1930s

Live Alone and Like It

StuckinaBook All , 15 Comments

I don’t often talk that much about my DPhil research, because most of my time is spent reading books and articles that are either impossible to track down, or too prosaic to recommend. But after reading Marjorie Hillis’ Live Alone and Like It (1936) for my upcoming chapter on childlessness and fantastic creation (oh yes) I thought I’d like to blog about it. But surely it would be too difficult to find? (thought I) So I Googled it, and it turns out that Virago reissued it in 2005 – and there are plenty of copies around, so I feel I can blog about it guiltlessly.

The book is non-fiction, and does what it says on the tin – it’s a guide to the single girl. There were already rather more women than men in the UK before the First World War, but in the 1920s and ’30s there were around two million ‘surplus women’, as they were labelled. The whole history of these women is detailed in Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out, which I’ve been reading for a while and will talk further about soon. I’m rather annoyed by the tacit assumption in both Nicholson’s book and the contemporary guides that any single man could easily get married – I suspect life could be as difficult for bachelors as for spinsters – but certainly unmarried women proliferated at a rate higher than ever before in living memory.

I’ve read quite a few of these guides – some are maudlin, others are progressive, and everything in between. They agree on very little. The reason I wanted to write about Marjorie Hillis’ Live Alone and Like It is because it is the most accessible for a modern audience. You don’t need to be an unmarried woman in 1936 to find this a fascinating read, and what is more, a funny one. Hillis’ tone is not hectoring or patronising, but quite witty and sensible. Whether or not you’re on the look-out for a spouse, you might chuckle at this piece of advice:

But hobbies are anti-social now; modern men don’t like to be sewn and knitted at; and the mere whisper that a girl collects prints, stamps, tropical fish or African art is, alas, likely to increase her solitude.or this:

Clutter is now as out-of-date as modesty, and for just as good reasons.or, without intending to cast aspersions against any bloggers (and glossing over my uninformed references to Gissing and Braddon yesterday), this:

Most people’s minds are like ponds and need a constantly fresh stream of ideas in order not to get stagnant. The simplest way to accomplish this to is [sic] exchange your ideas (if any), with your friends and acquaintances, cribbing as many as possible from books, plays, and newspaper columns and passing them off as your own. Anyone who does this well is considered a brilliant conversationalist. If you do it extra well, you are a Wit.

There are sections on how to save money, how to furnish a home on a budget, and even what term to use to describe the unmarried woman (the term spinster is ‘becoming rapidly extinct’, apparently). Hillis also cheerfully lists the advantages of living alone, including this rather unlikely one, demonstrating how the times, they have a-changed:

You will be able to eat what, when, and where you please, even dinner served on a tray on the living-room couch – one of the higher forms of enjoyment which the masculine mind has not learned to appreciate.

All in all, there is quite a lot that still comforts or helps the single person – but for the most part Live Alone and Like It is an involving piece of social history, and also amusing in that wry, 1930s, almost Provincial Ladyesque manner. I found it useful for my research too, so that’s a bonus. And I’ll leave Hillis to offer the last piece of advice, as true now as it was in 1936:

For the truth is that if you’re interesting, you’ll have plenty of friends, and if you’re not, you won’t – unless you’re very, very rich.

Illyrian Spring

StuckinaBook All , , 21 Comments

Early warning – there is a giveaway right at the bottom of this post!
That Rachel (Book Snob) is pretty scary, isn’t she? I knew she loved Ann Bridge’s Illryian Spring (1935), and so dropped her an email to let her know I’d found my own copy. Minutes later I found myself under house arrest, surrounded by armed policemen and ferocious guard dogs, and the recipient of dozens of death threats – if I didn’t immediately drop everything, read Illyrian Spring, and post a positive review of it. Right now I’m in a dungeon, blindfolded, typing away with a gun held against my temple…

Gosh, that took a macabre turn, didn’t it? What I MEANT to say was that Rachel thought I should definitely read Illyrian Spring before the end of April – which I duly did, it’s just taken me a while to get around to writing about it. In return, I told Rachel she should read the (much shorter) novel The Love Child by Edith Olivier by the end of April. How’s that going, Rach, hmm?

But I am only teasing, of course. I am very grateful that Rachel pointed me in the direction of Illyrian Spring (I gave you a copy of The Love Child – just sayin’) because it’s a beautiful novel.

Grace Kilmichael – known also as Lady K – feels unappreciated by her husband Walter, daughter Linnet and sons Nigel and Teddy. As the novel opens, she has escaped off on the Orient Express – hoping to evade discovery, it is perhaps foolish to choose this mode of transport, ‘but Lady Kilmichael was going to Venice, and she lived in a world which knew no other way of getting to Venice than to travel by the Simplon Orient Express.’ That sets the scene for Grace – one to whom custom and good fortune are equally good companions. In many novels this would be enough to dismiss her out of hand, but Ann Bridge is no inverted snob (in fact, she is often simply a snob) and Grace is undoubtedly the heroine of the novel from the outset. She is a talented painter whose family treat her paintings as an amusing hobby; she is intelligent, sensitive to others, and bewitched by the beauty of life and adventure. And she’s off on an adventure.

