1920s

Spinster of this Parish – W.B. Maxwell

StuckinaBook All , , 20 Comments

I’m back!  Did you miss me?  I suspect a lot of people barely noticed, since I wasn’t away for all that long – but I usually try to post at least five times a week, so it felt like a lengthy holiday for me.  Sometimes a break is needed to keep blogging fresh for me – and my week-and-a-bit was enough to get me raring for more.  Let’s kick things off with a review to fill the 1922 slot on A Century of Books, eh?

It was in this article by Sarah Waters (an introduction to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes) that I first heard about Spinster of this Parish by W.B. Maxwell.  (A William, it turns out, but not that William Maxwell.)  It was only mentioned in passing, alongside F.M. Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter (which sadly underwhelmed me) but it was enough to pique my interest.  Luckily Oxford library has a copy in its store, and eventually I got around to reading it.  It’s rather extraordinary.

The action kicks off in 1920, with Mildred Parker (age 25) visiting ‘old maid’ Miss Emmeline Verinder (age 50) in the hopes of receiving some advice.  Mildred is ‘that mixture of shrewdness and innocence which makes the typical modern girl seem at once so shallow and so baffling.’  She has fallen in love with a man of whom her parents do not approve – and is bewailing this state to Miss Verinder when she stops suddenly, and suggests that Mildred might not be able to help her, as she has never experienced ‘the passions’…

Rewind to 1895, and Emmeline’s youth.  We’re still in the third person, so it’s not entirely Emmeline Verinder’s perspective, but she is certainly taking centre stage.  She is engaging in the late-Victorian social whirl, when she happens to meet celebrated explorer Anthony Dyke… and yes, dear reader, Emmeline is smitten.

How had he captivated her?  She did not know.  Was it only because he was the incarnate antithesis of Kensington; because he was individual, unlike the things on either side of him, not arranged on any pattern, not dull, monotonous, or flat; a thing alive in a place where all else was sleeping or dead?  Neither then nor at any future time did she attempt mentally to differentiate between the impression he had made upon her as himself all complete, with the dark hair, the penetrating but impenetrable eyes, the record, the fame, and the impression she might have received if any of these attributes had been taken away from him.  Say, if he had been an unknown Mr. Tomkins instead of a known Mr. Dyke.  Absurd.  The man and the name were one. […] He was Anthony Dyke.  He was her lord, her prince, her lover.

In other words, he is about equal measures Tarzan and Mr. Rochester.  Indeed, he borrows more than a penetrating stare from the world’s most beloved bigamist – for Dyke [er, SPOILERS!], like Rochester, has a madwoman in the attic.  Like poor Rochester (for we can’t our brooding heroes being too cruel, can we?) Dyke was tricked into marrying a madwoman (variety of mental illness not mentioned) who is now not, actually, in an attic but in an asylum.

This is where things start to get a bit daring.  Dyke is rather more honest than Rochester, and tells Emmeline about his wife.  She, in turn, decides that their love is more important than society’s morals and her parents’ approval – and becomes, as it were, his mistress.  This was pretty daring for the time, wasn’t it?  Shunned by her parents (although, to do Maxwell justice, Mr. Verinder ‘was not in any respects the conventional old-fashioned father that lingered in the comic literature of the period’) Emmeline takes her maid Louisa and lives elsewhere.

Being an explorer, Dyke must explore – and he’s high-tailing it off to South America.  They have rather a rushed emotional goodbye and he sets sail… only… wait… Emmeline has sneakily crept onboard!

This, blog-readers, is where everything goes mad.

The next section of the novel takes place in South America – and I highly doubt that Maxwell had ever gone nearer to it than Land’s End.  They go emerald-hunting, get lost in caves, involved in duels… it’s insane, and entirely different from the novel I was expecting.  Had I seen the cover (below) then I might have been better prepared for the excesses of Spinster of this Parish, which were in no way betrayed by the novel’s title.

The Sheik by Ethel M. Hull was published in 1919, and was wildly popular into the 1920s – although Spinster of this Parish involves none of the disturbing rape fantasies of The Sheik, it’s clear that Maxwell (and many others) were influenced by the popularity for exoticism.  I, however, found this section rather tedious, and flicked through it…

Finally we are back in English society – Emmeline grows gradually less shunned, and Dyke’s adventures continue abroad without her.  He is determined to succeed in his quest to get to the South Pole… will he survive or not?  Maxwell has rather calmed down by now, and Dyke’s activities take place off stage, thankfully – instead, we see the changing views of upper-class society, and Emmeline’s unwavering loyalty to her absent lover.

Picture source

Ah, yes, their love.  I got a bit tired of that.  He is physically perfect and unimaginably manly; she is womanfully patient and devotedly passionate.  Hmm.  Not the most original of pairings.  A lot made sense to me when I found out that W.B. Maxwell is the son of none other than Mary Elizabeth Braddon – of Lady Audley’s Secret fame.  He certainly inherited her love of sensation romance literature (did I mention the blackmail plot that’s thrown in?)

And yet – I enjoyed an awful lot of it.  Maxwell’s writing is, if not exceptional, consistently good.  He is quite witty throughout, and certainly writes better than most of the authors who would warrant a similar dustjacket image.  When we were in England, looking at the workings of society, it was very much my cup of tea – even if the characters were a little too good to be true.  At one point I even thought of suggesting it to Persephone Books.  But… I couldn’t get past the insane section in the middle.  The bizarre trip through South America, duels-n-all, is what will make Spinster of this Parish so memorable – but also that which lets down the overall writing, and makes it feel rather silly.

So, a strange book with which to make me blog return!  If nothing else, it has taught be that one must not only forswear to judge a book by its cover – similar caution must be taken as regards a book’s title.

Uncanny Stories – May Sinclair

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To those of us in this particular corner of the blogosphere, where reprint publishers of early twentieth-century women’s novels are our bread and butter, the name May Sinclair is probably most closely connected with her 1922 novel Life and Death of Harriett Frean (and perhaps for coining the term ‘stream of consciousness’, in print).  And a very good novel it is too (my thoughts here.)  What gets less attention is that the following year she published a collection called Uncanny Stories.  Indeed, she was astonishingly prolific, publishing fourteen books in the 1920s alone – and, as Uncanny Stories demonstrates, was not afraid to venture into different genres.

