1912

A Bachelor’s Comedy by J.E. Buckrose

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After I enjoyed J.E. Buckrose’s novel The Privet Hedge, my friends Kirsty and Paul bought me a few other of her novels. She’s one of those writers who could so easily be a Persephone or a Virago, but has yet to be rediscovered. I’m hoping to keep reading and find one that could be good enough for the British Library Women Writers series – or, rather, which fits all the criteria. Because I think A Bachelor’s Comedy (1912) is really good, but the protagonist is a man so it doesn’t fit the Women Writers series.

Here’s how it opens…

This was no comedy to those most concerned, of course, for comedy is like happiness – directly a person knows he is in it, he is out of it. Tragedy, on the other hand, can only touch those who do not take themselves seriously enough.

No man, however, could take himself more seriously than did the Reverend Andrew Deane as he travelled down alone in a third-class railway carriage to his new living of Gaythorpe-on-the-Marsh.

You might need to dispense with some of the stereotypes that come into your mind straight away. Reverend Andrew is not some white-haired, kindly old man – he is fresh from theological training, in his 20s, and quite unsure how to take up his position leading a rural parish. At the same time, he has a certain bullishness. He doesn’t want to show weakness to this new flock, and is keen to get their respect as soon as possible. No more being called ‘Andy’ by people who can’t see him as a proper, responsible grown up.

One of the first things he wants to do is fire the gardener, on the advice of the churchwarden who gives him a lift from the railway station.

“Those Petches are none of ’em models. They don’t seem to know when they’re speaking the truth and when they aren’t. And young Sam drinks a bit too. No, I can’t really advise you to keep him on.”

“I shall certainly not do so after what you tell me,” said the new Vicar, sitting very erect. “I have the strongest feelings about the households of the clergy – they should be above reproach.”

Of course, these fine resolves don’t hold up when Reverend Andrew is faced with the Petches themselves. Sam Petch is one of my favourite characters in the novel. The churchwarden’s assessment is accurate, and Petch doesn’t think twice about lying if it will get him out of trouble – is that alcohol on his breath, or is it that his coat has been cleaned with spirits? – but is affable and generous in his turn. He is prepared to respect and help Reverend Andrew where he can, and his deceit and laziness don’t seem to factor into his own interpretation of the equation. Reverend Andrew tries to get Sam Petch to give up alcohol by making a pact to give up his favourite thing in return – butter. This has the effect of spreading rumours around the village that the new vicar is eccentric… and Sam doesn’t really think beer counts as alcohol, so doesn’t have much effect on the gardener.

Reverend Andrew often finds that his ideals aren’t born out by the real life of a parish priest. There are some funny moments – such as his bidding for an ornately ugly sideboard that his housekeeper has to sell, intending to give it as a present. It won’t fit in her new, smaller home, so he reluctantly ends up having to have it in ‘safe keeping’ for her. Buckrose is very good at finding the genuine emotion of silly moments like this. In a Wodehouse novel, it would be a sprightly knockabout moment. In A Bachelor’s Comedy, it is certainly amusing, but we also feel the pathos of the situation – and the awkward frustration that a good deed has not gone quite to plan.

At the auction, Reverend Andrew was almost outbid for the sideboard by a young woman – who later turns out to be a local called Miss Elizabeth Atterton. It is instantly obvious that they will fall in love… and, of course, the course of true love never did run smooth. Not least because everyone expects her to marry another man in the village, including the man himself.

As I wrote in my thoughts about The Privet Hedge, I think Buckrose is more enjoyable and interesting when she is talking about village life and all its myriad relationships than when she is writing about romance. But it’s also true that I tend to find romantic storylines a bit tedious in general. I certainly enjoyed Reverend Andrew’s enamoration with Elizabeth to be more engaging than the love affair in The Privet Hedge, but I still think it was less engaging than all the rest of the book. (Though, at the same time, I was cheering them on as the novel drew to a close.)

What I’m trying to say is – Buckrose is fresh and witty when she writes about shirking workers, gossipy neighbours who flit comfortably between friend and nemesis, chaotic village events, and all the other things that make up the eternal patchwork of village life. She is perfectly capable when writing about romantic love, but less original and less vibrant. Though it is a nice change for a vicar to be a feasible romantic hero in a novel – and, indeed, unusual for a vicar to be a hero at all, and one who doesn’t fall into any stereotypes. Some of the sweetest moments were when he thought back across the centuries to a previous incumbent, also a bachelor, and considered him a brother.

Overall, this is a real delight of the sort of well-written, amusing domestic novel that is often being rediscovered. Maybe J.E. Buckrose will be the next rediscovery, and I’m glad to have more of her books on my shelves to try.

The Green Overcoat by Hilaire Belloc

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Like many of us, I suspect, the name ‘Hilaire Belloc’ was always associated in my head with characters like Matilda, who lied and burned to death, and Jim, who ran away from his nurse and got eaten by a lion. These spoofs of moralistic stories for children have outlasted the things they were spoofing, and I remember enjoying a cartoon of it as a child. It’s also where most people hear about Arthur Wing Pinero and his very-interesting-play nowadays.