I’m not going to pretend to understand the geography of Europe. I hadn’t heard of most of the places she went, but I think they’re probably mostly Italian. To be honest, I didn’t really care. Seeing the sights through Grace’s eyes was enough for me – much of the novel simply documents her travels, and reflections upon her life and family. And her affection, maternal friendship with Nicholas (I’ll get on to him in a bit).

By rights, I shouldn’t have liked Illyrian Spring as much as I did. You know me and descriptions of landscapes – and Bridge’s novel is crammed full with descriptions of scenery, buildings, ruins, water, nature, everything. Grace even carries a travel guide around with her – a form of writing to which I am allergic. But how could I not be swept away by this?

But nature in Dalmatia is singularly open-handed, and distributes beauties as well as wonders with lavish impartiality. Within a few hundred paces of the source of Ombla they came on a thing which Grace was to remember all her life, as much for its beauty as its incredibility. The road here swung round to the right, pushed out towards the valley by a spur of the mountainside; some distance above the road the slopes of this spur rose steeply, broken by ledges and shallow gullies, the rocks of the usual tone of silver pear-colour. And all over the ledges of these pearly rocks, as thick as they could stand, grew big pale-blue irises, a foot or more high, sumptuous as those in an English border, their leaves almost as silver as the rocks, their unopened buds standing up like violet spears among the delicate pallor of the fully-opened flowers – Iris pallida dalmatica, familiar to every gardener, growing in unimaginable profusion in its natural habitat. Now to see an English garden-flower smothering a rocky mountain-side is a sufficient wonder, especially if the rocks are of silver-colour and the flowers a silvery-blue; and Nature, feeling that she had done enough, might well be content to leave it at that. But she had a last wonder, a final beauty to add. In the cracks and fissures another flower grew, blue also, spreading out over the steep slabs between the ledges in flat cushions as much as a yard across – a low-growing woody plant, smothered in small close flower-heads of a deep chalky blue, the shade beloved of the painter Nattier. Anything more lovely than these low compact masses of just the same tone of colour, but a deeper shade, flattened on the white rocks as a foil and companion to the flaunting splendour of the irises, cannot be conceived.

There are a few, a very few, authors who manage to write about the visual in ways which focus upon characters’ emotions and their responses, even if this isn’t stated explicitly, and that works for me. I’m thinking the moment when Jude looks out over Christminster in Jude the Obscure, and more or less every moment of Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April. Ann Bridge joins that select few, for me. Those of you without my natural-description-qualms will adore this novel all the more.


And I promised you Nicholas, didn’t I? A less likely hero you’ll be hard-pressed to find. Blustery, fairly rude, a victim to indigestion, self-pleased – and with a very red complexion, to boot – Nicholas meets Grace when she is trying to copy down an intricate engraving for her son. Nicholas doesn’t think she’s doing it right, and eventually insists upon doing it himself – and he does it very accurately. Somehow this is the beginning of their travels together – and I wouldn’t know how to describe their relationship and discussions. I know some people (*cough*, Rachel) love Nicholas, and while I never wholly warmed to him, I did love Grace and Nicholas together. Not romantically, you understand, but as companions who discuss everything under the sun, and appreciate the beauty they discover together. Grace becomes something of a mentor to Nicholas, as he seeks to develop his own artistic talent, and prove to his parents that he can pursue a career as a painter, rather than an architect. Some of the novel’s most interesting sections come, though, when Grace begins to tire of Nicholas, but is far too caring and kind to tell him so. That’s when Bridge’s writing is at its subtlest, and most perceptive – inching through changes in their relationship in a very believable manner. Bridge’s style of narrative is the sort which does not lend itself to plot synopses, and is incredibly difficult to do justice – everything and nothing happens. Like many – maybe even all – great novels, the story does not matter so much as the way in which it is told.

At heart, Illyrian Spring could be considered a deeply feminist novel. Grace’s emancipation happens so quietly and with so few signs of open rebellion that it would might seem understated – but there is incredible strength in passages like this:
Married women so often become more an institution than a person – to their families a wife or a mother, to other people the wife or the mother of somebody else. Apart from her painting, Grace Kilmichael had been an institution for years. She didn’t mind it; she hadn’t really noticed it; but when Nicholas Humphries started treating her as a person, being interested in her as herself, ‘Lady K.’, and not as Nigel’s or Teddy’s or Linnet’s mother, or as the brilliant Sir Walter Kilmichael’s nice wife, she did notice it. She found it something quite new and rather delightful. And entirely without conscious intention, without being aware of it, the presentation of herself which she was making up to Nicholas was, in some subtle way, more personal and less ‘institutional’ than it would have been if she had met him in her London house, as a friend of Linnet’s or Nigel’s.

Illyrian Spring is not without its faults. There is a persistent intellectual snobbery which has a stranglehold on the novel – people must always have the best, and be the best, and there is apparently no sense in doing things simply for enjoyment. The novel seems to suggest that only those with genius at painting should ever wield a paintbrush. Nicholas himself decides he’ll only help people looking for directions because ‘these people were intelligent, much more so than most – he might as well go down with them.’ This constant thread of snobbery felt a bit like poison dropping steadily upon bowers of beautiful flowers, damaging what the novel could have been. If Bridge could have dialled this down, Illyrian Spring would be as charming as The Enchanted April, and even more substantial.

