1920s

The Chip and the Block by E.M. Delafield – #ABookADayInMay Day 22

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E.M. Delafield was a very prolific novelist, and even though I’ve been reading her steadily for more than 20 years, there is still a handful of her books I’ve not read. I am pretty sure I’ve owned The Chip and the Block (1925) for the best part of those 20 years, and I finally got it down from my special Delafield shelf yesterday – and it’s lovely to spend more time in her company. (I will note that she needlessly uses the n-word in the first line, which was not an auspicious beginning, and I’m glad didn’t continue beyond that.)

If you’ve only read The Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels, you might think of E.M. Delafield primarily as a comic writer. And, yes, she is brilliant at comedy – often weaving dry humour into most of her more serious novels. I think The Chip and the Block is one of the least overtly funny – though there is dark humour, and the comedy that comes from somebody being totally lacking in self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge (and, yes, its lack) is the dominant theme in E.M. Delafield’s oeuvre, taken as a whole. In The Chip and the Block, it is seen chiefly in Charles Ellery, also known as Chas. He is the patriarch of a small family, with his tired, good wife Mary and his three children – Paul, Jeannie, and Victor. As the novel opens, the children are young – Victor, the youngest, is only recently engaging in conversations. The whole family has been recovering from influenza, and the most affected are Victor and Charles. Victor has been seriously ill. Charles has declared himself so. This telling scene happens during the recuperation period:

“Come along!” Father shouted gaily, catching Jeannie by the hand.

“You’re forgetting your stick, Father,” said Victor’s baby voice.

He pointed to the stick that had fallen unnoticed to the ground.

Father looked at Victor, and Victor looked back at his father. Paul could not help noticing them.

Although he was so unobservant about things and places, he always noticed people, and he often felt curious certainties as to what they were thinking and feeling.

This time he did not feel any certainties at all, but only a little uneasiness that he could not possibly have explained even to himself.

It is emblematic of many personalities. Paul is also watching, bewildering by the world even while he can perceive things that others miss. He is often close to tears, and fears his father’s ready wrath – which irritates him even more. Jeannie is content, happy to dismiss any sad feelings, and amiably unintelligent. And Victor? If Charles is the block, he is the chip. He sees through his father’s masquerades – while also being given to many of the same foibles as he grows older.

Delafield’s portrait of Charles is so frustratingly accurate. We all know people who have at least some echo of his personality. Charles is a fairly unsuccessful writer, totally given to self-mythologising. He is ruthlessly selfish but presents himself as angelically selfless, always berating his children for not considering anybody except themselves. He tells stories of finding Beethoven so beautiful as a four-year-old that he bursts into tears of artistic joy (his sharp elderly mother says he was seven years old, and cried because he’d eaten too many plums). He claims to have slaved night and day to write books while the children played and cried around his feet – while they distinctly remember being kept far from his study, and shouted out if they made any noise.

Charles doesn’t develop or grow as a character, it is fair to say, but Delafield has drawn him so well that it doesn’t matter. His arguments and self-presentation are so eloquently twisted that it is hard to disagree with him – and he certainly wouldn’t brook any contradiction, given his self-proclaimed artistic and sensitive temperament. But he is a nightmare to be near, poisoning the family around him.

The novel progresses until the children are grown up, and the second half of the novel looks more at the legacies of this upbringing – including careers, romances, and the inescapable expectations of their father. Again, they develop entirely in line with the personalities they showed as infants. Is that true? Perhaps, though I imagine there is more scope in reality for people to be distinct from their past selves. I hope I’m not very like my eight-year-old self, though maybe that is wishful thinking.

Anyway, I think this is a strong, convincing and engaging contribution to E.M. Delafield’s wide output. I did miss the wit that characterises most of her books, and she clearly wanted to do something more sombre and serious. On its own merits, it’s very good indeed.

The Camomile by Catherine Carswell #ABookADayInMay – Day 3

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Off to 1920s Scotland for the latest in my A Book A Day In May journey – and The Camomile by Catherine Carswell. The narrator is Ellen Carstairs, a clever, slightly cynical woman in her early 20s. She is a gifted musician – though currently using this talent to teach reluctant children – and lives in a slightly bleak flat in order to escape the oppressive attentions of her religious aunt. Deep down, and growing steadily less deep, is her ambition to write professionally rather than play the piano.

I say she is the narrator – this is sort of an epistolary novel, though Ellen seldom seems to pay any attention to any letters she might get from her correspondent, long-term friend Ruby. We learn very little about Ruby, and I do wish she was less of a shadowy construct. The letters that Ellen sends her are intentionally in the style of a detailed journal – so it’s really just a conceit for Ellen to share her reflections on the people and events she encounters, not quite at the openness that a diary would reveal, though not far off. (And, indeed, the latter part of the novel becomes a diary instead of these letters.)