Truth be told, there is only really one story which stands out in this collection, and that is the first one: ‘Where Their Fire is not Quenched’.  I’d read it a while ago, and hoped that the others in the collection would match up – sadly they didn’t really.  The atmosphere, characters, and writing were all good, but they often follow essentially the same premise: a ghost returns to clear up some unfinished business, usually romantic. I suppose that is as good a ghost story prototype as any, and Sinclair is careful always to incorporate some psychological angle, but ‘Where Their Fire is not Quenched’ is excitingly original by comparison.  (Oh, and there is ‘The Finding of the Absolute’, which is a posthumous discussion about adultery and Kant… but that was mostly bizarre.)

The term ‘uncanny’ had only recently (four years earlier) been used as the title to an influential essay by Freud (‘Das Unheimliche’) and it is likely that Sinclair deliberately chose her title to connect with his, especially given her interest in psycho-analysis.  But the relationship between sexuality and the supernatural is not hidden in ‘Where Their Fire is not Quenched’.

The story concerns Harriott who, like her near-namesake Harriett Frean, misses out on an early chance at love.  No further opportunities present themselves until, after her father’s death, she embarks upon an affair with a married man, Oscar.  They spend a fortnight together in the Hotel Saint Pierre, Paris, and the affair drags on… and on…

She tried hard to believe that she was miserable because her love was purer and more spiritual than Oscar’s; but all the time she knew perfectly well she had cried from pure boreom. She was in love with Oscar, and Oscar bored her.  Oscar was in love with her, and she bored him.  At close quarters, day in and day out, each was revealed to the other as an incredible bore.
At the end of the second week she began to doubt whether she had ever been really in love with him.

When Harriott wonders whether or not she could marry Oscar, she thinks ‘Marriage would be the Hotel Saint Pierre all over again, without any possibility of escape.’  Little does she realise the fate that awaits her after her death… Although she lives many years after the end of her affair, even becoming a deaconess, after her death it is Oscar she sees.

The rest of the story is hauntingly surreal, and incredibly filmic.  It would make a superb short animated feature, actually – think Tim Burton meets Salvador Dali.  Harriott keeps escaping Oscar, running through past memories of a church, her village, her childhood home and garden… but every corner she turns, the rooms and streets rearrange themselves into the corridor of the Parisian hotel.  Sinclair writes this so well, vividly and visually.  I thought that Jean de Bosschere’s illustration, which accompanies it, gives a good idea of what Sinclair was trying to convey:

Ineluctably Harriott is forced back to the scene of her loveless affair, overriding everything else she has done.

“In the last death we shall be shut up in this room, behind that locked door, together.  We shall life here together, for ever and ever, joined so fast that even God can’t put us asunder.  We shall be one flesh and one spirit, one sin repeated for ever, and ever; spirit loathing flesh, flesh loathing spirit; you and I loathing each other.”
“Why? Why?” she cried.

“Because that’s all that’s left us.  That’s what you made of love.”
It is unpopular these days for a work of fiction to have a moral; the much-fated quality of ‘openmindedness’ has led to people being extremely closed-minded in this area.  It was pretty unpopular for stories to have morals even in the 1920s, but Sinclair has dared to.  The story is not so much a warning against adultery as a cry against sexual relationships where there is no love – as such I think the story is very resonant today, and chilling in ways that Gothicised tales of horror cannot be.  It’s a shame that the rest of Uncanny Stories is fairly pedestrian – entertaining and diverting enough, but never experimental.  But I do recommend you track down ‘Where Their Fire is not Quenched’, in or out of this collection.  In fact, you can read a pdf version here…

The Rector’s Daughter – F.M. Mayor

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There are a few books which I expect to love, end up not loving, and then wonder why.  I lean back in my chair, eye the novel sternly, and ask myself (and it) what went wrong.  Was it timing?  Would a re-read make me fall in love?  Have I recently read something else which does the same sort of thing, but better?  That’s a sure-fire way to leave me unimpressed.  Or is the book simply not as good as everyone tells me?

Well, recently a novel joined the ranks of Hotel du Lac, Gaudy Night, and A Passage to India.  All books which have their passionate fans, and (with me) a somewhat underwhelmed reader.  Well, The Rector’s Daughter, I certainly didn’t hate you.  I liked you rather more than the above trio of disappointments.  But nor did I love you in the way that I anticipated I would, based on reviews by Rachel and Harriet.  So I have stalled writing about this novel… I finished it right at the beginning of 2012, and yet… what to say?  How to write about it properly – justifying my lack of adoration for this much-adored title, but not only that: this was one of those novels which gave me no heads-up on how I would structure a review.  But… well, I’ll try.

The Rector’s Daughter (1924) concerns the life and ill-fated love of Mary Jocelyn, the rector’s daughter in question.  She is motherless, and lives a life of obedient graciousness towards her father – who is deeply intellectual, but not able to show his love for his daughter.  I think Mary was supposed to be in the mold of silently passionate women, having to be content with their lot.  A bit like Jane Eyre, perhaps… but then I have always thought Jane Eyre a little overrated.  Here she is:

His daughter Mary was a decline.  Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early.  Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair.  She had her father’s beautiful eyes, and hid them with glasses.  She was dowdily dressed, but she had many companions in the neighbourhood, from labourers’ wives to the ladies of the big houses, to share her dowdiness.  It was not observed; she was as much a part of her village as its homely hawthorns.
Mary has one great chance at love, with Mr. Herbert – and I do not think it gives too much away (for it is no surprise) to relate that her chance comes to nothing, and she must live with the consequences of this unlucky, ineluctable failure.  Love is one of the major themes of the novel.  That’s true of a lot of novels, but in The Rector’s Daughter the theme is love-out-of-reach; the journey from innocence to experience, bypassing happiness.  What horrifies Mary – and what seems to horrify F.M. Mayor too – is any sort of irreverence towards love.

