1920s

The Indignant Spinsters by Winifred Boggs

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Last year, Sally on the Rocks by Winifred Boggs was one of my favourite reads, and I’ve made no secret about the fact that I’d love it to be a British Library Women Writers title at some point. But it wasn’t the first of her books that I read. The reason I got interested in Boggs in the first place was The Indignant Spinsters (1921). I figured I couldn’t help but love an author who would write a book with a title like that.

I love a slightly ridiculous premise, particularly if it involves convoluted lying and disguise, and that’s what The Indignant Spinsters provides in spades. The first section of the book tries to get the reader comfortable in what’s going on, and I’ll admit I had to re-read bits of it several times. The long and the short of it is that there are three unmarried sisters, the Miss Smiths – Kit, Doll, and the narrator whose name I can’t find. Maybe unnamed? They have lived oppressed lives with an uncle who, when he dies, leaves them with a fair chunk of money but not enough to live on forever.

How easy to be good on a few thousands a year! How difficult on a hundred or so! Oh, the daily grinding sordid things that threaten to make us sordid too! We may manage, a few of us, to afford a heart; we know we cannot afford a soul. We have got to ‘make two ends meet’ instead, perhaps spend fifty years at it – and fail at the last. I also told myself that there were few things I would not do to get a chance at the big things of life.

The Miss Smiths have some tangled connection with the housekeeper of a house where the son moved to Australia and cut ties with the Wanstead family – and had three daughters, all of whom died. As luck would have it, these three daughters are about the same age as the three Miss Smiths. They decide to announce themselves as the missing women, and move into the ancestral home.

The plan is concocted in order to find them eligible husbands, as they no longer wish to be indigent spinsters – or indignant, as is misheard, for such is the origin of the title. They know that wealthy women are far more likely to find men who want to marry them. Their plan is not cruel, as they don’t want to take anything away from the Wansteads. And there is no emotional manipulation at play, since nobody they’re meeting has any fondness for the absent son, or any personal knowledge of his three daughters. Boggs does a good job at keeping us on side, and sympathetic with them.

But – oh, of course – things go wrong. The missing women’s uncle John – also believed dead – turns up, and he is rather dubious about their claims. And that’s just the first of the obstacles that gets in their way, as they deal with their plan crumbling and their moral resolve following suit.

In all of this, there are a few delightful character-types – like straight-talking Aunt Susannah:

”I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I was discussing spinsters. Be good enough not to interrupt and to speak when you’re spoken to, Miss Pert! I say spinsters are maligned. If half of them are ‘couldn’ts’, the other half are certainly ‘wouldn’ts’, and when one sees what some of their fellow women pick up and endure with complacency one hardly wonders or blames them. In the old days they had a regrettable taste in curates; now they prefer motor cars, and again I don’t blame ’em!”

So, it’s a ridiculously silly plot and it’s good fun to read. And it’s not an awful lot more than that, but sometimes that’s all one needs. There isn’t much emotional depth to the characters, and the stakes feel relatively low. Which is why I found it a surprise when I read Sally on the Rocks which is so much more impactful – a genuine feeling of the desperation of unmarried poverty, and characters who are so well drawn. I found a lot to enjoy for a few frivolous afternoons. It was only when I saw what else Boggs was capable of that I realised this wouldn’t be the one of hers that I would be pushing on everyone.

The Land by Vita Sackville-West [or a bit of it]

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File:Victoria-mary-sackville-west-vita.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

I am trying to be the sort of person who likes poetry, and picking some of the poems off my bookshelves. If I’m honest, it hasn’t been an enormous success yet – though I did enjoy some of the Yeats I read, and felt pretty unenthusiastic about quite a lot of it.

One of the poems I’ve been keen to try is The Land by Sackville-West – a book-length poem from 1926. It is perhaps best remembered now, at least to the non-poetry read fraternity, for Virginia Woolf’s teasing of it in Orlando. In that novel, published a couple of years later and inspired by Vita Sackville-West, Orlando spends years writing a long poem called The Oak Tree that is later lampooned by a noted Elizabethan critic.

