#1920club

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.

#1920Club – round up

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The 1920 Club kicks off tomorrow – what better way to spend a Bank Holiday Monday, if you have such a thing?

Put links to your reviews on this post, and I’ll round them all up at the end of the week.

And if you have any suggestions for which club year Karen and I should do next, let us know that too.

Happy reading…

The Master Man by Ruby M. Ayres

Stuck in a Book

The Happy Foreigner by Enid Bagnold

HeavenAli

Call Mr Fortune by H.C. Bailey

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Mary Rose, A Play in Three Acts by J.M. Barrie

Relevant Obscurity

Glinda of Oz by L. Frank Baum

Pining for the West

Queen Lucia by E.F. Benson

Lizzy’s Literary Life

She Reads Novels

Madame Bibi Lophile

The Princess of the School by Angela Brazil

Scones and Chaises Longues

Development by Bryher

Neglected Books

R.U.R by Karel Capek

Typings

Youth and the Bright Medusa by Willa Cather
What Cathy Read Next

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

Book Around the Corner

746 Books

Book Tapestry

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Bitter Tea and Mystery

Katharine Harding

Cheri by Colette

Buried in Print

Harriet Devine’s Blog

What Me Read

Tension by E.M. Delafield

Stuck in a Book

The Heel of Achilles by E.M. Delafield

Stuck in a Book

The Top of the World by Ethel M. Dell

Staircase Wit

Penny Plain by O. Douglas

HeavenAli

Adventures in Reading, Running, and Working from Home

The Cut-Glass Bowl by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Love Books, Read Books

Flappers and Philosophers by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ripple Effects

Miss Lulu Bett by Zona Gale

The Literary Sisters

In Chancery by John Galsworthy

Booked For Life

Wandering by Hermann Hesse

1stReading’s Blog

The Farcical History of Richard Greenow by Aldous Huxley

Tony’s Book World

Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay

1stReading’s Blog

Katharine Harding

The Doom That Came to Sarnath by H. P. Lovecraft

What Me Read

Potterism by Rose Macaulay

Stuck in a Book

What Next? by Denis Mackail

Stuck in a Book

Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield

Brona’s Books

The Wind Blows by Katherine Mansfield

Brona’s Books

Psychology by Katherine Mansfield

Brona’s Books

The Stepmother by A.A. Milne

The Captive Reader

If I May by A.A. Milne

The Captive Reader

Further Chronicles of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery

Staircase Wit

Every Man for Himself by Hopkins Moorhouse

The Dusty Bookcase

The Great Impersonation by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Staircase Wit

A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

Typings

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Bridal Wreath by Sigrid Undset

What Me Read

In The Mountains by Elizabeth von Arnim

Karen’s Books and Chocolate

The Black Grippe by Edgar Wallace

ANZ Litlover’s LitBlog

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Book Word

Tredynas Days

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The Cask by Freeman Wills Crofts

A Hot Cup of Pleasure

Madame Bibi Lophile

Stories by Virginia Woolf

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Essays by Virginia Woolf

Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

The next club is announced!

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Thanks to everyone who put forward suggestions for the next club year, following #1930Club! Karen and I looked through everyone’s ideas, and two decades were definitely standing out – the 1920s and the 1950s.

In the end, we decided upon the #1920Club – first suggested by Paula. It’s right at the beginning of the period we do club years in, and it’ll be the centenary next year – which feels very appropriate. Maybe we’ll turn to the 1950s next time?

Here’s the badge, and as you can see it’ll be next April. Plenty of warning so get hunting for what you might read!

By the way, for those asking why we don’t do earlier or later years, and who haven’t seen the explanation before – the reason we decided to stop at 1980 was basically personal taste! The reason we don’t go earlier than 1920 is because cheap printing and a wider reading public around that time led to a great deal more books being published – and, in practice, it would be harder to get the same diverse range of books (particularly if we want them widely accessible) if we went earlier. Hope that clears that up!