Old Wife’s Tale and only looked at Constance’s life, I should have liked it all the more. (But I will concede that this opinion was not shared by anybody at book group, and thus I may well be in the minority.)

So, I shall certainly return to Bennett when I’m in the mood for this level of expert detail. That won’t be every week, nor yet every month, but it might be every year. I’m glad to have finally made the acquaintance of one of the most notable names of 20th-century writing – and to have realised something of his worth away from the unjustly negative reputation he might have been lumbered with.