1920

Two #1920Club Novels by E.M. Delafield

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E.M. Delafield was astonishingly prolific in the first few decades of the 20th century – she managed to write about 40 books in less than thirty years. And so there are quite a few years where two books appeared – since 1920 is one of those years, I decided to read ’em both. Tension and The Heel of Achilles both bear many traits of Delafield’s novels, and are recognisably from the same author, but they are also extremely different.

Tension

Apparently I read this in 2004, but I got to the end of it without remembering a single detail – and I’m glad I re-read it, because it’s brilliant. The main characters are Lady Rossiter and Sir Julian Rossiter, and when Delafield created them I suspect she had half an eye on Mr and Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice. They have very little fondness for each other, though Sir Julian usually restricts himself to silently laughing at Lady Rossiter’s nonsensical sayings and gossip. Where she differs from Mrs Bennet is that Lady R is also hypocritical and a little cruel – though she would always see it as doing her duty. That is one of the main tensions of Tension.

But all starts off very amusingly – here’s the opening of the novel:

“Auntie Iris has written a book!”

“A book!” echoed both auditors of the announcement, in keys varying between astonishment and dismay.

“Yes, and it’s going to be published, and put into a blue cover, and sold, and Auntie Iris is going to make heaps and heaps of money!”

“What is it to be called?” said Lady Rossiter rather gloomily, fixing an apprehensive eye on the exuberant niece of the authoress.

“It’s called ‘Why, Ben!’ and it’s a Story of the Sexes,” glibly quoted the young lady, unaware of the shock inflicted by this brazen announcement, delivered at the top of her squeaky, nine-year-old voice.

Could there be a better fake title than Why, Ben! – I love it, and all the comedy around how horrified everyone is by the idea of this book is glorious. Delafield might also have Austen in mind with her style in this novel – she does lots of sentences with the balance and irony of an Austen sentence, laughing at everyone involved and never saying quite everything – leaving the reader to fill in the gaps and thus feel on the side of the author.

The children (whom the Rossiters unite in loathing, though Lady R would not admit it openly) are neighbours, and the offspring of harassed, jovial Mark. Their mother is (whisper it) a ‘dypsomaniac’, shut away but very much not dead. And that is why Lady Rossiter takes an officious concern when a young woman moves to the area and starts working with Mark – because, surely, it is the same Miss Marchrose who once broke off an engagement when her fiance became disabled…

Delafield often enjoys poking fun at people who ‘Don’t want to gossip, but…’ – and sometimes she shows the dark side of it too. Tension is always an extremely funny book, particularly if you like dry, character-based, and dialogue-heavy comedy (which I definitely do), but it gets darker as it goes on. Lady Rossiter is ruthlessly determined to ruin Miss Marchrose, all in the name of protecting those around her and not wanting to gossip. She never does anything outright. She just quietly and subtly makes the situation impossible for Miss Marchrose. And Delafield is so clever at not making Lady Rossiter a deceitful character – she genuinely does believe she is doing what is right, and has an answer for every exasperated accusation Sir Julian makes. Which isn’t that many, because he follows the path of least resistance.

Delafield is brilliant when she unites comedy and tragedy, and I think Tension is one of her best books. It’s certainly stylised, but it’s a style I loved.

The Heel of Achilles

The Heel of Achilles was published the same year, and also republished as a Hutchinson’s ‘Pocket Library’ edition – but appearances are a bit deceptive because it is MUCH longer. The font is tiny in these pages. It’s a Bildungsroman about Lydia Raymond – whom we meet in the opening lines:

“I am an orphan,” reflected Lydia Raymond, with immense satisfaction.

She was a very intelligent little girl of twelve years old, and she remembered very well that when her father had died out in China, three years ago, it was her mother who had been the centre of attention and compassion. People had spoken about her poor dead father, and had praised him and pitied him, but their real attention had all been for the widow, who was there under their eyes, pathetic and sorrow-stricken. Lydia herself had been “poor little thing,” but Grandpapa and her aunts and uncle had all told her that it was her mother who must be thought of now, and she knew that they kept on saying to one another that “the child will be a comfort to poor Mary.” Her own individuality, which she felt so strongly, did not seem to count at all, and Lydia had, quite silently, resented that intensely, ever since she could remember anything at all.

