1930s

The House in Paris (in which we learn that Darlene is right, is garlanded with flowers &c. &c.)

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A while ago the very lovely (but, it turns out, fiercely competitive) Darlene laid down a challenge.  She would read a book by my beloved Ivy Compton-Burnett, if I would give her beloved Elizabeth Bowen a second chance.  “Game on!” said I, always happy to give respected authors two or three tries – but she comfortably beat me with her fabulous review of Manservant and Maidservant in early September, which you can read here.  I took my time, but I’ve finally managed to keep up my end of the bargain, and on my trip to the Lake District I managed to finish The House in Paris (1935).

Well, Darlene, you were right.  I didn’t enjoy The Last September at all, but The House in Paris is beautiful.  Cancel the book burning, Bowen is back in business.

The novel has a layered narrative.  The first and last quarters (called ‘Present’) take place in the Parisian house, belonging to Mme. and Miss Fisher, where young Henrietta is spending the day between one chaperone and another.  Coincidentally, Leopold is also there – nervously waiting to meet his biological mother for the first time in his life.  The middle half reverts to ‘Past’, and concerns Leopold’s mother Karen, who knew Miss Fisher (Naomi) when they were ten years younger, and the affair which led to Leonard’s conception.

It is the beginning and end of The House in Paris that I loved, and I half wish that Bowen hadn’t left the house in Paris at all.  The scenes between Henrietta and Leopold are so perfectly judged that it seems impossible that writing can be so beautiful as well as so plausible – surely Bowen (one thinks) would have to sacrifice one to the other?  But no, every moment described is a new insight into the way children interact, and beautiful because true.  This is the first conversation they have while alone together:
He said: “Miss Fisher says you’re here for the day.”

“I’m just crossing Paris,” Henrietta said with cosmopolitan ease.

“Is that your monkey?”

“Yes.  I’ve had him ever since I was born.”

“Oh,” said Leopold, looking at Charles vaguely.

“How old are you?” Henrietta enquired.

“Nine.”

“Oh, I’m eleven.”

“Miss Fisher’s mother is very ill,” said Leopold.  He sat down in an armchair with his knees crossed and, bending forward, studied a cut on one knee.  The four velvet armchairs, each pulled out a little way from a corner, faced in on the round table that reflected the window and had in its centre a tufted chenille mat.  He added, wrinkling his forehead: “So Mariette says, at least.”

“Who is Mariette?”

“Their maid.  She wanted to help me dress.”

“Do you think she is going to die?” said Henrietta.

“I don’t expect so.  I shall be out, anyway.”

“That would be awful,” said Henrietta, shocked.

“I suppose it would.  But I don’t know Mme. Fisher.”

It is never natural for children to smile at each other: Henrietta and Leopold kept their natural formality.  She said: “You see, I’d been hoping Miss Fisher was going to take me out.” Leopold, looking about the salon, said: “Yes, this must be a rather funny way to see Paris.”  But he spoke with detachment; it did not matter to him.In the first quarter of the novel, little takes place to propel the plot.  Henrietta meets Mme. Fisher (slowly, wryly, dying in a bedroom upstairs); Leopold snoops through Miss Fisher’s letters, and finds letters from his adoptive mother and Henrietta’s grandmother, and an empty envelope from his biological mother.  What makes this section so special is the gradual, engaging way Bowen builds up the relationship between the children – character is paramount.  Although they develop a fragile and fleeting friendship, they have the child’s selfish indifference to each other’s feelings – as Bowen expresses so strikingly:
With no banal reassuring grown-ups present, with grown-up intervention taken away, there is no limit to the terror strange children feel of each other, a terror life obscures but never ceases to justify.  There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone. This passage demonstrates one of the qualities of Bowen’s writing that I most admired and liked – the way she moves from the specific to the general.  Authors are often told “show, don’t tell”, and Bowen finds an original way to follow this maxim while subtly evading it.  She never plays too heavy a narrative hand with the characters, letting their actions and words form their personalities, but then she steps back a pace or two, and draws general conclusions about children or lovers or parents or people in general.  She shows with the cast, and tells about the world.

As the first part closes, Leopold learns that: “Your mother is not coming; she cannot come.”  Isn’t that sentence delightfully Woolfean, with its balance and half-repetition?  No wonder people have often drawn comparison between Bowen and Woolf – including Byatt, in her excellent introduction (which, as always, ought to be read last – and pleasantly blends personal and critical aspects.)

actual houses in Paris wot I saw once

In the central section of the novel, we meet Leopold’s mother Karen, and witness her relationship with Naomi’s fiancee Max.  Although longer than the other sections put together, ‘Past’ felt less substantial to me.  It is, essentially, the very gradual and incremental development of the relationship between Karen and Max – from distrust to love, and… onwards.  But here I shall draw a veil over the ensuing plot for, although plot is hardly primary in Bowen, it cannot be called negligible, and I shall not spoil it.

And, finally, back to Henrietta and Leopold, as they make proclamations about their lives, in the midst of situations they cannot understand for more than a moment at a time – and eventually they part.  Without giving away too much, I shall remove one possibility – they do not end up living like brother and sister; they will probably never see each other again.  Their encounter has been fleeting, and wholly at the whim of the various adults (present and absent) whose decisions so heavily influence the children’s lives.  As a conceit it is not entirely natural, but we can forgive Bowen that – it structures the narrative perfectly, and gives opportunity for so many other moments where the natural triumphs against the artificiality of fiction: time and again novelistic cliches and truisms have the carpet whipped from under their feet, and the reader thinks “Oh, of course, that is what would happen.”

Above all, Bowen is a wordsmith.  She crafts sentences so perfectly.  They are not of the variety that can be read in a hurry – perhaps that is where I went wrong with The Last September – but, with careful attention and a willingness to dive into the world of words she creates – it is an effort which is very much repaid.  Darlene, thank you for refusing to let me declare Bowen done and dusted – she’s now very much back in my good books.  You might have won this competition, but this is a case of everyone’s-a-winner, right?

Others who got Stuck into it:

 “From the very first page of The House in Paris when Henrietta is collected from the train station by Miss Fisher, both wearing cerise cockades so as to recognize one another, I adored this book.  Elizabeth Bowen’s genius as a writer is staggering and to anyone who doesn’t agree or simply does not get on with her…I could weep for you.” – Darlene, Roses Over A Cottage Door

 “The pages were awash with beautiful, sonorous language formed into exquisite sentences that swirled through my thoughts, leaving lingering, evocative images behind.” – Rachel, Book Snob [Simon: this review is much better than mine!  Go and check it out if you haven’t done already.]

