1930s

Cactus by Ethel Mannin

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After reading Rolling in the Dew, I was keen to read more of Ethel Mannin’s fiction  – particularly something in a non-satirical mode. I wondered if something she wrote could be suitable for the British Library Women Writers series, so hunted down one that was clearly about a woman’s life: Cactus (1935). Sadly my Penguin copy more or less fell apart as I read it, so I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to re-read it, but it was certainly an interesting experience.

Elspeth is the heroine of Cactus. The novel opens when she is a young girl, with family in the north of England and in Scotland – she doesn’t really fit in with her family and their expectations of her, and she doesn’t have friends her own age. They don’t understand her and she doesn’t understand them. Her greatest friend is her Uncle Andrew – an eccentric man who chooses to live alone rather than with the rest of the family. They tolerate him with bemused affection.

In these early sections of Cactus, he teaches Elspeth to be an independent thinker. He quietly reveals the dangers of group-think, whether that be jingoistic nationalism or the meek place of a woman in Edwardian middle-class life. They are lessons that she takes very much to heart. And, on a more tangible level, he introduces her to the beauty of cacti. Others wonder why she is train to something spikey and plain, but…

When a cactus came into flower, said Uncle Andy, it was the most wonderful flower you ever saw, and it lived on long after other flowers, which bloomed more readily, had died and been forgotten. It was worth waiting for, said Uncle Andy.

And if you’re thinking ‘hmm, I wonder if this will be a metaphor for Elspeth herself’ then, yes indeed, you are right. Throughout the novel, Mannin returns to this metaphor – it becomes a little unsubtle at times, and perhaps didn’t need to be quite so foregrounded, but it’s an interesting enough idea.

Elspeth grows older and moves to Germany in the late 1930s. She falls in love with a slightly tempestuous young man called Karl, defying convention on the one hand while remaining quite bound by it on the other. For instance, she is shocked when he wants to have sex before marriage – shocked a little, in fact, that this friendship has developed into love almost unawares. Mannin isn’t condemning her for this element of conventionality. Elspeth is no more an obedient disciple to modern, bohemian thinking than she is to old-fashioned morality. She forges her own path, with her own decisions and standards.

But even the most independent thinker cannot avoid being affected by war. As it becomes clear that Germany will soon be at war – and possible (though still, to the characters, unlikely) that Britain will also enter the war – Elspeth decides to leave Germany and return to her family home. It is, she hopes, a temporary absence. But she has also been chilled by the bellicosity she had never anticipated in Karl. It is equalled by the ‘Hun-hate’ (a common word in the novel) that she finds back home. In vain does she try to explain that she may disagree with Germany’s authorities while still liking, even loving, individual Germans. I was so impressed that Mannin would write about this in the mid-1930s, when anti-German rhetoric was clearly on the rise again in Britain. Her nuance in resisting mindless nationalism and hatred of other countries is done perfectly.

These tensions become more palpable when two German prisoners of war are left at Elspeth’s family’s farm. One is a bit of a brute, but Elspeth instantly feels a connection with the other – Kurt. The similarity of his name to Karl’s is not a coincidence. While the two men are quite different, Elspeth explains that Kurt reminds her a lot of her lost love – a man she has to accept may well be dead now, given his keenness to fight. Her family won’t let the men in the house, and initially only give them food fit for the pigs – but Elspeth wears them down a little, and forges a connection with Kurt that is central to the second half of Cactus.

Mannin really doesn’t hold back in her visceral writing about war. Elspeth’s brother is working in an army hospital, but Kurt says he cannot really understand what front-line war is like. (Skip this quote if you are sensitive to graphic descriptions.)

“He doesn’t know what war is. No man who hasn’t been in the trenches does.”

“He sees every day what war does to men.”

“It’s not the same as having it happen to yourself. you can know all about building a trench parapet of human bodies and walking on human faces, and such things, but it doesn’t do anything to you unless you’ve experienced it for yourself. It’s not a case of being physically shocked compared with being intellectually shocked, it’s a case of knowing something in your bowels. In English you talk about having guts. Mind is an abstraction, but guts are damnably real. They get twisted round your bayonet. Round your pick when you’re digging. That’s the kind of knowing, when your own guts writhe with it.”

It’s hard to believe something like this is in a 1930s novel by a woman better known, I believe, for light-hearted comedies and romances. While Cactus never takes us to the front-line, the brutality of war seeps through its pages. She doesn’t address the impending war, which was becoming inevitable in many people’s eyes by the time Cactus was published, but it is a silent subtext to the reading experience.

Cactus isn’t a perfect novel. There are times when it loses a little of its subtlety and gets too close to melodrama. It is very earnest, and I would have appreciated more of the wit that played through its first chapter or two. But, for the most part, I found it an involving, passionate cry against unthinking conflict and herd mentality. I’m certainly keen to keep exploring Mannin’s fiction.

Gerald: A Portrait by Daphne du Maurier #ABookADayInMay No.12

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I usually try to join in Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, though I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it work with finishing a book a day in May, since none of the candidates on my shelves were very short. Then I had a brainwave – I could finish an audiobook one day in the car, and spread reading a Daphne du Maurier out over two days.

