1930s

Business as Usual by Jane Oliver and Ann Stafford

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When I read Business As Usual (1933) in January, it was difficult not to write about it immediately. But there are few things more irritating than reading about a delightful book and then finding that it’s not yet available to buy – and while there are doubtless 1933 editions of Business As Usual out there somewhere, you can now buy the lovely Handheld Press reprint of it. At https://taxfyle.com/blog/can-i-deduct-my-medical-expenses/ you will find purposes of the medical expenses deduction. And if Handheld Press never achieve or achieved anything else, the rediscovery of this novel would secure my eternal gratitude.

I was pretty sure I’d love it when I heard the barest outlines: it is a novel in letters from the 1930s about working in the book department of a department store. I might as well stop my review there, and some of you are probably ordering a copy as we speak. But it’s even better than it sounds.

All the letters are by Hilary Fane, and we must imagine the replies (and are easily able to do so from her replies). She has just finished university and is engaged to a pleasant young man called Basil. Being the 1930s, she is preparing to prioritise the doctor’s role of wife once she is married, and Edinburgh society is ready to receive her in this role. It (and her parents) are rather more surprised when she decides she wants to wait a year, get a job, and see something of the world. Off she goes to London.

Here, she manages to find an overpriced, unlovely flat (plus ca change!), and begins to realise that life alone and on the job market isn’t quite as simple as she’d hoped. But she takes it in good part. Hilary is such a delightful character – it’s so hard to create an optimist who isn’t annoying, but Oliver and Stafford have done it. She refuses to be crushed down, but does allow the odd acerbic moment to sneak into her letters – not least when she begins to prove people wrong:

Basil Dear

I meant to write to you last night, but I waited, because I thought there might be a letter. And there was – a very sweet one. Bless you! But I don’t think one enjoys: ‘I told you so’ however beautifully it’s put. It isn’t true either I’VE GOT A JOB. So I won’t be coming to heel just yet.

It’s always fun to read about people being out of their depth, and Hilary’s first job in Everyman’s (a department store clearly based on Selfridges) is as a typist in the books department. If you’ve enjoyed Monica Dickens’ hilarious One Pair of Hands or Betty Macdonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything, then you’ll know what to expect. She is initially enthusiastic and confused and inept – and later just confused and inept. This clearly isn’t her forte. Oliver and Stafford don’t diminish those who are good at this sort of routine-work, and Hilary admires them with an open heart – but it is not where she should be.

As she comes to the attention of the manager, Mr Grant, when dealing with a difficult situation, she is given the more responsible task of improving the organisation of the department. Her rise through the ranks is a trifle unrealistic, but we’ll forgive it because it gives such a fascinating insight behind the scenes of this lending library feature of a bookshop that has long disappeared.

Her life begins to shift in interesting ways, and not always the ways I anticipated when I started reading it. What remains consistent is how funny, joyous, and addictive Business As Usual is.

I often write here that I’m looking forward to rereading a book, and it’s relatively seldom that I actually do end up rereading. But I’m going to say with confidence that Business As Usual will join the pantheon of those books I return to when I want to read something that will put a broad smile on my face.

Vulgarity in Literature by Aldous Huxley – #1930Club

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I’m sneaking into the final day of the 1930 Club with another 1930 read – albeit a very short one, at 59 pages. It’s one of the Dolphin Books series that I’ve written about before, and which I love. Beautiful little hardbacks covering a wide range of fiction and literary non-fiction. I haven’t been able to find out if they were specially commissioned or what, and I’m sure this essay of Huxley’s will have appeared in other forms, but it’s nice to read it in this original form.

I thought it might be about obscenity in literature, since that was such a raging battle of the period – not long after books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness had both been banned in the UK. But he quickly dispels this idea, and indeed stands up for writers being able to write about anything:

I myself have frequently been accused, by reviewers in public and by unprofessional readers in private correspondence, both of vulgarity and of wickedness—on the grounds, so far as I have ever been able to discover, that I reported my investigations into certain phenomena in plain English and in a novel. The fact that many people should be shocked by what he writes practically imposes it as a duty upon the writer to go on shocking them. For those who are shocked by truth are not only stupid, but morally reprehensible as well; the stupid should be educated, the wicked punished and reformed.