So that is quite a starting point for trying The Land! And I can see why it might be lampooned. It’s essentially a rustic and atavistic take on nature, filled with farmers doing ancient things with scythes etc. etc. I’m going to be honest, most of it didn’t really work for me. That ‘poetic shepherd’ genre always feels a bit improbable and fey to me. BUT I am glad I read it for this small section alone, which I really liked.

Long story short – I don’t think I’m the right audience for The Land, but I love two particular pages. So, if you’re like me – here, I’m saving you some time and just sharing this bit, on comparing poets and artisans.

The poet like the artisan
Works lonely with his tools; picks up each one,
Blunt mallet knowing, and the quick thin blade,
And plane that travels when the hewing’s done;
Rejects, and chooses; scores a fresh faint line;
Sharpens, intent upon his chiselling;
Bends lower to examine his design,
If it be truly made,
And brings perfection to so slight a thing.
But in the shadows of his working-place,
Dust-moted, dim,
Among the chips and lumber of his trade,
Lifts never his bowed head, a breathing-space
To look upon the world beyond the sill,
The world framed small, in distance, for to him
The world and all its weight are in his will.
Yet in the ecstasy of his rapt mood
There’s no retreat his spirit cannot fill,
No distant leagues, no present, and no past,
No essence that his need may not distil,
All pressed into his service, but he knows
Only the immediate care, if that be good;
The little focus that his words enclose;
As the poor joiner, working at his wood,
Knew not the tree from which the planks were taken,
Knew not the glade from which the trunk was brought,
Knew not the soil in which the roots were fast,
Nor by what centuries of gales the boughs were shaken,
But holds them all beneath his hands at last.

British Library Women Writers #4: Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay

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I intend to write about each of the British Library Women Writers titles as they come out, though I’m already a bit behind because the brilliant Father by Elizabeth von Arnim is also out now!

I knew, when I was first asked about women writers who shouldn’t be out of print anymore, that I was keen to get some more Rose Macaulay back. She is well known for The Towers of Trebizond, her final novel, but I prefer her witty, spiky novels of the 1920s. Perhaps they are less of a tour de force, but they have an awful lot to say about contemporary (middle-class) society, and they’re a hoot. I’m pleased to say that Handheld Press and Vintage have also been bringing back some of her novels from that period and, who knows, maybe some others will find their way into the BLWW series at some point. But there was one obvious choice for a series that looks at how novels reflected women’s lives in the early 20th century: Dangerous Ages (1921) does it for a whole bunch of different women.

Those women are several generations of the same family. Neville is in her 40s (yes, ‘her’ – Macaulay often gave her female characters male names) and thinking about resuming her career as a doctor. Her daughter is part of a generation that dismisses everything pre-20th-century and talks a lot about ‘free love’ etc – in fact, let me interrupt this list to give a wonderful piece of Macaulay dryness:

“Marriage,” said Gerda, “is so Victorian. It’s like antimacassars.”

“Now, my dear, do you mean anything by either of those statements? Marriage wasn’t invented in Victoria’s reign. Nor did it occur more frequently in that reign than it did before or does now. Why Victorian then? And why antimacassars? Think it out. How can a legal contract be like a doily on the back of a chair? Where is the resemblance? It sounds like a riddle, only there’s no answer. No, you know you’ve got no answer. That kind of remark is sheer sentimentality and muddle headedness. Why are people in their twenties so often sentimental? That’s another riddle.”

Neville’s grandmother is in her 80s and pretty content with life. But the character I found most interesting in many ways was Neville’s mother, known always in the novel as Mrs Hilary.

Mrs Hilary is in her 60s, ignored by the world, craving just a little bit of attention from anyone – and one of the options she experiments with is psychoanalysis. That’s what I wrote about in my afterword for the book, because it was such a ‘thing’ in the 1920s.