So, which to choose? Eventually I alighted upon Gerald, Daphne du Maurier’s biography of her father – published in 1934, the year that Gerald du Maurier died. Daphne du Maurier was only 27 – she’d published three novels, but none of them are the ones that would make her name as a writer of fiction. According to the not-too-subtle cover of my 1950 reprint, it was apparently Gerald that initially brought her fame as a writer.

And it really is a marvellous book. It has been sitting on my shelves for a very long time and I had never been particularly tempted by it, but it is an exceptionally good read. It is not a biography in any traditional sense of the word – certainly she does not treat Gerald du Maurier with any criticism, which is unsurprising from a grieving daughter. But this is not even a hagiography – it is a novel, based heavily on fact, in which Gerald is the flawless hero. And because it is a fantasy of a person, it doesn’t matter that we only see one side. There is something in the tone that goes even past novel. It is a fairy tale of a person’s life, and enveloping in that way that only a fairy tale can be.

Daphne du Maurier starts even before Gerald is born, and we see scenes of their childhood – anecdotes that were clearly passed down through the generations are turned into stories told by an omniscient narrator. This continues as Gerald gets older – his unsuccessful engagements and his eventual courtship with Muriel (‘Mo’) are shown with a novelist’s detail. Woven into the narrative are letters that may well have been preserved, but they sit alongside full conversations that du Maurier must have made up. Here, she pictures her only parents in their early days of romance (where ‘Mummie’ is Daphne du Maurier’s grandmother):

Up to the present they had been in rooms, and during the early part of the summer had taken a cottage at Walton-on-Thames, which was a happy refuge from the from the hot weather. “When I’m not picking green-fly off rose heads, I’m picking the black fly off dwarf beans,” Gerald gravely wrote to Mummie. “Everything is doing very well except Japanese iris and parsley. I haven’t been outside the estate yet, but Muriel manages both indoor and outdoor servants with marvellous tact, and even the stable-boys worship here.” (The cottage really had about three rooms, and a tiny square of garden.) Mummie nodded her head an smiled. Darling Gerald was so funny. And it was a wonderful thing to see him happy like this.

Dear Muriel was obviously taking great care of him. She had not seen him looking so well for years. He had got quite brown, too, not that horrid washed-out colour she was used to. Her never took his eyes off Muriel.

The bulk of Gerald, though, is about his acting and theatre producing career. I had always thought of him as primarily a theatre manager, and hadn’t realised how much he had acted – and how influential he had been in this world. But Daphne du Maurier takes us through his ascent to fame, and then his triumphs and failures, each considered as though she had seen the play in question – even when that would be impossible. His big break-through was playing a villain in Raffles in 1906.

And yet there were those who believed that because Gerald did not hump his back, cover his face with hair, wear tights, and speak blank verse, he was therefore no actor. How many times, then and afterwards, did people exclaim, “But du Maurier, he does not act; he is always himself.” To act is to portray an emotion; to show the feelings aroused by some sensation, whether joyous or traffic; to make the man in the audience feel, either uncomfortably or happily, “That might have been me.” This is what Gerald, who started the so-called naturalistic school of acting, tried to do.

There are some famous names in du Maurier’s milieu, and it’s entertaining to read about how J.M. Barrie’s plays went over – and, indeed, how the adaptation of Trilby by George du Maurier (Gerald’s father) became such a sensation. Other of the plays mentioned were already fading from popularity by 1934, and have disappeared altogether now. Similarly, some actors mentioned would still ring bells – Gracie Fields, Gladys Cooper, Irene Vanbrugh, Celia Johnson – while others are no loner discussed. But to be still well-known a century and more later is quite the feat!

I love anything about the theatre, fact or fiction, so lapped up all of this. The brief interlude when Gerald becomes a soldier in the First World War is, indeed, brief. Partly because he didn’t enlist until 1918 and never left England, but also because it doesn’t seem like part of the life that Daphne du Maurier wants to focus on. For her, and for her implied reader, Gerald is a brilliant theatre impresario – and she also wants to show the great man at home. This does mean we get slightly curious, but still delightful, sections where Daphne du Maurier refers to herself in the third person:

As they grew from babies into children, and occasionally the little nursery storms came to his ears, he would settle disputes in strange, amusing ways, turning a scolding into a game. There was the famous time when Daphne pulled Angela’s hair and trod on her face, Angela replying with her peculiar death-grip like a bear’s hug. The joint shrieks of rage reaching Gerald in the drawing-room, he had them brought downstairs, and, dressing up as a judge, staged a court of law with the children as prisoners at the bar and witnesses in one. It lasted until past bedtime, and, when the nurse came to fetch them, the original quarrel had been long forgotten.

These sweet stories are enjoyable fluff – but there is a definite poignancy as she writes about her father when she is a bit older. A tell-all memoir wouldn’t reach the same level of emotion as this:

There is, alas, a world of difference between the girl of eighteen and the man of fifty, especially when they are father and daughter. The one is resentful of the other. The girl mocks at experience and detests the voice of authority; the man yearns for companionship and does not know how to attain it. They stand side by side, with the barrier of years between them, and both are too shy to break it down; both are too diffident, too self-conscious. They chant about superficialities, and avoid each other’s eyes, while all the time they are aware that the moments are passing, and the years will not bring them nearer to one another. Gerald was hungry for companionship; he longed for Angela and Daphne to tell him everything, to discuss their friends, to solve their problems, to share their troubles; but the very quality of his emotion made them shy/ They could not admit him into their confidence, and they drew back like snails into their shells.

