1930s

Young Man With a Horn by Dorothy Baker #1938Club

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Young Man With a HornThis review is part of the 1938 Club: add your reviews to the comments here.

I was so pleased when Kate at Vulpes Libris asked the other foxes if they’d like to celebrate the 1938 Club this week (they said yes!) and so, of course, thought it would be nice to house one of my reviews over there.

You can read my thoughts on Young Man With a Horn by Dorothy Baker over there (spoilers: I really liked it). I’m really pleased that, so far, all the books I’ve read and am reading for the 1938 Club are books I’ve had on my shelves for a while – the Baker has been there for about four years. Before that, though, I often saw this copy in the secondhand bookshop on Walton Street in Oxford. I kept not buying it, and it kept being there, and eventually I decided I should probably just make my purchase and take it home. And I’m glad I did!

Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly #1938Club

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This review is part of the 1938 Club: add your reviews to the comments here.

Enemies of PromiseMy first review for the 1938 Club (thanks so much for the support so far, btw!) is a book I’ve had on my shelves for about 12 years. Worse than that, it’s not even my book – I borrowed it from my aunt and uncle back then, and haven’t managed to return it yet. Well, Jacq and Dan, you can have it back now, thanks v much!

Enemies of Promise is a useful starting point for the 1938 Club because it is Connolly’s overview of contemporary literature. This is not without its omissions and faults – indeed, at times it seems to be only omissions and faults – but it’s a useful and interesting look at how a critic in 1938 saw the period’s writing in broad brushstrokes. The first two-thirds are literary criticism. Rather surprisingly, and baffling, the final third is an autobiography of Connolly’s schooldays. It feels so tacked onto the end, and I confess to skimming it in the end – I didn’t care about the names of his Eton friends, or which schoolteachers he liked or disliked. Why was it included? This post will concentrate on the rest of Enemies of Promise.

What does the title refer to? Well, the enemies of promise are the many things which stand between a promising author and his/her (though in Connolly’s eyes it seems to be ‘his’ invariably) eventual success: ‘whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising’. He deals with these in turn – they range from success to failure, from singleness to marriage, from drink to sobriety. Indeed, there is scarcely a hope for anybody – and it is curious that Connolly doesn’t have the self-awareness to laugh at the many lines he has drawn all over the sand.

Still, these sections are certainly interesting, if not much more than the reflections of an individual. What Connolly pronounces about the dangers of anything in particular are only really backed up by anecdote and bias; it is enjoyable and engaging, but could hardly be called fact. It’s this section that contains probably the most remembered line from Enemies of Promise: ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’. This sounds almost feminist until you realise that is the male author whose productivity is being ruined by the intrusive wife and her be-prammed offspring. It doesn’t seem to cross Connolly’s mind at all that women might write.

But the substance of Enemies of Promise comes before these sections, engaging as they are. If the pram line is the most remembered, then the most influential line of argument is where Connolly writes about style: specifically the ‘Mandarins’ vs the vernacular. The latter includes Hemingway, Orwell, and others who strive to write plainly and realistically. I’ll let Connolly define Mandarin himself:

[Mandarin describes the style] beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs and one which is always menaced by a puritan opposition. To know which faction we should belong to at any given moment is to know how to write with best effect and it is to assist those who are not committed by their temperament to one party alone, the grand or the bald, the decorative or the functional, the barqoue or the streamlined that the following chapters are written.

This quotation tells us two things about Connolly. The first is that apparently nobody ever introduced him to the semi-colon; the second is that he believes himself to consider the Mandarin and the vernacular equally good, if not misused. His examples, throughout the rest of this section, suggest that he is actually rather prejudiced against the Mandarin – in which class he puts Woolf and Stern (when it comes to specifics, he believes in women writers!), then traces back both styles right through the history of English literature, considering Lamb, Keats, Butler, Dryden, Forster more or less on a level playing field.

Connolly can be pithy about writers – I particularly enjoyed ‘one finds much dandyism in Wilde and some in Saki who, however, adulterated his Wilde to suit the Morning Post‘, Gertrude Stein as ‘rinsing the English vocabulary, by a process of constant repetition, of all accretions of meaning and association’, and his description of ‘Sylvia Beach’s little bookshop where Ulysses lay stacked like dynamite in a revolutionary cellar’ – but more often we see somewhat laboured and lengthy quotations from writers across the centuries, and somewhat hasty pronouncements after them.

His conclusions are – and I do recognise the irony here – the swift and absolute conclusions of the young man. He was only 35 years old when he wrote this; in five years’ time, I don’t think I’d feel qualified to divide up all of literature or make such bold and unequivocal declarations about it. He somewhat spoils his adeptness as a critic by the sweeping statements he makes; naturally, Enemies of Promise is remembered for these rather than its many nuances. (To be fair to Connolly, I daresay I also won’t be able to write with his fluid elegance.)