Incidentally, in one group of friends we use ‘belloc’ as shorthand for ‘hilarious’.

Well, nine years ago I bought The Green Overcoat (1912), to find out a bit more about Belloc’s other writing, and now I’ve finally read it. The main character is Professor Higginson, a psychologist described thus:

He was a tall, thin man, exceedingly shy and nervous, with weary, print-worn eyes, which nearly always looked a little pained, and were generally turned uneasily towards the ground. He did not dress carefully. He was not young. He had a trick of keeping both hands in his trouser pockets. He stopped somewhat at the shoulders, and wore a long, grey beard. He was a bachelor, naturally affectionate by disposition, but capable of savagery when provoked by terror. His feet were exceedingly large, and his mind nearly always occupied by the subject which he professed.

He is leaving an event when he discovers it is pouring with rain and he hasn’t brought a coat. He decides to borrow another coat on the rack, intending to return it the next day – it is a very distinctive green overcoat, and he doesn’t know its owner. What’s the worst that can happen?

Well, as it turns out, he gets kidnapped! The overcoat had misidentified him.

This is only the beginning of the bizarre chain of events that happen because Professor Higginson borrowed the coat. All of them follow relatively convincingly after the first, only slightly heightening probability. Truth be told, I expected them to be a little more surreal than they are, and there are periods of the novel where Belloc seems almost deliberately to be avoiding the more extreme things that could have happened.

In terms of tone, it’s a comic novel but with a much lighter touch than I’d expected. That is, Higginson’s distress at being kidnapped is real rather than written for laughs – the humour comes from the absurdity of the situation. And Professor Higginson is a likeable main character, having the right mix of nervousness and ultimate determination to make him empathetic. These sorts of things rely on the reader thinking they might have made the same choices, and there is no cruelty at his expense from the novelist, in the way that Waugh does when his affable characters experience misfortune.

Ultimately, I think I’d have liked the novel more if it had been a bit more heightened – closer to Saki, perhaps. As it is, it’s a fun read that doesn’t quite live up to its potential, but good to know more about Belloc than I did before.

Alexander’s Bridge by Willa Cather

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Willa Cather has definitely been on my list of authors I’m stockpiling rather than reading – so I decided to rectify that a little. I picked up one with a name in it, mais naturallement, but it also turned out to be her first novel – Alexander’s Bridge from 1912. She apparently disowned it later in life, but I thought it was rather good.

The Alexander of the title is Bartley Alexander, an engineer who has specialised in bridges and secured a great deal of money and renown with his ambitious designs. We first see him through the eyes of a man who has known him since he was a boy, Professor Wilson, and is now visiting Alexander and his wife in their Boston home. Mrs Alexander is intelligent, warm and conscious of having made the choice to live in her husband’s shadow. I found Mrs Alexander the most intriguing character in the novel, and would have loved to spend more time with her. Cather is so good at memory and a feeling that is not quite regret, but wondering how life could have been different. But with a romanticism that has not been dimmed by this:

“The bridges into the future—I often say that to myself. Bartley’s bridges always seem to me like that. Have you ever seen his first suspension bridge in Canada, the one he was doing when I first knew him? I hope you will see it sometime. We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh when I tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest river, with mists and clouds always battling about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb hanging in the sky. It really was a bridge into the future. You have only to look at it to feel that it meant the beginning of a great career. But I have a photograph of it here.” She drew a portfolio from behind a bookcase. “And there, you see, on the hill, is my aunt’s house.”

But Alexander isn’t just hanging around in Boston. He works in London regularly, and there he meets again a woman he used to romance… and picks up where he left off.

I found Cather rather less convincing in this part of the novella, and it doesn’t help that I find tales of adultery rather dull on the whole. She is still an excellent writer, but there felt like there was less truth and sincerity in these sections. Maybe that was why she wanted to disown it later. They’re not terrible pages, but they contrast poorly with how good she is elsewhere.

The novella ends with a very effective climax, beautifully described – and based on a real event from the news, though I don’t think Cather drew the characters from life outside this moment. I really enjoyed reading it and it’s given me a keenness to return to Cather’s portraits of small-town American life again before too long. A Lost Lady is better, but there is enough here for me to relish.

Mrs Ames by E.F. Benson

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Mrs Ames (1912) by E.F. Benson has been on my shelves since 2010 – indeed, it is the final book from the two batches of Bloomsbury Group reprints that I had to read. These reprints are renowned round these parts for including Miss Hargreaves (and me quoted on the back!) and they were the best thing to happen in publishing for ages. But I guess they didn’t sell as well as had been hoped, so we only got two batches and ten books in total. All of ’em wonderful!

And I’m happy to add Mrs Ames to that number now. I’ve read quite a few Benson novels including, of course, the Mapp and Lucia series, and the setting will come as no surprise to those who like him. Yep, it’s upper-middle-class people squabbling in a small community. Doubtless said community (Riseborough) has various people who aren’t upper crust, but we don’t care about them. We care about Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans, and (to a lesser extent) their male relatives. And we are introduced to the community through Mr and Mrs Altham, who are keen gossips, though they wouldn’t use the word. I did enjoy that this married couple seem to delight equally in observing and talking about their neighbours – even if they have to cover it with a veneer of pretending they discover things by accident.