 “I wanted to love Elizabeth Bowen; one of my most respected history profs at university cited Bowen as her absolute favourite author and ever since then I’ve intended to read her. I liked this book, I even found some quotable passages which I delightedly copied out. But somehow it didn’t coalesce into a Great Read, at least not for me.” – Melwyk, The Indextrious Reader

The Outward Room – Millen Brand

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photo source

A long, long time ago (I can still remember) I was sent Millen Brand’s The Outward Room (1937) to review – in fact, I had asked for it – and it has taken me absurdly long to read it, and a couple months longer to get around to reviewing it.  But it is really very good indeed, and worth the wait.

The reason I asked for this NYRB edition was (apart from the fact that all NYRB editions are beautiful and belong on my bookshelf) that I remembered The Outward Room being mentioned once in a Persephone Quarterly – and it fixed in my mind.

The Outward Room starts with Harriet Demuth’s life in some sort of mental hospital, having suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of a family tragedy.  Estranged from her parents and frustrated by her doctor’s blinkered obsession with Freudian analysis, Harriet’s life has been sucked dry of anything but routine and confusion.  Her ability to articulate her personality and self have been stifled by illness and by the unsympathetic institution which came as a consequence to it.  Brand writes this section very well, but it is necessarily claustrophobic and begins to stifle the reader.

But Harriet escapes.

She makes her way to New York, pawns her brother’s ring, and lives hand-to-mouth for some time.  The Great Depression has given the city a desperate air, and she struggles to find the means of supporting herself – her first ‘job interview’ is for a single day’s work, and consists of standing in a long row with many other women, and not being pointed at.  There are some poignant scenes where Harriet first rents, and then must leave, a tiny apartment.

After about 100 pages, Harriet is sitting in a late-night cafe, unable to afford a cup of coffee, when a stranger approaches and offers to buy her the drink.  John (for this is his name) invites her back to his house for food and shelter and – desperate, and a little naive perhaps – she goes.  At this point I expected awful things to happen to her, or for John’s apparent kindness to (at least) be revealed as covering ulterior motives.  What I wasn’t prepared for was a gentle, gradual, and quite beautiful love story.  Through simple, ordinary scenes of everyday life and undramatic conversations, Harriet and John fall in love and become necessary to one another.  We see some of Harriet at work, and the friend she makes Anna; we see a neighbour or two – but the beauty of The Outward Room is the quiet unfolding of a believable, unassuming relationship.

I don’t normally just give all the plot in a series of paragraphs like that – I usually try to break it up with some of my thoughts about the author’s approach, etc. – but it seemed important to lay out the  structure of The Outward Room and the direction the novel takes before addressing the issue of style.  They are so interrelated.  At the beginning, Brand opts for quite a lot of the disjointed and fragmentary prose that is often used to represent mental disharmony or any kind of mental illness.  Personally, I find it very easy to overuse this style.  Stream of consciousness has of course often been used to portray thoughts, especially of a disturbed mind – but I think it has to be done exceptionally well (we’re talking Woolf-standards well) to work, otherwise it can simply seem sloppy.  These were the sections of The Outward Room which I found least convincing.

However, when Brand didn’t concentrate this effect into single chapters, he used a more successful variant on it – by simply omitting verbs and pronouns.  It’s a bold way to start a paragraph, giving a sense of both immediacy and uncertainty, and it think it works well within a sparser descriptive mode:

Dark, the smell of stairs.  She began to notice the stairs as she had not the day before.  She leaned and looked down the dark stairwell.  These stairs were not solid; their treads sagged, the staircase was pegged to the walls with iron rods at each landing.  The house was old.  She went down and when she came into the light of the lower open house door, she looked around her.  She saw only a bare hallway; on one side was a large metal barrel with a warped cover, on the other a table on which were several letters – evidently this was where mail was left for those in the house.  Except for this, the hall was vacant; scribbled on the plaster were a few names – “DIDOMENICO 2nd” “LICORA” —
Brand moves between this fairly straightforward narrative and a fluid, more consciously beautiful prose.  And that is the result (and the cause) of the relationship between John and Harriet.  Which comes first?  I don’t know – the gentle unfolding of their love is both mirrored and created by the gentle unfolding of touching imagery and emotional explorations.  This paragraph was picked more or less at random, but hopefully it gives you a sense of what I mean:

Breathing the air deeply, she looked down at the courtyard.  Hardly changed, a little dirtier from melted snow, the tinge of winter.  Frost had made new cracks in the cement, in the so-called paving.  Yet the evidences of winter were small only to be seen, like the signs of spring, by the heart that feels small changes.  The room too had its changes from winter, but because of her need of its permanence they too were small, only what had been absolutely necessary.

It is incredibly difficult to write about this sort of novel, because it is of the variety which can only be appreciated once one is reading them.  Perhaps that is true of any book, but it seems especially so of The Outward Room.  And that being said, it is especially impressive that Peter Cameron writes such a good afterword in the NYRB edition.  Good afterwords and introductions are hard to find, aren’t they?  One thing Cameron writes will strike home with many of us:

It’s somewhat frightening to learn that good books – even books heralded in their time – can disappear so quickly and completely.  We like to think that things of enduring quality and worth are separated from the dross and permanently enshrined, but we know that this is not true.  Beautiful things are more likely to disappear than to endure.  The Outward Room is such a beautiful thing.  
None of us are surprised when we find that wonderful, beautiful books have fallen by the wayside – we all know too many examples.  Despite having an initial print run of 140,000 copies (wow!), The Outward Room has fallen victim to this disappearing act – its peculiar qualities are those which can so easily be overlooked.  Thank you NYRB for bringing it back – the novel definitely deserves it, and I hope you give it a chance too.

His Monkey Wife – John Collier

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Some titles are metaphors.  Some titles seem to suggest one thing, only for the book to be about something completely different – from The Silence of the Lambs to A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.  And His Monkey Wife (1930) is also a bit false… but only because he isn’t married to the monkey.  There is some question of it later.  But, as the novel kicks off, it’s simply that a monkey is in love with him.  That’s all.

Mr. Fatigay is an English schoolmaster in the Congo whose charms (mostly of a scholarly nature) win him the love and affection of Emily, a chimpanzee.  (I’m afraid I don’t know the difference between monkey, ape, and chimp, or where these things might overlap – for the sake of argument, I’ll refer to Emily as a chimp [which she definitely is] rather than the title’s monkey [which she might or might not be.])  Emily is rather a dear.  She is incredibly intelligent, and with an eavesdropping sort of learning, manages to become an expert reader – although she cannot talk.  You might remember that last October I wrote about G.E. Trevelyan’s Appius and Virginia, where a woman tries – with a limited sort of success – to educate an ape as her son.  Well, Mr. Fatigay is a fairly oblivious man, and has much greater success without even meaning to.