As it is, even with this fault (which some may not perceive as a fault, maybe) Illyrian Spring is a delicious gem of a novel. Grace Kilmichael and Nicholas are unlikely companions whose companionship would be impossible to doubt – and both are utterly genuine and believable characters, far more complex than I could delineate in this review. I am very indebted to Rachel for the joy of this novel – and if I found it joyful, I am certain that those of you who like their books to be like travel guides will fall so deeply in love with Bridge’s novel that you will frame copies of it around the house, and name your first child after it.

So, Rachel, there you go – many thanks. Now, The Love Child…

* * *

I have a spare copy of this to give away – I spotted a nice edition in a bookshop, and swooped upon it, which means I’m now giving away my tatty old Penguin edition. I do warn you, it is very tatty – the cover is taped on, and the spine is so tightly bound that reading the far side of each page requires effort. It’s a reading copy only – but Illyrian Spring is difficult to track down, so anybody who can cope with the poor condition and would like to read it, just pop your name in the comments – along with your favourite season, in honour of the novel’s title. Mine, suitably enough, is spring.

Echo

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

One of the novellas I read during Novella Reading Weekend was Echo (1931) by Violet Trefusis (translated from French by Sian Miles) and I thought it was rather brilliant. If I hadn’t read Paul Gallico’s exceptionally good Love of Seven Dolls at the same time, I’d probably have dashed off an enthused review of Echo right away. As it is, prepare yourself for some enthusiasm now. (I should add, I’ve since read Broderie Anglaise – I’ll probably write a blog post on it at some point, but I was severely disappointed – it was nowhere near as good as Echo.)


I had a little stack of unread Violet Trefusis novellas (they do all seem to be short – Echo is 109pp.) on my shelf, mostly because I recognised her name from Virginia Woolf’s diaries and various Bloomsbury books. I hadn’t quite worked out where she fitted into everything (turns out she had a youthful affair with Vita Sackville-West, as you do) but the combined allure of Bloomsbury and brevity was enough for her to find her way to my shelves. And, eventually, to my hands – I’m very glad she did, because Echo is very funny, as well as well written and occasionally quite moving. Oh, and it has twins in it. That’s what sealed the deal.

As people seem to in novels of the period, the central characters live in a Scottish castle. To give you an image of its state, this describes the bedrooms: ‘They were all equally high-ceilinged, equally pale, equally damp, and entirely devoid of comfort or charm.’ The castle houses Lady Balquidder and her twin niece and nephew, Jean and Malcolm – Lady Balquidder is proper and restrained, always behaving exactly as polite society expects of her, and receiving her due from society in return. Here she is:
Her plump hands were covered with freckles which matched the colour of her hair, still auburn, despite her sixty-five years. From time to time, the ale-coloured eyes, beneath their reddened lids, darted a glance at the door. Her whole person flickered like a small but constant flame.
Jean and Malcolm are not built in the same mould as their aunt. They are hardy, rough, and unmannered youths – in their early 20s – whose behaviour is closer to savages than to Lady B’s. That is to say, they greatly prefer nature to the confines of rooms (‘each of the twins had a passionate love of their wild homeland and were constantly entranced by its beauty’), and possess no frailties nor qualms which generally afflict those of their supposed class. Jean, especially, is proud of not being unduly feminine – and is devoted to her twin brother.

Into the mix of this maelstrom comes another of Lady Balquidder’s nieces, the twins’ cousin, Sauge, from Paris.
“Yes,” agreed Jean, “I can’t wait to see her teetering about the moors in Louis Quinze heels. She’ll want to have snails every mealtime – when she’s not eating frogs, that is. She’ll have a little corncrakey voice, and she’ll keep saying ‘Ah mon Dieu!’ all the time. And, of course, she’ll be fat and dumpy, like her mother; you know, there’s a photo of her on Aunt Agnes’ desk.”

“Well we can certainly make her life a misery,” proclaimed Malcolm with relish.
Needless to say, Sauge is not in the least like this. Trefusis dashes us away from Scotland to Paris, and we get to glimpse Sauge first-hand:
Her searching curiosity was by now proverbial and she was strong and capable enough to act as a prop to someone who really interested her, as a trellis to the young tendrils of a plant slow to develop.

But whenever the eternally grateful ‘subject’ showed signs of wanting to stabilize a relationship regarded always by Sauge as temporary, she would quietly slip away, fearful lest a human heart bring her down from the Olympian heights of her disinterestedness.
The arrival of Sauge triggers off all manner of change at the castle, of course. Initially the twins treat her with the rudeness they intend – but Sauge’s unusual, beguiling nature begins to work its effect over the family. This is no Cinderella tale, or even a novel with the enchantment of The Enchanted April – Sauge brings tragedy alongside comedy; and I should reiterate, Echo remains very amusing throughout – Trefusis’ turn of phrase is a delight. But it is not unmitigated…

Through no fault of her own, Sauge is the catalyst for a change in Jean and Malcolm’s interaction with one another, as both become, in their clumsy ways, besotted with their cousin. Behind Jean’s refusal to be thought feminine lies a painful naivety; behind Malcolm’s bravado lies inexperience and immaturity. Running beneath the amusing encounter of the civilised and uncivilised is a much more dramatic, tautly told narrative of a crisis point in a relationship – albeit one between siblings. The early 20s can be an incredibly difficult time to be a twin, and Trefusis paints so perfectly the unspoken struggle that must take place when one is ready to loosen the close bond before the other. Trefusis moves from comic to farce to moving with brio – and all in just over a hundred pages.