One winter day when Dora Redland had come to stay with Ella, she and Mary met for a walk.  Mary suddenly started the subject.  “I wish you would tell me something about love.  I should think no one ever reached my age and knew so little, except of love in books.  Father has never mentioned love, and Aunt Lottie treated it as if it ought not to exist.  There were you and Will, but I was so young for me age I never took it in.”

“What a funny thing to ask!” said Dora.  “I don’t think I know much about it either.  There was one of the curates at Southsea – I never imagined he cared at all for me; I had hardly ever spoken to him.  I think some one else had refused him.  That makes them susceptible, I believe, and also the time of year and wanting to marry.”  There was a mild severity, perhaps cynicism, in this speech, which astonished Mary.

“But, Dora, don’t you think there is a Love ‘Which alters not with Time’s brief hours and days, / But bears it out even to the edge of Doom’?”

“Take care, Mary dear, you stepped right into that puddle.  Wait a minute.  Let me wipe your coat.  I am not quite sure that I understand what you were saying.”
Dora is also a spinster, but less angsty.  I think I would have rather enjoyed a novel from Dora’s perspective…

It is usually easy to give reasons why a book didn’t work for me.  Indeed, they are few more satisfying activities than laying into a poorly written novel… but The Rector’s Daughter isn’t poorly written.

Perhaps my ennui can be attributed to spinster novel fatigue?  I have read quite a few recently, and have to say that May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean attempts a similar type of novel rather more (for me) successfully.  The public debate about unmarried women between the world wars (covered fascinatingly in a chapter of Nicola Beauman’s A Very Great Profession, and less fascinatingly in Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out) was loud and often angry; the 1920s novels dealing with this issue were written at a time when the issue was contentious, as well as potentially tragic.  Maybe I’ve just read too many, now?

Perhaps I found The Rector’s Daughter too earnest?  I have often noted that novels others love sometimes fail with me if they are very earnest.  It kills a narrative.  And certainly there appeared to be very little humour in Mayor’s novel… at least in the first half.  I was surprised, in the second half, to come across moments which would be at home in Jane Austen or E.M. Delafield’s lighter work.  This passage was brilliant – it’s from Miss Davey, a character (looking back) whom I remember nothing else about:

“Who can that be coming down the road?  Why, it’s the pretty little girl with the dark curls we saw yesterday when the Canon took me out a little walk – your dear father.  Oh no, it’s not; now she comes nearer I see it’s not the little girl with the dark curls.  My sight isn’t quite as good as it was.  No, she has red hair and spectacles.  Dear me, what a plain little thing.  Did you say she would be calling for the milk, dear? Or is this the little one you say helps Cook?  Oh no, not that one, only ten; no, she would be rather young.  Yes, what the girls are coming to.  You say you don’t find a difficulty.  Mrs. Barkham – my new lodgings; I told you about her, poor thing, she suffers so from neuralgia – she says the girls now – fancy her last girl wearing a pendant when she was waiting.  Just a very plain brooch, no one would say a word against, costing half-a-crown or two shillings.  I’ve given one myself to a servant many a time.  Oh, that dear little robin – Mary, you must look – or is it a thrush?  There, it’s gone.  You’ve missed it.  Perhaps we could see it out of the other window.  Thank you, dear; if I could have your arm.  Oh, I didn’t see the footstool.  No, thank you, I didn’t hurt myself in the least; only that was my rheumatic elbow.”
Had I simply missed this sort of thing at the beginning, or did Mayor alter the tone?  I’m not suggesting that all novels ought to be comic novels, but without a slightly ironic eye, or dark humour, or even a slight reflective smile, I am rather lost.  This came too late in The Rector’s Daughter – or at least I missed it.  Hilary wrote in her review at Vulpes Libris that “There is no distancing irony or humour – its serious tone is relentless.”  I didn’t find it quite relentless, but otherwise I agree with this sentence (although Hilary, as you’ll see at the bottom, was overall more positive about the novel.)  I admire good comic writers so much more than I admire good poignant writers – it is so much more difficult to be comic – but maybe that is simply horses for courses.

However, as I finish a lukewarm review of The Rector’s Daughter, I am chastened by the memory of my initial response to Mollie Panter-Downes’s One Fine Day.  Who knows, perhaps a re-read of The Rector’s Daughter would give me an equally enthusiastic second impression?

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“This is such a brilliant book, worthy of being a classic, really, in that it so perfectly encapsulates how limited unmarried women’s lives could be before the advent of feminism” – Rachel, Book Snob

“The novel is minutely observed; there is beautiful detail about each day and the East Anglian countryside, so that although time passes in the book very slowly, it is wonderfully described.” – Verity, Verity’s Virago Venture

“This is a novel about how hard it is to understand other people, and how many misunderstandings and even tragedies arise from it.” – Harriet, Harriet Devine’s Blog

“I wouldn’t have missed it, and I do recommend it. I can understand why this novel is regarded as a hidden gem.”  – Hilary, Vulpes Libres

Blindness by Henry Green

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Normal weekend posts are suspended, since I failed to write my review of Blindness (1926) during weekdays of Henry Green Reading Week (run by Stu) – indeed, I didn’t finish reading the book until last night.  But let’s hope the weekend counts, and get on with the show!  And it’s going to be quite a long show, as I ended up having a lot to say about Mr. Green…

I decided to start with Blindness because it was Green’s first novel, and I’ve never read an author chronologically before.  Blindness was great, and so I’ll be reading the rest of Green’s novels chronologically… over the course of many years, I suspect.  I wasn’t sure I’d like him, based on excerpts I had seen around the blogosphere – perhaps he has to be read in context, rather than piecemeal?  Perhaps the first novel is different from the others?  I don’t know, but I do know that this novel has left me keen to try more.

Blindness starts with the diary of John Haye, a privileged boy at a posh school.  He is something of a dandy and an aesthete, pontificating on art and culture and how to best the boys who try to best him.  He’s not unpleasant, but nor is there much depth to his diary.  Even though orphaned (with an attentive stepmother who has been ‘Mamma’ for nearly all his life) it seems that nothing of great emotional moment has ever affected his life.  Here’s a sample diary entry:

Bell’s, across the way, have bought as many as seven hunting-horns.  Each possessor blows it unceasingly, just when one wants to read.  They don’t do it all together, but take it in turns to keep up one forced note.  Really, it might be Eton.  They can only produce the one note during the whole day.