She grows up with that Grandpapa and aunts and uncle – the dominating character is Grandpapa, though. He is selfish, brusque, and very weak even at the beginning of the novel – though, given how long he lives for, he must have only been about 60 when his age meant he needed to be assisted across the room. He certainly isn’t pleasant, but he takes an interest in Lydia and tries to coach her – chiefly, never to talk about herself, because people aren’t interested. Always let others talk about themselves. (He never really addresses what happens if both interlocutors are taking this approach…)

There are some funny interludes when she goes to stay with some boisterous, sporty cousins who classify anything sentimental, artistic, or even ordinarily sensible, as ‘nonsense’. Delafield sends them up brilliantly, along with Lydia’s confusion and resentment of the new world she is thrown into. She does much better at school, where her aptitude for maths apparently gets her all the friends – would that my school’s popularity system worked on maths and not sports!

This mathematical ability gets her a job doing accounts at a milliners when she leaves school, and we see her new world of a boarding house and a business, populated with its own mix of eccentrics, pathetic characters, and the odd sympathetic one.

Along the way, there’s a big jump of a decade or more, and we see the impact that a life of determined self-sacrifice has on Lydia’s family…

Delafield often returned to the idea that people who are always sacrificing themselves for others are a pain to be around. She does it very amusingly in some places (notably As Others Hear Us) and more poignantly in others – in The Heel of Achilles, it’s intended to be more poignant, I think. My problem with it is that Lydia’s self-sacrificial nature seems to come rather late in the day – the offshoot of the ‘don’t talk about yourself’ maxim, but perhaps not as thoroughly worked out a theme as it could be.

The Heel of Achilles is very good, but I think it should have been a third shorter. Delafield dwells for a long time in periods that don’t enhance the story much, and everything felt rather slow – in contract to Tension, which zips along and keeps momentum. It’s nowhere near as funny as Tension, nor is intended to be, though there are plenty of lines with that witty, ironical twist. It is, perhaps, the sort of novel to which Delafield returned most often – but, for my money, Tension is more successful.

Still, impressive that Delafield could turn her hands to two such different novels in 1920 – the main overriding theme being selfish women spoiling the lives of those around them…

The Master Man by Ruby M. Ayres – #1920Club

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Of course, the novels that we remember from 1920 probably aren’t the ones that most people were reading. Fitzgerald, Woolf and Mansfield’s stories, Wharton – all had their audience in their day, but they weren’t the bestsellers. That’s why I’m really pleased that Con read Ethel M. Dell and that’s why I decided to read The Master Man by Ruby M. Ayres.

Ayres is one of those names I came across a lot while researching popular fiction of the interwar period, but I hadn’t read any first hand (and had that in common with plenty of cultural commentators of the period). In a lovely little bookshop in St David’s, I picked up The Master Man – and it only took me a couple of hours to read.

From the off, let me say perhaps my favourite thing about this particular edition of the book. And that’s that the quote on the cover never happens. In case you can’t read it, it says ”You hate me? quite likely! it does not surprise me. Brute force? I confess it: but still – you were Kissed.” Besides a lamentable approach to capital letters, this quote also betrays the period’s fondness for sexual assault in literature, and brutes who are convinced to be more considerate by the sheer power of the woman’s English virtue. This was, after all, only a year after E. M. Hull’s tremendously successful novel The Sheik. But in The Master Man? Nothing even vaguely approaching this scene occurs. A section of the readership would certainly be disappointed.

The main character of The Master Man is Patricia – a spoilt, rich, unpleasant woman who has lived to the age of twenty-one with everything that money could buy. Except family and friendship. Her benefactor is Peter Rolf, the man who adopted her when she was seven, but has never shown her much affection. In the first of many rather unbelievable moments, Patricia can’t remember much at all from the first seven years of her life, including the family she came from.