The novel gets off to a slightly slow start. Well, a very slow one initially, with a reminiscence of a long-ago music lesson – it’s a bizarrely anticlimactic way to open a novel. Luckily it’s tidied away quickly, and we get into the novel proper. Ellen is clearly very naive and immature in some ways, still in the hinterland between childhood and adulthood, but it is impossible not to warm to her. Carswell has created a heroine with tried-and-true traits that will endear her to most readers: Ellen is bookish, more familiar with life from literature than experience; she is slightly stubborn and judgemental but quick to repent and try to do better; she has high standards and expectations, and we want her to achieve them. I suppose it is a coming-of-age novel, even though she is older than the usual age for such heroines.

I am for ever straining after Reality with a capital R, and life seems to fob me off continually […] I don’t of course know what reality is, but I do hope some day I shall. I suppose getting married and having children would bring one face to face with it. But then that may never happen to me. Anyhow not for years and years.

As the novel progresses, this reality comes closer to home. What starts as wry observations and gradually emerging ambitions becomes more about the genuine prospect of marriage – and whether or not it is possible to pursue her hopes of being an author with the particular man who has proposed.

The title of the novel comes from Shakespeare – ‘The camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows’ (1 Henry IV). Carswell makes it overt that the camomile in question is Ellen’s aim to become a successful, published writer. But it is also broader than that: Ellen is herself the camomile. The way she responds to being trodden on by repressive relatives and acquaintances is treated comically – but the prospect that she will be more permanently trodden down by marriage, and whether or not she will have the resilience to grow despite this, becomes a more serious theme in the novel.

I think The Camomile gets better and better as it keeps going. For a while it’s not clear what the point of the book is, but once that becomes clear, the fine writing and perceptive character study have something firm to cling to. And, throughout, it is funny in the slightly barbed way that an Austen heroine can be. For example:

My other new pupil is Sheila Dudgeon, who wants a course of ‘finishing lessons’. The only difficulty about her ‘finishing’ is that she has omitted the formality of beginning.

This was a re-read for me, and I’ll leave you to guess why I might be re-reading a 1920s novel. It’s an interesting, deceptively deep read, and I’d love to hear more people’s opinions on it.

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“No surprise that this novel was chosen by feminist press Virago for republication in the 1980s, for it is all about female self-determination in the face of almost universal societal disapproval.” – Leaves and Pages

“Sometimes I read a book and think ‘How dare the author assume that I want to know what is going on in her head in such detail?’ – and I can think this while simultaneously enjoying the book.” – Clothes in Books

“I wasn’t really able to whip up any sympathy for her and was glad when this book was finished.” – Adventures in Reading, Running and Working From Home

Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Vera

For years I’d heard three things about Vera (1921) – that it was Elizabeth von Arnim’s darkest novel, that it was autobiographical, and that it was possibly the inspiration for Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. For some reason that made me think that it might be a bit of an outlier in von Arnim’s output – but Vera is very clearly from the same pen of Father, The Caravaners and many of von Arnim’s other novels that feature a terrible man to a greater or lesser extent.

As it opens, Lucy is mourning her father. Or, rather, she is feeling numb in the first shock of his death – it has only been three hours. She cannot quite believe that it has happened, or imagine a world without him. Lucy has cared for him for years – not just this final illness, but a lifetime of delicacy. ‘She had had no thought since she grew up for anybody but her father. There was no room for any other thought, so completely did he fill her heart.’ We never truly get to know her father objectively – only through the deeply affectionate memories of his devoted daughter. And she is barely grown up herself, just a few years into adulthood.

It is in the midst of this grief that she meets Everard Wemyss. He, too, is in mourning – officially, at least. His wife has recently fallen to her death from their home, The Willows – and she, like du Maurier’s Rebecca, gives her name to the title. She has only been dead a fortnight.

Lucy sees someone who can be a companion in grief. Perhaps they can support each other as they face life without somebody they held so dear? But it quickly becomes clear that Everard has something else in mind. He has fallen for naïve, gentle Lucy and is determined to make her his wife. Lucy receives a charm offensive – he is lovable, loving, entirely confident that it is not too soon after Vera’s death – quashing her doubts on the subject. Von Arnim is very clever in the way she presents Everard. We get enough hints of his character to see that Lucy should probably run a thousand miles away – but also enough of his ability to charm that we can understand how Lucy, rocked by her loss, assents to his proposal of marriage.