‘What you really wanted was some man whose trade it was to listen and to give heed. Some man to whom your daughter’s pneumonia, of however long ago, was not irrelevant, but had its own significance, as having helped to build you up as you were, you, the problem, with your wonderful, puzzling temperament, so full of complexes, inconsistencies, and needs. Some man who didn’t lose interest in you just because you were gray-haired and sixty-three.’

Macaulay is very witty about Freudianism, as so many writers were at the time, but also sees the need that it is answering in Mrs Hilary and the way that society neglected her. Which is impressive, considering she was only in her forties at the time herself.

There is a lot going on in this novel, and more characters and concerns than I have covered in this short review, but what holds it together is Macaulay’s intense interest in her characters. She laughs at them, but she understands them too. Each portrait is affectionate and kind, even when the ridiculous is on show. And it’s a complete delight of a novel. I’m so pleased it’s back in print, where it deserves to be!

My Discovery of England by Stephen Leacock

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When I went to Toronto in October 2017, there was only one site that I really, really wanted to go to. Well, two including Niagara Falls – but the place I was most excited to visit was a little town called Orillia. Mention that to anybody in Toronto and they will be baffled – and, having spent a day there, I can see why they might be. It’s a small, perfectly pleasant town, but not the sort of place tourists from England would usually make a beeline for – unless, of course, they love Stephen Leacock. Or are the twin brother of someone who loves Stephen Leacock.

So we spent a day there, and I got to visit his house. Not many people were doing the same, but I found it very moving. I’ve loved Leacock since I started loving books aimed at grown ups, more or less, and it was a dream come true to be in the house where he wrote.

I’ve read a fair amount of Leacock, and had even more unread, but I had not come across My Discovery of England (1922). As soon as I knew it existed, I had to get my hands on it. In the early twentieth century, there were lots of books written by British authors about North America – often on the back of a few weeks travelling between hotels. They repeatedly answered the same sorts of questions about American culture, American women, America’s future – you might remember it being teased in E.M. Delafield’s The Provincial Lady in America.

Well, Leacock decides to beat the writers at their own game – and writes the reverse, coming to England to ‘jot down his impressions’, always bearing in mind comparisons with the places he knows and loves in ‘America’ (he often refers to Canada and America interchangeably as ‘America’ in the book, mentioning in a footnote that he uses it as shorthand for North America).

By an arrangement with the Geographical Society of America, acting in conjunction with the Royal Geographic Society of England (to both of whom I communicated my proposal), I went at my own expense.

The resulting book is (a) very funny and (b) frequently shows how little has changed in the UK in the intervening century. For instance, here he is not long after his arrival, taking a train journey:

The journey from Liverpool to London, like all other English journeys, is short. This is due to the fact that England is a small county; it contains only fifty thousand square miles, where the United States, as every one knows, contains three and a half billion. I mentioned this fact to an English fellow-passenger on the train, together with a provisional estimate of the American corn crop for 1922; but he only drew his rug about his knees, took a sip of brandy from his travelling flask, and sank into a state resembling death. I contented myself with jotting down an impression of incivility and paid no further attention to my fellow-traveller other than to read the labels of his luggage and to peruse the headings of his newspaper by peeping over his shoulder.

It was my first experience of travelling with a fellow-passenger in a compartment of an English train, and I admit now that I was as yet ignorant of the proper method of conduct. Later on I became fully conversant with the rules of travel as understood in England. I should have known, of course, that I must on no account speak to the man.

A lot of the humour in the book comes from comparing the way English writers were treated in provincial towns in North America with the way he is treated in England’s major cities – he notes sadly, for instance, that he is not met by the mayor for a tour of the local soap factory. It’s all dry and I enjoyed it a lot.