In addition to this trifling detail, it is “the thing to do” now to throw stones at me as I sit at my window.  However, I have just called E.N. a “milch cow,” and shall on the first opportunity call D.J.B. a “bovine goat,” which generally relieves matter.  These epithets have the real authentic Noat Art Society touch, haven’t they?
Contrast that which the first paragraph of the second section.  In between there is a brief letter, from B.G. to Seymour, which tells the reader what they have suspected from the title onwards: John has been blinded.  I shan’t tell you how (it’s good to have some specifics left for the reading experience) but immediately we drop out of the self-conscious intimacy of John’s diary, and into this paragraph:

Outside it was raining, and through the leaded window panes a grey light came and was lost in the room.  The afternoon was passing wearily, and the soft sound of the rain, never faster, never slower, tired.  A big bed in one corner of the room, opposite a chest of drawers, and on it a few books and a pot of false flowers.  In the grate a weary fire, hissing spitefully when a drop of rain found its way down the chimney.  Below the bed a yellow wardrobe over which large grain marks circled aimlessly, on which there was a full-length glass.  Beyond, the door, green, as were the think embrasures of the two windows green, and the carpet, and the curtains.
The buoyancy has gone; the repeated word ‘weary’, and ‘tired’, drag the writing down with heaviness which doesn’t need to be overstated.  Green is excellent at conveying emotion through simple thoughts, allowing the reader to interpret the characters and their states of mind without giving too much overt direction.

John is at home, now, and the main characters change.  They are too well written to be accurately described in brief, but I’ll give a vague sketch.  John’s stepmother, Mamma, is of huntin’-shootin’ stock, doesn’t understand her arty stepson, but would (and does) do everything for his sake.  Nanny has cared for him from infancy.  And then there is Joan – the daughter of a local defrocked clergyman.  She isn’t particularly intelligent, although she has greater depth than her conversation suggests… and her relationship with John is as awkward as it is enlivening.  This is John’s thoughts after first meeting her:

Voices as become his great interest, voices that surrounded him, that came and went, that slipped from tone to tone, that hid to give away in hiding.  There had been wonder in hers when he had groped into the room upon them both; she had said, “Look.”  But before she had opened her mouth he had known that there was someone new in the room.

Voices had been thickly round him for the past month, all kinds of them.  Mamma extracted them from the neighbourhood, and all had sent out the first note of horror, and some had continued horrified and frightened, while others had grown sympathetic, and these were for the most part the fat voices of mothers, and some had been disgusted.  She had been the first to be almost immediately at her ease, when she spoke it was with an eager note, and there were so few eager people.
It is an interesting coincidence that I am reading this so soon after reading Helen Keller’s The World I Live In.  Of course there are differences (not least fact and fiction) but, although I can’t really know, I think Green writes a plausible narrative of dealing with sudden blindness.  And it certainly gives Green restrictions which he approaches impressively: to use, from John’s perspective, no visual descriptions.  I jotted down a line which I thought summed up much of the novel, and later (because I always read introductions at the end) discovered that Jeremy Treblown had begun his with the same quotation:

It was so easy to see and so hard to feel what was going on, but it was the feeling that mattered.
That’s a pretty good summary of any author’s task.  It’s essentially ‘show: don’t tell’, isn’t it?

Many of the novelists I love from the interwar years have spent the subsequent decades hovering between ‘canon’ and ‘non-canon’.  The Leavises et al may not have welcomed them, but they have been reclaimed by later critics – or left out in the dust.  Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth von Arnim, E.M. Delafield… to my mind, von Arnim is every bit as good as Taylor, but the latter has risen in critical appreciation where the former has not.  These seemingly arbitrary decisions can be found everywhere.

As for Green, he is a curious case.  You’d be hard-pressed to find a literary critic who didn’t think him significant – but equally hard-pressed to find one who’d bothered writing about him.  His style is often compared to Woolf’s or Joyce’s (although I don’t think those two authors should be grouped together) – what struck me is that Henry Green writes like James Joyce would if Joyce were a lot less arrogant, and more concerned with making his prose enjoyable as well as experimental.  There are several pages from Nan’s perspective, meandering hither and thither, reminiscing and wondering, that Joyce would have given his back teeth to be able to write.

Does Henry use stream-of-consciousness?  Yes, I suppose he does.  But whereas Woolf (whom I love) incorporates beautiful imagery and stylistic wanderings like waves on a shore, Green does the opposite.  He never uses a word or a metaphor that the character wouldn’t speak aloud.  It is beautiful, but it is resolutely simple.  And thus probably incredibly difficult to write – especially for a 21 year old.  Yes, Green was 21 when he finished this novel – and at school when he started it.  Sickening, isn’t it?

Blindness isn’t just from John’s perspective, though.  In fact, the perspective is a bit like a butterfly – flying about, settling for a few paragraphs on one person, then moving onto another – dipping in and out of people’s minds, and giving their thoughts, feelings, and worries in an honest, perceptive manner.  Green builds character so well, from the inside out.  Nobody is considered too insignificant for this treatment – the reader hears from the nurse, the cook, even a cockerel, alongside the principal cast.  If that feels dizzying, don’t worry, it is not – simplicity always remains Green’s mantra.  Sometimes this flitting between different consciousnesses does, though, create intriguing uncertainties.  Take this excerpt, during a conversation between John and Joan – Joan is speaking:

“Yes, an’ there’s the chicks that get lost in the grass, I love them, an’ there’s a starling that nests every year in the chimney, and my own mouse which plays about in my room at night, an’…”

G-d, the boredom of this.

“… but sometimes I hate it all.”
With my apparent knack for pre-empting Jeremy Treglown’s introduction, he also quotes this section – although unambiguously attributing the mental interjection to John.  That’s certainly the most likely reading, but I like the ambiguity that Green does incorporate.  It could easily be Joan’s thought (it would certainly match the other thoughts we’ve heard from her in this scene) or even a shared moment of bored despair – connecting mentally where they do not connect verbally.