As the novel opens, she is lounging about on the houseboat of Bernard Chesney, a man she thinks little of but might also marry, because he is rich and connected. Chesney’s servant is on to her, and gives her a few sharp words, at which she is very indignant. But she hasn’t got much time to be indignant, because, as the opening lines say…

When Peter Rolf died[,] Patricia was away from home staying with some people in a houseboat on the Thames.

It had been ideal weather for the river, hot and breathless, with wonderful starry nights, and it was an ideal evening when the telegram came summoning her home because Peter Rolf had inconsiderately died while she was away and spoilt a holiday which she had been thoroughly enjoying.

Patricia isn’t too bothered about the death of the only parent she’s ever known (because, again, she doesn’t remember anything about the first seven years of my life, though this is never directly acknowledged) – she’s just annoyed that her holiday is over. And even more annoyed when she realises… she’s been cut off without a penny. Peter Rolf has left all his money to the son that none of them have ever seen. And in a twist that would be quite clever if it hadn’t come so early in the novel… the son is Chesney’s servant! For no reason! This coincidence is never referred to again, but it was a fun surprise.

Having been brusque and masterly and rude when he first met her, Michael – for that is his name – immediately cares deeply about Patricia’s future. She continues to be petulant and unpleasant and refuses to take any of his money, insisting that she will support herself and/or stay with friends, neither of which prove to be true. And so they’re in a cat and mouse situation of him trying to help her and Patricia refusing to be helped from… pride? I guess?

It’s really unclear why Michael cares about her, because she is horrible, and it’s equally unclear why she won’t accept that help, having been very happy to live off other people for her whole life. There are one or two other twists that look a little like Ayres only thought of them as she was writing, and the ending is entirely predictable. The title has very little to do with the novel, which would have been more interesting if Michael had continued to treat Patricia a little rudely – as she deserves – rather than bending over backwards for her. He certainly wouldn’t dream of kissing her against her will, as per the cover.

So, yes, this novel was completely stupid and littered with stereotypical writing. Nobody ever laughs without ‘laughing mirthlessly’, for instance. But, you know what, I had a ball reading it. I imagine half of its 1920 audience took it deathly seriously, and the other half recognised it was total nonsense but easy to race through, and satisfyingly predictable in its ending. Ayres knew what she was doing, and did what was needed well – i.e. wrote something interesting enough to keep reading at break-neck speed, without ever letting logic, common sense, or human nature get in the way of a rattling story.

What Next? by Denis Mackail – #1920Club

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I promise not all of the authors I’ve chosen for the 1920 Club begin with ‘Mac’ – but I’ve been meaning to read a few more Denis Mackail novels that I’ve had around for a while. His name is probably familiar to you from Greenery Street, the sweet story of early married life that Persephone republished – but he was prolific and there are plenty of other novels to explore, though most of them are pretty difficult to find. What Next? was his first.

What Next? is set over the course of three days, and it’s rather a dizzying novel in terms of what happens and it terms of how it’s written. The hero, for want of a better word, is Jim. He’s a young, affable, wealthy, rather hopeless young man who is immersed in club life, spends his days doing little of value, and frequently proposes to a young woman called Mary who is very fond of him and refuses to take him seriously. In other words, they’re the sort of young pair familiar to any Edwardian reader of Punch, and who more or less survived the First World War as archetypes, slowly petering out in the decades to follow.

Jim continues to affable but very soon ceases to be wealthy – as the rich relative who had kept him living luxury dies, leaving behind a bankrupt and ruined company. Jim learns in the first pages of the novel that he has been left with practically no money, and must learn to economise. Which he does by going to his club and having dinner, and unloading his cares onto his manservant, Lush.

Lush proves not just to be good at serving drinks and listening – he is also something of a financial mastermind, and needs only capital in order to accumulate enormous riches. And it’s here that we come across the first of the many times that Mackail gives a character an enormously long, expository speech. Lush explains in great detail what he intends to do, but it’s the sort of detail that is more confusing than none – somehow still very abstract, and I left with no real clue what Lush intended to do to re-secure the riches. Luckily Jim seems to be convinced, and lends Lush his last remaining money to give it a go – and Lush disappears.