Is it so hard to understand how she came to a comprehension of the function of books, and even, perhaps, of the abstracter functions of language?  Our scientists may think so, who have chosen to measure the intelligence of the chimpanzee solely by its reactions to a banana.  They suspend the delicacy from the ceiling of a cage and assess the subject’s mentality in terms of the number of boxes he or she will pile one upon another in order to secure it, failing to see that nothing is revealed except the value which that particular chimp chooses to set upon the fruit.  And, beyond a certain low limit, this surely is in inverse ratio to intelligence.  What boy of ten would not pile up a dozen boxes in an attempt to climb within reach of it?  How many would Einstein clamber upon?  And how many less would Shakespeare?  Emily, though a fruitarian by instinct, would have disdained an eagerness capable of more than two and a jump.
For Emily is quite concerned with etiquette, and wants to do things properly.  And thus it pains her to break into Mr. Fatigay’s desk and read the letters from his fiancée in England – but she is not perfect, and not unafflicted by jealousy.  She is all ready to sacrifice her love at the altar of Mr. F’s happiness, but when she has read the letters, she (and the reader) realise how callous his fiancée, Amy, really is.  She is stringing out the engagement, clearly not eager for Mr. Fatigay to return from Congo.

But they do go back to England.  Emily is thrilled to be accompanying Mr. Fatigay… but less thrilled when she realises why.  He is giving her to Amy as a present, to be Amy’s maid!  Emily is not averse to a little hard work, but it is hardly dignifying to be the maid of your rival in love… especially one who shrinks from Mr. Fatigay’s touch, and treats him appallingly.  What can Emily do?….

Celebrity librarian (!) Nancy Pearl apparently called Emily one of the best characters in modern fiction, which is quite the claim –  but I can see where she’s coming from.  Emily is so charming.  Besides being besotted with Mr. Fatigay, she is wholly enamoured with books.  She manages to sneak out of Amy’s apartment to visit the British Museum – and becomes quite a cult figure there.  Apparently the simple expedient of wearing clothes renders her more or less indistinguishable from a human (and there is, sad to say, a bit of 1930s racism in this section, when various gents try to guess her country of origin.  For the most part, they settle on Spain – but because of her spirit, rather than her appearance.)

“Well, I like her,” said a simple fellow, “because she’s a little woman.  A bouncing little woman.  I like them like that.  My first wife was not.  I was deliriously happy with my first wife.  With my second – not altogether so.  I like a bouncing little woman.” 

“Well, gentlemen” said the senior member of the company, who ignored the last remark as being the probably carnal utterance of one whose work was merely the compiling of a cyclist’s encyclopaedia.  “Well, gentlemen, we had better make a move if we’re to catch a last glimpse of her, for like all that’s best in life, she comes late and departs early, Heaven knows where.”
I always find it impossible not to love a bibliophile in a novel – and Emily’s love of the written word is a joy.  Indeed, she is a joy altogether.  As Osbert Sitwell writes somewhere, she is in many ways the least animalistic of all the characters.  She is certainly more sophisticated, responsible, moral, and caring than Amy – although things do take rather a twist later in the book… and the ending came as quite a surprise…

Collier has picked an eccentric theme for his novel, and sometimes that might have hindered rather than boosted my interest in his writing.  Sure, I wouldn’t have read this novel if it weren’t relevant for my thesis – but I can’t help wondering how his talent for characterisation and writing would fare in a more quotidian novel.   The only other thing I’ve read by him (and this will serve as my post to link to from A Century of Books, as I don’t think I’m going to blog about it fully) is Green Thoughts (1932), a short book (c.50pp.) where people metamorph into plants – also well-written, but absorbed by the strange.

What I liked most about his writing were the incidental similes he used, and they crop up a lot.  Here’s one:

Fate, whose initial gifts to lovers are supplied as generously as those free meals an angler offers to the fish[…]
And there are plenty more to look out for!  He’s also pretty witty, adept at turning a sentence in a semi-Wildean way:

The men were the sort who have given up art for marriage, but, as if nature was scheming to restore the balance, many of their women appeared likely to give up marriage for art.
Collier really is quite an impressive prose stylist, finding that middle ground between modernist experimental and simple storytelling.  There are loads of literary references throughout, from Virginia Woolf to George Moore: Collier clearly respects his audience’s intelligence.  I don’t really know what else he wrote, but I think this might be a case where the novelty of his topic overshadows the talent Collier simply has as a novelist.  I admired His Monkey Wife, and I’d be intrigued to read something else… does anybody know anything else about John Collier and his work?

Books I Borrowed…

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There are a few books I’ve borrowed from friends and libraries which have now been returned, and so I’m going to give each one a paragraph or two, instead of a proper review.  Partly so I can include them on my Century of Books list, but partly because it’s fun to do things differently sometimes.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’ll get carried away, and write far too much… well, here are the four books, in date order.  Apologies for the accidental misquotation in the sketch today… I only noticed afterwards!

Canon in Residence – V.L. Whitechurch (1904)
This was surprisingly brilliant. Rev. John Smith on a continental holiday encounters a stranger who tells him that he’d see more of human life if he adopted layman’s clothes.  Smith thinks the advice somewhat silly, but has no choice – as, during the night, the stranger swaps their outfits.  Smith goes through the rest of his holiday in somewhat garish clothing, meeting one of those ebullient, witty girls with which Edwardian novels abound.  A letter arrives telling him that he has been made canon of a cathedral town – where this girl also lives (of course!)  He makes good his escape, and hopes she won’t recognise him…

Once in his position as canon, Smith’s new outlook on life leads to a somewhat socialist theology – improving housing for the poor, and other similar principles which are definitely Biblical, but not approved of by the gossiping, snobbish inhabitants of the Cathedral Close.  As a Christian and the son of a vicar, I found this novel fascinating (you can tell that Whitechurch was himself a vicar) but I don’t think one would need to have faith to love this.  It’s very funny as well as sensitive and thoughtful; John Smith is a very endearing hero.  It all felt very relevant for 2012.  And there’s even a bit of a criminal court case towards the end.