Echo starts like a Saki short story, all dark mischief and childish menace, but develops and maintains the fablesque tragedy of the Brothers Grimm, alongside flashes of the vibrant, vulnerable 1920s heroine. It’s a heady, brilliant mixture – and, of course, a further addition to the pantheon of twin-lit.

Books to get Stuck into:

The Juniper Tree – Barbara Comyns: the same weaving of fable and pathos appears in this lesser-read Comyns novel

‘The End of the Party’ – Graham Greene: I haven’t written about this twin-based short story, but it is a perfect little accompanient, and can be read online if you click the link.

A bit of 1930s fun

StuckinaBook All , 10 Comments




Yesterday I mentioned The Perfect Pest by Adrian Porter, which I picked up in a charity shop and quickly read. It’s not the kind of book you normally find in a charity shop – a piece of 1930s whimsy and silliness.

The book is a collection of comic verse of the sort that appeared (as some of these did) in Punch and the Morning Post. The first half covers ‘The Perfect…’ example of various types – host, husband, child, dog – in a wry way. The second half does a similar thing, but with more varied topics. It’s all light and silly and amusing – and delightfully illustrated by Eileen McGrath, in a style similar to Joyce Dennys’ wonderful illustrations.

The best way to sell this sweet little book is to give you an example – I’ll pick the title poem, and a few images of the sketches. I think this would make a fun gift for anyone with a retro taste in books – or something to pop on the bedside table in your guest room. Fold down the pertinent pages if you want your guest to make an early exit…


The Perfect Pest

She merely sent a wire to say
That she was coming down to stay.
She brought a maid of minxsome look
Who promptly quarrelled with the cook.
She smoked, and dropped with ruthless hand,
Hot ashes on the Steinway grand.

She strode across the parquet floors
In hobnail boots from out of doors.
She said the water wasn’t hot, and Jane gave notice on the spot.
She snubbed the wealthy dull relations
From whom my wife had expectations.

She kept her bell in constant peals,
She never was in time for meals,
And when at last with joyful heart
We thrust her in the luggage cart,
In half an hour she came again
And said, “My dear, I’ve missed the train!”

To See Ourselves

StuckinaBook All , 12 Comments

Burns’ (anglicised) line ‘Oh would some Power the gift to give us / To see ourselves as others see us’ was one which Delafield played with on a couple occasions (the brilliant collection of sketches As Others Hear Us, and the play To See Ourselves which later proved inspiration for VMC The Way Things Are). More broadly, I think it can be seen as the cornerstone of her writing – whether witty or sad or biting (and Delafield excels at all of these, in different works) her primary technique is demonstrating people’s lack of self-awareness.

Danielle and I have both been reading Gay Life (1933) and both our reviews will appear today – if I’ve understood time differences properly, then Danielle’s will come along later. It is another example of characters who have built up false images of themselves – but rather than having a single focus, Gay Life is filled with a cast of many. We see through nearly all of their eyes at different points, and thus Delafield builds up many perspectives on the same few days and group of people. They’re all on a long holiday in the South of France, staying at a hotel, mostly having stayed to the point where they know each other reasonably well and have separated wheat from chaff – usually getting stuck with the chaff. Delafield’s title, of course, uses ‘gay’ in its original sense – but also ironically. Despite the supposedly delights of the resort, few of the characters are enjoying themselves; even fewer have happy or uncomplicated relationships with those around them.

There are so many people – I ought to start introducing them. Hilary and Angie Moon are recently, and dejectedly, married (‘The little that they had ever had to say to one another had been said in the course of an electrically-charged fortnight, two years earlier, when they had fallen desperately in love.’) She’s already on the look-out for a new beau, but isn’t likely to find it in grumpy Mr. Bolham, still less his hapless secretary Denis. Angie’s not the only woman willing to welcome love – Coral Romayne is besotted with Buckland, the beefy holiday tutor hired ostensibly to teach her neglected son Patrick. There are a few more, but I don’t want to dizzy you.

EMD is mistress of the brief description which utterly reveals a character and their flaws. This, for instance, is Denis: ‘Morally – in the common acceptance of the term – he had remained impeccable, for he was both undersexed and inclined to a physical fastidiousness that he mistook for spirituality.’ And Dulcie, one of the most amusing characters in the novel, who is the daughter of a hotel entertainer, and thus treading an awkward line between guest and servant: ‘Dulcie continued to prattle. It was evidently her idea of good manners, to permit no interval of silence.’