Jim believes that Lush has absconded with his cash – but no, of course not, he returns and has trebled it! He even explains how, in a long, expository speech – that doesn’t seem even remotely related to what he said he’d do in the first place. Never mind.

Around this point, the novel shifts into being much more about a road trip, unveiling a corrupt fellow, and reuniting Mary and Jim. There’s precious little connection between the first half and the second half – except a fondness for monologues that last several pages. It becomes a sort of romantic moral caper at the end, and the financial stuff that dominated the first half of the novel is quietly forgotten.

So, What Next? shows a great deal of writerly immaturity when it comes to plotting, structure, and exposition. Here’s the weird paradox – I really liked it. Mackail might be weak at those things here, and I’ve seen similar issues in novels he wrote nearly thirty years later, but what he’s so great at is tone. He is great at creating something sprightly, whimsical, joyful. There are hints of A.A. Milne’s ‘Rabbits’, or of a toned-down Wodehouse. Very much of its era, it’s the sort of atmosphere I lap up in a novel – and totally reflective of its era, as is befitting for a club readalong.

And I had to single out this bit to quote…

Of the literary contents of his not inconsiderable library he had a fair but by no means exhaustive knowledge, finding, as many have found, that a book which while still lying unbought and uncut in the monastic odour of a bookseller’s shop cannot be put down, has yet an unaccountable habit of losing its interest when removed to one’s own fireside; and having also fallen a victim to the weakness, only to be indulged in by the rich, which does so much to keep the literary world on its legs, of always ordering the whole of an author’s output whenever he had derived pleasure from a single example of it.

Potterism by Rose Macaulay #1920Club

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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.

In The Mountains by Elizabeth von Arnim

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It was Elizabeth von Arnim Reading Week a week or two ago, organised by some nice people on Facebook, and I took In The Mountains (1920) off the shelf. One of the things I wanted to do this year was read more of the unusual or rare books I’ve got, because it seems a shame that the excitement of finding them shouldn’t get the opportunity to be matched by the reading experience. In the Mountains is one of the harder E von A titles to find in an early edition – though print-on-demand options are there – but I was lucky enough to stumble across a copy in a little bookshop in Dunster. It taught me always to check the pocket editions sections, as it won’t always be Thackeray and Austen.

In the Mountains was initially published anonymously – suggesting, perhaps, that it’s more autobiographical than she could allow under her own name. But any fan of von Arnim’s who came across this novel couldn’t possibly have mistaken it for the work of anybody else – it bears many of the hallmarks of her writing, from various different genres.

The mountains of the question are in Switzerland – the English narrator has returned there after a gap that encompasses the war. She comes with grief and weariness. We are never truly told what the grief is, but the first part of the novel (all of which is told in diary entries) tells how the landscape and the solitude are beginning to cure her. It isn’t quite the vision of natural panacea seen in The Enchanted April, but it is certainly of that ilk. And presumably it was largely inspired by von Arnim’s own Swiss mountain home.

I enjoyed all of this, but I will admit that one of my least favourite of von Arnim’s characteristic narratives is the nature-idyll-description. I still like it a lot, but there are other moulds in which I rather prefer her writing. And, in In the Mountains, she turns from one to the other – the comic outsider.

Mrs Barnes and Mrs Jewks arrive – they are English widows, exhausted by the heat and looking for a pension to stay. While our unnamed narrator isn’t hosting anybody officially, she has had enough of the curing solitude and quite welcomes the company. We see them through the prism of the diary entries, as the narrator gets to know them – or, at least, gets to know Mrs Barnes. She’s a conservative woman, horrified by anything too personal and constantly worrying that her impromptu stay is costing her hostess too much money. No protest assures her, and von Arnim writes amusingly about the hostess having to give up readily-available and much-liked treats to pacify her. Mrs Barnes’ strong (kind but immensely forceful) character gradually dominates the whole group. Her sister just smiles and complies, the only sign of a different character being the wry, amused looks she occasionally shoots the narrator.