It irked him that their engagement — Lucy demurred at first to the word engagement, but Wemyss, holding her tight in his arms, said he would very much like to know, then, by what word she would describe her position at that moment – it irked him that it had to be a secret. He wanted instantly to shout out to the whole world his glory and his pride. But this under the tragic circumstances of their mourning was even to Wemyss clearly impossible. Generally he brushed aside the word impossible if it tried to come between him and the smallest of his wishes, but that inquest was still too vividly in his mind, and the faces of his so-called friends. What the faces of his so-called friends would look like if he, before Vera had been dead a fortnight, should approach them with the news of his engagement even Wemyss, a person not greatly imaginative, could picture.

Everard gets his way – we are learning that he will always get his way – and they are not only engaged but married at incredible haste. This does take most of the first half of the novel, but it covers a very short time – and as soon as the marriage is complete, the veil starts to be lifted from Lucy’s eyes. Here they are, on honeymoon:

Marriage, Lucy found, was different from what she had supposed; Everard was different; everything was different. For one thing she was always sleepy. For another she was never alone. She hadn’t realised how completely she would never be alone, or, if alone, not sure for one minute to the other of going on being alone. Always in her life there had been intervals during which she recuperated in solitude from any strain; now there were none. Always there had been places she could go to and rest in quietly, safe from interruption; now there were none. 

Everard thinks only of his own happiness, and at the moment his happiness revolves around being with his lovely young wife. We don’t see much behind the bedroom door, as it were – being 1921, this is unlikely to be a big topic – but he monopolises her throughout every waking hour. Perhaps this is something that honeymooning couples would usually be very pleased about. But Lucy has previously seen Everard in courtship mode, and that was forceful but charming. Married Everard is forceful without the charm.

Von Arnim is very good at infantilising her ogres. From what I’d heard about Vera, I’d imagined that the husband would be brutal, perhaps violent. But he is like many of her terrible man: monstrously selfish. So many of her male figures are like toddlers, but toddlers with the power to live out their self-centredness, sulkiness, demand for attention. Everard is particularly childlike in his determination that his birthday be a hallowed day. He cannot believe that anybody would cross him or refuse him anything on his birthday, even if some of the ‘refused’ things are things he hasn’t mentioned.

And they go back to The Willows. Lucy doesn’t want to live there. If she has to live there, she doesn’t want Vera’s old sitting room. If she has to have Vera’s old sitting room, she wants it redecorated. None of these things happen. Everard dismisses all her concerns and anxieties. He twists them to be antagonistic to him. Her wishes and feelings clearly mean nothing to him – and von Arnim is brilliant (as ever) at the man who sounds logical even while he is being appalling. Like Father in Father, Otto in The Caravaners, Jocelyn in Introduction to Sally and probably others I’ve forgotten, Everard manipulates what other people say – retaining his cold sense of being hard done by, pouncing on any weakness so that he can seem calmly affronted. He does it with Lucy; he does it with the servants (who have long learned to put up with it, because he is in London most of the week); he does it with Lucy’s aunt Miss Entwhistle who is clear-eyed about what a disastrous marriage this is.

Oh, Everard is brilliantly infuriating to read! And Lucy has gone into the lion’s den without any defences. She is intimidated by the lingering presence of Vera in her possessions and her portrait – but the reader quickly realises that Vera is a fellow-victim of this monster. It’s an interesting choice for von Arnim to make Vera the title. I’m not quite sure she earns it. The reader feels sympathy for Vera from the outset, so despite Lucy’s fear around her, she doesn’t have the sort of narrative presence or power that du Maurier’s Rebecca does. If she did steal that idea, she does it better.

I was surprised by what a short time period it covers, particularly the time at The Willows – which is only a week, most of which Everard isn’t there. We only see Everard and Lucy at home together for a couple of days, which means von Arnim has to escalate the horror of marriage to him quite quickly. His brattiness, his selfishness, his cruelty – he locks Lucy out in the rain for petty reasons, then gets angry with her for being wet. I think it is meant to be all the more horrifying as a snapshot of what Lucy will have to endure for much longer, but I do wonder if it is sped up a little too much. This sort of horror might have worked even better as a gradual dawning.

But this is a quibble for a very good book. If someone came to this after only having read the charm of The Enchanted April, it must feel like a huge gearshift. But if you’ve read more widely in von Arnim’s oeuvre, this is very much in her wheelhouse. It’s bleak, though with trademark ironically funny moments and the amusingly detached narrator. Above all, it’s a brilliant character study.