One character I haven’t mentioned, who is awfully significant, is the novelist Chrissie Challoner. She is staying in a house near the cottage, and one of the central threads of this multi-faceted novel is her encounter with Denis. He’s had a rather pathetic life, but she immediately sees through his facade of worldliness – and rather falls in love with his true self. Which leads to all manner of moonlight proclamations and furtive assignations. Being honest, I was a bit worried at this point. A lot of interwar novelists try their hand at romance and flail a bit madly. It’s all much more comfortable for the reader when they’re being arch and detached – and there is nothing detached about Chrissie’s pondering on his inner being, declaring she has never felt this before, etc. etc. I daresay such things are enjoyable to the people experiencing them, but not really to the reader…

But, of course, I ought to have trusted Delafield not to err. After a few pages where it seems Denis may have finally met a woman who will understand and appreciate him… but no, I shan’t spoil the plot for you.

Besides, Delafield is never too earnest. The humour of The Provincial Lady is toned down, but makes it appearances, especially when Dulcie is on the scene.
“Mr. Bolham, is your bedroom door locked?”

“Why should my bedroom door be locked?” said Mr. Bolham. “I’ve nothing to hide.”

Dulcie gave a thin shriek of nervous laughter.

“You are funny, Mr. Bolham. I shall die. I suppose it did sound funny, me putting it like that. What I meant was, really, could I possibly pop in there, just for one second, to get something – well, it’s a bathing-cloak really – that’s fallen on to your balcony.”

“Again?”

Dulcie giggled uncertainly.

“It’s not my fault, Mr. Bolham,” she said at last, putting her head on one side.

“I know. It’s the Duvals.”

“It just dropped off their window-ledge, you know.”

“Did madame Duval send you to get it?”

Dulcie nodded.

“I expect she thought you might be a tiny bit cross, as it’s happened so often,” she suggested.

Mr. Bolham felt her eyeing him anxiously, to see if this would get a laugh. He maintained, without any difficulty, a brassy irresponsiveness, and Dulcie immediately changed her methods.

“I like to do anything I’m asked, always – my Pops says that’s one of the ways a little girl makes nice friends,” she observed in a sudden falsetto. “And Marcelle – she lets me call her Marcelle, you know – she’s always terribly sweet to me. So naturally, I like to run about and do errands for her, Mr. Bolham.”

“Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed doing this one,” said Mr. Bolham sceptically. “I’ll send the towel, or whatever it is, up by the chambermaid.”
Although there are some central players in Gay Life, the cast is so wide that things don’t get dull or stilted. Delafield takes it in turns to focalise goings-on through the eyes of each character, so that we are still learning back-story well on into the last quarter of the novel – so it feels more like meeting every guest at a hotel than it does like a linear novel. Presumably that is the effect EMD wanted – and it certainly works. Plot isn’t entirely unimportant, though – and a Big Event rears its head towards the end.

Danielle asked me, in an email, what else I’d read by Delafield. I did a quick count on the back of a piece of scrap paper, and realised that I’ve read 19 books by EMD – mostly in pre-blog days, and a fair few in pre-uni days, when I could afford to indulge in one author for a month or two. (Favourites include: As Others Hear Us, Mrs. Harter, The War Workers, Faster! Faster!, Consequences…) Of that 19, I have read no duds. Gay Life isn’t the best of those reads – in fact, it probably lags somewhere towards the end – and yet it is really very good indeed. EMD deservedly has most of her fame from the Provincial Lady books, which are sublime and which I can well imagine reading every year for the rest of my life – but her other works shouldn’t be neglected. She seems incapable of writing a bad novel, and if most play towards sombreness and melancholy, she can never quite avoid the comic touch.

Gay Life is incredibly scarce, but you might be able to find it in a library. But you can’t go wrong with a Delafield – and I encourage you to look beyond the Provincial Lady books (and, of course, to read those IMMEDIATELY if you have yet to do so). It is wonderful that she is remembered at all, but she leaves a legacy of works which have been sadly neglected – have a hunt in your library archives and see what you can find! Go on, have a search now – and let me know what’s available in your area.

I’m looking forward to hearing Danielle’s response to this novel, and will put in a link here once her review appears. EDIT: here it is!

Strange Glory

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

One of the books I bought during Project 24 was Strange Glory (1936) by L.H. Myers. For some reason I had jotted down this name during my doctoral research, and so I bought it when I spotted it in my favourite shop in Oxford, Arcadia. Having read it (quite a while ago, actually) I have no idea why I decided to write it down. It wasn’t remotely helpful for my research… but it was interesting enough.

It starts with Paulina stopping her chauffeur next to a mysterious wood in Louisiana. She is off to meet her fiancee, but is captivated by the wood instead – and the equally mysterious man she spots amongst the trees. Strange Glory returns to Paulina’s life once every year, as she returns to the wood and to that man – whom she thinks a hermit – as gradually she detaches herself from her life of privilege and gravitates towards a new life.

To be honest, Myers lost me a bit sometimes. I read most of the novel on a long train journey, and when I returned to it I had great trouble working out what was going on. (That’s the sort of confession you won’t find in a newspaper review.) The second half of the novel becomes a sort of love triangle, with left-wing politics thrown into the mix, and for me it lost a bit of its mystique. Reminded me a little of David Garnett’s Aspects of Love, which I didn’t particularly love.