Curiously, the one time he does seem not to be dry is when writing about co-education – and, despite being a professor at McGill University and teaching both men and women, he launches into quite an odd and unconvincing line of argument against women receiving degrees. Try, if you can, to put that to one side – and then there is much to enjoy in his cursory exploration of Oxford University (from the vantage of the Mitre pub which, one hopes for his sake, was nicer in 1922 than it is today). The university certainly doesn’t seem to have changed much…

In the second half of the book, he focused more on the disadvantages of being a visiting speaker – again, very amusing, but I preferred the first half of the book. But overall it was exactly the sort of mildly silly, gently biting book that I have come to expect and love from Leacock. Something fun for lockdown, certainly.

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.

Ann and Her Mother by O. Douglas

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Image result for ann and her mother o douglasAlongside a few others, I picked up an O. Douglas novel in homage to a friend called Sarah – I’ve written a little bit about her, and why, at the bottom of this post. Like the other Douglas novel I read this year, this one was kindly given to me by my friend Emily’s mum, and it came from her mother’s library.

I chose Ann and Her Mother (1922) because it fit Project Names, and it turns out to be a little different from the other two I’ve read – Pink Sugar and The Proper Place. Both of those novels have quite a lot of plot and movement – whereas Ann and Her Mother takes place entirely across a handful of days, in conversation between Ann and – you guessed it – her mother. Ann is in her late 20s and her mother is what the 1920s considered old. Certainly she is old enough that Ann thinks it’s appropriate to write down an account of her life. The novel does acknowledge that there wouldn’t be a wide public for the ghostwritten memoir of a minister’s widow, and does so with a nod and a wink – because this is exactly what is written.

Another review I’ve read points out that it’s very autobiographical, but I don’t know enough about O. Douglas’s life to notice the similarities – other than that she was really called Anna Buchan, sister of the famous novelist John. In the novel, at least, the mother’s life has been dominated by the death of four people – recently, her husband; longer ago, two sons in war and a daughter in infancy. Douglas manages to write about the death of this young innocent in a way that sidesteps the mawkish because it is so heartfelt and genuine.

The loss of these four aside, there is much to amuse in their reminiscences of being respectively a minister’s wife and a minister’s daughter. Ann is a little quicker to see the ridiculous than her mother, and is occasionally reprimanded for not depicting the locals kindly. And she writes very well about growing up in the manse – having grown up in a vicarage myself, this rang SO true:

“I do so agree,” said Ann; “‘a bright, interested expression’ is far too often demanded of ministers’ wives and families. What a joy to scowl and look listless at a time. You know, Mums, a manse is a regular school for diplomatists. It is a splendid training. One learns to talk to and understand all sorts of people—just think what an advantage that gives one over people who have only known intimately their own class! And you haven’t time to think about yourself; you are so on the alert to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. You have to try and remember the affairs of each different member, how many children they possess, and all about them, and be careful to ask at the right moment for the welfare of each.”

I have seldom read a less urgent novel. It is not one to keep you up late reading to find out what happens. There is almost no pace. But that is deliberate, and it perfectly suits a certain reading mood. I enjoyed easing myself into it in an evening, letting the gentleness wash over me. However painful the topics covered, this is not a painful book to read. The affection the two have for each other, and their optimism and faith, makes it an ideal novel to soak in.

Douglas does anticipate the inevitable criticism of the novel, as not being edgy enough, by having Ann send the unfinished manuscript of her mother’s Life to a friend…

“Here’s a nice state of things,” said Ann.

“Is anything wrong?” asked her mother.

“Well, I don’t know whether you would call it wrong or right. Mr. Philip Scott sends me back my MS., with his criticism of it. I agree with most of the things he says: my language is too incorrigibly noble, my quotations are very frequent——”

“But if they’re good quotations,” Mrs. Douglas interrupted.

“Oh, they’re good quotations. ‘It was the best butter,’ as the poor March Hare said. But what he objects to most is the sweetness of it. He says, ‘Put more acid into it.'”

Reader, she does not put more acid into it. This novel is entirely absent of acid. Perhaps it would feel too saccharine in some moods, and I did tend to pick it up only when it was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to read – but, at those times, it could scarcely be bettered. And is mercifully light on the Scottish dialect, impenetrable to non-Scots like myself!