To Let by John Galsworthy #ABookADayInMay No.22

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Super quick post tonight, because it’s late. In fact, let’s do it in bullet points.

  • I read To Let by John Galsworthy, originally published in 1921
  • (In fact, I listened to the audiobook – which was good, though it kept repeating lines of dialogue that I assume were meant to be edited out)
  • It’s the third of the Forsyte Saga
  • The first was published in 1906, but then Galsworthy went on a bit of a role – with one in 1920 and another in 1921
  • I read the first one a few years ago, for Tea or Books?, and then the middle one towards the end of last year
  • To Let really relies on you remembering what happened in book 1 – the doomed, cruel marriage of Irene and Soames
  • To Let is chiefly concerned with the next generation – particularly the love that blooms between Irene’s son and Soames’s daughter from their subsequent marriages
  • (But these two – Fleur and Jon – don’t know the other exists. They don’t even know that their parents used to be married.)
  • Fleur has a much more eligible, but profoundly dull, suitor
  • It’s a classic Romeo and Juliet sort of pairing, but if Romeo and Juliet don’t know why they aren’t a perfect match in the eyes of their families
  • Galsworthy is just very good, isn’t he? There’s a reason he was such a staple in the Edwardian era
  • It became fashionable to despise him in the mid-century, particularly if you were someone like George Orwell (who described bad books as ‘Galsworthy-and-water’)
  • But he really gets families, regrets, secrets, sacrifice, stubborness
  • He even makes reading about young, selfish people falling love bearable, and that’s impressive in my eyes
  • To Let has such a brilliant final line – you *almost* feel sorry for a character you’ve spent three books loathing
  • I am amazed that the three books of the first trilogy of the Forsyte Saga are so distinct, and each cover a distinct and intense theme, and yet work together masterfully as a series. Bravo, John.
  • Will I ever read the (gulp) six books in the Forsyte Chronicles? Does anyone? Perhaps in the next six decades.

Mystery at Geneva by Rose Macaulay #ABookADayInMay No.5

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Today’s book is a curio by a relatively well-known writer. Lots of us love Rose Macaulay’s novels, whether that be her famous Towers of Trebizond or the delightfully funny, wry books she wrote in the 1920s – Crewe Train, Dangerous Ages, Keeping Up Appearances, Potterism and so forth. Not so much talked about is Mystery at Geneva (1922)

It starts with an author note that we certainly shouldn’t take at all seriously:

Note: As I have observed among readers and critics, a tendency to discern satire when none is intended, I should like to say that this book is simply a straightforward mystery story, devoid of irony, moral or meaning. It has for its setting an imaginary session of the League of Nations’ Assembly, but it is in no sense a study of, still less a skit on actual conditions at Geneva of which indeed I know little. The only connection I have ever had with the League being membership of its Union.

Let’s be clear – this is not at all true. Macaulay is at her most satirical in this novel – a satire of detective novels, to an extent, but particularly a satire of the League of Nations. The hero is Henry Beechtree, a journalist for The British Bolshevist – and he has been sent to Geneva to cover a meeting of the League (which, at the time Macaulay’s novel was published, was still very much in its infancy.)

Along the way, Macaulay has a great time poking fun at newspaper men and the rivalries between them, as well as the mutual hysteria of journalists who cling to the far-left or far-right of the political spectrum. Macaulay is always wonderful when she is at her driest, and if the characters are very exaggerated then that doesn’t stop the prose being very funny.

Similarly broadly drawn are the delegates from different nations. Macaulay mostly manages to avoid anything that would feel uncomfortably racist today – the divisions are drawn chiefly along political lines (Irish Republicans vs Loyalists, for instance) and the good-humoured rivalry of adjoining European countries.

All is going more or less dully, and Henry is sending back sarcastic reports to the Bolshevist, when the mystery kicks in. The President of the assembly goes missing.

And then, over the next few days, more and more of the delegates disappear. We often see their final moments before disappearance – coaxed away by appealing to their particular weakness, whether that be wanting to help the poor, or getting involved in a political discussion, or finding a rare copy of their own book for sale. Rumours start to circulate that the whole thing is being done to undermine the League itself.

For what would be the use of getting rid of one man only, however prominent? The Assembly, after the first shock, would proceed with its doings. But what if man after man were to disappear? What if the whole fabric of Assembly Council and Committees should be disintegrated, till no one could have thoughts for anything but the mysterious disappearances and how to solve the riddle, and how, still more, to preserve each one himself from a like fate? Could any work be continued in such circumstances, in such an atmosphere? No. The Assembly would become merely a collection of bewildered and nervous individuals turning themselves into amateur detectives and, incidentally, the laughing-stock of the world. 