It was not only Gerald’s tragedy. It is the tragedy of every father and every daughter since the world began.

What really sets the book apart, alongside Daphne du Maurier’s unique perspective, is her exceptional writing. That’s one of many things that make it feel more like novel than biography. From an objective biographer, these sorts of passages might be struck out as purple prose – in the world that Daphne du Maurier has created for us to enter, they are beautiful:

Gerald belonged to Wyndham’s; he was as much a part of it as the boards, the curtain, the heavy swing door, the row of stalls shrouded in their white and grimy covers, the cat in the dress circle, the backcloth and the false movable walls that were not walls, the dust in the passages, the intimate, indescribable, musty, fusty smell that was the back of the stage and the dressing-rooms and the front of the house in one.

Much of his personality is embedded in those walls. His laughter is still in the passage, his footstep on the stairs, and his voice calling for Tommy Lovell when the curtain falls. For all their passing away and the coming of other sounds – new voices, new laughter, other men and other memories – something of himself remains for ever amidst the dust and silence of that theatre; a breath, a whisper, the echo of a song.

I don’t know if anybody else has written a biography of Gerald du Maurier. There was definitely a vogue for a while of writing enormous biographies that didn’t spare the subject, and the more invasive and unpleasant the more they were considered to be authentic. The tide, thankfully, seems to have turned a bit. Since it is impossible to entirely know a person through a book anyway, I would rather we get this subjective, overly generous, loving portrait than anything more callous. Gerald is a wonderful book by a sublime storyteller.

 

 

Police at the Funeral by Margery Allingham #ABookADayInMay No.7

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Today was a lovely sunny day, and I spent quite a lot of it sat in the garden reading Margery Allingham’s 1931 detective novel Police at the Funeral. Something I discovered in previous book-a-day challenges is that reading a murder mystery in a day is really fun and rewarding – because you don’t have to wait very long to discover whodunnit.

Police at the Funeral is a curious title for a novel that doesn’t include any funerals, though it does have more than one death. At the outset, though, series detective Albert Campion is prevailed upon to look for a friend’s fiancée’s missing uncle. Campion thinks the thing is likely to be a case of someone getting het up over nothing, but when he meets the fiancée, Joyce, he recognises that she is not given to hysteria. Her uncle is missing, and it rather looks like he could be dead.

We soon get to know about her family. While she is looked on kindly by most of the relatives she has grown up with, the same cannot be said between the rest of them. Her great-aunt rules a household with a rod of iron, despising and pitying her various adult offspring who still live with her, and still feud and squabble as though they were in the nursery. Great-Aunt Caroline thinks ill of the modern era and the household still behaves as though Queen Victoria is on the throne. It’s a very Ivy Compton-Burnett set up, though of course the style of the novel isn’t remotely like one she’d have written.

“There they are, a family forty years out of date, all vigorous energetic people by temperament, all, save for the old lady, without their fair share of brain, and herded together in that mausoleum of a house, tyrannised over by one of the most astounding personalities I’ve ever encountered. […] There’s no vent to the suppressed hatreds, petty jealousies, desires and impulses of any living soul under that roof. The old lady holds the purse strings and is the first and final court of appeal. Not one of her dependants can get away without having to face starvation, since not one of them is remotely qualified to earn a sixpence.”

Before long – and not remotely to the reader’s surprise – it turns out that the uncle is dead. His body is found in the river – hands and feet having been tied together, with a shotgun wound through the head. Nobody truly mourns him, since none of the family likes or respects each other, but they still want the truth to come out.

But… this death is quickly followed by another. (Unlike the blurb to my edition, I shan’t spoil more than that!)

Albert Campion is a fun detective. I’ve read a couple of other books in which he appears – I have to admit the schtick of him looking vacantly stupid is a bit unnecessary, and I’ve not read the books where he is apparently most openly a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but once you get those things out the way, there’s a lot to like. He has a funny way with words, and a rather sweetly teasing relationship with the inspector on the case – Inspector Stanislaus Oates, whose son is Campion’s godson. His actual detection is all rather hurried at the end, but that’s fine.

And it’s a very satisfying solution, with enough clues along the way that we don’t feel cheated. I loved the set up with the horrendous family, and Great-Aunt Caroline is just the right amount of terrifying and formidable for the reader to actually quite admire her dominance. Joyce is a very likeable character to have along the way too, and both insider and outsider to the family, so we don’t feel too buried with a group of appalling adult-children. I don’t remember finding Allingham’s writing so enjoyably funny and dramatic before, so this was a goody.

I think this is my favourite of the Allinghams I’ve read – which is your favourite Allingham?

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck #ABookADayInMay No.6

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My friend Matt recommended Cannery Row (1939) by John Steinbeck back in 2009, and I ordered a copy which has sat on my shelves for 15 years. Now it is neglected no longer! And I really enjoyed the atmosphere and tone of Steinbeck’s tribute to a small Californian town.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries or corrugated iron, honky-tonks, restaurants and whore-houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop-houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peep-hole he might have said: ‘Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.