What is his solution? Well, as the reader could perhaps have predicted at the beginning – it is compromise:

At the present time for a book to be produced with any hope of lasting half a generation, of outliving a dog or a car, of surviving the lease of a house or the life of a bottle of champagne, it must be written against the current, in a prose that makes demands both on the resources of our language and the intelligence of the reader. From the Mandarins it must borrow art and patience, the striving for the perfection, the horror of cliches, the creative delight in the material, in the possibilities of the long sentence and the splendour and subtlety of the composed phrase. 

[…]

From the realists, the puritans, the colloquial writers and talkie-novelists there is also much that he will take and much that he will leave. The cursive style, the agreeable manners, the precise and poetical impact of Forster’s diction, the lucidity of Maugham, last of the great professional writers, the timing of Hemingway, the smooth cutting edge of Isherwood, the indignation of Lawrence, the honesty of Orwell, these will be necessary and the touch of those few journalists who give to every word in their limited vocabulary its current topical value. But above all it is construction that can be learnt from the realists, that discipline in the conception and execution of a book, that planning which gives simply-written things the power to endure, the constant pruning without which the imagination like a tea-rose reverts to the wilderness.

He also writes about what shouldn’t be taken from each of them, but I am in danger of typing the whole book out. I do recommend this to anybody interested in the history of literary criticism, or anybody wondering how the 1930s were viewed by those in the midst of them – and it will also be interesting to see all the 1938 Club reviews coming in, and thinking about how they correspond to Connolly’s definitions of Mandarin and vernacular – and which of them have outlasted that bottle of champagne.

The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller

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Private PapersHidden away, high on a shelf, in a secondhand bookshop in Bath, was a plain green volume. I can spot a 1930s hardback at a hundred metres, and thought it was worth pulling it down, to see what it was… well, truth be told, when I saw the title The Private Papers of a Bankrupt Bookseller (1931), I was hardly likely to leave it where I found it.

It claims to be anonymous, but is actually by William Darling – as somebody has inscribed in the front of my copy. I thought perhaps it was signed by the author, but the pencil note underneath (‘let’s hope I don’t have to write one!’) makes me think that perhaps the Bath bookshop owner put it in there himself.

The book is a collection of very short essays and observations, often no more than a couple of pages long, and give the life of a bookseller. It’s not easy to see how much of it is fiction (it’s certainly not the non-fiction account the narrator asserts), but I’m going to assume that Darling had at least some familiarity with running a bookshop. Sometimes it is about the customers who come in. Sometimes about ordering stock. Often he is diverted into talking about books in general, whether madness in books, books with pictures, blue books, etc. Here, as an example, is part of an enjoyable explanation about the life cycle of unfashionable books:

The first stage is when it arrives – after much of Sunday Times and Observer heralding. It is almost hot from the printers and, if it is a great success, I may sell my three or maybe six. I am encouraged. I believe the book is going to be the big book of the year. I buy another six, and the comes the frost. I am left with them. Strenuously practising salesmanship, I sell – on credit – one – maybe two – more, but the four remain. What can I do with them?

Their jackets – they have always wonderful jackets – coats of many colours – get rubbed and torn and they languish. They become tired and weary. I lose taste of them. I ignore them.

Some Monday I put them into the window. I expatiate to any who will listen on their claims to attention. They are worth buying, if only as representing a phase, I plead. It avails nothing.

I take them out of the window. I try a little longer with them on the counters and then – they are in the old shelves at the back shop incurably, definitely bad stock.

And so it goes on! The narrator/author/character is a genial man, though he has a few stern words to say about the draper working next door, and the draper’s customers. This (inevitably fictitious) draper is also the writer of the preface. This lends some amusement to a volume that remains amusing, even when we learn at the outset that the supposed bookseller has died, penniless, before his papers were discovered.

Alongside the lighthearted tone, the author has created an entertaining and likeable character. Is he the mouthpiece for the authors opinions? One has to assume so, when he recommends books (and this is one of the chief joys of the collection – the number of recommendations from a 1930s perspective, though perhaps not always entirely up my street) though perhaps not at other times.

I love what an unexpected find this was, and how unusual. Who would publish this sort of book today? Those of us who love the 1930s are always after different perspectives on it, and something like this very clearly ticks all sorts of boxes for me and my tastes.