It should be noted that nobody is trying very hard to preserve themselves, as they do continually wander off into places where they are likely to be abducted. And there are so many characters, many of whom disappear before we know very much about them, that it is certainly more comic than tragic when they vanish.

Henry muses about the motives and perpetrators, but there isn’t really a sense that the reader is being given clues to disentangle. There is a solution, but ultimately it doesn’t really matter. This is first and foremost a satire on political and national grounds. The teasing of detective fiction is less successful because detective fiction was routinely so outlandish in the period that it’s almost impossible to satirise the lengths to which a plot can go. Of course, with most of the satire resting at a point in time in 1922, it is hardly a novel for all the ages. Some elements are recognisable, but others feel very much of a moment.

Something that does feel quite perennial is Macaulay’s (/Henry’s) comment on the way that magazines and newspapers write about women. It’s a theme she returns to often in her fiction and non-fiction, often in near-identical phrasing – but I love it every time, particularly the frustration that seethes beneath the surface humour:

All sorts of articles and letters appear in the papers about women. Profound questions are raised concerning them. Should they smoke? Should they work? Vote? Take Orders? Marry? Exist? Are not their skirts too short, or their sleeves? Have they a sense of humour, of honour, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men. How few persons discuss superfluous bachelors, or whether the male arm or leg is an immodest sight, or whether men should vote. For men are not news.

Mystery at Geneva is an odd, slightly silly and ultimately rather enjoyable book. I should think it would entertain anybody with an interest in 20th-century political history, particularly the way the League of Nations was considered by the everyman/woman. It’s not up there with Macaulay’s most accomplished and satisfying novels, but it does feel intended to be a jeu d’esprit rather than a substantial work. On its own terms, it’s a lot of fun.

Three more #1929Club books

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It’s the final day of the 1929 Club and I have three books I haven’t reviewed – I really went to town on 1929 titles! Indeed, one of them I only started yesterday. Here are some quick thoughts about the three final books I read…

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson is one of those names that I’ve heard a lot – one of the literary hangers-on who is better known for his criticism than his own fiction. Or perhaps better known in America than in the UK. Apparently he helped the public get to know and appreciate a range of writers, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to William Faulkner to Ernest Hemingway. It wasn’t until I looked at his Wikipedia page just now that I realised that I Thought of Daisy was his only novel. (Having said that, other reviews say he wrote three, so who knows.)

One of the things that makes us know that we are in 1929 America is that Prohibition is front and centre – and one of the things that makes us know we are in a certain echelon of society is that everyone seems to known ways to evade it. The narrator is at one such party, flowing with booze despite the rules, when he meets two women. Rita and Daisy. Rita is a poet; Daisy is a chorus girl. The novel is occupied with seeing which of the women he will choose (with something of an assumption that either of them would be delighted to be chosen).

Reading I Thought of Daisy was an interesting experience. Wilson doesn’t write in a High Modernist style – that is to say, he always uses full sentences, and the prose is quite traditional. But he has the Modernist technique of considering every small detail of essentially equal worth. Everything he notices and thinks is documented. Characters are given long, anecdote-driven backstories that could last ten pages, and then they’re never seen before.

What I found, in Wilson’s hand at least, was that this approach made each sentence, paragraph, page interesting to read, and his writing is very pleasing – but that the whole was less than the sum of its parts. I found that, by documenting everything, he left us with nothing. I read acres of details, but never felt that I knew or cared about anyone. Though I could also see that, to another reader, it might be mesmerising.

Mr Mulliner Speaking

Mr Mulliner Speaking by P.G. Wodehouse

Well, you can’t go wrong with a Wodehouse, can you? Mr Mulliner Speaking is a collection of short stories, and Mr Mulliner is the least significant character in them. He is merely a man in a pub who has lots of stories to tell, and tells them insistently – so there is always something in the first paragraph that reminds him of a nephew, cousin, or friend. From then, he tells the story about them, and fades into the background.

It’s all delightfully Wodehouse. In perhaps my favourite story, a gentleman goes to extreme lengths to avoid being seen in public with yellow shoes. But most of the plots are about engagements – either ones that people want to get into, or get out of. His characters stumble in and out of proposals at the drop of a hat, and it’s such fun. In one story, the winner of a golf match must propose to a woman they both loathe; in another, a man will be horse-whipped on the steps of his club by one man if he doesn’t propose and trampled with spiked boots by another if he does.  Here’s Archibald, masquerading as a teetotaller who believes Francis Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare to impress his chosen woman’s aunt:

Life, said Archibald, toying with his teacup, was surely given to us for some better purpose than the destruction of our brains and digestions with alcohol. Bacon, for instance, never took a cocktail in his life, and look at him.