Cannery Row is quite a leisurely tour of the different inhabitants of the street – a mix of vignettes of their lives and something of an ongoing plot, though it is really more of an ongoing set of characters. Chief among them are Lee Chong the grocer, Dora Flood the brothel madam, ‘Doc’ the research scientist, and Mack and his gang of men who are something between gangsters and disciples. It is a close-knit individuals that don’t seem much to need the outside world, and Steinbeck portrays a cocktail of mistrust and reliance.

I think that’s one of the things I most liked about Cannery Row. It’s a tone I haven’t really come across before. Certainly this is not an idyll of human goodwill – but everybody knows when anybody else is lying or cheating them, and it is accepted as a necessary part of being neighbourly. At the outset, Lee Chong becomes the owner of a warehouse, and Mack suggests it could be a place where he and the other men live – to stop it having windows smashed, or burned down, by children. Lee Chong knows that there is an implied threat – that Mack himself will smash windows and commit arson if his offer isn’t accepted. Lee Chong also knows that he won’t receive any of the proposed rent.

And if it be thought that Lee Chong suffered a total loss, at leas! his mind did not work that way. The windows were not broken. Fire did not break out. and while no rent was ever paid, if the tenants ever had any money, and quite often they did have, it never occurred to them to spend it any place except at Lee Chong’s grocery. What he has was a little group of active and potential customers under wraps. But it went further than that. If a drunk caused trouble in the grocery, if the kids swarmed down from New Monterey intent on plunder, Lee Chong had only to call and his tenants rushed to his aid. One further bond is established – you cannot steal from your benefactor. The saving to Lee Chong in cans of beans and tomatoes and milk and watermelons more than paid the rent.

Steinbeck depicts a curious kind of contentment in this ecosystem. And nobody seems above or below anyone else. Even the brothel madam is accepted with the unspoken rule that she will be the largest donator when public funds are needed. The man who might seem the most of an outsider is Doc – he is cleverer, wealthier, more cultured than the other inhabitants of Cannery Row. His work is with snakes, rats and frogs and it’s unclear who he is working for, or why he is living in this place, but he too builds a relationship with all the others. There is a base understanding that, when push comes to shove, people on Cannery Row will help one another – and then go back to cheating each other the next day.

The main action that happens away from the row is when Mack, for convoluted reasons, decides to take his gang away to secure hundreds of frogs for Doc. Mack often wants to do Doc a good turn, and it invariably turns out to make Doc’s life much harder. There is a seam of farce in the plotting of Cannery Row, though in reading it feels gently comic and rooted in the earthy relationships between all the characters, rather than silly.

I’ve not read huge amounts of Steinbeck, but I know some of his books can be very sombre, dealing with great injustices. But Cannery Row, even while showing limited lives of people pretty close to poverty, seems to be filled with hope. Not hope for big changes, but hope that there is goodwill and respect somewhere beneath the surface of even the most brazenly selfish and opportunistic communities. It’s an unusual mix of grim reality and optimism, and I really enjoyed spending time in this short book.

Two Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan

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Two Thousand Million Man-Power eBook by Gertrude Trevelyan - EPUB | Rakuten Kobo United Kingdom

One of the questions asked about Gertrude Trevelyan (the artist formerly known as G.E. Trevelyan) is why she has disappeared, when her writing is so good and her early reviews were glowing. One answer, of course, is that any number of brilliant writers disappear – and that’s why we should be grateful for reprint series like Recovered Books (edited by Brad Bigelow aka Neglected Books). Another reason, with this book at least, is that Trevelyan chose one of the worst titles imaginable. Please don’t let it put you off. Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937) is so much better than the title suggests.

It comes from a quote about machine power in the US, and essentially how it will put an awful lot of people out of work. One of the men in danger of losing work is Richard Thomas – a research chemist whose work has largely been concerned with cosmetics, face creams etc. He is definitely at the commercial end of the research scientist world, which might be thought to help him in an era of increasing capitalism. And you’d be wrong.

The other main character in Two Thousand Million Man-Power is a schoolteacher called Katherine. The early sections of the novel chart their coming together and falling for each other, against a backdrop of youthful idealism and radicalism. While both have jobs, and are thus perhaps part of the machine of capitalism, they rail against it. They have hope for changes in the future, while also still enjoying any trappings of middle-class life that do come their way. Impressively, Trevelyan makes both Robert and Katherine deeply empathetic. They may have aspects of hypocrisy from the beginning, and they may be more earnest than is usual for a lovable fictional character, but we are invited into their lives in such detailed ways that it’s impossible not to care about them.