Three Marriages – E.M. Delafield (1939)
Delafield collects together three novellas, each telling the tale of a courtship and marriage, showing how things change across years: they are set in 1857, 1897, and 1937.  Each deals with people who fall in love too late, once they (or their loved one) has already got married to somebody else.  The surrounding issues are all pertinent to their respective periods.  In 1897, and ‘Girl-of-the-Period’, Violet Cumberledge believes herself to be a New Woman who is entirely above anything so sentimental as emotional attachments – and, of course, realises too late that she is wrnog.  In 1937 (‘We Meant To Be Happy’) Cathleen Christmas marries the first man who asks, because she fears becoming one of so many ‘surplus women’ – only later she falls in love with the doctor.  But the most interesting story is the first – ‘The Marriage of Rose Barlow’.  It’s rather brilliant, and completely unexpected from the pen of Delafield.  Rose Barlow is very young when she is betrothed to her much older cousin – the opening line of the novel is, to paraphrase without a copy to hand, ‘The night before her wedding, Rose Barlow put her dolls to bed as she always had done.’  Once married, they go off to India together.   If you know a lot more about the history of India than I do, then the date 1857 might have alerted you to the main event of the novella – the Sepoy Rebellion.  A fairly calm tale of unequal marriage becomes a very dramatic, even gory, narrative about trying to escape a massacre.  A million miles from what I’d expect from Delafield – but incredibly well written and compelling.

Miss Plum and Miss Penny – Dorothy Evelyn Smith (1959)
Miss Penny, a genteel spinster living with her cook/companion Ada, encounters Miss Plum in the act of (supposedly) attempting suicide in a duckpond.  Miss Penny ‘rescues’ Miss Plum and invites her into her home. (Pronouns are tricky; I assume you can work out what I mean.)  It looks rather as though Miss Plum might have her own devious motives for these actions… but I found the characters very inconsistent, and the plot rather scattergun.  There are three men circling these women, whose intentions and affections vary a fair bit; there are some terribly cringe-worthy, unrealistic scenes of a vicar trying to get closer to his teenage son. It was a fun read, and not badly written, but Dorothy Evelyn Smith doesn’t seem to have put much effort into organising narrative arcs or creating any sort of continuity.  But diverting enough, and certainly worth an uncritical read.

The Shooting Party – Isabel Colegate (1980)
Oh dear.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, I rushed out to borrow a copy of The Shooting Party after reading Rachel’s incredibly enthusiastic review.  Go and check it out for details of the premise and plot.  I shall just say that, sadly, I found it rather ho-hum… perhaps even a little boring.  The characters all seemed too similar to me, and I didn’t much care what happened.  Even though it’s a short novel, it dragged for me, and the climax was, erm, anti-climactic.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps my tolerance for historical novels (albeit looking back only sixty or seventy years) is too low.  Sorry, Rachel!

More Women Than Men – Ivy Compton-Burnett

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When I wrote about Pamela Hansford Johnson’s pamphlet on Ivy Compton-Burnett, I mentioned that it had made me keen to read more of my beloved Dame Ivy’s work soon.  It didn’t take me long – at Easter I delved through my collection of Ivy Compton-Burnett novels to find one to fill a gap in A Century of Books, and opted (because I love its dryly prosaic title) for More Women Than Men (1933).

If I dared, I would try an Ivy Compton-Burnett Reading Week, but I don’t think it work – partly because people often seem intimidated by her, but also because it’s no secret that Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels are all similar in tone and title.  It’s difficult to differentiate Mother and Son from Daughters and Sons; Parents and Children from Elders and Betters; A Family and a Fortune from A Father and his Fate, etc. etc.  The previous owner of my copy of More Women Than Men obviously had the same issues, for she has noted down a little list on the first page:

1933
Girls’ school
Mrs Napier
Felix Bacon.

Well, anonymous (and probably deceased) owner of my book, you have organised my thoughts for me.  More Women Than Men does, indeed, take place in a girls’ school – which is unusual for Ivy Compton-Burnett, who usually sets her novels in sprawling families with nine or so children.  I initially thought that she would just transfer this dynamic to the hierarchies and alliances of pupils and teachers, but in actual fact none of the girls say anything at all in the novel.  Rather, we watch the headmistress, Josephine Napier, rule over family and staff with a firmness which doesn’t repress the verbal dalliances of those around her, but which does render them powerless in the face of her unflappable logic.  People love to chop logic in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels – and I love reading them do it.  Truisms are interrogated; the polite shorthand tricks of conversation are exposed as evasions, and analysed to death.  None of it is very natural, it is definitely stylised – but deliciously so.

“I feel a little conscious of my appearance,” said Felix, coming up to the group.  “Perhaps it is being one of the few people who can wear formal clothes.”

His speech was met by incredulous mirth, his hearers keeping their eyes on his face, in case of further entertainment.

“Well, I hope that no one will be conscious of mine,” said Josephine.  “It is not my habit to be aware of it; but when I am oblivious, it may be hitting other people in the eye.  I got into the garment in time, but I admit it does not add to the occasion.”

“People always seem to think admission alter things,” said Helen, “when it really rather helps to establish them.”I’m running ahead of myself, as usual, since I haven’t explained who these people are.  

Apologies if the following run-through is confusing – there are always a lot of characters in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, often with complex interrelations.  More Women Than Men starts with Josephine greeting her all-female staff back after the school holidays.  Helen is a new staff member, and the others are returning – none of these are pivotal to the plot, for the majority of the novel, but each is rather wonderful to read about.  Miss Munday is large, vapid, and doleful; Miss Luke is grateful and ignored; Mrs. Chattaway is one of the few who has been married (now widowed):

Mrs. Chattaway seldom referred to her wedded life, and her companions, in spite of their sincere deprecation of the married state, assigned her reticence to her sense of loss; whereas the truth was, as they might consistently have guessed, that the memory was uncongenial.

Josephine herself is married to Simon, who fades into the background – not so much browbeaten as so wholly in her shadow as to be rendered free of personality.  They have an adopted son, Gabriel, who is in fact Josephine’s nephew – he is in his early twenties, but still living at home, rather uselessly.  Josephine’s brother Jonathan (Gabriel’s father) taught pupils independently, until the last one stayed with him for 22 years.  This last one is Felix Bacon, who (joining together disparate groups) becomes the drawing master at Josephine’s school.  There are plenty of amusing conversations where Felix defends the idea of a man teaching girls to pupils’ fathers who think the job beneath him.  (I should add that More Women Than Men, like maybe of Dame Ivy’s novels, is set in a vaguely Edwardian period.)  And then there is the change of dynamic when a man is introduced to the all-female staff…

“You will find that not much gossip is done here,” said Josephine, smiling as if in spite of herself.