At this, the aunt, who up till now had plainly been regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents, sprang to life.

It’s bits like ‘regarding him as just another of those unfortunate incidents’ that make me love Wodehouse so much. His turn of phrase is unparalleled, isn’t it? A delight to read a book I’ve had since 2006, thanks to the 1929 Club.

Hill (New York Review Books Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Giono, Jean, Abram, David, Eprile, Paul: 9781590179185: Books

Hill by Jean Giono

I’ve managed to get one book in translation into the 1929 Club – Hill by Jean Giono, translated from French by Paul Eprile. This was his debut novella and tells of a small community who live in an isolated community. There are twelve people living in four houses – each household holding some slightly fractured version of a family. In one, the wife has died, found hanging a few years ago. In another, the patriarch (Janet) is in the final throes of illness. It is a self-sufficient community, but very discontented.

In the space of about 120 pages, Giono shows us the slightly grotesque world here. He described it as the first of his ‘Pan’ books, and nature is certainly front and centre in the book, but so too is the ugliness of human nature that lies just below the surface. The people here care only for themselves, deep down – but do so in a casual way. There is little malevolence here, just an absence of kindness.

Someone on Twitter, with whom I was discussing 1929 books that had been translated into English, seemed quite cross that Jean Giono had been translated at all. She called him a bystander, a regional writer, who wrote about things that weren’t significant in 1929. And I disagreed – while the everyday lives of a community relying on the land will not be in history books, survival is always the most significant thing in any country, at any time. And farming will always be central to that. Rural life is often dismissed as less important than cities and politicians and wars, but without the production of crops, civilisation ends.

Giono knew that. And he knew how to write piercingly about nature – knowing its dangerous beauty.

Until now Gondran used to study the clouds for the threat of storms, for the white light that warns of leaden hail. Hail is no longer on his mind.

Hail means flattened wheat, hacked-up fruit, ruined hay, and so forth . . . but what he’s on the lookout for now, it’s something that threatens him head-on, and not just the grass. Grass, wheat, fruits—too bad for them. His own hide comes first.

He can still hear Janet saying: “So you think you know, do you, you sly devil, what’s on the other side of the air?”

And so, Gondran stays absorbed, right until the moment they call out to him from the Bastides.

And it is the elements that threaten them – starting with their water supply, which dries up overnight. Before this, they have seen a black cat walking through their community. They knew this cat to be the portent of something evil. Not evil in itself, but a warning. They have to work out where the evil within the four houses – who might have cursed the water, and how they can prevent it. The plot gets going at this point, as the superstitious and the intensely practical interweave, as they try both paths to solve this crisis.

Throughout, Giono (and Eprile’s translation) had lines that showed great perception, written in eerily lovely prose. I noted down this, of a girl suffering a terrible illness – ‘Through her skin you can the fire that’s consuming her, licking at her bones.’

The only reason I didn’t love Hill as much as this review might be suggesting is that I found it a little confusing. There are a lot of characters for such a slim novella, and beauty is sometimes prioritised above clarity in the writing. It wasn’t the easiest book to sit down and spend time with, though rewarding when I did. I’ve read three books by Giono now – this, Melville and The Man Who Planted Trees – and they’re all so different. But I’m glad to have experienced something so powerfully elemental – and, even though Giono was writing about some unspecified time in the past, the passions and needs of communities like the one in Hill existed in 1929, and still exist.

The Iron Man and the Tin Woman by Stephen Leacock – #1929Club

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Stephen Leacock is one of the authors I first got really into, and I’ve put together quite a collection. Like a lot of the authors I loved around 2002-2005, I binge-read a lot at the time and now only read one every few years. When I spotted that The Iron Man and the Tin Woman was a 1929 title, it was a great opportunity to make this one my next Leacock.

It’s not one of his best known or easiest to find, in this country at least, and I think it’s a really interesting addition to the 1929 Club because it’s about the future. While in Leacock’s characteristic style of humour – dry exaggeration – it shows what was considered to be the frontiers of modernity in 1929. Some of the sections are what might happen in a couple of decades’ time, while other sections highlight things that seem alarmingly modern in everyday life. For example, there is the idea that life is far more regulated by rules and bureaucracy:

“Dear me!” sighed Angelina, “I suppose it’s wicked to say it, but sometimes it seems terrible to live in this age when everything is so regulated. Did you read that awfully clever novel that came out last week called ‘Wicked Days’ that told all about our great-grandfathers’ time when people used to just do almost as they liked?”