I daresay I have delighted you long enough, so I will conclude.  Blindness is such an interesting novel, written so well.  As a first novel by a very young man, it demonstrates astonishingly maturity; I’m very excited about reading his later works.  This wouldn’t be a great choice for those who prize plot above character and style, but for anyone who likes the idea of modernism, but struggles to enjoy it in practice, Henry Green’s style (on the basis of Blindness, at least) is perfect for you.

Do head on over to Stu’s blog to see what he and others have read during Henry Green Reading Week.  And thanks, Stu, for giving me the incentive finally to read up my Greens!

Time Importuned – Sylvia Townsend Warner; or, Why Do Poetry and I Not Get Along, Wherein our Reader Struggles With Verse

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Well, I can tick off 1928 on A Century of Books, because on Saturday I read Time Importuned by Sylvia Townsend Warner.  This volume of poetry was published two years after Lolly Willowes, an excellent novel about which I’ll soon be writing a chapter of my thesis – but which I only wrote about very briefly on SiaB.  I intended to write another post last year, when I reread it.  I worry that, if I tried, I would end up writing ten thousand words… well, perhaps I’ll give it a go one day, since the review I wrote doesn’t do it justice.

Anyway, I read Time Importuned hoping that there would be something useful to include in that chapter (which, incidentally, there was) but I can’t say I’ve converted to a poetry lover.  This isn’t going to be a proper review, because I don’t really know how to write blog posts about poetry.  I can analyse them in a doing-an-English-degree sort of way, and I used to quite enjoy doing that, but blogs are chiefly about reading for pleasure.  The activities of the student are not those of the ardent reader – I enjoy both aspects, but they are distinct in my head.  You don’t want to know what I think of Warner’s use of syntax.  You might want to know whether or not I enjoyed reading Time Importuned – and the truth is, I don’t know.

Some poetry I hate.  If it doesn’t make sense to me on three readings, I’m not interested.  If the poet name-drops all manner of classical mythology, I raise my eyebrows; if they name-drop 21st century technology, I raise them still more (these were both frequent crimes in the Magdalen poetry society I occasionally visited.)

Some poetry I enjoy.  But mostly comic verse, or things which are probably considered doggerel by those in the know (does Longfellow fall into this category?  Does Walter de la Mare?)

Oddly enough, I enjoy writing poetry – but I’m under no illusion that it’s very good, and I do it entirely for my own amusement or catharsis, as case may be.  Since I rarely read poetry, I feel wholly unqualified to write it, and a little ashamed that I have the audacity to put pen to paper…

Something like Time Importuned… I just don’t know.  The topics covered tend towards hopeless love and countryside matters, often combined, and with an atmosphere almost as though they are old wives’ tales, passed down in small villages for many years.  Which was nice, but I did end up reading the poems mostly as though they were paragraphs of prose laid out in an unorthodox manner.  Perhaps that is a valid way of reading poetry… but perhaps it also misses a lot?  I don’t know how else to benefit from verse.  I deliberately slow myself down, by mouthing the words (I’m quite a fast reader of prose, in a manner which loses poems completely) but I still can’t imagine reading a volume of poetry for pleasure.  It’s not that I need prose, because often I read plays for pleasure – and that’s more or less as unusual a trait as poetry-adoration, so I’m led to understand.

Well, I’m going to type out a couple of the poems which I did quite enjoy, although I am far from the ideal reader for them.  Poetry washes by me, enchanting others who dip in their toes, and merely splashing me slightly.  So, before I get to some excerpts, I have a question… which poet/poetry would you recommend to the prose lover?  How would you go about converting me to the possibilities of poetry?

Over to Warner…

The Tree Unleaved

Day after day melts by, so hushed is the season,
So crystal the mornings are, the evenings so wrapped in haze,
That we do not notice the passage of the days ;
But coming in at the gate to-night I looked up for some reason,
      And saw overhead Time’s theft ;
For behold, not a leaf was left on the tree near by.

So it may chance, the passage of days abetting
My heedless assumption of life, my hands so careless to hold,
That glancing round I shall find myself grown old,
Forgotten my hopes and schemes, my friends forgotten and forgetting ;
      But all I can think of now
Is the pattern of leafless boughs on the windless sky.

Walking and Singing at Night

Darkened the hedge, and dimmed the wold,
We sang then as we trudged along.
The heart grown hot, the heart grown cold,
Are simple things in a song.

The lover comes, the lover goes,
On the same drooping interval,
Easy as from the ripened rose
The loosened petals fall.

Between one stanza and the next
A heart’s unprospered hopes are sighed
To death as lovely and unvexed
As ’twere a swan that died.

Alas, my dear, Farewell’s a word
Pleasant to sing but ill to say,
And Hope a vermin that dies hard ;
As you will find, one day.

Safety Pins – Christopher Morley

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I seem to write my reviews in protracted parts now – there are the bits I can’t help typing out and posting as soon as I read them, and then, rolling along months later, comes the actual review proper.  The snippets are probably more enjoyable to read, and certainly speedier to write, but I’ll leave that sort of blogging to people like Claire who does it so beautifully.  Me, I like the sound of my own voice.  So not only did I give you Christopher Morley’s delightful, wonderful essay ‘On Visiting Bookshops‘ back in July (go and read it now, if you didn’t then) but I’ll cover the whole collection it came in: Safety Pins (1925).  (I’m pretty sure these essays are collected elsewhere under another name, or scattered through different collections – grab any book of essays with Morley’s name on it!)

Morley was best known to me as the author of Parnassus on Wheels, which I love, and its sequel The Haunted Bookshop, which is a curate’s egg.  I love little literary or personal essays, and was delighted to find that he had written some – doubly delighted when I discovered that it included bibliophilia of that order.  The rest of the collection is something of a mixed bag – brilliant at its best, and humdrum at its worst.  Actually, that assessment isn’t quite fair: I find him fascinating when our interests overlap, and less so when they don’t – only the greatest essayists can make a subject compelling which would otherwise be considered dull.  I don’t even remember the topics of those that I skimmed through, so let’s move on to those I loved?  And when I love Morley’s essays, I really love them.