“I suppose it hardly could be in a common room.”

“Either there or elsewhere.”

“And in a community of women!  I am glad I am seeing life for myself, as all the theories about it are untrue.  Now I see that you are dismissing me with a look.  Of course you are one of those people whose glance is obeyed.”

Josephine initially appears to be the paragon of diligence and kindness – a rather dominant and detached paragon, one whose glance is indeed obeyed, but a paragon nonetheless.  It becomes apparent, however, that she is ruthlessly manipulative – and yet she is far more complex than those words suggest.  Her love for husband and adopted son is deeply genuine, but it is coupled with her immovable sense of justice, and the love she demands in return.  She puts up a great deal of resistance when Gabriel becomes engaged to Ruth, the daughter of Elizabeth, an old acquaintance of Josephine and Simon Napier whose reappearance causes quite a stir earlier in the novel.

“In that case you will be grateful to Ruth, Josephine,” said Gabriel, coming nearer with a stumble, to avoid lifting his head.  “She is giving me a happiness greater than I had conceived.”

“Then it must be on a generous scale indeed, indulged boy,” said Josephine, her tone out of accordance with the change in her eyes.  “Let us hear about it before I resume my labours.  Come to the point, and enunciate some demand of youth.”

“It is the demand that I was bound to make one day.  It is naturally often a demand of youth.  This breaking up of our life seemed to the best time to make it.  The lesser change must count less at the time of the greater.  I make the demand with confidence, having been taught, as you will say, to make demands.  I have said enough for you to understand me?”

“No,” said Josephine, in a quiet, conversational tone; “I don’t think so.  You have not said anything definite, have you?”

There are almost never histrionics in an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel.  Whatever their emotions may be, characters are far more likely to react by calmly picking apart their antagonist’s sentence than hysterically screaming in their face.  These verbal gymnastics are not true to life, but they raise tension far more effectively (and originally) than a few outbursts could achieve.
did you really think that Sherpa wouldn’t find her way into this post?

 

The interconnections, misalliances, grievances, dependencies and loyalties between characters in More Women Than Men would be impossible to explain in a mere blog post.  Although the dialogue is undeniably stylised, there are complex and believable relationships throughout the novel – an aspect of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s writing which is seldom applauded.  A discussion of whether or not her novels are realistic would be fascinating – because ‘realistic’ has so many facets and definitions.  Would people talk like this?  No, definitely not.  Would people act like this?  Probably no.   But would people feel like these characters feel?  Yes – absolutely – and it is Ivy Compton-Burnett’s genius that she can interweave the genuine and the bizarre.
It is not true, either, that nothing happens in Ivy Compton-Burnett novels.  In fact, More Women Than Men contains one of the most ingenious murders ever – done by exposing a ill person to a draught.  A spoiler, yes, but the reason that Compton-Burnett’s novels have the reputation of nothing happening is that the plot, as such, doesn’t really matter.  It’s the way things happen, and the way she writes.  Oh! the way she writes!  I adore it.  Settling down to her aphorisms and linguistic somersaults is a joy – because they are not simply clever, but hilarious.

 

Of the six Ivy Compton-Burnett novels I’ve now read, this is perhaps my favourite.  Others have had sections where they dragged, but this one never did.  It’s not the easiest of her novels to find, but definitely worth hunting down – I’m hoping that my enthusiasm will lead to one or two Ivy Compton-Burnett converts, or at least encourage some more readers to give her a go.  You’ll love or loathe – and, if you love, you’ll never look back.

Summer Will Show – Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Yes, the excerpt yesterday was from Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1936 novel Summer Will Show.  STW has had quite a few mentions at Stuck-in-a-Book this year, since I’ve been researching a chapter of my thesis on her novel Lolly Willowes, and I read Summer Will Show for the same reason.  Well, it’s very different.  Warner is renowned, in fact, for the disparity of her topics – which include a missionary on a desert island, a medieval convent, a woman becoming a witch, and, in this instance, the French Revolution.  The only tie between her novels is her striking prose and observational eye.

Our heroine is Sophia Willoughby, who begins Summer Will Show as a rich, aristocratic wife and mother in 1840s Dorset.  Her marriage is not an especially companionable one, but she doesn’t seem particularly upset about it.  Indeed, it seems to be par for the course.  Warner expertly encapsulates the change in temperament between an engaged woman and a married woman of the period:

Sophia might refuse her food, pine, burst into unexpected tears, copy poetry into albums and keep pet doves, while her marriage was being arranged and her trousseau ordered; but once married it was understood that she would put away these extravagancies and settle down into the realities of life once more.
Sophia seems rather unfeeling at the outset – strict, rather than motherly, and without any noticeably emotional attachments.  Warner often summarises people’s essential characters through seemingly incidental – and here is Sophia’s sentence: ‘She disliked sitting down in the middle of a walk, she disliked any kind of dawdling.  A slow and rigid thinker, to sit still and contemplate was an anguish to her.’

She is contented, if anything, when her husband absconds to Paris – but even her delight in the freedom afforded by her unassailable singleness is tainted when she learns about her husband’s Parisian mistress, Minna Lemuel:

For even to Dorset the name of Minna Lemuel had made its way.  Had the husband of Mrs. Willoughby chosen with no other end than to be scandalous, he could not have chosen better.  A byword, half actress, half strumpet; a Jewess; a nonsensical creature bedizened with airs of prophecy, who trailed across Europe with a tag-rag of poets, revolutionaries, musicians and circus-riders snuffing at her heels, like an escaped bitch with a procession of mongrels after her; and ugly; and old; as old as Frederick or older – this was the woman who Frederick had elected to fall in love with, joining in the tag-rag procession, and not even king in that outrageous court, not even able to dismiss the mongrels, and take the creature into keeping.

Ouch.  But doesn’t Warner arrange an image well?

Something tragic happens, which sets Sophia off to find her husband – even with the obstacle of Minna.  She arrives in Paris, and first encounters Minna while the latter is telling a story about her past to an assembled group of eager listeners.  The difficulty about having a great raconteur as a character is that the novelist must be one themselves (it’s one of the things which makes Angela Young’s accounts of storytellers so wonderful in Speaking of Love, incidentally) – Warner is pretty impressive, but her strength lies in unusual metaphors and striking images (which only occasionally go too far and become too self-conscious), rather than compelling anecdotes, per se.  Here’s another of those curious little verbal pictures I love so much:

And with dusters tied on her feet she [Minna] made another glide across the polished floor, moving with the rounded nonchalant swoop of some heavy water bird.  Her sleeves were rolled up, she wore a large check apron, she had all the majestic convincingness of a gifted tragedy actress playing the part of a servant – a part which would flare into splendour in the last act.
Indeed, Minna’s personality is captured most effectively when we are told that ‘she was always pitching herself to an imaginary gallery’.  Her dramatic nature captures Sophia’s interest, and the burning resentment with which she arrives turns into affection, and then devotion…  The excerpt I posted yesterday comes into play here.