So, what does he mean by vulgarity? He dances around the topic but is never particularly clear on the point. It can be intellectual, emotional, or spiritual. It seems connected to insincerity or going too far, or misusing form, or… well, Huxley writes well and engagingly, and it is only when you get to the end that you realise it’s all been inconclusive. Fascinating, but inconclusive.

In terms of the ‘in literature’ bit of the title, he only talks in detail about Poe and Balzac, though with references to Dickens, Dostoevsky, and a handful of others. He doesn’t really consider contemporary literature at all, and thus can’t be said to comment on 1930 itself. But it was an enjoyable intellectual exercise, if not the sociological one that I was expecting when I picked it up.

The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton – #1930Club

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The 1930 Club seemed like a great opportunity to take a look at my British Library Crime Classics shelves, which are overflowing with books I’ve not yet read. When they started republishing these intriguing detective novels in beautiful editions, I wanted to get them all. I still want to, if I’m honest, but they stepped up how many they were publishing and I realised it wasn’t very realistic. Still. Plenty there.

And one of them was The Secret of High Eldersham by Miles Burton, reprinted in 2016 and thus maybe one of the earlier reprints. Certainly Martin Edwards’ introduction makes it sound like one of the books he was keenest on getting out to a new public.

High Eldersham is a small and out-of-the-way village. The beautiful cover doesn’t strictly relate to any of the houses in the book, but there are a couple of larger ones – lived in respectively by a doctor and a landowner. Otherwise it’s mostly farm labourers and others that Burton doesn’t seem very interested in telling us about. And there’s a pub about a mile from the village proper, and not on the way to anywhere else. It hasn’t been very profitable for quite a while, because of its distance from anywhere, and the novel starts with the landlord Dunsford asking the brewery owner if he can be moved to a different pub nearby. Off Dunsford goes, with a warning that it might be difficult for the new landlord – not only because of the lack of profit, but because the villagers in High Eldersham are not very accepting of outsiders. Indeed, it almost seems as if ‘foreigners’ – those not born in the village – are cursed when they arrive…

Still, a retired policeman called Whitehead becomes the landlord, and we fast forward a few years. Turns out newbies aren’t very lucky, because he gets stabbed to death. The local policeman feels very ill-equipped to deal with any of this, since he usually just sorts out drunk and disorderlies, and others are brought in. I got a bit confused with who all the police who came are, but the important one is Desmond Merrion – an amateur detective, but with close ties to one of the detectives. And, in turns out, a coincidental relationship with a villager – and a prospective relationship with another…

I spent a while trying to decide whether to include spoilers in this post, and have chosen not to. The thing I was going to write about happens relatively early in the book, and you spend the rest of the novel trying to determine whether or not it actually happened… it plays on themes that were quite big at the time, but also atavistic.

That’s all I’ll say on that, but it is the dominant thread of the novel – and one that makes it an interesting and unusual book to read, but also which separates it from the more down-to-earth books of the Golden Age. Merrion went on to appear in dozens and dozens of other books, and I’d be interested to see how he fares as a detective in more traditional mysteries.

As it is, this one relies heavily on coincidence, and the plotting and detection can be a bit clumsy – but I did read a review that said it was more like a thriller than a detective novel, and I think that’s a good point. What Burton lacks in terms of intricate plotting he makes up for in suspense and excitement – and some engaging distortion of a village idyll. It rattles along and is probably rather sillier than the author intended, but certainly good fun for this year’s club.

Turn Back The Leaves by E.M. Delafield – #1930Club

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I hope and suspect that most of us have read one of the books that E.M. Delafield published in 1930 – The Diary of a Provincial Lady. Rather less popular is the title that I picked off my well-stocked Delafield shelves: Turn Back The Leaves. I have quite a few unread Delafields among the many that I have read, and it was good to get one down.

Turn Back The Leaves is a very different novel from The Diary of a Provincial Lady. It is not at all funny, for starters. Often Delafield combines serious topics with some levity, but this is nearly absent in this tangled story of illegitimacy and secrets. And, above all, the tensions of a family maintaining Catholic mores.