So why hasn’t it escalated into my all-time favourites? Hard to say. Perhaps I would have preferred it to be clearly fictional, or to be actually non-fictional. Maybe the joke wasn’t carried quite far enough, or the mix of satire and sincerity didn’t quite work perfectly. But, if not an all-time favourite, it’s definitely on the second or third tier – extremely enjoyable to read, and a gem for my ever-growing books-about-books shelf.

Richmal Crompton and me

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richmal-cromptonWhen I’m asked who my favourite authors are, I often find myself immediately giving the answers I would have given ten years ago or more: A.A. Milne, E.M. Delafield, Richmal Crompton. I would have unhesitatingly rattled those off in 2002, because they were the three authors I had discovered for myself in my first ventures beyond obvious, in-print choices. I’ve written before about discovering A.A. Milne, and these other two weren’t very dissimilar. I started reading Richmal Crompton’s novels because I loved her William series and stumbled across Family Roundabout in Hay-on-Wye; I started reading E.M. Delafield because I’d bought a 1940 anthology called Modern Humour (featuring A.A. Milne) and loved an extract from Delafield’s As Others Hear Us. Perhaps not the usual way to discover EMD, but I’m grateful for it.

Picking up that old red hardback of Family Roundabout changed my life in enormous ways. I don’t know if things would have happened anyway, somehow, but the path would have been different. I loved Family Roundabout, and so was surprised when (in 2003) I saw that it had been reprinted. I picked up the Persephone edition in my local library, and started to explore what else they had republished – seeing ‘E.M. Delafield’ in their catalogue confirmed that I might rather like this publishing house. Exploring reviews of Family Roundabout on Amazon led me to one by a lady called Lyn. This was in the days when Amazon included reviewers’ email addresses, so (with the boldness of youth) I emailed Lyn to say how much I loved Crompton, and had she read many others? You might know Lyn as I Prefer Reading. Very kindly, she didn’t quietly ignore the enthusiastic email of an 18 year old, but instead told me about an online book discussion group – which I joined and, over a decade and a third of my life later, am still a member of. It was that group that helped form my reading tastes further, which led to my choice of DPhil topic (and, I daresay, to me doing a DPhil at all), not to mention StuckinaBook and, thus, my job at Oxford University Press. Basically almost everything in my day-to-day life can be traced to picking up that Richmal Crompton novel in 2003.

But is she still one of my favourite writers? Now, I would find it too difficult to give a list, in all probability – but, if pushed, I wouldn’t question including Milne and Delafield. I’d umm and ahh over Crompton. Yes, I still want to collect everything she’s written – but that’s partly the thrill of the chase. Some of her books are entirely impossible to track down (though not as many as before, given Bello bringing them back into print – including the Print on Demand review copy I’m writing about today). But buying books and reading books are entirely separate pleasures, and I’m no longer quite sure that Richmal Crompton deserves such a high place in my affections. Is she a great writer? No. Is she even consistently very good? I might have to conclude not. But is she a delight to read? Absolutely.

My criteria for favourite writers might now include an adept or unique style, or a way with humour that sets apart. Crompton doesn’t have those things. But what she does have is a knack for putting together a domestic novel which, if not par excellence, is certainly astonishingly archetypal. Somehow she is the quintessential interwar writer. Her subjects tend to be three or four families in a village, interacting and fighting, learning about themselves, and often changing for the better. Under the quiet surface of her extremely readable prose are alcoholism, abuse, affairs, and that’s just the ‘a’s. She packs in more than a soap opera. In fact, her novels are almost like soap operas – the amount of incident, the slightly exaggerated characters. Sometimes she excels herself – I would argue that she does this in Family Roundabout, Frost at Morning, and Matty and the Dearingroydes. Occasionally she significantly under-performs, and that is when she is saccharine (see, for instance, The Holiday).

Portrait of a FamilyWhat of Portrait of a Family (1932)? This is one that I’ve never been able to track down – despite once buying a second copy of Family Roundabout when I confused the titles. As with many Crompton novels, it looks at a sprawling family of people who are very different from one another. It starts with Christopher remembering the deathbed revelation of his wife Susan…

Suddenly she opened her eyes. She was smiling – just as she had smiled at him across the Rectory lawn. A feeling of hysterical relief seized him. It was all right. She couldn’t be dying if she smiled at him like that. She began to speak, but so faintly that he had to bend down his head to hear what she said.

“Did you – never guess?”

“What?” he said breathlessly.

“About Charlie – and me.”

Then her eyes closed and she lay motionless, as if her looking at him and speaking had been an illusion.