Throughout the novel, Trevelyan uses a conceit that must have been difficult to pull off, but is rather brilliant. After some pages of scenes of daily life for Katherine and Robert, she will give a list of significant world events happening – often hinting towards a war that was still a prediction rather than a reality when the novel was published in 1937. And she will then swoop from the broad to the specific, narrowing in on a simple action of Katherine’s or Robert’s. It’s like a camera panning in suddenly. Here’s an example from early in the novel:

The Protocol is coming. France rejects the notion that there is no such thing as a German air-force: air-ports springing up: Dutch, Danish, Italian and Russian establishments produce aeroplanes for the Reich. Powder and munition factories in Russia work full time under German engineers: ten thousand aeroplane programme. In Rome a great demonstration celebrates the sixth anniversary of the birth of Fascismo. Naval manoeuvres off Magdalena Bay – “greatest concentration of naval power ever assembled in the Pacific” – show America powerless to protect the Pacific coast against an attack of enemy air-force. The Government of Great Britain is unable to accept the Protocol. Katherine, with her paper spread out on the stuffy green cloth of the parlour table behind the ferns of 26 Verbena Road, feels terribly flat and wear, and all at once she knows that the one thing in the world she wants is to tell Robert Thomas all about it.

As the book spans from 1919 to 1936, these sections must have required a lot of research – or a lot of faith in her memory. I found them very effective, written with a Woolf-like rhythm and making the emotions of the two protagonists feel equally significant with huge world events. Because, of course, they are – in the eyes of Katherine and Robert. All of us still feel our everyday lives very deeply, whatever else is going on in the world. (The introduction and the afterword to this edition, which are remarkably similar in content, both mention that John Dos Passos had recently done something similar in his USA Trilogy – I haven’t read it, so can’t comment on how original Trevelyan was being – but, to my mind, it really sets the novel apart.) (Incidentally, the afterword also mentions a ‘near-complete absence of any mention of Trevelyan’s work in any sources I could locate online’, and I’m proud to say that I was one of the few exceptions – both on this blog and in my DPhil thesis, where I wrote about her novel Appius and Virginia.)

As the novel continues, and time passes, Katherine and Robert lose some of their idealism in the face of financial realities. Or, rather, everyday practicalities have replaced any fervour they had for effecting change. Their anxieties have moved from whether they’ll be seen together, unmarried, to whether or not they’ll be able to find work. There are sections of both going looking for jobs, and the reasons they are turned down. Their household objects are ranked by what can be sold. On the other hand, when anything looks up these objects are re-bought, and Katherine starts looking for nicer homes to move to. Their whole life seems to be guided by what they can or can’t afford, and the exact slot this puts them into.

They might always have been like that, he a coward and she not really caring about anything, but they hadn’t known it. That was what the machine had done to them, shown them one another. Each had seen the other as something the machine didn’t want. And now it had caught up Kath again and tired her out, so that she couldn’t think of anything but food and rent. It didn’t make much difference whether the machine caught you up or threw you out; it came to the same in the end.

Trevelyan is brilliant at taking the reader through these all-encompassing scenarios, so we feel the stakes as keenly as Robert and Katherine. Even the ‘newspaper headline’ style reminders that much else was going on in the world can’t compete. These two lives are the most significant things on the page. And while Two Thousand Million Man-Power certainly isn’t a happy book, it also didn’t feel too miserable. It helps that the writing is beautiful and the authorly control of the narrative is absolute, but ultimately the feeling I got from the book was that happiness and unhappiness aren’t the point. The novel ends up being about survival, and what the constant drive to keep head above water can do to a couple. And yet we get to know them too intimately to feel that this novel is about some abstract point. It’s about Katherine and Robert, and how they lost their identities.

Excuse It, Please! by Cornelia Otis Skinner

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A lot of people know and love Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, but fewer people have gone on to discover Cornelia Otis Skinner’s collections of humorous short sketches. When I was in America in 2015, I ordered a whole heap of them to my friend’s apartment – because they’re much easier to find in the US than in the UK. But I didn’t get Excuse It, Please! (1936) – and yet, here it is, and that is because Lisa May very, very kindly sent me a copy! That was also in 2015, but every book has its correct moment and, in 2022, Excuse It, Please! found its time had come.

(Sidenote: isn’t the cover wonderful?)

The title comes from the opening sketch – which seems a better term than ‘story’ or ‘essay’, though they could equally be called that. Each is a scene from Skinner’s life, probably rather exaggerated and fictionalised, usually telling a self-deprecating foible of mid-century middle-class life. And the first sketch is about trying to get through to a required company on a telephone call, back when all such calls had to go through a telephone operator. The connections go awry.

“Is this 51?” I asked.

“Hello,” came again.

“When’s the next ferry from New London?” I inquired.

“How the hell should I know?”

“Aren’t you the ferry?” I faltered.

“What d’ya mean am I a ferry? This is Billy’s Garage in Goodground.”

And the title comes from the hapless operator asking Skinner to ‘excuse it, please’ – rather than ‘excuse me’. It’s not the biggest punchline in the world, and perhaps might only make a passing anecdote in everyday life, but that is Skinner’s brilliance. She can take the mundane and delve into the hidden ridiculous. She is always the butt of the joke, but she laughs with the reader.

The topics in this book might be everyday, but perhaps only for a certain sort of class of person. She doesn’t talk about an office job or housework, but rather about learning to ride a horse, sitting for a portrait, and being asked to sit on the captain’s table when on a ship. It’s a glimpse into another time and another world, so she manages to combine a sense of the quotidian (for her) and the exotic (for us – or at least for me). It is a delightful mixture, and I suspect her life would have felt quite alien even for quite a few of her contemporary readers.