The novel starts in 1890 and ends in 1929, though most of it takes place just before and after World War One. But that section needs a bit of back story, and that’s what Delafield starts us with. In brief, a woman with the extraordinary name Edmunda marries a man named Joseph, despite neither of them being enthused by the match. They are both ardent Catholics, and their families are keen for them to marry other upstanding Catholics. It is a loveless match, though neither of them have been and love and don’t particularly miss what they haven’t had. Except then, of course, Edmunda does fall in love with another man – and Stella is born illegitimately. Joseph forgives her; they have four other children; she dies. Stella is left alone in London with a paid governess and nurse, and the others grow up with Joseph and his second wife.

Fast forward a few years – and some rather unnecessarily detailed characterisation of characters we will never see again, along the way – and Stella moves back to live with her half-brother and half-sisters, though none of them know the connection. She is only there as a ‘family friend’. And has been taken in because Joseph and his new wife are keen to give her a ‘good Catholic upbringing’. Only… there are temptations in the way of her and one of her half-sisters. They both fall in love with Protestants. Marrying out of the Catholic church is not forbidden, but it is only allowed if the non-Catholic partner allows their children to be brought up as Catholics – ‘the promises’ – and the prospective husbands won’t allow this.

Delafield’s author’s foreword reads that ‘this book is in no way intended as propaganda either for or against the Roman Catholic faith. It purports only to hold up a mirror to the psychological and religious environment of a little-known section of English society as it has existed for many years, and still exists today’. This is pretty disingenuous. As with quite a lot of Delafield’s novels, particularly the early ones, this is clearly motivated by some distaste for her Catholic upbringing. It isn’t a bitter book, but you never get the sense that the author is ambivalent.

But the Catholic characters are not monsters by any means. Sir Joseph is rather domineering, but others are motivated by their love for their church and their eagerness to do right. And it’s a very engaging, well-written novel, with vivid characters who only slightly lose their vividness by the author’s attempt to have slightly too many focuses. Stella should really be front and centre, but disappears towards the end when Delafield wants us to empathise with the rest of the family too.

I don’t know much about Catholicism, and I don’t know if inter-marrying is still as big a deal, or if the official line is still that no other Christian denomination is properly following Christ. I do know that Protestants still follow the beliefs of the Protestants in this novel – that following Christ is the important bit, not the specific church. As Delafield writes in her foreword, the Catholic angle was a niche point even in 1930 – and many readers might be uncertain that their interest could be sustained in a novel which revolves around the Catholic/non-Catholic angle.

Which would be a pity, because I think Turn Back The Leaves is very good indeed. At her best, Delafield is great at giving a novel momentum as well as psychological complexity and empathetic characters. Her writing is not unduly fancy, nor does it have the hilarious phrasing of the Provincial Lady books, but she does use the quiet, unshowy prose to pull the rug from under our feet. We are suddenly hit by observations and emotional moments, in few and precise words, that we might not be expecting. I think this is the 25th novel I’ve read by Delafield, and it’s up there among the ones I’ve enjoyed most. It feels odd to read one in which she is almost never humorous at all – but perhaps she wanted to make her 1930 output as distinct as possible. And the Provincial Lady this ain’t!

Corduroy by Adrian Bell – #1930Club

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The first book I picked up for the 1930 Club was Adrian Bell’s memoir Corduroy, the first in a trilogy all of which – I think – have now been reprinted in beautiful Slightly Foxed editions. That’s quite hard to track down now, but there are plenty of other editions kicking around – and I’d certainly recommend getting your hands on a copy, because it’s lovely.

The premise is that Bell didn’t really know what to do with his life when was 19 – which was in 1920. Between them, he and his father decided that he might become a farmer – and Corduroy is his account of getting some experience to this end. Before putting all his eggs in one basket, he had to find out how the farming malarkey went.

So off he went to Bradfield St George in Suffolk – known as Benfield St George in Corduroy – accepted by the Colville family. From here, he plays a slightly odd role in the social strata of the farm. He is clearly on the level of the farm owner and family, in terms of accommodation and society, but he is among the working men for the tasks.

The majority of the book is Bell being introduced to a task, doing it badly, and getting better. What makes Corduroy such an enjoyable book is the way he writes about the experience. He is never patronising about the labourers, and nor does he idolise them in with the eye of a Romantic poet. He recognises their expertise, and they recognise his eagerness to learn – not mocking him when he is useless at milking a cow or ploughing a straight furrow or being able to tell one pig from another. At least they don’t in Bell’s memories of his year as a farmhand – it’s worth remembering that their perspectives are, of course, given in Bell’s narrative and not their own.