She seems to be confessing to an affair – or is she? The thought haunts Christopher, and he determines to discover the truth by asking his various children and acquaintances, in the most subtle way possible. This might be deemed enough plot for many novelists, but Crompton is determined to give every character their due. Christopher has three children, and they each have a spouse. Throw in some grandchildren, Charlie’s sister, a housekeeper, and each of them has a certain frenzied vitality. One of Christopher’s children is trying to escape a loveless marriage, another is seeing his destroyed by a selfish and paranoid wife, while the third seems genuinely content.

Characters tend to be either good or bad, and react morally or immorally to any set of circumstances that present themselves – so the woman who treats her husband badly will also smother (metaphorically!) her children, ruin people’s parties, snap at the maid etc. etc. Crompton certainly delineates characters differently, with their own set of neuroses or tics, but – though they are very different from one another – the same types appear and re-appear throughout her novels. I had a very strong sense of deja vu while reading Portrait of a Family, to the extent that I genuinely began to wonder if I’d already read it – but I couldn’t possibly have done. The same scenarios, the same character thoughts, the same outcomes – all have appeared elsewhere in her writing, and will reappear later. Goodness knows why she returned so often to the same wells.

BUT – and it is a really significant but – her novels are such a compulsive delight to read. Portrait of a Family is in the stronger half of her novels, certainly; in that body of hers (below the best and above the worst) that differ from one another only slightly. And it’s addictive. It’s unputdownable. It’s oddly relaxing, given the amount of strife that happens. I would wholeheartedly recommend it for an afternoon or two of delightful reading – even while recognising that Crompton is not the calibre of novelist I once thought.

So, where does this leave me and Richmal? I will still continue to read her every now and then, with my expectations adjusted appropriately. I will forever be grateful for the path she inadvertently led me down, but – on the strength of her writing alone – she might not be one of my favourites any more. But there are still few more entertaining ways to spend a Sunday afternoon than reading one of her soap operatic novels.

 

The Middle Window by Elizabeth Goudge

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The Middle WindowIf you had told me at the beginning of 2015 that I’d have read two reincarnation romances before the year was over, my response would probably have been along the lines of doubt that two such books existed. But, yes, they do. The first one I read was Ferney by James Long – but over fifty years earlier, Elizabeth Goudge had written The Middle Window (1935) which had a similar idea at its heart.

This is actually the first Goudge book I’ve read, which is probably a rather unusual place to start. It came as part of a postal book group, otherwise this cover wouldn’t have inspired me to pick it up (nor yet would the tagline ‘a lively story set in the majestic Scottish Highlands’), though I ended up really enjoying it – particularly the first half.

The Middle Window is very definitely divided into halves. The first – set in the 1930s – concerns Judy, a London-dweller, whose life is changed when she looks into the three windows of an art gallery. Each displays a painting: one is a cityscape; one is a country cottage. In the middle window is a painting of the wilds of the Scottish highlands. For some reason, Judy believes that her life must follow the path indicated by one of those paintings. This isn’t the last time that the title of the novel will be significant, but Judy (as you may have guessed) opts for the middle window and the Scottish highlands.

Being in the happy position to be able to afford to take a ten week holiday, she advertises to rent a house there, and goes with her parents and her fiancée Charles to Glen Suilag. It’s a beautiful but neglected mansion in the middle of nowhere. There is no running water (which horrifies Judy’s mother, Lady Cameron) and little by way of local amusements. The only company seems to be a grumpy old servant, Angus – who greets Judy by saying “Mistress Judith, ye’ve coom back”.

I loved this section of the novel. The descriptions of being released from the city into the countryside rang true with me, and in fact the scene with the painting inspiring Judy’s decision – coming alive, so she can feel the breeze and see the mountains – is strikingly similar to scenes in Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes and Elizabeth von Arnim’s Father. But how would I cope when the reincarnation bit kicks in? Well, the hint is there in Angus’ welcome, and grows apace as Judy feels like she already knows the area. She also feels like she already knows Ian, the Laird of the Manor, who is staying in the village. He is a passionate, amusing, and educated man; a contrast to her nice-but-dim Charles. Ian works as an unpaid doctor in the little village, treating things which aren’t serious enough for the local hospital which, in those days before the NHS, was beyond the means of the poor locals. (Curiously, these minor ailments include a boy who has cut two fingers off; I’m wondering if that denotes an injury less appalling than it sounds.) Oh, and they take a trip to Skye that reinforces how much I really must visit it one day.

Judy and Ian gradually fall in love, and also gradually realise that it is not the first time they’ve met – but the first time was in another life…

“A man living a life is like a man writing a book. He may break off after a few chapters but he comes back to his work again and again until the book is finished.”

“And will you and I come back again and again through the centuries until we have built paradise in our glen? Faith, but Glen Suilag will grow mightily tired of us.”