But why did I still enjoy Strange Glory? The aura of mystery does pervade it, and Myers’ description of the woods helped deepen a narrative which could have remained quite dull. Here’s an example – if you like this, then you might well enjoy the novel as a whole:
She woke from her musings to find herself passing through country that she had never seen before. The sun, now high overhead, was shining fiercely through a white haze. Fields of short, greyish grass bordered the road, and behind there rose clumps of huge, moss-hooded trees, the outposts of a line of forest. In the chalky, violet sunlight these mountainous forms loomed up hollow and spectral; they looked like lumps of foam left by a withdrawing tide. And the forest behind seemed to be more unsubstantial still – hoary and unsubstantial with an ancientness independent of time. A frontier of mystery, it stretched on for mile after mile; always the same distance away, it tantalised Paulina until suddenly the road made a turn, and the car rushed into it and was engulfed. At once a cool, swampy smell filled the air; pools of water glittered in the half-dark, the car plunged through clouds of noise that came from the throats of countless frogs.Even though Strange Glory proved fairly useless for my research, it was yet an entertaining diversion and a glimpse into unusual territory for my reading. The blurb describes it as ‘transcendental’. Perhaps it is no coincidence that L.H. Myers is the son of F.W.H. Myers, who wrote a rather bizarre (and very long) two volume work on the unconscious mind, called Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death which enjoyed a vogue in the early 20th century. Not the sort of work I’d particularly enjoy in purported ‘non-fiction’ (although it does currently sit on my desk, for research purposes) but when this sort of thing influences fiction, it can lend a haunting quality.

One of my more unusual and eccentric choices for Project 24, perhaps, but I’m glad I’ve read it – and there a few cheap secondhand copies over the internet, should you wish to sample it yourself.

Books to get Stuck into:

The Haunted Woman – David Lindsay: Lindsay was a friend of Myers, and weaves odd metaphysical elements into this unusual novel.

The Man Who Planted Trees – Jean Giono: not the most obvious of connections, but equally captivating in its depiction of woodland as the central force of a narrative.

Personal Pleasures

StuckinaBook All , 7 Comments

I’m currently, and slowly, reading Personal Pleasures by Rose Macaulay, one of the books I bought under Project 24. It’s a collection of paeans to the m
any and various delights Macaulay encounters in life – from believing to disbelieving, from doves in the chimney to improving the dictionary. It’s a hodge-podge, or perhaps a hotch-potch, and certainly good fun. It does feel a little over-written compared to Macaulay’s novels, with elaborate expressions and fanciful imagery. You can imagine Philip Sidney penning it, whilst not musing on Astrophel and Stella. Having said that, Macaulay delights in pulling the rug from under your feet, and each section has a little turning-point where she considers the flip-side.

This isn’t really a review of the book – that would be foolish, since I’m not even halfway yet – but I thought I’d treat you to one of the sections which tickled me. AND this prepares you for some Macaulay news coming later in the week…

‘Departure of Visitors’

An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors, like trodden herbs. A peace for gods, a divine emptiness.

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy Sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy Companies of Men. . . .
Society is all but rude
To this delicious Solitude.

The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books of gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the hairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand. “I am afraid the room is rather littered….” The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.

What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.

To-night we shall sleep deep. We need no more hope that you “have everything you want”; we know that you have, for you are safely home, and can get it from your kitchen if you haven’t. We send you blessing and God speed, and sink into our idle peace as into floods of down.

But you have unfortunately left behind you, besides peace, a fountain pen, a toothbrush, and a bottle of eye lotion with eye bath.

Pass the Buck

StuckinaBook All , , 16 Comments

33. The Good Earth – Pearl S. Buck
I still have three birthday books to mention – my bounty is seemingly unending! – but I’ve just finished a library book, and wanted to write about that before returning it. This is quite unusual, and it seems I currently wait until all memory of a book has faded before attempting to blog about it… those who can spot a flaw in this plan, you’re not alone. This one is going straight into my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.

I am usually wary of that common book group phrase: “Well, that’s the point of book groups, isn’t it – to make us read things we wouldn’t normally read.” This is almost invariably said when people have hated a book… and, to be honest, there’s usually a reason I don’t read the books that I ‘wouldn’t normally read’. BUT I was forced to use this very expression at book group on Wednesday, concerning Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth.

I don’t know why I’d heard of Buck – possibly because she won the Nobel Prize, and this 1931 novel was a huge bestseller – but there was nothing about this novel which appealed, aside from publication date. Not realising that Buck was brought up in China, I thought this would be akin to a travel guide; the mentions of poverty, peasants, heartbreak, and deception in the blurb made this sound like a tiresome specimen of misery lit; bestselling books, let’s be honest, tend not to equate with great books. But it all just goes to show that all the signs can point in one direction, and yet the novel turn out to be completely unexpected. In the case of The Good Earth, it turned out to be unexpectedly brilliant.

The novels tells the story of a Chinese farmer, Wang Lung. The land is everything to him; it provides or withholds; it is a sign of wealth and status; it is his livelihood. This is the strongest theme of the novel, and one that survives all the human interaction. In bare bones, The Good Earth documents the descent into poverty, and raise into riches, of Wang Lung and his expanding family. They travel south to avoid starvation, begging to survive – always with the intention to return to the land they own. When they do, and when they become rich, there are other intrusions and temptations which mar their good fortune. Across 350 or so pages, the narrative eye does not wander from this family’s experience – Buck decides, wisely in my opinion, to show the state of China in the 1920s and ’30s through the world of a few individuals, rather than great political swathes.