And here’s a bit about Sarah, and how I came to pick up the novel.

It’s odd to mourn a friend that you’ve never met. I’ve been in an online book group since 2005, and it has settled into the same handful of like-minded readers for about the past ten years. We don’t all read the same books, but we have similar taste – and it is a lovely place to share reading tastes and recommendations. And, of course, other aspects of life come alongside. We’ve all become friends – and those of us in the UK meet up once a year. I’ve met a couple of the readers from the US. But I never met Sarah.

She was a very active member of the group, often starting and continuing conversations. She was encouraging, kind, and funny, and the group relished having her. Earlier this year she died, and I miss her contributions deeply – despite not even really knowing what she looked like. But I knew more important things, like her love for her husband and family, her infectious love of reading, and her favourite authors. Among them was O. Douglas, and several of us in the group used reading an O. Douglas novel as a way of saying thank you and farewell to Sarah.

The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg by Louis Bromfield

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I bought The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928) by Louis Bromfield back in 2011, after reading Rachel’s review of his novel Mrs Parkington. I do also own that novel, but had yet to read anything by Bromfield. Both would have qualified for Project Names, but the reason I picked up Annie Spragg was (a) because the title was so intriguing and (b) because I read a review that said it was like reading an Alfred Hitchcock film.

Well. Hmm.

This might be the worst structured novel I’ve ever read. Or cleverly experimental in a way that I really don’t understand. And yet it was sufficiently well written – in its constituent pieces – that I still liked it. All very confusing.

The novel opens with Mr Winnery, who is living in a small town in Italy and slowly, laboriously writing a long book about miracles. He believes there is always a rationale explanation for them, and that is the gist of his book – but it has taken him years, and he doesn’t imagine he’ll ever finish it. Instead, like almost all of the English-speaking society he moves in in Italy, he has stayed in this exile because he can’t afford to leave. The one wealthy woman is the doyenne of the society, Mrs Weatherby, and she has a matriarchly abusive relationship with her companion – who loathes her but cannot leave. Throw in some Roman Catholic colour – nuns, priest – and you have the contemporary set up. Annie Spragg is not part of this set, but she is known to them – an odd, sad older woman.

But when Annie Spragg dies, the nun attending her deathbed finds that stigmata have appeared on her. Her palms and feet bear the scars of nails; her side the sign of having been cut. A miracle has happened – she has the same scars as the resurrected Christ.

I think this is a fascinating set up for a novel, and I was enjoying reading about the group of ex-pats in Italy. There was enough tension for an interesting and moving novel. But instead…

For approximately the next two hundred pages, Bromfield gives us detailed, scattered portraits of other people. We do see a bit of Annie Spragg’s childhood – one of many daughters of the leader of a religious cult. I find this sort of painstaking flashback a little irritating, but worse was when he goes off into detail about characters we’ve not met yet. Often these would end with some tangential connection to the present day events, sometimes impacting them. Occasionally they’d only link to a whole other chapter of back story that would then link to the present – which we didn’t see, we just had to remember it existed.

It’s a patchwork of stories that all feel like they should have been notes he made, to work out a history in his head. But they are compiled in such a disjointed way that we have to wade through many pages that have no emotional connection for the reader, because we don’t have a clue who he’s talking about. Or we get a chapter of back story that could equally well have been achieved with a couple of sentences of context.

It’s frustrating, because his writing is excellent. He manages to get moments of dark humour and observational humour into the scenes, and is incisive about human behaviour. I was really enjoying the beginning – and, indeed, I really enjoyed the end, when we were back in the present. (And all is… sort of explained?) In each chunk, once he’d finally established where we were and what was going on, I enjoyed a lot. But it was all so maddeningly arranged.

Perhaps people had more patience in the 20s, or perhaps this was all a formal experiment in storytelling. It didn’t really pay off for me, not least because I had to wait so long before the characters I was interested turned up again. BUT – because the page-by-page writing was so good, I’m quite likely to give him another go sometime. And Mrs Parkington is still on the shelf.