“No! We are as much a part of it as the bog myrtle and the heather. It does not tire of its children.”

That conversation actually takes place in the second half of the novel, which takes place in 1745. Here they are Judith and Ramand, who fall in love and marry only a day before Ramand is called away to fight in the Jacobite rising for Bonnie Prince Charlie. This is period of history I know very little about, so The Middle Window was surprisingly instructive, helping put in context lots of terms I’d heard but without knowledge.

I had to fight my natural aversion to historical fiction, but that actually didn’t end up being my problem with the second half. It’s just as well drawn, character-wise, as the first half (for they are essentially the same characters), but the end of the first half essentially tells us what will happen at the end of the second half. I shan’t spoil it now, but the link is a flashback Judy has – which gives away the end. Of course, plot is not the only thing to read for, but it removes some of the tension – though there is a bit of a twist which goes some way to atone for it.

Despite, on paper, being a book that shouldn’t interest me, I actually really liked The Middle Window. And what I mostly liked about it was the style and humour of the writing. The humour is more evident in the first half, and it’s great; it’s centred around how insufferable the rest of the family find Judy. She’s rather a great heroine to read it, but must be endlessly frustrating to live with – as this indicates:

Lady Cameron sighed. Judy’s recent saintly mood of meditation and withdrawal had been distinctly trying, leading her as it did to leave her galoshes about in awkward places and take not the slightest notice of anything said to her, but it had at least been harmless. The same thing, she felt, could not be said of this new phase. She knew quite well, from painful past experience, that when Judy drew her belt in tightly like that she was about to be tiresome.

Little turns of phrase throughout demonstrate Goudge’s skill as a writer, even as early as her second book. Some might be too put off the theme, but – having spent years immersed in 1920s and ’30s fantastic fiction – I was willing to suspend my disbelief and enjoy it. My only wish is that she’d spent the whole time in the 1930s, with perhaps flashbacks to 1745, rather than giving equal space to both halves when there couldn’t really be equal tension or reader engagement.

 

Others who got Stuck into it (and generally hated it!):

“Gar. What a tiresome story this was. I feel all bilious; I think I need to read something crisp and witty to cleanse my emotional palate.” – Barb, Leaves and Pages

“This, unfortunately, is the first book by Elizabeth Goudge I have ever wished I hadn’t read. I disliked Judy Cameron heartily.” – Jenny, Shelf Love

 

 

Father by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Eliz von A

As I mentioned recently, I spent last weekend in Cambridge at a conference about Elizabeth von Arnim. It was really enjoyable; the people there were divided between those who knew everything about E von A and those (like me) who really like her, but haven’t read them all (I’ve only read about eight). The panel I spoke on had three people (including the chair) who’d published books about von Arnim… and me. But they made me feel very welcome, and I spoke about one of her lesser-known novels, Father (1931).

Rather than replicate my paper, I’ll do something more akin to my usual book reviews – though stealing some of the same research! Father is a novel that reminded me an awful lot of Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. In both, an unmarried woman is desperate for her independence, and not to be subservient in her relative’s home. For Laura Willowes, it’s her brother’s home; in Father it’s – you guessed it! – the father’s. Jennifer is 31 and a slave to her widowed father, a writer; she laments ‘the years shut up in the back diningroom at a typewriter, with no hope that anything would ever be different’. Only things are different. Father is getting married again, to Netta, who is younger than Jennifer. She sees her opportunity for escape: she can move to the countryside.

Through and beyond father she saw doors flying open, walls falling flat, and herself running unhindered down the steps, along Gower Street, away through London, across suburbs, out, out into great sun-lit spaces where the wind, fresh and scented, rushed to meet her […] Jen, her wide-open eyes shining with the reflection of what she saw through and beyond father. She could feel the wind – she could feel it, the scented fresh wind, blowing up her hair as she ran and ran…

And, like Laura Willowes, she does move to the countryside. Only things aren’t quite as uncomplicated as she’d hoped. Waiting for her, in that village, are James and Alice – the vicar and his tyrannical sister – who make an interesting parallel to Jennifer and her father. Alice is also a spinster, but holds all the power in her brother’s house – and is keen to dissuade any possible sisters-in-law who might oust her from the vicarage.

Among Elizabeth von Arnim fans, I don’t think Father is particularly well-regarded, but I thought it was excellent. Most of her novels seem to concern marriage, whether happy or unhappy, so to see her tackle the much-discussed issue of ‘surplus women’ in the interwar years was very interesting – and Jennifer is a great character. With her love of nature, her unconventionality (she sleeps outside on a mattress when she first arrives), and her naive but firm belief that she can escape her father’s domain, she is an attractive and engaging heroine.