I enjoyed the first half of Summer Will Show.  Warner’s prose is certainly dense here, not to be read speedily, but the dignity and spark of Sophia still came through strongly.  Her concerns about reputation in a judgemental aristocratic world were interesting and subtle; her relationship and re-encounter with her husband were vibrant and never slipped into the sort of unrealistic emotionalism seen in a lot of novels from the 1930s.  But… the second half dragged and dragged.

First edition (can be bought here)

Perhaps my main problem was that I’m not especially interested in the French Revolution – and I’m certainly not coming from the impassioned left-wing perspective with which Warner wrote this novel (although she later grew rather less zealous in later life.)  Understandably a lot of the action of revolutionary France takes centre stage later in the novel, and as the narrative wandered a little away from relationships, hurt, and pride – themes Warner explores rather masterfully – I lost interest.  And yet even in the first part of the novel, I admired more than I loved.  It was enjoyable, but I couldn’t respond with the fervour with which I greeted Lolly Willowes.  The writing was so thick, so relentlessly beautiful, even, that I felt exhausted reading it.  That can hardly be labelled a criticism of Warner, but it prevented me loving the novel deeply.

I have heard Summer Will Show praised to the heights, and thus part of me thinks a re-read in a decade or so would be a good idea.  I don’t thrill to the thought.  Harriet Devine has also recently struggled to love this novel, so at least I’m not aloe in my assessment.  For those more interested in historical fiction than I am (and it would hard to be less) maybe you’d get more from this than I did.  For the reader new to Warner, I would certainly suggest Lolly Willowes as the first novel – but I have grown increasingly to think that her greatest triumph is her letters.  I’ve heard people say the same thing of Virginia Woolf, about her letters and diaries, and thought the assessment rather silly – but, for Warner, the chief qualities of her fiction-writing (adeptness at unusual imagery; an eye for original perspectives) appear in her correspondences, without the flaws which creep into her novels.  The Element of Lavishness is still the best thing I’ve read by Warner, and Summer Will Show didn’t come close to challenging the throne.

Opus 7 – Sylvia Townsend Warner

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I’m reading around my next DPhil chapter, on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, and thus there might well be a little spate of Warner related posts coming up here over the next few weeks.  I have an inkling that this might be one of those reviews which is very specialist, and might not attract much interest (1930s narrative poem, anyone?) but I shall plough ahead and see what happens!

I read Opus 7 (1931) by Warner mostly as a counterpoint to Lolly Willowes, but it is also interesting on its own account.  It’s a narrative poem, about fifty pages long, about Rebecca Random – an unsociable woman who lives in an idyllic cottage, ‘lives on bread and lives for gin’, and has an almost uncanny ability to grow flowers:

Some skill she had, and, more than skill, a touch
that prospered all she set, as though there were
a chemical affinity ‘twixt her
stuff and the stuff of plants.

Indeed, the most obvious connections between Opus 7 and Lolly Willowes are the countryside, and this almost witchlike ability that Rebecca has.  Flowers spring up almost overnight, and make Rebecca and her garden something of a spectacle for the villagers.
But the topic is really just a way of exploring the dynamics of village life, especially the darker side.  Rebecca starts to sell her flowers – but only because she needs money for drink.  The villagers buy her flowers for their mantelpieces, parties, and funerals – but do not accept her; she engages in these exchanges, but does not talk to the people next to her in the pub, nor buy them the drinks they anticipate.  In a really interesting aside, Warner leaves the stance of anecdote-reteller and dips into the author’s voice – comparing her addiction to writing and rewriting with Rebecca’s reliance on alcohol:

And down what leagues of darkness must I yet
trudge, stumble, reel, in the wrought mind’s retreat ;
then wake, remember, doubt, and with the day
that work which in the darkness shone survey,
and find it neither better nor much worse
than any other twentieth-century verse.
Oh, must I needs be disillusioned, there’s
no need to wait for spring!  Each day declares
yesterday’s currency a few dead leaves ;
and through all the sly nets poor technique weaves
the wind blows on, whilst I – new nets design,
a sister-soul to my slut heroine,
she to her dram enslaved, and I to mine.
I rarely read poetry, as you know, so perhaps I am not the best judge of quality.  I recently wrote a little bit about Warner’s collection Time Importuned, which I didn’t really like or dislike.  I felt I got a lot more out of Opus 7 – perhaps because it had a sustained narrative, and everything which comes along with that, particularly the foregrounding of character.  Once I had that all set in my mind, I could sit back and enjoy Warner’s writing.  It was occasionally a little forced, and I didn’t approve of all her attempts to create end-rhymes.  This was rather inexcusable:

But now Rebecca, wont to chatter ding-
dong with the merriest, and when drunk to sing

But in general I found it rather beautiful – her use of metaphor is quite striking, for instance.  This excerpt isn’t to do with Rebecca, but concerns the aftermath of village life after the first world war – looking back to the war with quite a chilling, effective image.  Even with all the writing about the trenches which I have read (which we have all read, I imagine) this made an impact on me:

I knew a time when Europe feasted well :
bodies were munched in thousands, vintage blood
so blithely flowed that even the dull mud
grew greedy, and ate men ; and lest the gust
should flag, quick flesh no daintier taste than dust,
spirit was ransacked for whatever might
sharpen a sauce to drive on appetite.
I can’t imagine any publisher willing to publish Opus 7 now, simply because of its form and length.  It’s not long enough to be considered a novel in verse, but it is obviously too long to be merely a poem.  However I am glad that Chatto and Windus decided it was worth issuing back in 1931, in their lovely Dolphin Books series (which I collect when I stumble across them) – it’s not my favourite book by Warner, but it is rather powerful and striking.  And, for a poetry ignoramus, rather an accessible way to enjoy the form, without forfeiting the qualities which make me primarily a lover of prose.