All day to-day I have emptied myself of any wishes of my own and tried to be the perfect hostess. I have given myself up to Mrs. Barnes, and on the walk I followed where she led, and I made no suggestions when paths crossed though I have secret passionate preferences in paths, and I rested on the exact spot she chose in spite of knowing there was a much prettier one just round the corner, and I joined with her in admiring a view I didn’t really like. In fact I merged myself in Mrs. Barnes, sitting by her on the mountain side in much the spirit of Wordsworth, when he sat by his cottage fire without ambition, hope or aim.

This was my favourite section of the novel. It was really amusing, and von Arnim draws the characters really well – the anxieties of hosting people one doesn’t know well, the exasperation of coping with well-meaning pains, and the gradual development of friendship. Because Mrs Jewks brings one or two unexpected secrets with her…

The final act is a little forced, but von Arnim often sprinkles a bit of fairy dust into her conclusions and it’s forgivable because it’s enjoyable. This is the tenth novel I’ve read by von Arnim, and while it doesn’t hit the top spot – that honour still belongs to Christopher and Columbus – I thought it was a lovely, slim introduction to many of the things that make von Arnim charming, witty, and with an undercurrent of topical commentary that prevents the mixture being too sweet.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“It is a nice book but rather an odd mix” – The Captive Reader

“It’s a little compromised by its structure, by the sharp change part-way through, by the need to come to an end where there should be not an end but simply a change.” – Fleur in Her World

“I loved reading it, and it has put me in the mood for a lot more Elizabeth Von Arnim” – HeavenAli

Our Women: Chapters on the Sex Discord by Arnold Bennett

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1920s women

You know who needs to comment on the role of women? It’s Arnold Bennett! In 1920! Look, obviously nobody is looking for a man’s opinion from nearly a century ago to help with contemporary debate – but I can’t resist this sort of glimpse back into the past. A bit like the Ursula Bloom book I talked about the other day, albeit a different sphere. And so, yes, my relaxing holiday reading started with Arnold B’s chapters on the sex discord. What, you didn’t see it at the airport in their 3-for-2?

Bennett proudly labels himself a feminist, which was rather a surprise to me (and a welcome surprise). His definition of ‘feminist’ definitely doesn’t match up to any 21st-century definition, but I daresay none of our definitions will find favour with 22nd-century feminists. We’ll leave some of his more controversial opinions for later…

A positive? He is a big fan of women having jobs. Yes, he does more or less think these should work around their domestic duties, but it’s… something? But he does rail against the current state of things, with women expected never to change their role at all, never earning money and yet having vital places to fill in civilised society. True, his vision of the far future is female pilots (IMAGINE), but he is at least thinking that things could be different from how the world is organised in 1920.

The first chapter is ‘The Perils of Writing about Women’, where he acknowledges potential minefields (and, incidentally, his own complete lack of knowledge of Havelock Ellis). ‘Change in Love’ and ‘The Abolition of Slavery’ follow on next, setting the scene for ways the world may change – and that women should be more appreciated for their contribution to that world. I doubt a 2017 author would throw around ‘slavery’ in the flippant way he does, but he’s doing his best.

Where things get super troubling – and thus, at the same time, super interesting from a reading-for-historical-interest angle – is the chapter ‘Are Men Superior to Women?’. Spoilers: Bennett thinks they are.

Some platitudes must now be uttered. The literature of the world can show at least fifty male poets greater than any woman poet. Indeed, the women poets who have reached even second rank are exceedingly few – perhaps not more than half a dozen. With the possible exception of Emily Bronte no woman novelist has yet produced a novel to equal the great novels of men. (One may be enthusiastic for Jane Austen without putting Pride and Prejudice in the same category with Anna Karenina or The Woodlanders.)

Firstly – who on earth would pick The Woodlanders as their ammunition in favour of Thomas Hardy?? Secondly – this is obviously something I don’t agree with, but when he goes on to ‘can anybody name a celebrated woman philosopher’ and so forth, the obvious argument is ‘well, women didn’t get a chance until quite recently’. He tries to rebut this, but pretty unconvincingly… it’s all rather a peculiar position to take, and not very coherently argued, and rather undermines other parts of the book. Still, this all works together to make it an interesting history piece.