Though dealing with some slightly sombre issues at times, von Arnim can never leave her humorous tone completely to one side. There are some very funny scenes – particularly, perhaps, one where James and Alice are both trying to abandon the other one in Switzerland (it makes sense in context), though Jennifer’s quirky world-view makes many otherwise mundane sentiments wryly amusing to read.

I’m always intrigued about the effect a choice of title has on a novel. If this one had been called (say) Jennifer, it would feel very different. Though her father isn’t on the scene all that often, calling the novel Father makes him feel curiously omnipresent; it seeps throughout the narrative. A clever decision on Elizabeth von Arnim’s part.

Not the easiest of her books to track down (unless you have a Kindle, where it’s probably free [EDIT: maybe it’s not…]) – and also not up there with her best novels – but definitely an entertaining and interesting one which I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. And a perfect companion to the excellent Lolly Willowes!

 

Other People’s Lives by A.A. Milne

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…or, what it’s like to read a book that almost nobody else will ever read.

You may remember, back in April, I posted about Other People’s Lives (1935) – or, at least, about finding it online and receiving my copy in the post.

Other-Peoples-Lives

It was never published as a book; the only copies that have ever existed were acting editions. By their nature, they’re not intended to be kept for very long, and it is rare to find a copy of this play. I was super lucky to do so – and, a few months later, completed the deal by reading it.

The play is quite a simple idea, but executed very well. Mr and Mrs Tilling, and their daughter Clare, are a very happy little family living in a little flat. Mrs Tilling is disabled, and Clare’s job is no grander than labelling envelopes, but neither thing stops them having a wonderful life – and listening to the novel that Mr Tilling has been writing for a while. If Milne’s portrait of a happy family could be accused of being patronising, then those (hypothetical) critics could also be accused of cynicism. It’s heart-warming and, what is more, believable.

In the flat below them congregate Arnold, Lola, Stephen, and Meg. They are Milne characters through and through in their light-hearted teasing and silliness, but with a darker edge than he usually portrays. They are mostly quite selfish and inconsiderate in their joviality; happy to joke and banter, but fairly uninterested in anything deeper. Lola is an exception, and is the driving force behind trying to help her upstairs neighbours.

The plot is a little more complicated than that, but it’s basically a cautionary tale for what happens when people interfere. It’s perhaps a little too bleak – too conveniently bleak, really, considering the series of events that come towards the end – but it’s still executed very movingly, and even made me cry a little.

But, can I really recommend it? I waited over a decade for an affordable copy to appear online, so I don’t imagine anybody will be running out to purchase a copy (nab one if you ever spot it!). It definitely added something to the experience, channelling my inner-hipster instincts; I knew that only a handful of people alive had ever had the chance to read Other People’s Lives, and somehow that made me feel more connected to the audiences of 1935 who’d have seen this on stage. Reading it was quite a different experience from reading Pride and Prejudice or Fingersmith or One Day or any novel that is likely to be recognised by most book-loving people I mention it to. Curious.

Have you had this experience? How do you feel when reading a novel or play or poetry collection so scarce that you’re almost reading it in a void? Let me know!

(And, on a completely unrelated note, episode 5 of Tea or Books? is going to be even later than it already is, because Rachel doesn’t currently have Internet access…)

Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay

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I have been extremely pleased to see the success of the British Library Crime Classics, but although I’ve cheered them on from a distance, and bought one of the John Budes, it’s only now that I’ve actually read one of the series. And it isn’t the John Bude; it is one they kindly gave me: Death on the Cherwell (1935) by Mavis Doriel Hay.

This is extremely apt for me, since it is set in Oxford – the Cherwell (pronounced char-well, please) is part of the Thames – and I know the places Hay describes. The setting is largely the environs of the non-existent Persephone College, a women-only Oxford college. A handy map in the front shows where this college supposedly stands – a small park by the river that, incidentally, remains building-free, and would be a very foolish place to build anything you didn’t want to have annually flooded. But, according to Stephen Booth’s introduction, it’s based on St. Hilda’s – which Hay attended as a student, but before women were awarded degrees.

A group of undergraduates, or ‘undergraduettes’ as the papers apparently label them, are in the process of setting up the Lode League (‘the formation of esoteric societies is one of the favourite pastimes of undergraduates’), sat on the corrugated iron roof of a small boathouse, when a mysterious canoe floats by… In it is the body of the bursar, Miss Myra Denning, an unpopular woman whose unpopularity was, indeed, the very genesis of the Lode League.

This League is composed of Daphne, Gwyneth, Nina, and Sally. In truth, I found these young women more or less interchangeable – one was supposed to be wiser than the others, one more impetuous, and so forth, but any of them could fairly easily have said any of the dialogue. It didn’t much matter. What matters rather more is the fun that Hay throws us into.