“No, the book was suppressed, you know, immediately. But I heard something of it.”

“It must have been awfully queer. Anybody could go round anywhere and visit any house they liked and actually, just think of it!—go and eat meals in other people’s houses and even in public restaurants without a Sanitary Inspector’s Certificate or anything!”

Edward shook his head. “Sounds a bit dangerous,” he said. “I’m not sure that I’d like it. Suppose, for instance, that somebody had a cold in the head, you might catch it. Or suppose you found yourself eating in a restaurant perhaps only six feet away from a person infected with an inferiority complex, it might get communicated to you.” He shivered.

“Let’s sit down,” said Angelina suddenly. “I want to go on talking, but I don’t feel like walking up and down all the time. Here’s a bench. I wonder if we are allowed to sit on it.”

“I’ve got a Sitting License for two in my pocket,” said Edward, “but I’m hanged if I know whether it’s been stamped.”

I also love any time when Leacock apes popular styles of writing, and applies them to mundanities to highlight their absurdities. It’s something he often returns to and I can’t quite describe what he’s doing and why I enjoy it so much. Anyway, here’s an example – where he is satirising the tell-all memoir:

I want to begin these Disclosures by speaking of my childhood.

First let me talk of my parents. There were two of them, my father and my mother.

And I am now going to tell here something about my father which up till now I have never even whispered to a soul, namely, that he was born in Peterboro, Ontario.

My father seldom spoke of having been born in Peterboro. But I know he brooded over it. I remember once when I was quite a little girl he drew me to him and patting my head quietly he murmured, “I was born in Peterboro.” After that he sat silent, looking into the fire for a long time. Then he put on his hat and went out. And a little afterwards he came in again.

I found The Iron Man and the Tin Woman a mixed bag – and enjoyable, but with limits. Leacock is always diverting, and he has a real eye for human foibles and a gentleness, even a kindness, in the way that he teases them. But the premise of this book has its limits. When his vision of the dizzying future is 1950, it’s understandable that some of the impact is lost by 1950. For instance, he suggests people will be taking round-the-world tourist trips within a day by 1950 – and, the brilliantly observant bit, will be rather bored by them and glad to get home. Now, the humour relies a little on the possibility of this happening. 70+ years later, we know it hasn’t. It’s still fun, but without the frisson of possibility that a 1929 audience would have seen in the background.

The other thing that stands out, reading this almost a century after it was published, was how eternal the complaints about modernity are. Among the ideas that are highlighted in this book are:

  • too many cars on the road
  • marriage not being taken seriously
  • everything being too commercialised
  • young people not respecting their elders or being willing to work hard
  • advertising being devious

It just goes to show that every generation complains about more or less the same things. And, of course, every generation sees themselves as the pinnacle of modernity – for good and bad – as every generation is the pinnacle of modernity, until they are replaced. If The Iron Man and the Tin Woman is probably best read in 1929, it was still fun to read today. Definitely not where I’d recommend somebody start with Stephen Leacock, but plenty to enjoy for the existing fan.

Storm Bird by Mollie Panter-Downes – #1929Club

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speedy Death by Gladys Mitchell – #1929Club

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I’ve been meaning to read some Gladys Mitchell for years, and have had a couple on my shelves for at least eight years – what better opportunity than the 1929 Club, where I can encounter her detective Mrs Bradley in her first mystery.

I am familiar with some of the many Mrs Bradley mysteries through the TV series of them, starring Diana Rigg, that was on in the late 1990s. I see from the Wikipedia page that there were only five episodes made, which is odd as I remember there being far more. The first of them was, indeed, Speedy Death – though I don’t remember how accurately the script follows the original text. Something that definitely isn’t accurate is the casting. Here is the description of her, given by one of the characters:

Then there is Mrs Bradley. Know her? Little, old, shrivelled, clever, sarcastic sort of dame. Would have been smelt out as a witch in a less tolerant age. I believe she is one. Good little old sport, though.

Elsewhere she is described as a ‘playful alligator’. And every time she is mentioned, the narrative mentions her ugliness, her appalling outfits, her witchlikeness. Not necessarily somebody you’d naturally think noted beauty Diana Rigg should play?

Besides her looks, Mrs Bradley is chiefly notable for her love of psychoanalysis – very much on-brand for 1929, where Freudianism was discussed everywhere, even if it wasn’t believed by all that many people. ‘The Oedipus complex was a household word, the incest motive a commonplace of tea-time chat,’ as D.H. Lawrence wrote in 1923. Mrs Bradley is an author of books on this topic, and cheerfully cynical about human nature.