When he writes about books and writing, I am besotted – ‘The Perfect Reader’ is sweet and sensible; ‘On Unanswering Letters’ is farcical and yet oh-so-true (how letters are accidentally left unanswered for so long that it is impossible to do so, and no greeting works); he even admits to ‘the temptation to try to see what books other people are reading – this innocent curiosity has led me into many rudenesses, for I am short-sighted and have to stare very close to make out the titles.’  But beware the man who falls asleep while reading in a chair:

And here our poor barren clay plays us false, undermining the intellect with many a trick and wile.  “I will sit down for a season in that comfortable chair,” the creature says to himself, “and read this sprightly novel.  That will ease my mind and put me in humour for a continuance of lively thinking.”  And the end of that man is a steady nasal buzz from the bottom of the chair where has collapsed, an unsightly object and a disgrace to humanity.

Not even Shakespeare is safe from Morley’s attentions – in ‘On Making Friends’, he gives his own views on those tenets laid down in Hamlet:

Polonius, too, is another ancient supposed to be an authority on friendship.  The Polonius family must have been a thoroughly dreary one to live with; we ave often thought that Ophelia would have gone mad anyway, even if there had been no Hamlet.  Laertes preaches to Ophelia; Polonius preaches to Laertes.  Laertes escaped by going abroad, but the girl had to stay at home.  Hamlet saw that pithy old Polonius was a preposterous and orotund ass.  Polonius’s doctrine of friendship – “The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” – was, we trow, necessary in his case.  It would need a hoop of steel to keep them near such a dismal old sawmonger.

You probably sense Morley’s tone – and have a good idea whether you’ll love him or loathe him.  Some people do have an odd hatred for insouciant humour.  Morley’s essays are like A.A. Milne’s or Stephen Leacock’s or anybody who deals in slightly over-the-top whimsy – but rooted in a love of ideas and a passion for literature.  Morley becomes earnest, when on the track of his hero R.L. Stevenson, but is equally adept at cod-earnestness – for example, in the title essay, in praise of ‘Safety Pins’:

The pin has never been done justice in the world of poetry.  As one might say, the pin has no Pindar.  Of course there is the old saw about see a pin and pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck.  This couplet, barbarous as it is in its false rhyme, points (as Mother Goose generally does) to a profound truth.  When you see a pin, you must pick it up.  In other words, it is on the floor, where pins generally are.  Their instinctive affinity for terra firma makes one wonder why they, rather than the apple, did not suggest the law of gravitation to some one long before Newton.

Well, quite.  I keep using the word ‘delightful’, but it is the perfect word for Safety Pins.  If he is not entirely consistent, at least that is better than being consistently dull.  There is plenty here for the bibliophile, and plenty more for those who like to laugh at the little things in life.  I love it – I think a lot of you will too.

Other things to get Stuck into:


Once a Week by A.A. Milne – every now and then I eulogise about AAM, and hope that one or two of you will try him and love him.  The review I link to is really more about Punch, but hopefully you’ll be inspired to try Milne’s whimsical, clever essays.


Literary Lapses by Stephen Leacock – the great Canadian humorist deserves a better post than I gave him, but you can at least read one of his pieces there.  His sketches and essays brim over with humour, and he was wonderfully prolific too.

Any other humourous essayists you think I would enjoy?

A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee by Bea Howe

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Most of you, my lovely readers, chose the obscure novel yesterday – which goes to show how lucky I am to have you lot reading my blog!  I’ll probably end up writing about both – perhaps the well-known author will even pop up tomorrow in my absence, whilst I’m gallivanting in London.  Dark Puss suggested I wrote about the one I enjoyed more… well, I enjoyed this one more, but the other one was probably better.  (Other people used to that feeling?)

As you might have spotted from the post title, this is an obscure book, but I have mentioned it before.  A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee (1927) by Bloomsbury Group hanger-on Bea Howe lent its paper to my new blog background – I thought it was time I told you what was on the pages (other than David Garnett’s signature!)  (Some of you may even have spotted a very brief section of this review in your blog readers yesterday… oops!)

The outline of the novel is pretty simple – William and Evelina have fallen in love, and deal with the difficulties of not being able entirely to understand one another.  Much of the narrative flicks back and forth between their minds, as they grapple with starting a new stage of their life together – melding two rather different personalities into one prospective marriage.  Oh, and along the way a fairy turns up.

Evelina is not unlike a fairy herself – she is fanciful, thoughtful – bright, light, and sparkling:

She was dressed in a silver frock with a deep jewelled belt that gripped her waist.  Her light brown hair was cut quite short like a boy’s and brushed softly over her ears; it was shot with gold at its curling tips.  But it was her eyes, of an odd green colour, that William first noticed.  They regarded him so intently; like a child’s.  They were also very bright.  Eyebrows thin, dark, arched, gave a flying look to her face.  Her face which was painted and pale.

William, on the other hand, is a little more staid and grounded.  Where Evelina is concerned with her ‘secret self’, and often wanders off into realms of imagination (although not in an annoying way, for the reader at least) William is an etymologist – the fluttering world of moths is his chief concern, and he approaches it with the eyes of a scientist.  (Scientists will doubtless tell us – indeed, my brother does tell me – that there is a greater beauty in the structure and order of numbers/nature etc. than in its aesthetics.  Well, horses for courses.)  William’s captivation by lepidoptera is all-consuming, and colours even his attempted romantic overtures:

“One day I will tell you all about my moths.  In some odd way you remind me of them.”  His voice was low and gentle.  Evelina did not know that this was the first compliment he had paid a woman.

Yet it is he, the scientist, rather than she, the wistful romantic, who stumbles upon the fairy.  I once attended a nighttime moth hunt, and sadly no fairies turned up.  The one William finds has not quite the daintiness of Tinkerbell et al:

A pale, extremely ugly, wizened-looking little face, about the size of a hazel-nut, stared up at him.  And this face did not belong to a giant moth or beetle!  The filmy stuff, the cobwebby matter which had first stuck between his fingers and given such a peculiar sensation to his skin, was evidently part of this creature’s clothing.  Underneath its thin protection, William could see the vague outline of a tiny body.  It was a woman’s body, shaped quite perfectly, like a minikin statuette.  With a vague feeling of embarrassment he knelt down and rolled his prisoner gently off his palm on to the ground.  The fairy did not move.  She only remained looking in a dazed way at him.  William gazed back.  He still felt completely bewildered.  