At other times, he wrote things that would have been SO useful in my doctoral thesis. It’s a few years too late for me, but I had to highlight this for anybody who might want to write about spinster lit of the 1920s at any point…

I will not attempt to determine at what age an unmarried virgin begins to incur the terrible imputation of spinsterhood; it varies, being dependent on a lot of things, such a colour of hair, litheness of frame, complexion, ankles, chin (the under part), style of talk and of glance. I have spinsters of twenty-five, and young girls of at least forty. 

My favourite section of the book is definitely the end. It’s probably not a coincidence that this is where he stops writing about theories and starts writing fiction – he dramatises the same situation in two chapters, one from the wife’s viewpoint and one from the husband’s. The scenario is pretty simple: an argument about a flower show on the day that their son is coming home from boarding school. I don’t think the scenes are as instructive as Bennett thinks they are, but it shows that he is on much firmer ground – and certainly more fluid and more entertaining – as a writer of fiction than of, well, anything else.

While Bennett’s views are, of course, not today’s – it’s quite impressive that a man in his 50s in 1920, and a man who was very much considered one of the old guard, should even have thought of writing it. And for anybody who wants to know more about the 1920s and issues around gender at the time, this is an interesting (surprising, frustrating, etc.) book. Add it to the list for when you’re feeling particularly able to cope with reading things you don’t agree with, maybe?

Disappointing myself (with The Age of Innocence)

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Age of InnocenceYou know when there’s a book that you really assume you’re going to love, and you end up not loving it? Everybody you know who usually shares your taste are big fans; the author seems right up your street, but… it doesn’t work. And it’s not just the disappointment of reading a book that doesn’t hit home – it’s the added disappointment in yourself, for somehow not measuring up to your own expectations.

I’ve given the game away in the post title. It’s The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.

For those who don’t know, The Age of Innocence is about 1870s upper-class New York (published in 1920, in four serialised parts, and then as a novel) and particularly about Newland Archer, his fiancée May, and the mysterious woman (Ellen Olenska) who catches his eye. It’s basically your classic love triangle, surrounded by the details and mores of society.

The positives: there are occasional lines that I loved, where Wharton lets her slightly barbed wit or satire come through. This one was a joy, about an opera:

She sang, of course, “M’ama!” and not “he loves me,” since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Love it. That’s in the first few pages of the novel, and gave me hope – but I found that we lost that, and instead were treated to the minutiae of 1870s etiquette and the minutiae of Newland Archer’s ummings and ahhings. Now, the etiquette thing I could cope with. If Wharton had been writing about the 1920s, I’d probably have loved it. But so much of The Age of Innocence seems to be implicitly drawing a distinction between the 1870s and the 1920s of Wharton’s original audience that the 2010s are out of kilter with whatever framework she is building and conclusions she is coming to.

As for Newland Archer, well…

This was a book group choice, and a few people commented on the fact that he’s not a very nice person. He’s certainly unkind, selfish, and hypocritical – not the ‘charming, tactful, enlightened’ that my edition’s blurb claims; is it being sarcastic? – but none of that matters. A great book can be written about an unpleasant person. I could read about Lady Catherine de Burgh for days. The characters in The Age of Innocence committed a far worse crime in my eyes. I found them all boring.

If the crux (or a crux – can you have more than one crux?) of a novel is whether a man chooses the woman he loves with the messy past or the woman he likes and has Society’s approval, then it’s essential that the reader cares. And millions of readers obviously have cared. This book is a classic, after all, and I know plenty of people who love it. But… I just wasn’t bothered. I didn’t want to spend any time reading about these people. I couldn’t even tell the difference between most of the supporting cast, who lived in one identical rarefied building after another.

Perhaps all this would have been saved if I’d been able to get along with Wharton’s writing. This isn’t my first Wharton – I read Ethan Frome years ago – but I don’t remember what I thought of that. There’s something in her style that I find curiously obfuscatory. It was a bit like looking at something through translucent plastic, or trying to follow an autocue that was moving too fast. I couldn’t connect.