As with his depictions of the workers, Bell has a great eye for the natural world. Again, it is observational rather than a paean. I enjoyed this vivid description of pigs at feeding time. Don’t say you don’t get variety from Stuck in a Book:

I wandered out again, and watched Jack feeding the pigs, helped him by carrying slopping pails of barley-meal, which gave my boots a less genteel appearance. At the first rattle of a pail the pigs set up a pathetic squealing, and, when one pen was temporarily lulled with a pailful, the laments of the others rose to a hysteria of anxiety at the sight of their brothers being fed before them. By the time we had brought the refilled buckets to the second pen, the first had finished theirs and were wailing for more. Thus the chorus went on, in strophe and anti-strophe, till all were filled and slept.

Fun, no?

I’ve realised what I want in people who write about villages. Either gossipy fun, like Beverley Nichols, or the sort of writing Bell does. People who respect the countryside and village life without romanticising it. And many things haven’t changed – like the sense of community. And many things have, of course. I’ve lived in three different villages all with working farms, but there is no longer any sense that everyone in the community is involved in the life of the farm. Even more than all the mechanisation of farming, I think that’s the thing that’s changed the most. Back in 1920, when Bell started farming and my great-grandad was a farm labourer, it was the whole world for almost everyone who lived nearby. The city was another world. As exemplified when Bell asks a farmhand what his brother does, and is told ‘nothing, just some writing’ – only to learn that he has an office job with the water board!

Corduroy looks at a period a decade before the book was published, so this isn’t an absolutely accurate reflection of 1930 – but I think it gives a good sense of the sort of semi-nostalgic writing that was coming out as the dizzy hope of the 20s started to turn to the nervous misgivings of the 30s… Was war already looming on the horizon? Perhaps not quite, but Bell writes with already a sense of a world that was disappearing.

Mr Emmanuel by Louis Golding

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I have a feeling I first bought Mr Emmanuel (1939) by Louis Golding when I was looking for novels by Louis Bromfield and got confused. And I’ve decided to try both Louises – Louis? Louiss? – recently. Unsurprisingly, they are very, very different. And Mr Emmanuel is very different from what I thought it would be when I started it.

The novel was published in 1939, but I’d be intrigued to know whether it was before or after September 3rd. That is, was it after war had been declared between England and Germany, or after? It is certainly very concerned with the situation in Germany, and is set in the period shortly before the war.

But we start out in England. Mr Emmanuel is a Russian immigrant who is now a British citizen and very proud of it. He lives in a close-knit suburb, where he is well-liked and respected by the neighbourhood. And rightly so. He is an upright, thoughtful, kind man – often depicted as being on the older side of things, in the novel, but I suspect no more than 50. (I also discovered that Mr Emmanuel is the second novel in a series of four, and so many of these characters should probably be familiar, but I think it’s fine to read this book independently.) The setting appears in quite a few of Golding’s novels, I think. It’s an interesting depiction of nineteen-thirties segregation beginning to blur.

Magnolia Street is a small street in the Longton district of Doomington, in the North of England. It is one of several streets called after the names of flowering shrubs, that run parallel to each other right and left across the central thoroughfare of Blenheim Road. It is mainly Jews who live in the streets south of Magnolia Street, though some Gentiles live there. The converse holds of the streets north of it. Magnolia Street itself is different from those others because Jews and Gentiles live there in equal numbers, the Jews in the odd-numbered houses on the south side, the Gentiles in the even-numbered houses on the north.

That has been the situation for several decades, and there was a time when it would have been as unthinkable for a Jewish family to live on the Gentile pavement as for a Gentile family to live on the Jewish pavement. The two sides of the street virtually did not exist for each other, excepting when certain major public occasions, like the Great War, or certain dramatic private occasions, like a wedding or a death, reminded the folk they were made of pretty much the same stuff, spirit and mind and flesh. There had even been one or two marriages between people from the opposite sides of the street, but on the whole these had not much affected the general situation, though they had caused a good deal of chatter at the time they happened.

In rather a protracted opening, he learns that some friends are looking after German Jewish refugees, and would appreciate his help. Mr Emmanuel is Jewish himself – as was Golding – and he is very conscious of the need to help these refugees. He is less conscious about the situation for Jewish people in Germany, at least in terms of specifics.