A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee is a strange little book, not least because the fairy doesn’t do very much, except sit listlessly in William’s house.  She emphasises, however, the disparity between William and Evelina.  He has no personal curiosity in the fairy, except as a scientific specimen – ‘It had not even occurred to him to think of her as another living being.’  Evelina, on the other hand, is jealous that she did not make the discovery – and the existence of the fairy propels her even further into realms of the fanciful and fey.

A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee is a simple story which I found charming and enchanting – but which really could have done with a better structure.  It feels a little as though Howe started writing on page one, and put down anything that crossed her mind – which does give the novel a feeling of freedom and flow, but it ultimately lacks the impression of unity and progression which a properly planned novel has.  Evelina and William fall out and make up and fall out and make up – often without even seeing each other in between – which is possibly more life-like, but a little dizzying to read.

This was Bea Howe’s only novel (although she wrote a few biographies) so it’s impossible to tell how her style might have progressed.  For a first novel, A Fairy Leapt Upon My Knee is rather delightful, and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone with a taste for a touch of whimsy – as an only novel, it does lead one to speculate what Bea Howe could possibly have followed it with, and gives me an altogether bemused impression of Howe as an authoress.  That creative inspiration should hit only once in this manner, and in such a manner, is curious and amusing.  Perhaps, just once, a fairy leapt upon her knee?

Tomorrow… another strange book, but one from almost eighty years earlier and a different language altogether.  Ten points to anybody who can guess…

Early Young

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One of the best books I’ve read this year was William by E.H. Young – a few of us did a joint read back in February, and I became a confirmed fan of Emily Hilda’s, after having previously enjoyed Miss Mole. In a manner not unknown to me, I had stockpiled EHY novels long before I knew whether or not I would like her, and so when I saw that someone at the conference I’m attending this week would be discussing The Misses Mallett (1922), I was able to prepare.

My received understanding about EH Young, from various reviews and from Virago’s judicious selection of novels to reprint in the 1980s and 1990s, was that her first three novels were rather mediocre and that The Misses Mallett (also published as The Bridge Dividing) was something of a momentous turning point. After that (so I understood) she wrote nothing but gems. After all, nothing separates those early rural novels from the sophistication of William except one novel: yes, The Misses Mallett.

I had great expectations. And, I’m sorry to say, they rather faltered. The topic showed such promise, especially given my predisposition towards spinster novels of the 1920s. And there are plenty of spinsters around – let me hand you over to my favourite one, Caroline:
“The Malletts don’t marry, Henrietta. Look at us, as happy as the day is long, with all the fun and none of the trouble. We’ve been terrible flirts, Sophia and I. Rose is different, but at least she hasn’t married. The three Miss Malletts of Nelson Lodge! Now there are four of us, and you must keep up our reputation.”Caroline, Sophia, and Rose are sisters, Rose being rather younger than the first two – who are drawn rather two-dimensionally, if amusingly. Caroline is fairly feisty, and spends her autumnal years reliving imagined conquests of her youth, and alluding to improprieties which she, in fact, has never had the opportunity to commit. Sophia is mousy and quiet and traipses after Caroline, excusing, correcting, and loving her. They have their own touching dynamic, even if their characters aren’t hugely evolved. It is with Rose, and later their feckless brother’s daughter Henrietta, that the reader is supposed to sympathise. They are from the same mould – affected intensely by their emotions, but compelled by society to quash their wilder affections, etc. etc. And they’re both tangled up with love for the (to my mind) wholly unattractive Francis Sales. He’s off the market anyway, married to an invalid wife of the variety who alternates catty remarks with lunges after her smelling salts.

To be honest, much of this plot reminded me of the most unlikely excesses of Thomas Hardy. People fall in love from distances of a hundred metres, flash their eyes all over the place, and emote wildly through woodland and over moors. Here’s an excerpt:
She did not love him – how could she? – but he belonged to her; and now, if this piece of gossip turned out to be true, she must share him with another. Jealousy, in its usual sense, she had none as yet, but she forged a chain she was to find herself unable to break. It was her pride to consider herself a hard young person, without spirituality, without sentiment, yet all her personal relationships were to be of the fantastic kind she now experienced, all her obligations such as others would have ignored.I haven’t read anything by Mary Webb et al, but this has to be the sort of thing Stella Gibbons was parodying in Cold Comfort Farm, no? (Which reminds me – review of Stella Gibbons’ Westwood coming soon, promise.) I’m being a little cruel to EHY here, perhaps, but only because her later novels are so brilliant. It’s somewhat reassuring that she wasn’t born with inherent subtlety and style.

I’m skimming over the plot rather, because it’s a bit predictable. I’ve watched enough corny films to know that the Rugged Hero will eventually be passed over for the Male Best Friend. In Henrietta’s case, the latter appears in the wonderful character of Charles. He is like a lump of real gold amidst fool’s gold – when EH Young went on to write better, much better, novels, she need not have been ashamed of creating Charles. He is a wonderful mixture of the aesthetic and inept. He lives for beauty in music, much in the way that characters in EM Forster might, but he also lacks confidence and is unnervingly self-aware.
Charles blinked, his sign of agitation, but Henrietta did not see. “He’s good to look at,” Charles muttered. “He knows how to wear his clothes.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

Charles heaved a sigh. “One never knows what matters.”As a hero he defies cliche, and thus is a nod towards the sort of complex characters which Young would later form. It’s just a shame that the Misses Mallett themselves, inoffensive though they might be, never really reveal any inspiration on Young’s part. A novel about 1920s spinster sisters living together could have been deliciously fun or painfully poignant, or even both, but there are only brief moments when The Misses Mallett could be said to be either. A serviceable novel, certainly, and good enough to pass the time – but unworthy of the pen which would later create William and Miss Mole, and goodness knows whatever other sparkling or clever works.

I’m very glad that this wasn’t my first encounter with EH Young, as it might well have also been my last. Instead, I shall chalk this up to experience – and go foraging for one of her later novels next time. Can anybody at all step forward to defend Young and, equally importantly, those Misses Mallett?