Frustratingly, I couldn’t work out why the style didn’t work for me. Clearly Wharton is a good writer. She isn’t even the Henry James-esque ‘good’ writer whose sentences are so laboured down with clauses that they’re unreadable. And it’s certainly not anything like being the wrong age or the wrong nationality, or any of those slightly silly reasons that people sometimes come up with. I didn’t hate it, but I certainly didn’t enjoy it. I confess to being disappointed with myself.

Oh well. Chalk this one up to experience, I suppose, and a recognition that sharing 90% of a person’s taste won’t account for the other 10%.

Which books have you found leave you cold when you were expecting to love them?

 

There’s Nobody Quite Like Agatha

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In 2000, or thereabouts, I read an awful lot of Agatha Christie novels – mostly Miss Marple, because my love of slightly eccentric old women started way back then – but since then, I’ve only read one or two.  In 2010 I read The Murder at the Vicarage, and thought it might issue in a new dawn of Christie reading.  Well, two years later that dawn has, er, dawned.  After hearing an interesting paper on Agatha Christie covers at a recent conference, I decided that a fun way to fill some gaps in A Century of Books would be to dip into my shelf of Christies, many unread.  Since she wrote one or two a year for most of the 20th century, she is an ideal candidate for this sort of gap-filling.

Before I go onto the two novels I read (pretty briefly), I’ll start with what I love about Agatha Christie.  She is considered rather non-literary in some circles (although not quite as often as people often suggest) and it’s true that her prose doesn’t ripple with poetic imagery – but the same is true of respected writers such as George Orwell and Muriel Spark, who choose a straight-forward seeming prose style, albeit with their own unique quirks.  Leaving aside Christie’s prose talents – and they are always better than I expect, and often funnier than I remember – she is most remarkable for her astonishing ability with plot.

For a lot of people, myself included, reading Agatha Christie is our first experience of detective fiction.  She sets the norms, and she sets the bar high.  Only after dipping my toe into books by Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers do I realise quite how vastly superior she is when it comes to plot.  It was once a truism of detective fiction that the author would be unfair, only revealing important clues at the last moment.  “What you didn’t know was that the gardener was Lord Alfred’s long-lost cousin!”  That sort of thing.  Dame Agatha never does that.  There are almost invariably surprises in the last few pages, but they are the sort of delightful, clever surprises which could have been worked out by the scrupulously careful reader.  Of course, none of us ever do fit all the clues together along the way – it would spoil the novel if we did – but Christie has a genius for leaving no loose ends, and revealing all the clues which have been hidden thus far.  Other detective novelists of the Golden Age still (from my reading) rely upon coincidence, implausibility, and secrets they kept concealed.

Reading a detective novel demands quite a different approach from most other novels.  Everything is pointed towards the structure.  There can be innumerable lovely details along the way, but structure determines every moment – all of it must lead to the denouement, and everything must adhere to that point.  Many of the novels we read (especially for someone like me, fond of modernist refusal of form – witness my recent review of The House in Paris) are deliberately open-ended, and the final paragraphs are structurally scarcely more significant than any arbitrarily chosen lines from anywhere in the novel.  With an Agatha Christie, the end determines my satisfaction. My chief reason for considering a detective novel successful or unsuccessful is whether it coheres when the truth is revealed.  Is the motive plausible?  Does the ‘reveal’ match the preceding narrative details?  Are there any unanswered questions?  That’s a lot of pressure on Agatha Christie, and it is a sign of her extraordinary talent for plot that she not only never disappoints, but she casts all the other detective novelists I’ve tried into the shade.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

I’d never read Christie’s very first novel, so it was serendipitous that 1920 was one of the few interwar blank spaces on my Century of Books.  I’m going to be very brief about these two novels, because I don’t want to give anything away at all (a carefulness not exemplified by the blurbs of these novels, incidentally.)  Suffice to say that there is a murder in a locked bedroom – and a lot of motives among family and friends.