While staying with these refugees, he befriends a young boy called Bruno. He is unpopular among the other children, and clearly very anxious. He misses his mother, and wants to know whether she is dead or alive. And Mr Emmanuel promises Bruno that he will go to Germany and find out. Against the advice of everybody else… that is exactly what he does.

This is quite a long novel (over four hundred pages) and a sizeable portion of the first half feels like set up for the novel proper. I never quite disentangled who all the figures were in this section, and it’s quite possible that they are bigger players in the previous novel Five Silver Daughters. I kept reading, but it was only when Mr Emmanuel went to Germany that I really thought the novel started working well.

He has the name of Bruno’s mother and a potential address – which no longer exists. Golding does an excellent job of sustaining the tension for a long time as Mr Emmanuel gently, persistently tries to find Bruno’s mother’s whereabouts. We get a sense of the fear and anger on the streets of 1939 Germany. Mr Emmanuel is oddly naive in her determination, scarcely recognising the danger he is in. He firmly believes that being a British citizen will protect him from the anti-Semitism that is clearly rife.

This is where the novel gets quite grim. I was surprised how graphic the scenes were when he gets on the wrong side of the Gestapo and is imprisoned. Seeing this lovable, kind, innocent man being mentally and physically tortured is really hard. (When I say ‘tortured’, I mean beaten often and without knowing when – in case, like me, your mind replaces that word with far worse things if no details are given.) It is also illuminating about what people knew was happening, as early as ’39.

The denouement of the novel is unexpected, though it is difficult for such a long novel to sustain something that changes how we have perceived what comes before, if that makes sense. I shan’t give away more. And, while it is on the long side, Golding has a measured and steady style that makes for a good reading experience. I still think he should have cut quite a lot of the beginning, but perhaps it was necessary for getting the uninitiated reader to love Mr Emmanuel.

 

The Death of Noble Godavary by Vita Sackville-West (25 Books in 25 Days: #20)

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Vita Sackville-West is certainly a name that’s known in the blogosphere. Sometimes that’s for her relationship to Virginia Woolf; sometimes for Sissinghurst and her garden design; sometimes for The Edwardians, All Passion Spent, and The Heir. I love all three of those books, but it is amazing how many of her novels and novellas are almost unmentioned online. One such is The Death of Noble Godavary (1932). The only review I can find is at Smithereens.

I started this ages ago, and set it aside for some reason. I went back to the beginning this time, and had much more success – it’s 100 pages of atmospheric writing, and shows that nobody is better than Sackville-West at showing the power of houses. The Heir is a wonderful example of somebody falling in love with a house and home – The Death of Noble Godavary is sort of the opposite.

Gervase Godavary is reluctantly taking a long journey back to the house he used to live in. He is going for his uncle’s funeral, and you get the feeling that nothing else would persuade him to return. He certainly hasn’t stayed in touch with the people there – his brother, cousin, uncle, and various other family members whose relationships to each other did rather confuse me. Among them (his cousin’s half-sister?) is the mysterious Paola, who feels like she’s plucked from a novel by Daphne du Maurier. Gervase is fascinated by her – not enamoured, but struck by her power over the household.

The house and the area are wet, dark, gloomy. Gervase is not excited about being back in his childhood bedroom, but he does feel the power and influence of these familiar surroundings. And when his uncle’s will is read out, things get particularly interesting…

I thought this was a good novella, but it becomes truly great in the final 20 pages. I shan’t say what happens, but it is an extended powerful, destructive image – combining the power of nature with the influence of houses. And hopefully that intrigues you enough for you to seek it out. It’s worth reading for the ending alone. One I won’t forget for a long time, not least because it leaves you with far more questions than answers.

Dickens by Osbert Sitwell (25 Books in 25 Days: #19)

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I’ve gone for a still shorter book today – 47 pages – and it’s in the series of Dolphin Books that I’ve written about before. This set of slim hardbacks from the 1930s are very varied – poetry, essays, plays, all sorts – and I love them. I love how they look; I love that such an eccentric imprint existed at all. Though it didn’t last very long, so I guess it wasn’t successful – but it’s fun to see what they chose.