While she is ultimately always the one we are being encouraged to laugh at, that doesn’t mean that nobody else gets a dose of dry humour. The opening to ‘Seeing stars’ is a case in point:

Of the many varieties of bore one of the worst I know is the person who wants to point out the stars and constellations. This is a form of midsummer pest which, like the sand flea, tends to ruin beach parties.

I cannot help but keep quoting, forgive me… this is on the next page:

He singles me out from a group of ordinary picnickers with the infallibility of the compass pointing out the magnetic pole. Were this individual possessed of any particular allure, I should not at all mind; or were his intensions bordering on the carnal, there might be a little less ennui. But he is generally the kind of man who wears rubbers and belongs to drama societies, and his intentions are purely astronomical.

“Have you noticed how clear the stars are?” he begins.

I have been noticing this phenomenon with dread and secretly praying for fog ever since I have been aware of his approach. But I answer “Yes, aren’t they?” with a politeness that I hope is frigid.

At this point, you know this is either your sort of thing or not. It perfectly chimes with my sense of humour and I can’t get enough of it. If you’re the same, then you can seek out more or less anything by Skinner. I’m very grateful that Lisa May sent me this one, so that I can spend some happy hours immersed in it.

Friends and Relations by Elizabeth Bowen (Novella a Day in May #24)

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I was inspired by the latest Backlisted episode to pick up a Bowen – specifically the one they covered, Death of the Heart, but it turns out that I don’t own it – so I substituted a novella of 151 pages, Friends and Relations (1931). It’s not one I see people talk about all that much, but I thought it on par with her others – the usual hallmarks of exceptionally beautiful and perceptive writing, and a plot that is never quite obvious.

The story opens at the wedding of Laurel Studdart and James Tilney. It is a very proper, slightly passionless affair. I loved this exchange, showing Bowen’s talent for dialogue that does a lot more than is evident on the surface.

‘You might hold your lilies,’ said Mrs Studdart, who had discovered the sheaf on a hall table specially cleared for the top-hats.

‘Oh, Mother, I can’t; they’re heavy.’

‘But don’t you think it would be nice, Edward, if she were to hold her lilies?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Edward. ‘Do people generally?’

‘They’d be such a strain on one arm all the time. You see I can’t change them; I must keep my right arm for shaking hands.’

‘And shake hands lightly,’ said Mrs Studdart, ‘don’t grip.’

‘Did I look …?’

‘Lovely, lovely,’ said Mrs Studdart. She was looking round distractedly for a vase and soon found one, a kind of Italian urn in which she arranged the lilies beside the bride.

It’s not long before Laurel’s sister Janet gets married – though this is rather more of a surprise to the family, as Janet was not expected to do anything so fortunate and conventional. What’s a little less conventional is that she is marrying the nephew of the man who had an adulterous affair with Edward’s mother. If that sentence is a little confusing, fear not, it’s clear in the book – essentially the dark horses in the family tree of both sisters’ new husbands are tangled together.

I found Laurel and Janet both rather unknowable. I’d be hard pressed to describe their personalities, and perhaps that reflects the rather controlled conversations they have with each other – appropriately sisterly to appearances, but without giving too much away.

On the other hand there is Theodora, easily my favourite character in Friends and Relations, and the most vivid. We see her first as a 15 year old at the wedding, pressing ice creams on unwilling guests and believing herself to be doing a great kindness, loudly berating her parents for huddling together, and evading speaking to the bride by walking outside and round the building to get to the food. She dominates her parents, finding them deeply embarrassing and forever correcting things that only a child would notice. It is a pitch perfect portrait, and funny too.

We move forward ten years into the past – both marriages have children, Theodora is still around, and the dark horses of the past are still having their effect on the future. There is a turning point in this section, but also the sense that the past lingers long over future generations.

I found I didn’t always know exactly what was going on, partly because Bowen’s writing is too complex to rush-read in a novella-a-day challenge, and partly because everybody prevaricates. The dialogue is never there for exposition; it is more realistic, and gives a rich sense of the relationships between people, rather than the details of the plot. I had to go back and re-read bits to try and piece things together. But it didn’t stop me enjoying Bowen’s striking writing. So many lovely sentences – I noted down one about a cat, of course: “The Siamese, reappearing like a malign sun over the cushions, looked at his mistress with penetration, without sympathy.”

Ultimately, I might land more on admiring Bowen than loving her – but there is so much to admire that that is no weak praise.

Novella a Day in May: Days 18 and 19

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Day 18: The Nymph and the Nobleman (1932) by Margery Sharp

When I was in Hay-on-Wye last year, I stumbled across The Nymph and the Nobleman, one of Margery Sharp’s first books. And – gasp – signed by Margery Sharp! And all for £5. Of course, I snapped it up straight away.