“Like a good detective story myself,” remarked Miss Howard.  “Lots of nonsense written, though.  Criminal discovered in last chapter.  Every one dumbfounded.  Real crime – you’d know at once.”

“There have been a great number of undiscovered crimes,” I argued.

“Don’t mean the police, but the people that are right in it.  The family.  You couldn’t really hoodwink them.  They’d know.”
I love it when Christie gets all meta.  In One, Two, Buckle My Shoe one character accuses another, “You’re talking like a thriller by a lady novelist.”  Heehee!  But the best strain of meta-ness (ahem) in The Mysterious Affair at Styles is adorable Captain Hastings.  He narrates, and he is not very bright.  He considers himself rather brilliant at detection, and is constantly sharing all manner of clues and suppositions with Poirot, only for Poirot to laugh kindly and disabuse him.  Hastings really is lovely – and doesn’t seem to have suffered even a moment’s psychological unease at having been invalided away from WW1.  Poirot, of course, is brilliant.  It’s all rather Holmes/Watson, but it works.

You’ve probably read the famous moment where Poirot is first described, but it bears re-reading:

Poirot was an extraordinary-looking little man.  He was hardly more than five feet four inches, but carried himself with great dignity.  His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side.  His moustache was very stiff and military.  The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.  Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police.  As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.

Isn’t that line about the bullet sublime?  (Although, again, demonstrates a remarkable lack of shellshock on Hastings’ part.)  What I found ironic about this, the first Poirot novel, is that (with decades of detection ahead of him), Hastings thinks:

The idea crossed my mind, not for the first time, that poor old Poirot was growing old.  Privately I thought it lucky that he had associated with him someone of a more receptive type of mind.

Hastings is wrong, of course, but as a retired man, Poirot must enjoy one of the longest retirements on record.  As for the novel itself – Christie tries to do far too much in it, and the eventual explanation (though ingenious) is very complicated.  Colin tells me that Christie acknowledges the over-complication in her autobiography.  It’s not surprising for a first novel, and it does nonetheless involve some rather sophisticated twists and turns.

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940)

Onto another Poirot novel!  For some reason I love the idea of titles being nursery rhymes or quotations, and Christie does this a lot.  And Then There Were None is my favourite of her books (that I have read), and I also think the twist in The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side is brilliant.  I hadn’t read this one, and chose it over Sad Cypress for the 1940 selection.  Which turned out not to be very clever, as it is set at a dentist’s, where I will probably have to go soon…

The plot of this one isn’t amongst Christie’s best, and does depend upon one minor implausibility, but it’s still head and shoulders over other people’s.  I realise I’m giving you nothing to go on, but I don’t even want to give the identity of the victim (even though they’re killed very early in the novel) because every step should be a surprise.  What I did like a lot about the novel was this moment about Poirot:

She paused, then, her agreeable, husky voice deepening, she said venomously: “I loathe the sight of you – you bloody little bourgeois detective!”
 
She swept away from him in a whirl of expensive model drapery.
 
Hercule Poirot remained, his eyes very wide open, his eyebrows raised and his hand thoughtfully caressing his moutaches.
 
The epithet bourgeois was, he admitted, well applied to him.  His outlook on life was essentially bourgeois, and always had been[.]

Having sat through an absurd talk recently, where the embittered speaker spat out ‘bourgeois’ about once a minute (and then, after lambasting his own bottom-of-the-pile education, revealed that he’d been to grammar school) this came as a breath of fresh air!  One of my few rules in life is “If someone uses the word ‘bourgeois’ instead of ‘middle-class’, they’re probably not worth paying attention to, and they certainly won’t pay attention to you.’  The other thing I loved was the morality Christie slipped into Poirot’s denouement… but to give away more would be telling.

So, as you see, one of the other issues with detective fiction is that it rather defies the normal book review, but I’ve had fun exploring various questions which arise from reading Agatha Christie – and tomorrow I shall be putting a specific question to you!  But for today, please just comment with whatever you’d like to say about Christie or this post – and particularly which of her novels you think is especially clever in its revelation (giving away absolutely nothing, mind!)