As I wrote recently in my post on A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, detective novels that aren’t written by Agatha Christie inevitably suffer by comparison, when it comes to plot. (I’m not going to risk mentioning Dorothy L. Sayers again, even though there are striking similarities in scenario to Gaudy Night, published in the same year. I’d better not say what I thought of Gaudy Night.) And the plot of Death on the Cherwell isn’t filled with the sorts of twists, turns, and surprises that Christie would have found – it ends up being one of the people you suspected it would be all along, for fairly undisguised reasons – but, that acknowledged, this novel is great fun and very well told.

Hay is great at crafting an engaging narrative. Whenever it palls a bit, we get a new character – a vivacious and witty couple who apparently appeared in Hay’s Murder Underground make a reappearance, driving madly around Oxford and staying at the Mitre (which was apparently once rather classy; how things have changed). Then there is Draga, the ‘Yugo-Slavian’ student who lives in constant surprise at the English and equally constant poor grammar. She is in every way a stereotype of the Eastern European student, but perhaps we should expect no better from the 1930s – and she is certainly not intended as an offensive portrait. She is vibrant and amusing, and certainly stands out from the other student characters.

Although sold as an amateur detectives premise, there are a couple of police officers involved. Both, luckily, are extremely willing to share details of their investigations with the central characters, and they more or less work in tandem.

I wasn’t quite fair when I said there weren’t twists and turns. There are, just not particularly in the denouement – along the way, we get curses and secrets and all that sort of thing. There isn’t a dull moment, and it’s all (I keep coming back to this) very fun. Like The Red House Mystery, it’s definitely cosy crime – with the added bonus of offering a window into a women’s college in the 1930s. It’s a delight, and if the rest of the British Library Crime Classics are of an equal tone and standard, then I can’t wait to dive in and explore.

My Husband Simon by Mollie Panter-Downes

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I was very excited to get an abebooks alert about an affordable copy of My Husband Simon (1931) by Mollie Panter-Downes (which is usually either unavailable or extortionately expensive). Her novel One Fine Day is (bold claim) one of the best I’ve ever read, and her war diaries are exceptionally good, and naturally I wanted to read more. After I posted about buying it, I was inundated with (ahem) two requests that I read and review it quickly. So, dear readers, I have.

I’ll start by managing expectations – it’s not as good as One Fine Day, London War Notes, or her volumes of short stories published by Persephone. But I still rather loved reading it. The heroine (with the extraordinary name Nevis – is this a name?) is a young wife and novelist, and the novel does, indeed, largely concern her relationship with ‘my husband Simon’. Nevis is literary, intelligent, cultured, and quite the intellectual snob; Simon is none of these things, but is charismatic and jovial (as well as fond of horse-racing). They are not temperamentally suited, but they do have rather a physical attraction – more than I would have expected to find in a 1931 novel, until I remembered The Sheik – and the novel negotiates Nevis’ attempts to write her third novel and manage her marriage. Oh, and she’s 24.

From what I can gather on her Wikipedia page (which isn’t a lot), My Husband Simon is intensely autobiographical. Both Nevis and Mollie had had runaway bestsellers while still teenagers (Mollie was only 17 when The Shoreless Sea became a huge success); both married at 21; Mollie was 24 when writing My Husband Simon – which was her third novel. As far as I can tell, it was all very much drawn from life – and it is nice to know that her real-life marriage lasted for many decades beyond the three-year-anxieties.

As far as plot goes, it is all fairly simplistic. It’s not really the love triangle that the ‘about this novel’ section promises; it’s more introspective and undecided than that. While Nevis’s problems are fairly self-indulgent, and perhaps look a bit ridiculous to anybody older than 24 (which she obviously considers a couple of steps from the grave), the novel is still engaging and enjoyable.

Mollie P-D’s greatest quality – in her finest work – is that of a stylist, I would argue. Particularly in One Fine Day, where the prose is like the most unassuming poetry. There was a 16 year gap between My Husband Simon and One Fine Day (in terms of novels); her attention was transferred to short stories. And so there is only a hint of what her writing could become. It is certainly never bad, but there are only glimpses of beauty. I did like this moment of looking out from a tram, that has the same observational stance as much of One Fine Day:

We climbed on top of the tram and away it snorted. A queer constraint was on us. We hardly said a word, but in some way all my perceptions were tremendously acute so that I took in everything that was going on in the streets. A shopping crowd surged over the pavements. In the windows were gaping carcases of meat, books, piles of vegetable marrows, terrible straw hats marked 6/11d. I though vaguely: “Who buys all the terrible things in the world? Artificial flowers and nasty little brooches of Sealyhams in bad paste, and clothes-brushes, shaped like Micky the Mouse and scarves worked in raffia?” A lovely, anaemic-looking girl stood on the kerb, anxiously tapping an envelope against her front teeth. Should she? Shouldn’t she? And suddenly, having made her decision, all the interest went out of her face and she was just one of the cow-like millions who were trying to look like Greta Garbo.
So, be comforted to know that the best of Panter-Downes’ work is easily available – but this is a novel that certainly wouldn’t disgrace Persephone covers, if they ever decided to publish more by Mollie, and a really interesting example of how she developed into the writer she eventually became.