It’s a very slight work, only 75 pages – and quite a few of those are full-page illustrations by Anna Zinkeisen. The story is of a bashful member of the English aristocracy, Sir George Blount, who falls in love at first sight with a beautiful dancer he encounters in Paris. He speaks little French and she speaks little English – but she is ready enough to assent to an assignation that will take place over several days. It’s quite a coup to rush off to England with a gentleman, and she will have stories to tell when she returns to her fellow dancers. What she doesn’t realise is that Sir George is extremely honourable, and he has asked her to be his wife…

She was not used to it. She was used to the scramble of dressing, the bustle of rehearsal, the crowning excitement of the evening’s performance. She was used to fifteen companions of her own age, each with a lover or two, and a maitre-de-ballet who never stopped swearing. It saddened her, on rising, to find that no one had got up earlier and borrowed her stockings. Even a shoe out of place would be something to look for, but the new maid shut them all into a wooden press: her character had been approved by the dowager, and she never saw anything on the floor without immediately picking it up.

As you can see, if you know and love Sharp like I do, the slightly dry writing is certainly recognisable. This is a fable, of sorts, and the tone softens what might otherwise be a slightly saccharine story. But Sharp can’t put a foot wrong. This is a minor work, but an enjoyable one to spend an hour so with.

Day 19: The House (1938) by William McElwee

I love any story where a house is prominent, and the cover of this is a pretty accurate representation of the sort of house at the centre of the book.

The first impression made by the house on a sensitive visitor was one of happiness. It had charm and, in certain aspects, even beauty. But the charm and the beauty were of the kind which grows with more intimate knowledge. They did not assault the senses with an insistent demand for admiration, but waited quietly to be discovered. Everything about it was essentially unpretentious. Nobody had lavished on external appearances that constant attention which can make a house as tiresome and boring to live with as a society beauty. The gardens were care for, but not too well; they suggested the haphazard efforts of generations rather than the carefully laid design of one landscape gardener. Certain flowers grew in particular beds not because they could be the most effective where they were, but because they always had been planted there; and most of the trees stood where they did because, at some time or other, they had contrived to grow unnoticed to such a size that it had seemed a shame to cut them down.

That’s the opening paragraph, and exactly the sort of opening I want from a novel(la). Domestic, the slightest amount of whimsy, and plenty of down-to-earthness alongside. There are a few more pages setting up this lovely home. And into this scene comes the unnamed protagonist – a tramp, looking for any opportunity for food or some paid work. He is nearing 50, and came from a middle-class background but has steadily had bad luck for so long that he has hit rock bottom. But is firmly moral, and is determined never to end up at a police station, or do anything that could warrant police attention.

But he does end up going through a window into the house – because, gloriously, a cat turns up and expects to be let in and fed. I’m biased, but I always want plots to be propelled by a cat. He/she was great, and I’m sad that we didn’t see that much of him/her.

Having once got in, the man goes through a series of decisions that end up with him staying in the house and eating food from the larder. As he spends more time there, he learns about the family from their portraits and belongings. He becomes to want to know more and more about them.

I thought this was all brilliant. The second half of the novella worked a little less well for me – when he becomes obsessed with the son of the family, a man who looks (from pictures) to be in his early 20s, and a poet. McElwee creates many sonnets for this young man, and the tramp learns about his emotional trajectory through them. The poetry is mercifully good, and I certainly didn’t mind reading this, but I’m not sure it’s the direction I’d have taken the story – it felt less compelling then just seeing the tramp gradually change as he lived in the house. As it is, I was really impressed by how vital McElwee could make a book which, for almost all of it’s 191 pages, the tramp is the only human in the story.

Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (Novella a Day in May #12)

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Gentleman Overboard eBook : Lewis, Herbert Clyde, Bigelow, Brad, Szirtes, George: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle StoreWhen Brad of Neglected Books started recommending titles for a new series of reprints, from Boiler House Press, I knew we would be in for something special. Few people know more about overlooked literature than Brad, and he has a wide and varying taste. So I knew I’d have to read whatever output came – and first was a slim book from 1937, Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. I ordered a copy in December and it came last month, so… be careful where you order it!

Henry Standish is onboard the Arabella, sailing home from a period spent away from home. He has left his wife and young children behind in something that isn’t called a nervous breakdown, and perhaps isn’t that extreme, but certainly some mental instability has led to him wanting to get away from everything for a while. He is a successful businessman, sensible except when it comes to worrying about appearances, kind and private. (The ‘kindness’ we are told more than we see, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.)

As you may have guessed from the title – early one morning, walking the deck, he slips and falls overboard.

Standish’s thoughts during these seconds were strangely enough more concerned with shame than with fear. Men of Henry Preston Standish’s class did not go around falling off ships in the middle of the ocean; it was just not done, that was all. It was a stupid, childish, unmannerly thing to do, and if there had been anybody’s pardon to beg, Standish would have begged it.

The rest of the novella concerns the hours afterwards. Much of it is spent with Standish and his thoughts as he floats in the ocean – but we also go back to the Arabella and see the actions and responses of crew and passengers (curiously few passengers, helpfully for narrative purposes).

It is an unusual and very good book. I think the thing that makes Gentleman Overboard still feel vital is how timeless the idea is. Or, rather, being stuck alone in the ocean can have very few contemporary trappings. Back on board, there are some elements that remind us we are in the 1930s – but Standish, in the expanse of water, thinks thoughts that anybody in any decade or century might have thought there.

Lewis sustains the idea the perfect length – it is a short novella, and would have felt stretched if it were any longer. His writing is good – unshowy, with neat turns of phrase – but it is his psychological acumen that makes the novella work. And the subtlety with which he delivers it.