Dear Octopus – Dodie Smith

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When I was reading Dodie Smith’s first volume of autobiography, Look Back With Love, the title which cropped up most (and most intrigued me) was her play Dear Octopus (1938).  She didn’t write much about its creation or production, since obviously she didn’t write the play during her first eleven years, but she makes allusions now and then.  My attention was grabbed by the mention of family reunions, John Gielguid, and that curious title.  Actually, I’ll instantly put you out of your misery, lest you think this is a play set in an aquarium.  The title derives from the speech Nicholas gives at his parents’ Golden Wedding Anniversary:

“To the family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.”

Despite being an only child, Dodie Smith seems very able at portraying sibling relationships within large families.  (Indeed, one character claims to be ‘crazy about large families’, and their husband caustically remarks ‘That’s because you’re an only child.’)  Rose and Cassandra always seemed very believable in I Capture the Castle (albeit Thomas rather less so) and Dear Octopus is no different.  The size of the cast, and the various familial and marital relationships, was rather dizzying – but, of course, it would have been rather easier to identify everyone when seeing it on the stage, rather than reading the play.  We discussed reading plays a couple of years ago, and it seems that I am in a minority – although it has to be said that I do prefer reading plays with small casts, rather than the mammoth ensemble of Dear Octopus.

The situation is a tried and tested catalyst for all manner of action: a family reunion.  I don’t think there’s much point in me going into specifics, but it involves all the expected angles.  A daughter returns after a seven year absence, holding a secret; a sister-in-law holds resentment about a long-ago rejection; siblings compete and misunderstand each other; children try to understand the adult world; the gathering draws further attention to one family member who has recently died.  And, naturally, there is a romance plot threaded through – which culminates rather too neatly, perhaps, but everyone likes a bit of feel-good theatre.

There is plenty in Dear Octopus which does remind one of the insouciance of much of I Capture the Castle – and, indeed, Cassandra’s faux-sophistication.  Like this, for example:

MARGERY: Ken’ll carry on with anyone who crooks their little finger at him.
HILDA: Don’t you mind?
MARGERY: Not in the least.  It’s a safety valve.

Young love and young marriages are treated quite flippantly at times, although elsewhere the oncoming war (they must have known it was oncoming?) does crash through this flippancy:

LAUREL: Your father’s picture.  He was exactly your age when he was killed. (Suddenly.)  Oh, darling, darling–
HUGH: What?
LAUREL: Sometimes I wish we were quite middle-aged.
HUGH: Good lord, why?
LAUREL: So that you wouldn’t have to go if there’s another war.
HUGH: It’ll take a damn good cause to get me to war.
LAUREL: Oh, you all say that.

But the focal point is not budding romance – it is the security and trust of a fifty-year long marriage.  There is a lovely sense through that the anniversary couple in question (Charles and Dora) can cope with the antics of their family because of the depth of their bond.  For a young(ish) unmarried woman, Smith conveys this very well, and very calmly.

Dear Octopus doesn’t reinvent the wheel.  There are a lot of plays in a similar mould, and even with a similar tone, but Smith’s construction and balance throughout is so well done that this seems like an exemplar within its crowded genre.  Perhaps it won’t overly excite the reader, or transform any lives, but it does its job rather well.  I don’t know how often the play is revived now, but you do get a chance to see it, grab the opportunity.  Otherwise, I recommend you track down a copy, and have an entertaining afternoon…

Right Ho, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

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I found this post in my drafts, but it was originally published in 2012 – I put it in drafts because it got a lot of spam comments, but hopefully it is back to normal now. I didn’t mean to email it out :D

My book group recently read Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) by P.G. Wodehouse.  I always like an excuse to read some Wodehouse.  A diet of nothing else would be like living on ice cream, but as an occasional snack, there is nothing better.  And it would be a mistake to think that, since PGW makes for such easy reading, that it is easy writing.  I think Wodehouse is one of the best wordsmiths (or should that be wordpsmiths?) I have read, and it is far more difficult to write a funny book than it is to write a poignant or melancholy book.

But perhaps there are people out there who have yet to read any Wodehouse?  Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the way he writes (since, let’s face it, there is minimal variety within his output.)  In the typical Wodehouse novel you will have comic misunderstandings, elaborate disguises, accidental engagements, wrathful aunts, and everybody ending up happy in the end.  This formula is more certain than ever in a Jeeves and Wooster novel, where rich, foolish young Wooster gets himself entangled in a comedy of errors, and wise butler Jeeves demurely extracts him from them.

But the sheer joy, the genius, of Wodehouse is his wordplay.  It’s the kind of thing which will either appeal or not, and is impossible to explain into funniness (which is true of all humour, probably) – Wodehouse uses language like an acrobat, dashing from hyperbole to understatement in a moment; finding the longest way to express the shortest phrase; finding the most unexpected metaphors and similes, and twisting them all together alongside absurd slang and abbreviation.  Who but Wodehouse could have written this line?

Girls are rummy.  Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m.
Or have conceived of this image, when serving an aunt with alcohol?

“Give me a drink, Bertie.”

“What sort?”

“Any sort, so long as it’s strong.”

Approach Bertram Wooster along these lines, and you catch him at his best.  St. Bernard dogs doing the square thing by Alpine travellers could not have bustled about more assiduously.

Like Richmal Crompton’s William Brown, Bertram ‘Bertie’ Wooster is nothing if not blessed with aunts – most of whom view him with an unwavering, and understandable, loathing and distrust.  But, like William Brown, Wooster is endlessly well-meaning.  This is what makes him such an attractive hero – more or less all the messes in which he finds himself are caused by trying to help others, often in the romantic department.  Although Wooster himself sees engagement as a misery beyond all others, he often attempts to help others reach this state (invariably finding himself engaged to the soppiest female present.)

But so far I have not been specific.  I should mention Right Ho, Jeeves.  Aunt Dahlia – the only aunt who can tolerate Wooster, although she demonstrates the sort of affection which is shown through terse telegrams and much use of the term ‘fathead’ – summons Wooster to her mansion in Market Snodsbury, Worcestershire.  (Not many novels feature Worcestershire, the county in which I was raised, so it’s nice to see it get a mention – and Pershore, no less, which was the nearest town to my house.  If you’re thinking the village name is ridiculous, I should mention that Upton Snodsbury is in the area, and presumably inspired Wodehouse.)  He is being summoned to distribute prizes at a school, a fate which Wooster would rather avoid, to put it mildly.  So he ropes in newt-fanatic Gussie Fink-Nottle, who had been looking for an excuse to go there.  For why, you ask?  Well, with the coincidental air which characterises so many of Wodehouse’s convoluted plots, the girl with whom Fink-Nottle is besotted happens to be staying there.  She, ‘the Bassett disaster’ as Wooster terms her, comes across pretty clearly in his first description of her:

I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

The romantic entanglements do not end there, of course.  Wooster’s cousin Angela and her beau Tuppy also have something of a rollercoaster relationship, just to add to festivities.  Then there is Wooster’s white jacket, which Jeeves is determined shall not be worn…

My favourite scene from this, and one which often appears in anthologies etc., is Gussie at the prize-giving.  All I’ll say is that he’s been drinking, for the first time in his life.  It’s supposed to stiffen the sinews and summon the blood, but it’s a little more chaotic than that.