“We are all murderers, my friend,” said Mrs Bradley lugubriously. “Some in deed and some in thought. That’s the only difference, though.”

I haven’t mentioned this particular murder. It’s your classic mansion set up – a family have invited various notables to come and stay for a house party. Among them is the groom-to-be of the daughter of the house, who is also a noted explorer. Not long after everyone descends on the house, he is found dead in his bath – only it turns out that he is, in fact, a woman.

From here, things follow much as you might imagine from a Golden Age detective novel – at least in terms of plot. There are numerous suspects, there are police questionings, there is at least the possibility of more corpses along the way.

I actually found the plot a little flimsy and frenetic – things dart from one crisis to another, with not much in the way of detection happening between them. Many of the characters are similarly flimsy, though no more so than you’d encounter in many different novels. While the solution is a bit haphazard, and Mrs Bradley’s detection techniques are unorthodox, what made me really enjoy Speedy Death was undoubtedly Mrs Bradley herself. I can certainly see why Mitchell thought she should keep going with this detective, and indeed keep going for many more decades. She is larger than life, but Mitchell is brilliant at controlling that largeness – she is exuberant, ridiculous, confident but always consistent. Mitchell knows exactly what she’s doing, and deploys this bombastic character to best effect.

Perhaps later Mrs Bradley novels have a slightly more sophisticated plot, and less of a feeling that everything has been flung at it – even Agatha Christie put far too much into her debut detective novel. I’m looking forward to finding out, and re-encountering the entertaining burlesque that is Mrs Bradley.

Paying Guests by E.F. Benson – #1929Club

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I suspect E.F. Benson is like toffee – a little is a total delight, but you wouldn’t want to have too many in a row. It’s been a few years since I last picked up an EFB, and so I absolutely loved heading to Paying Guests for the 1929 Club.

Though the novel is called Paying Guests, the people in this book are very much living in a boarding house. ‘Paying guests’ or ‘PGs’ was a polite fiction that people used in the period to make the arrangement seem more genteel – often it would be just one or two people staying as paying guests in the home of people they knew, at least tangentially. Here, the residents are a mix of long- and short-term, mostly longer, and they aren’t likely to go anywhere any time soon.

The boarding house is run by two widowed sisters, one quite fluttery and inclined to panic, the other less invested and more inclined to enjoy seeing the worst in people. Their residents include retired Colonel Chase who nightly shares his triumphs in walking or cycling; Mr Kemp the hypochondriac and his daughter Florence who is permitted no will of her own; Miss Howard the amateur artist and musician who performs ‘improvisations’ that she has practised for many hours beforehand; Miss Bliss who is at Dolton Spa to take the waters but insists that Mind will heal her – and a handful of others, less prominent.

Like a lot of Benson novels, the joy mostly comes from the combination of people who have nothing to do but gossip about each other and try to come out top in a relatively amiable, never-ending tussle for dignity. Some have their eyes on something outside of this community – marriage, perhaps – but most have resigned themselves to staying exactly where they are. Or perhaps ‘resigned’ is not the right word – they are perfectly content with their minor gripes, antipathies, observations. It could be a much sadder novel if you didn’t suspect that most of the characters wouldn’t change a thing.

The biggest plot point in Paying Guests is probably Miss Howard’s exhibition of her paintings. Which is described with Benson’s typically merciless observation of the way a certain sort of person speaks:

“Are you going into town?”

“Yes. I’ve got to see about my little pickies being framed. Just fancy! I’m going to hold a little teeny picture-exhibition of some of my rubbishy sketches. So rash! But nobody would give me peace until I promised to.

This was approximately though not precisely true: Miss Howard had told the group in the lounge that Mrs Bowen had said that everyone was longing for her to do so, and the group in the lounge had all said “Oh, you must!” again and again and again. She had to yield.

“So frightened about it,” said Miss Howard, “I shall certainly leave Bolton the day before it opens, so as not to hear all the unkind things you say about it.”

The fate of this exhibition is probably the highest stakes in Paying Guests, and I did find it as compelling as much more dramatic plots in other novels.

The other element of the book I really loved was Miss Bliss and her Mind. Benson doesn’t use the term Christian Scientist, but she is certainly something of that ilk – trying to persuade everybody that their illnesses are illusory, and that even lost objects can be found with sufficient application to Mind. She herself is clearly severely unwell, but finds plenty of excuses to explain this away. Again, in another novelist’s hands this could have been desperately sad – but, in Benson’s, it is deeply funny.

I still have a few other 1929 titles on the go, but I think this is going to be my favourite 1929 Club read. Sheer fun.