Certainly a premise unlike anything I’ve ever read, and a worthy start to a promising series.

British Library Women Writers 14: Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes

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Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes, Simon Thomas | Waterstones

When I originally wrote about Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes in 2020, I ended with ‘Strange Journey is not at all easy to find – but I am certainly mulling it over as British Library choice at some point…’ Thankfully they agreed with me that it should enter the series, and it’s now back in print. I particularly love when there’s the chance to bring back impossible-to-find books – saving people a lot of money and time spent refreshing ebay!

Below is what I wrote originally. When I was writing my afterword to the book, I looked at the class issues in the novel – which are obviously front and centre – but also a little about contemporary cinema, how much a Rolls Royce might cost you, and which circumstances mean you use Lady Elizabeth rather than Lady Forrester (Cairnes assumes her readers will know!)

As has become custom, here’s a video review from Lil too – I love how she reads the whole series!

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The body-swap comedy is one of those tropes that is often talked about as if there were millions of them about, but in truth I can only think of a handful. In the world of literature, I’m down to Vice Verse by F Anstey, Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers, Turnabout by Thorne Smith, and, if you read it somewhat elastically, Asleep in the Sun by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Do let me know if there are others I’m missing. But I can now add to that number Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes.

If you’ve heard of it, it’ll be because of Brad’s review at the excellent Neglected Books blog, where he wrote about it in June. Brad is up there with Scott of Furrowed Middlebrow for his extraordinary knowledge of books nobody else on the internet has mentioned. And he certainly knows how to wipe the internet clean of the books he mentions – as soon as the reviews are out, the secondhand market is drained. The first copy of Strange Journey I ordered got me a ‘sorry, this book has gone’ reply – the second, thankfully, came to my house. And with such a fab cover!

Given my love of the period (it was published in 1935) and my interest in fantastic novels, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. When I say ‘fantastic’, I mean elements of fantasy happening in the real world. It had such a vogue in the ’20s and ’30s and so often commented on issues of the day. And in Strange Journey, the issue appears to be class.

Polly is a housewife in a middle-class (leaning towards lower-middle-class) household. Her family certainly aren’t poor, but they don’t have money to spare for luxuries. Even the basics can be a little bit of a struggle, and Polly feels rather run ragged. In 1935, it was still a novelty for some households to deal with only an occasional help, rather than a more regular maid or two. She is looking at from her front gate when she spots a woman in a Rolls Royce, clearly well-to-do.

Suddenly I felt a longing to change places with her, to get into that big, comfortable looking car, lean back in the soft cushions I felt sure that it contained, while the chauffeur made it glide away through the dusk to some pleasant house where there would be efficient servants and tea waiting, with a silver teapot, thin china, and perhaps hot scones, nice deep arm chairs to sit in, and magazines lying on the table.

I’ve quoted the same bit Brad did, but it is the key moment. Polly’s longing to exchange lives with this woman doesn’t happen instantly, but the seed is sown. A few days later, remembering that idle daydream, Polly suddenly feels dizzy – and discovers she is no longer in her own home.

Her dream seems to have come true. She is in a beautiful and enormous country house, with a team of servants and with no labour required of her. One of the first things she notices is her immaculate hands, which clearly have never had to be plunged into a bucket of soapy water.

Novels which use a fantastic device have to deal with the surprise of the protagonist. It’s the main difference between a fantastic novel and magic realism – this bizarre turn of events, and the character’s reactions, must be taken into account. Cairnes handles Polly’s disorientation very well. Her attempts to work out who the people around her are, and how they relate to her. Her frequent faux pas, as she tries to take on the tone of Lady Elizabeth (for such she is). And perhaps chiefly, trying to behave in a convincing manner to her new husband, Gerald (Major Forrester), without betraying her real husband, Tom. As it is, any affection from her seems to baffle Gerald.

Polly doesn’t stay there. Before too long, she is whisked back to her normal life – and it becomes clear that Lady Elizabeth has been there in her guise, telling Scottish folklore stories to Polly’s two children.

One of the less convincing elements of the book, albeit essential for the plot, is that Polly decides not to confide in her husband, or anyone. As the months go by, she keeps finding herself having dizzy spells that land her in Lady Elizabeth’s world. Cairnes has good fun with the humorous side of things, as Polly reveals Lady Elizabeth to be a secret bridge player, or as she gets confused with titles of nobles. At the heart of it is a lovable and empathetic character, making the most of the strange world she has found herself in, throwing in some matchmaking on the side. As the reader, I longed for Polly and Lady Elizabeth to meet… and, thankfully, they eventually do.

I loved Strange Journey. The novel sustains the initial idea wonderfully, and Cairnes is obviously an adept, if fairly light, writer. She appears to have only written one other novel, The Disappearing Duchess, and this costs $300 online…

Brad’s detective work add another fun twist to the tale. Maud Cairnes was a pseudonym – for Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick (!!), known as Lady Kathleen. Head over to his piece for a bit about her extraordinary milieu; it’s safe to safe she was more familiar with Lady Elizabeth’s world than with Polly’s, so it is to her credit that she makes both equally believable.

Strange Journey is not at all easy to find – but I am certainly mulling it over as British Library choice at some point…