Osbert Sitwell was, of course, one of the famous Sitwell family – and in this volume he takes it upon himself to defend Dickens. I don’t know quite what status Dickens had in the 1930s, but apparently some sort of defence was needed. This is essentially a 47-page essay on why Dickens is great, with illustrative examples. It’s also often quite funny:

It was said he was unable to portray ‘ladies and gentlemen,’ has to be content – for such a deliberate choice was unthinkable – to concern himself with low life, the unpleasant low life of the industrial cities, and never, it was evident, could have dealt, on the one hand, in the subtle psychological reactions of baronets, after the manner of George Meredith, then in his heyday, nor, on the other, have portrayed, with the pen of a Thomas Hardy, the ever-recurring woes of simple-minded by suicidal peasants.

Sitwell manages to keep it quite broad (a lot of it does feel like YAY DICKENS) while dipping into specific examples. So we see how he beautifully he describes a scene, how he shows us a character’s essential traits in a few lines of dialogue, how he presents literary morality. We get an overall sense that he’s a very English, very era-defining writer. And Sitwell is obviously influenced by the long, winding sentences of Dickens.

It’s slightly dizzying to read such a short book with such a vast thesis, and there are plenty of novels that aren’t mentioned at all – but it was fun and intriguing, and certainly left me wanting to read more Dickens soon.

The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff

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This isn’t one of my 25 Books in 25 Days – not at the page count the Sherriff weighs in at! – but I wanted to add it to my participation in Jessie’s Persephone Readathon. And I read it a couple of weeks ago – my third Sherriff, but certainly not my last.

The Hopkins Manuscript (1939) isn’t my usual fare, inasmuch as it is science fiction – not a genre I usually rush towards. But I had previously read and loved a couple of his other books published by Persephone, The Fortnight in September and Greengates, and so I was encouraged to pick up my copy of this one. It certainly didn’t disappoint. The premise is that the moon is going to hit the earth – but that really is just the premise for a character study.

There is a short (fake) preface letting us know that this manuscript has been unearthed, centuries after the events of the novel – and apparently almost all vestiges of the UK have long gone. Experts comb the world to find any evidence of what that civilisation might have been like – and this manuscript is by far the longest discovered. It is called the Hopkins manuscript because it was written by one Edgar Hopkins – and he takes over the story once the novel proper starts. This is, I suppose, his diary.

Hopkins is interested in astronomy and part of the Lunar Society – which is where he is first warned that the moon is likely to hit the earth. In a state of shock, but sworn to secrecy, he heads back to his normal life. And that life is quite a lonely one. He lives alone, except for staff and the poultry that he breeds in a mildly obsessive way, and seems to regard everybody else in his small village (Beadle) as a yokel and idiot. He often reflects that none of them would understand the calamity coming, and that he has nobody of sense to talk with. In short, Hopkins is not the most appealing narrator at the start – much as the gentleman at the centre of Greengates is a little obstreperous as things kick off.

To be honest, this first section of the novel could have done with a bit of editing. We know something seismic is going to happen, and it’s important to set up the world that will be disrupted, but I got a bit impatient waiting for the moon to do its thing.

But eventually, of course, it does. By now the world has been told what will happen – or at least the UK, because Hopkins doesn’t really seem to know that the rest of the world exists, at this point. Bunkers have been built, and prayers said. Most charmingly, Hopkins has befriended a small family who live across the valley from him – a Colonel Parker and his young nephew Robin and niece Pat. These are the educated society Hopkins has wanted (though apparently without wandering far to find it), and there are some touching scenes where Hopkins’ paternal side emerges – and where he watches their lights across the valley, taking comfort from it.

But comfort cannot last. The moon arrives. The world is not destroyed, but everything changes – and Hopkins finds himself living a far different life in a semi-ruined Beadle, growing closer to Robin and Pat, but increasingly isolated from everything else.

Sherriff writes the section of the moon’s landing so brilliantly – it is very tense, while still intensely human. The aftermath is similarly well told, and the central section of the novel was definitely the bit I enjoyed most. He draws the new familial relationships beautifully, and Hopkins gradually becomes a much more likeable character – each step and shade of his character changing being done slowly and believably.

But this is not the end. The final section of the novel looks at how different countries start feuding over the moon and its apparent economic qualities – all seen from the distant perspective of Hopkins. Humanity suffers at the hands of nations’ leaders’ greed and nationalism. Published in 1939, it certainly had relevance to the Second World War – but it felt extremely relevant to Brexit and Trump and far-right parties gaining ascendance across Europe today. Some evils only change their form, it seems.