My Sister Eileen – Ruth McKenney

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There aren’t enough unashamedly lovely books around. Too many modern books (it seems) feel they have to be either trivial or miserable, as though the only way to be literary was to be grim. There is a market for uplifting books, but these tend to be insultingly light reads (pastel-coloured romances) or forgettable books you buy from the pile by the till. Comedy, meanwhile, is apparently represented by arch or melancholic writers whose novels strike me as either entirely unamusing (I’m looking at you, Howard Jacobson) or tragedy decorated with jokes.

This is a broadbrush and uninformed portrait of modern literature, of course, but my sense is that we are experiencing a good decade for literary and experimental fiction with its serious face on, but missing out on well written joie de vivre. The exception that comes to mind might be David Sedaris’ non-fiction, which is very funny, but even this is decidedly melancholic.

So, what am I suggesting as an antidote? It’s every bit as lovely as Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages and Herbert Jenkins’ Patricia Brent, Spinster – it’s Ruth McKenney’s My Sister Eileen (1938). You might have guessed that from the title of this blog post.

I bought it a little while ago, after seeing it fleetingly mentioned in a review of Joanna Rakoff’s excellent My Salinger Year, and I was excited when a beautiful copy arrived. Still, it felt like an indulgence to be saved, and I didn’t dive straight in. My recent holiday felt like a very good opportunity to treat myself. As I expected, it’s lovely and funny and good.

It’s non-fiction – of the elaborated and exaggerated variety, I imagine – and is mostly about Ruth and Eileen’s childhood, although there are also some chapters devoted to their time living in an extremely dingy New York basement (and it is this section, I believe, that is used in the film version – which I have bought but not yet watched).

Their childhood is certainly played for laughs – it is very amusing. I wasn’t especially sold on the first chapter, which is about crying at the cinema (and the sisters’ demand that a story should be entirely tragic, or it barely counted as a story at all). But from the second chapter onwards I was completely sold. The second chapter (‘Hun-gah’) details the sisters’ attempts at amateur performances.

Eileen’s only ‘bit’ was playing a 1920s song called ‘Chloe’ (Eileen is ‘absolutely tone-deaf and has never been able to carry a tune, even the simplest one, in her whole life. She solved the difficulty by simply pounding so hard in the bass that she drowned herself out.’) The infant Ruth, on the other hand, had a foray into acting – via an experimental drama teacher who allotted her the part of ‘Hunger’ (which, incidentally, was also her only line – to be repeated). There is a wonderful climax in a scene where the sisters have been asked to amalgamate their performances into one for their assembled relatives:

Eileen played and sang first. Just as the final notes of her bass monotone chant, “I GOT-TUH go wheah yew ARE,” and the final rumble of the piano died away, I burst dramatically through the door, shouting “Hun-gah! Hun-gah!” and shaking my matted and snarled locks at my assembled relatives. My grandmother Farrel, who always takes everything seriously, let out a piercing scream.

Glorious.  And so the tales go on. We hear how Ruth was almost drowned by a Red Cross Lifesaving Examiner, how the sisters’ father was obsessed with experimental washing machines, how they enlivened a camp bird-watching, etc. When they move to New York, these adventures turn to the complexities of a basement window that drunks would yell through, a cheating landlord, and (the story that inspires the cover), the time when Ruth – then a reporter – was followed for a day by the Brazilian Navy. It’s so wonderfully silly and delightfully told. If it were not true (or at least based in truth) it might be criticised for being all over the place – but truth is not neatly arranged in logical or probable order, of course.

The Eileen of the title, incidentally, has another claim to notoriety – she married Nathanael West, and also died in the car crash that ended his life. This was actually two years after My Sister Eileen was published, so naturally it is not mentioned – but it lends a certain poignancy to the collection (and may influence the two sequels – one of which I now have, the other of which seems ungettable in the UK).

That moment of pathos aside, I think any lover of the Provincial Lady et al would also delight in this book – I certainly did, and was very glad to have found it.