Wang Lung lives with his father, and early in the novel he has decided to get himself a wife. This is no Austenesque tale of courtship: it has been decided before the narrative begins that Wang Lung will be married to a slave from the house of the area’s great family – meekly, uncertainly he enters these courts to collect O-lan, who is described thus by the Great and Ancient Lady of the house:

“This woman came into our house when she was a child of ten and here she has lived until now, when she is twenty years old. I bought her in a year of famine when her parents came south because they had nothing to eat. They were from the north in Shantung and there they returned, and I know nothing further of them. You see she has the strong body and the square cheeks of her kind. She will work well for you in the field and drawing water and all else that you wish. She is not beautiful but that you do not need. Only men of leisure have the need for beautiful women to divert them. Neither is she clever. But she does well what she is told to do and she has a good temper. So far as I know she is a virgin. She has not beauty enough to tempt my sons and grandsons even if she had not been in the kitchen.”
The blurb of my borrowed copy tries valiantly to turn The Good Earth into a feminist text, but it is not that. It is true that O-lan is ultimately the means of raising the family’s fortunes; it is true that she sacrifices much for her family, and is one of few in her family to remain steadfastly loyal, wise, and unselfish. But Buck doesn’t paint O-lan as a paragon, or hold Wang Lung up to disapprobation. It is the brilliance of The Good Earth, and Buck as a writer, that there is almost no sense of the author at all. Sometimes an author is evident in every word of a novel, through style or voice – and this can be either wonderful or dreadful. But I think it takes an even greater talent for the author to fade behind the characters and events, so they do not intrude at all. And this certainly isn’t because the characters’ minds take centre stage – Buck resists giving any sort of psychological insight, and instead allows events and dynamics between family members to have the most impact. Even the dialogue rarely wanders from the surface of characters’ thoughts and feelings – and while Wang Lung, sometime into marriage, ‘had learned now from that impassive square countenance to detect small changes at first invisible to him’, O-lan remains a closed book to the reader for much of the novel. A closed book psychologically, that is – it would yet be impossible not to be moved by O-lan’s life, including one moment where I gasped aloud.

If I had to choose one word to describe The Good Earth, it would indisputably be the word ‘authentic’. Presumably because Buck lived many years in China, she knew the culture inside out. Even reading it as an outsider, I felt enveloped by the culture – details I didn’t know (for example, wearing white for mourning) were mentioned, but subtly, not drawing attention to the reader’s ignorance. Somebody at book group commented that it occasionally felt as though it had been translated from Chinese – that’s how accurate the language and insights felt. Where a modern writer might feel they had to explain their own views, or condemn the sexism inherent to 1930s rural China, Buck bravely allows the characters simply to exist – without approval or disapproval. Instead there is simply the most involving and, yes, authentic narrative I have read for some time. Not a novel I would have imagined responding to thus, but I am very grateful to Yoanna for suggesting we read it – and hope to have encouraged you to do the same.

There is Nothing Like A Dame

StuckinaBook All , 20 Comments

Hello there, I’m back from my trips! I’ll have a rummage through my photographs at some point, and put some up for you to enjoy. Colin did *quite* well at preventing me from reading all the time, but I still managed to read quite a few books, including a mammoth one. And, being the contrary type, the first two I read weren’t even on the list I made. The first was The Seraphim Room by Edith Olivier, which I finished on the train down to Somerset, but the second was a definite read-it-on-a-whim book – usually the most fun. The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) by Agatha Christie somehow leaped to the top of the tbr pile, despite not being anywhere in sight beforehand.

Although my reading is quite diverse now – well, quite diverse – it used to go in very focused swathes. Enid Blyton – Goosebumps – Point Horror – Sweet Valley High (ahem) – Agatha Christie – AA Milne – everything else. When I was on the trail of an author or series, I read very little else for a long time. And, as you can see, Agatha Christie was one of them – and back in about 1999-2001 I read lots and lots by the Mistress of Mystery, the Empress of Enigmas, the Doyenne of Detectives… feel free to come up with your own.

Somehow it had been five and a half years since I last read a Christie novel (that one being At Bertram’s Hotel) and I had a sudden hankering for another. And it seemed quite ridiculous that, having grown up in a vicarage, that I hadn’t read The Murder in the Vicarage. So that was the one I pulled off the shelf and took on holiday.

I must add, before I go further, that I was spurred on by recent enthusiasm in Agatha’s direction from Harriet and Simon S – so thank you both for helping me revisit the Dame!

The Murder at the Vicarage is the first novel featuring Miss Marple (although she had previously popped up in a short story, my resident Christie-expert [Colin] tells me) and is narrated by the vicar whose home is unfortunately the scene of said murder. I won’t go through all the various characters and connections, because they’re much the same as any Christie novel. I don’t mean they’re stereotypes, but rather that they have complex relationships; secrets and lies; affinities and enmities – all the usual, delicious ingredients for a proper murder mystery.

All of that I was expecting. What I wasn’t expecting, what I had somehow either forgotten or never noticed, was how funny Christie is. The problems the vicar and his wife have with their servant are written so amusingly, I laughed out loud a few times. She also has the drifting ‘oh gosh how we simply shrieked’ type down pat too. Annoyingly I’ve left the book at home, so I can’t quote sections to you… so you’ll have to take my word for it.