If the other Sherriff novels I’ve read have felt very much about individual groups of people, with only faint links to class or other wider issues, this one is much more a state-of-the-nation type novel. While still, of course, keeping humanity at its core. I daresay the science of what would happen if the moon did start moving is all flawed, but that certainly doesn’t bother me – and doesn’t remotely affect whether or not this is an impactful novel.

I still prefer his other books, perhaps because this one did feel like it could lose 100 pages without any detriment – but this is still wonderful, and I’m keen to see what else Sherriff has written (and fingers crossed that Persephone publish more of it!)

 

The Progress of Julius by Daphne du Maurier

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I’m sneaking into the final hours of Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week to write about her third novel – The Progress of Julius (1933). My edition is simply called Julius – I don’t know when or why this change was made (unless perhaps it was to capitalise on the single-name success of Rebecca), but I prefer to go by the original title.

I picked this one up from my pile of unread DdMs because it had a name in the title, and thus qualified for my #ProjectNames informal reading challenge – it wasn’t one of her novels that I had heard discussed very often. Having read it, I can sort of see why…

It traces the life of Julius Levy from his birth right to the end – and his earliest days are spent in poverty in France. He has a loud and passionate mother and matching grandfather. Rather more negligible is Paul, his father, who is disparaged by everybody else in the household. He is an almost cartoonishly weak figure, good only for sitting in the corner and observing.

But Paul has a moment where he is not weak, or at least shows strength in the eyes of the world, and it leads to he and his young son escaping France – sneaking onto a train and travelling to Algeria. Here, as Julius grows, he begins to lift himself out of poverty through some legitimate projects – and lots of illegitimate ones. From stealing horses and selling them to tricking a tutor into educating him, du Maurier shows us a portrait of immoral ambition – and constant disguise. Julius only ever shows the face that is likely to win him the most reward.

Next stop – London. He has heard that this is the place to make his fortune – and make it he does, though he has been followed by the teenage prostitute whose room he frequented in Algiers. Elsa has disguised herself as a boy to sneak onto the boat with him, apparently unable to be without him. (One of the less successful plot elements, particularly towards the beginning, is how Julius is apparently an irresistible personality to all – when, to the reader’s eye, he seems to have very little to recommend him.)

With Elsa, Julius’s selfishness tips over into a sort of sadism:

The shoulders of Elsa began to shake, and her head bent lower and lower. Julius had to cover his mouth with his hand to prevent himself from laughing. He had discovered a new thing, of hurting the people he liked. It gave him an extraordinary sensation to see Elsa cry after she had been smiling, and to know that he had caused her tears. He was aware of power, strange and exciting.

And so it continues throughout his life. At each stage, he is ruthless and selfish – he’s what we would now call a sociopath. His financial success is the only thing that motivates him (at least until another figure comes into his life, in the final third of the book). He is, frankly, vile.

Du Maurier tells her narrative well and engagingly, but it is very straightforward. There is nothing like the twists in Rebecca or the moral ambiguity in My Cousin Rachel. And it was a bit conflicting – the novel is well written, but it is deeply uncomfortable to read.

On the one hand, plenty of the characters are anti-Semitic – initially to Paul and, later, to Julius. Despite having a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, and thus technically not be ethnically Jewish himself, it is taken for granted by all characters and the narrator that Julius is Jewish. And though the narrative does not endorse these insults, you have to ask yourself what Daphne du Maurier was doing in writing this novel.

Nowhere does it suggest that Julius’s behaviour is technical of all Jewish people, or that he is intended to represent anything more than a single character – but it certainly didn’t sit well to have a Jewish character whose life is motivated solely by financial greed. This was, of course, a stereotype around in the 1930s – one being used, even as this novel was published, to stir up hatred against Jewish people in Germany. It is hard not to feel disgusted at the portrait du Maurier has painted, and at the author for painting it.

I don’t need characters to be likeable – but, even if he hadn’t been Jewish, with everything that suggests about du Maurier’s intention, he is so relentlessly terrible that it isn’t all that interesting. He has no nuanced character, nor does he especially develop. We just see him being appalling to person after person, never learning from his actions, or reflecting on his behaviour. It is a uniform and stylistically well written novel, but – as well as being almost certainly anti-Semitic – it feels perhaps a pointless novel too.