Still – William

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Everytime I revisit Richmal Crompton’s William series, I have a nudging fear that they won’t be as good as I remembered, that what seemed screamingly funny to me when I was eight will have palled…

…and everytime I realise I needn’t have worried. (Photo credit, btw.) If you’ve never read one of the books, you’re in for a treat. Think how PG Wodehouse might have written about an eleven year old boy, if PGW tempered his exaggeration a little and developed an intimate knowledge with the minutiae of village life. Here’s one of the passing characters, for instance: ‘He was extraordinarily conceited and not overburdened by any superfluity of intellect.’

This isn’t a fully-fledged review or anything, it’s just a little overflow of joyfulness at revisiting William – in this case, Still William. Richmal Crompton wrote over thirty William books between 1922 and 1970, this being the fifth – each is a collection of stories about the well-intentioned mishaps of William Brown, who is eternally eleven. They’re hilarious, and warming. Although everything almost always goes lamentably wrong, and William ends up being hounded by his relatives and neighborus, there isn’t a malicious bone in his body. If anything, most of his misfortune comes from an irrepressible desire to help. In Still William he proposes on behalf of his brother, and later on behalf of his sister. He determines to be truthful on Christmas Day, with disastrous results. He determines to live a life of ‘self-denial and service’ with (you guessed it) disastrous results. He has only marginally more success when attempting to put on a show of ‘natives’, or teaching a visiting French boy idiomatic English.

I suspect most of us have read some William books at some point – but perhaps you’ve neglected them for a while, or somehow have never read one. Get one now. And get one with Thomas Henry’s excellent illustrations, not the more modern, awful ones. Richmal Crompton also wrote lots of wonderful novels (and some less wonderful ones) but, although she deserves wider fame for those, equally she deserves the immortality she has secured through William Brown.

In case you’re still not convinced, here is an excerpt between William and his uncaring older sister:William’s mother was out to lunch and Ethel was her most objectionable and objecting. She objected to William’s hair and to William’s hands and to William’s face.

“Well, I’ve washed ’em and I’ve brushed it,” said William firmly. “I don’ see what you can do more with faces an’ hair than wash ’em an’ brush it. ‘F you don’ like the colour they wash an’ brush to I can’t help that. It’s the colour they was born with. It’s their nat’ral colour. I can’t do more than wash ’em an’ brush it.”

“Yes, you can,” said Ethel unfeelingly. “You can go and wash them and brush it again.”

Under the stern eye of his father who had lowered his paper for the express purpose of displaying his stern eye William had no alternative but to obey.

“Some people,” he remarked bitterly to the stair carpet as he went upstairs, “don’ care how often they make other people go up an’ downstairs, tirin’ themselves out. I shun’t be suprised ‘f I die a good lot sooner than I would have done with all this walkin’ up an’ downstairs tirin’ myself out – an’ all because my face an’ hands an’ hair’s nat’rally a colour she doesn’t like!”

Ethel was one of William’s permanent grievances against Life.

Patricia Takes a Bus Ride

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As I predicted, I dove straight into the books by Kitty Vincent – I’ll write about them properly soon, maybe tomorrow, but I don’t think I can really do so without giving you a taste of her writing. So I thought I’d copy out the piece I love most so far – ‘Patricia Takes a Bus Ride’ from Gin & Ginger.


Patricia’s companion said something to the lady seated next him in the bus, but she regarded him with an icy stare. When they reached Patricia’s flat, and she was pouring out tea, she remonstrated with him.

“I shan’t take you out again,” she said, “if you don’t observe the proper etiquette. It has taken me years to learn it, but I am absolutely infallible now. I believe I could write a book on how to be a perfect lady in a bus.

“If you are travelling on top it is quite in order, I might almost say desirable, to enter into conversation with your neighbour. If it should happen to be raining a little light badinage is allowable as you snuggle beneath the cover, so thoughtfully provided by the company.

“If you are a woman you begin (I beg your pardon, you commence) the conversation by hoping that your umbrella is not objectionable, and the correct retort is, ‘Some weather for the ducks, what!’ Then you discuss the latest murder, or some interesting trifle of the description, being careful to keep the conversation within strictly suitable limits. It is advisable to preface your remarks with, ‘Well, what I always say is —‘ and you finish up by observing that ‘Murder is always a mistake; it comes out in the end.’

“You must never be original, because it may lead you into being daring, and to be daring on a bus is not good form.

“When you or he come to the parting of the ways, I advise you to murmur, ‘So long,’ or ‘Well, ta, awfully.’ I know that the latter remark is frightfully ‘bon ton’ because the most immaculate young man bade farewell to me in these terms, and he was so marvellously dressed that I am sure he was a dancing, partner or something really smart of that description.

* * *

“You should never speak to anyone inside a bus, as it violates every canon of deportment. If you should be forced to speak – if, for instance, you want to leap across the body of the person next you – you merely ejaculate ‘Pardon!’ This will have the desired effect.

“When the conductor asks for your fare, do, please, not enter into a long description of where you are going, it sounds excessively vulgar, and shows that you are not conversant with your world. If, for instance, you desire to alight at South Kensington, merely hold up one finger, and mutter, ‘South Ken.’ This places you, at once, as being ‘all right,’ while if you explain that you want to get to a square somewhere near the Underground, you are making yourself conspicuous.

“Many contretemps may occur in buses, and the way in which you meet them places you at once. If you are seated opposite a child who appears to be rapidly growing more and more ashen, you may assume that it is suffering from mal de bus. You must either pretend that, although you took a ticket to Piccadilly Circus, you recollect that you have pressing business at Hyde Park, and leap from the bus, or you must accept the consequences with sang-froid.

* * *

“Bus laws lay down that a child who is violently sick is ‘a poor little dear,’ and you are expected to behave accordingly, although in your heart of hearts you know that it is a gluttonous little pig. But if you so much as lift an eyebrow, child-lovers glare at you with muttered expressions of, ‘Well, I suppose she as a child once.’ It is useless and exhausting to explain that, although you were once a child, you were not a sick-in-a-bus one, and you merely become an object of universal execration.

“As one spends so many hours in buses, it is so important to learn how to behave,” Patricia said a little plaintively.