This isn’t my favourite Wodehouse novel.  I think I prefer the stand-alone books to the series, perhaps because they’re all the more unexpected and strange.  But Wodehouse’s exceptionally brilliant use of language is on fine form in Right Ho, Jeeves and I certainly loved reading this.  There are many imitators, but nobody can equal Wodehouse for his strand of comic writing – and a dose of it, in between other books, is always, always welcome.

Appius and Virginia – G.E. Trevelyan

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Keep the titles coming on yesterday’s post, folks – I’m really enjoying them.  And well done for spotting my oh-so-subtle allusion to one in my post title (but nobody spotted the deliberate mistake!)

Onto other matters.  One of the best things about blogging is, as we all know, collecting recommendations from other people’s blogs and comments – so many wonderful reads we wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, and I love to do my bit in recommending, since my reading tends away from the popular and well-known.  But I also love to hear recommendations from you lot, the more obscure the better, and was delighted when Virginia told me about Appius and Virginia (1932) by G.E. Trevelyan, because she thought it might be useful for my thesis (which it is) and added that the book is interesting but not brilliant.  I agree with her assessment – but I think it is still interesting enough to warrant blogging about.  Also, someone pointed out a while ago, in a comment here, that unless readers of obscure books blog about them, there will be no online record of a book.  Currently there are quite a few copies for sale online, but no synopsis or opinion on it (unless you count the ebay seller who assures the reading public that it is a ‘very good book’ and – coincidentally! – one he is selling.)

Appius and Virginia concerns a youngish woman, but confirmed spinster, who decides to experiment by raising an ape as a human.  I’m not a scientist and I’m not especially interested in whether or not the events of the novel could take place (I’m fairly sure they couldn’t – Appius learns a lot of spoken language very quickly; I’ve read about apes using a form of sign language, but not verbal communication) but I’m very happy to take these things on sight, disbelief suspended.  If you would find that too tricky, this definitely isn’t the novel for you!

(Incidentally, I can’t see any similarities to Webster’s play Appius and Virginia, nor the real-life Appius, but I am garnering my info on them from Wikipedia – step forward if you’re better qualified than me to comment on the topic, and you really couldn’t be less able than me.)

Virginia is rather an unsociable woman, earnest and persistent and not especially likeable.  Nor, however, is she dislikeable – her whole being seems occupied with the raising of Appius, and the reader sees very little of her character outside of this experiment.  Although I never really notice description of people’s appearances, and thus cannot swear to this, to my mind Virginia looks rather like the photo I later found of Trevelyan herself (below).

In many ways, Trevelyan’s novel relates to Edith Olivier’s wonderful little book The Love-Child – a spinster longs for the child she cannot have through traditional avenues, and so finds a creative way to fill this void.  For it becomes clear that Virginia, although interested in the pragmatics of an experiment, is motivated chiefly by loneliness – as she explains herself, to Appius:

“I was so lonely.  I wanted you to grow up as my child.  I wanted you to be human.  I wanted you to be something even more than a child, something I’d made with my own brain out of nothing, and shaped as I wanted it, and watched grow.”
Which makes it sound as though Appius becomes capable of understanding complex sentences.  I shan’t spoil the direction the experiment eventually takes, although I will hint that it takes somewhat disturbing steps, but most of the novel follows his increasing understanding of language and communication – but slower than Virginia hopes.  He follows some of what she says, but not all – the progression from concrete thoughts to the abstract, for instance, takes time.  Some of Trevelyan’s more experimental (and, to my mind, least successful) passages attempt to reflect the internal workings of Appius’ mind:

Hand on white line above him.  Fingers won’t go over it.  Why not?  Something there; the pale blue stuff.  Hard and cold.  Try white wisps.  Hard too.  Can’t be held.  Funny.

That, by the way, is the sky seen through a window.  I can see where she is going with these sections, which flit between the primitive and the avant-garde, but ultimately I don’t think Trevelyan is a good enough writer to get away with this approach.  And it is an approach which requires a very able writer – the dismantling of sentences and experimentation with language can so easily irritate, and even people like James Joyce irk rather than impress me.

While Trevelyan treats her topic in an interesting manner, she obviously has difficulty keeping the momentum going.  Each chapter adds a couple of years to the experiment, but very little changes – all the scenes take place in the house or the garden, and that gives
the novel a claustrophobic atmosphere.  Some of the scenes are done very well – when Appius first sees a mirror, for example, or his inability to distinguish between sentient and insentient objects leading to a battle with the fire – but what Appius and Virginia really lacks is humour.  Earnestness can kill a novel for me, and although Trevelyan’s novel didn’t die, it was a little bit wounded.

So – if this were available on shelves easily, I would probably recommend it as an interesting and unusual read.  There are the rudiments for a fascinating novel, although sadly Trevelyan doesn’t have the charm or poignancy of Edith Olivier and The Love-Child.  But since it’s so difficult to track down in the UK, I could only really recommend US readers hunt this out.

But I will end with possibly the most accomplished paragraph from the novel, or at least the section which met most with my approval.  Virginia imagines what her life will be like if she fails in her attempt to humanise Appius, and what follows is as striking a portrait of the lonely spinster as I have encountered.  If only the rest of the novel had been at this level.

She would go back to Earl’s Court and her bed-sitting-room – gas fire and griller, separate meters; to her consumption of novels from the lending library; her bus rides to the confectioner’s; her nightly sipping of conversation and coffee in the lounge: to middle-age in a ladies’ residential club.  Each year a little older, a little stouter or a little thinner, a little less quickly off the bus – “Come along there, please, come along,” and the struggle with umbrella and parcels through the ranks of inside passengers, and the half compassionate, half contemptuous hand of the conductor, grimy and none too gentle as she clambers down the swaying steps on to the sliding pavement. – Each year a little less bright in the after-dinner conversation; a little less able to remember the novels she has read; a little less able to find a listener; a little less able to live, yet no more ready for death.

Thanks for telling me about this, Virginia!