Mrs Ames is the accepted leader of the village. She sets the trends for the community, whether that be her outfits, her dinner parties, or her printed menu cards (little do the others know that she found them ready printed, and has been ordering food to match). She has an earnest son at Oxford who is keen to tell everyone that he’s an atheist, and a husband who is ten years her junior. The husband and the son have something in common – they’re both attracted to Mrs Evans. She is a recent addition to the village, with a charming husband and a willingness to accept the flirtations of others. She is also casually angling to be top dog of Riseborough… can Mrs Ames defend her position and her marriage?

Benson is in usual witty form as he documents the rivalries in the village, and we spend much of the novel not taking these would-be adulterers particularly seriously. Or, rather, there are other things that are more important – like new age treatments, how to one-up each other at dinner, and which Shakespearean character they can appropriately dress as for a costume ball. Here’s a fun bit on Mrs Ames addressing her advancing years:

Mrs Ames might or might not have been run down when she left Riseborough the following week, but nothing can be more certain than that she was considerably braced up seven days. The delicious freshness of winds off the North Sea, tempering the heat of brilliant summer suns, may have had something to do with it, and she certainly had more colour in her face than was usual with her, which was the legitimate effect of the felicitous weather. There was more colour in her hair also, and though that, no doubt, was a perfectly legitimate effect too, being produced by purely natural means, as the label on the bottle stated, the sun and wind were not accountable for this embellishment.

In early-to-mid Benson, he often throws in the serious among the trivial. Rather late in the day, the novel becomes (albeit briefly) about women’s suffrage, and there are sections of impassioned writing about women’s rights that are entirely straight-faced. (And, of course, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be – but it’s tonally a bit jarring.) He also aims for some emotional heights that he hasn’t quite earned, given the enjoyable triviality of the rest of the novel. I always think Benson found his firmest ground when he stopped trying to have emotionally climactic moments. Mrs Ames and Mrs Evans are good rivals, but they are only a foretaste of what he would achieve with Mapp and Lucia.

I have yet to read a Benson that was a dud, nor one that was a particular outlier in terms of the society, style, and content. Mrs Ames is every bit as enjoyable as the bulk of the others and, if it isn’t quite Benson at his absolute peak, it’s very good. Vale, Bloomsbury Group reprints!

 

A few little reviews…

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It has come to my notice that it is December, and there are only 27 days left this year.  I have almost 20 reviews to write for A Century of Books… oops, didn’t work this out very well, did I?  (Well, I still have 10 books to read – but I have 4 of them on the go already.)  So I’m going to rush through five of them today – books that, for one reason or another, I didn’t want to write whole posts about.  But do still free to comment on them!

Daddy Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster
An orphaned girl is given a scholarship by a mysterious, anonymous man – she has only seen his back – and one of the conditions is that she must write updates to him, without getting any replies.  She nicknames him Daddy Long-Legs.  Can you guess what happens?  Well, I shan’t give away the ending.  I was mostly surprised at how modern this children’s book felt, despite being a hundred years old – a lot of it would have been at home in a Jacqueline Wilson story.  I enjoyed it, but did find it a little creepy, and rather repetitive, but these are probably signs of not having read it when I was the target age.

Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he is an enormous bug.  Which is going to make his job as a salesman somewhat difficult.  The reason I’m not giving this novella/short story its own review is that I don’t feel I have anything new to say about it.  Kafka is famed for his matter-of-fact approach to the surreality in this story, and rightly so.  What surprised me here was how middlebrow it all felt.  It is definitely comparable to David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox – which actually seems to have greater pretensions to literariness.

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Another one which surprised me – I’d always heard that Marie Stopes started a sexual revolution in the UK, offering knowledge about sex to the everywoman for the first time.  Turns out she is much more conservative, and less revelatory, than a lot of the other guides written around the same time, and earlier.  I read these guides for my current DPhil chapter, by the way – my favourite so far being the person who argued that sexual intercourse and reproduction were acceptable as separate impulses, because protozoa separated them.  Sure, why not?  (I wonder if I’ve just made all sorts of inappropriate search terms for this blog now…)

Miss Hargreaves: the play (1952) by Frank Hargreaves
This is something of a cheat, since it was never published – but it was performed, with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role.  Tanya tipped me off that copies of all performed plays were in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives in the British Library – so I had the great privilege and pleasure of reading the play, with Baker’s own penned changes.  It’s pretty similar to the novel, only with the action restricted to a few settings.  Such fun!

V. Sackville West (1973) by Michael Stevens
I’m a sucker for a short biography, and I hadn’t read one of VSW before, so I gave this one a whirl.  It’s a critical biography, so Stevens discusses and analyses the work while giving an outline of VSW’s life.  About halfway through I thought, “this feels way too much like a doctoral dissertation.”  Turns out it was a doctoral dissertation.  I think I’ll be turning to a more charismatic writer for my next biography of Vita, as this one was rather prosaic and charmless, although very thoroughly researched.

Right, well that’s five down!  How are the other Century of Bookers getting on?