I only had two problems with The Murder at the Vicarage. Firstly, I wasn’t bowled over by the solution – Dame A can sometimes write such brilliant denouements, that this one didn’t quite live up to her genius for plot. Secondly, although Miss Marple’s first novel, she didn’t feature very much, and I mourned her absence because I love Jane Marple. Her character hadn’t quite settled down to the Miss M we know and love, but her interest in ‘human nature’, and her catalogue of seemingly unrelated anecdotes to help her deduce – they were present and correct. I just wanted more of her in the novel.

But I imagine there are quite a few of us in the same boat – we watch Christie adaptations on TV, and have read a fair few of her novels over the years, but maybe not for a while – and don’t quite rate her as a good prose stylist or delineater of character, etc. I think it’s worth looking again, and reinvestigating the Dame. I’m definitely glad I did.

Books to get Stuck into:

To be honest, I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by some of the other Golden Age and pre-Golden Age detective fiction writers. In comparison to Christie’s plots, they just seem a bit poor – Christie never springs surprises on you at the last minute; the clues are always there if you look closely enough. So I’ve picked a couple of my favourite Christies:

And Then There Were None – my favourite, and Colin’s favourite, even without Poirot or Marple or any detective at all – it’s probably her cleverest story. Ten people are mysteriously invited to an island, and are even more mysteriously killed off one by one…

The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side – a Miss Marple, with a simply brilliant plot, and a good one to get a feel for AC if – goodness me – you’ve not read one before.

The Green Child

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

I was flicking through the titles printed by Capuchin Classics the other day – and by ‘flicking through’ I mean ‘scrolling down their website’; and by ‘the other day’ I mean ‘a couple of months ago’ – and spotted The Green Child (1935) by Herbert Read. My only encounter with him had been a book called Prose Style, or something like that, which I’d flicked through – unaware that he’d written novels. Or, in fact, one novel – for this is it. This part of the blurb had me hooked: Widely debated when it came out more than a generation ago, The Green Child is truly a masterpiece, a rare blend of fantasy and reality.And so I emailed off to see if the had a review copy to spare – which they did…

I said that Read had only written one novel, and in a way that’s true – but he certainly made up for it with The Green Child. Although under 200 pages in length, the three parts of the book are essentially three different novels. The same story runs through them, and the same central character of Olivero, but the feel and style differs so dramatically that it’s unlikely you’ll react the same way to each section.

We learn on the first page that Olivero, the President of a South American country, has faked his own death by assassination. As you do. His yearning to return to his roots, a little English village, has overcome his political ambitions (wise man) and he makes his way back to the countryside of his youth. As he wanders around, seeing what has changed and what has remained, he is struck by a change which seems unlikely: It was then that he noticed, or thought he noticed, an extraordinary fact. The stream as he remembered it – and he could remember the pressure of its current against his bare legs as he waded among its smooth, flat pebbles – ran in the direction of the station from which he had just come. But now, indubitably, it was flowing in the opposite direction, towards the church. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might say. And he follows the stream until he arrives at a mill… wherein he sees a ‘frail and pallid’ woman being kept captive by a man he had once been schoolmaster to; Kneeshaw. Yes, the perspicacious amongst you will have guessed correctly: this is the Green Child of the title. No sooner has Kneeshaw been vanquished, and the silent Green Child headed off with Olivero, but: With a cry of happiness, as if a secret joy had suddenly been revealed to him, he raced forward, and hand in hand they sank below the surface of the pool.
And that’s the last we hear of them for a bit, because Part Two is all the back story of Olivero’s life. I’d wondered why they bothered making him an ex-President, and now I see why – we follow him through his political ascension and… well, to be honest, I skim-read quite a lot of this section. To be frank, I found it really dull. I don’t think novels should include huge chunks of ‘and this is what had happened beforehand’ (analepsis, is that?) because it’s difficult to be interested. And combine that with political stuff… well, if you’re interested in political novels, then this section might work for you – but I’d just got really interested in the first section, so was frustrated when we were diverted off track. It’s the diary section of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall all over again.

Fast forward ninety pages or so, and we’re onto Part Three: they’re in the underground world from whence the Green Child came, and they’re exploring. This section has most in common with utopia literature like Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis and, indeed, Thomas More’s Utopia. It would make really interesting reading alongside, especially the former. We’ve moved from fantasy-in-the-real-world to fantasy-in-a-fantasy-world where, for instance, there is no concept of time. I wonder what J.W. Dunne would have to say about that?

So there you go. One short novel; three genres. The first of them was my favourite, and I did rather wish that The Green Child had continued entirely in that vein. While the third section was interesting, it felt more like the set-up to a different novel. And, as mentioned before, the second section was very much not my cup of tea. And perhaps that’s the problem with the novel – I can’t imagine anybody loving each ‘genre’ equally? Surely you’ll want more politics and less fantasy, or vice versa, and so forth?

But someone who did approve is Mr. Graham Greene, who wrote the 1946 introduction included in this edition. The Green Child is definitely intriguing, and a very unusual novel, but I can’t agree with Greene in his unqualified enthusiasm – whilst I am not wholly unenthusiastic, there are a lot of qualifications.