1936

The Spring House by Cynthia Asquith

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We all know that the quality of a book is no guarantee that it will stay in print. The ones that survive almost always have merit, but the ones that disappear could be equally brilliant. And I was reminded of that yet again with The Spring House (1936) by Lady Cynthia Asquith. I’m going to warn you up front: this book is incredibly difficult to get hold of, but if you do have the chance then leap at it.

One of my favourite Instagram accounts is Virginia at Old Book Dreamer. She mostly reads mid-century women writers and has the most astonishing book collection – astonishing for the beautiful editions, but also because she manages to get hold of books that seem to have almost disappeared. It was she who recommended Asquith’s novels to me – not this particular one, but The Spring House was the first I managed to get hold of. And, indeed, I think Asquith only wrote two novels. I’m so grateful that Virginia directed me to her.

Though published on the cusp of World War Two, The Spring House is set during World War One. The heroine, Miranda, is living at her palatial family home that has been turned into a convalesence hospital for soldiers. In her mid-20s, she has a soldier husband who was in Canada at the outbreak of war and has had to remain there, and a young son called Pat. Among the cast of characters are her kind, slightly anxious mother, a witty friend called Gloria, a naively virtuous nurse called Vera, and her officious Aunt Madge. And then there are the men…

Miranda is considered a good person by everyone who knows her, the reader included. And it’s perhaps curious that nobody seems at all censorious about her various relationships with men. While she hasn’t committed adultery, there are several flirtatious friendships – with Richard, with Horace, with a pacifist poet and a demanding portrait artist – that are accepted fact in her social circle and seem to matter more to her than her absent husband. We learn so very little about him for most of the novel. Nobody seems to lament his absence or even particularly to notice it. It’s a curious slant on the traditional anxious-wife-on-the-home-front image that we are accustomed to.

Here she is with Richard who, as the novel opens, is perhaps the man getting closest to her heart (and, like the others, doesn’t give her husband a second thought):

Richard complained that she did not really care for him, but only for his admiration.

“To you I am only one of many. You ration me. I want long draughts of your company: not just tantalising sips. I wish you hadn’t got such a hospitable heart, that is, if you have any at all.”

Miranda winched.

[…]

“You only want admiration,” he went on. “You can’t stand any heart-searching. All you want is a superficial, stationary relationship.”

As always when pressed, Miranda felt herself losing all sense of her own identity. Everything seemed slipping from her. She felt like an actress in a badly-rehearsed play – as though she had forgotten her part. But something must be said.

“Oh, please, Richard,” she quavered, “must you be so interrogative? We used to be so happy.”

She spoke with a paralysing sense of unreality. The scene seemed something she had read about, and her mind, as we often the case, split into mutually critical parts. If only she could be spontaneous, instead of always her own censor! How much easier it would be to speak out on this sort of occasion if one had read less, she thought, not for the first time. If only I hadn’t read so many novels! They tie one’s tongue by making everything seem a cliché.

That ended up being quite a long excerpt, but I think it gives you a good sense of who Miranda is as a character – and who Asquith is an author. Because Richard isn’t wrong (without being entirely right). And Miranda just wants to be let alone to live as makes herself and others most content – including, later, getting involved in nursing. But what makes the scene and character so unusual for me is how conscious Miranda is of her perception and her reactions – not just in comparison to the other women she knows, but in comparison to the long line of fictional characters she’s encountered in books. And nothing can warm a reader to a character more than them being a reader.

But she is not alarmingly self-aware. She treads the line constantly between self-awareness and self-delusion, as the narrative often highlights. When her usually irritating Aunt does something requiring some sympathy, the narrative notes, ‘Never able to distinguish between pity and affection, she at once began to feel fond of her.’

Quite a lot of the novel has happened when the main plot comes along. He is a soldier, a friend of Miranda’s brother, home on leave. And with a speed that would be irritating if the novelist weren’t keenly aware of it, they fall in love. The main stage of the novel is then occupied by the rush and shock of feelings Miranda hasn’t experienced before, and the attempt to fit him into her life. The husband is remembered, but really only as a sad obstacle.

This is the perhaps the main thrust of The Spring House, but I am writing about it briefly because I didn’t find it as interesting as other relationships in her life – particularly her two brothers, Robin and Stephen. The way Asquith writes about mourning a sibling is subtle and beautiful. It is surely no coincidence that Asquith’s own brother died during World War One. There is a ring of authenticity to so much of The Spring House, and it’s worth remembering that Cynthia Asquith was in her late 20s during the war. Despite being written a couple of decades later, there are many elements that conjure up the war vividly and often with an unusual perspective. For example…

It was some weeks since Miranda had been in London. She was struck by its air of resigned adaptation, the prevalance of khaki, the number of slightly wounded to be seen in the streets, and the look of subdued sorror on so many faces. The sight and sound of marching soldiers still moved her like a fine line of poetry, but the Join-our-jolly-Picnic recruiting posters angered her, and she sickened at the grim sight of the sacks hung up for bayonet practice in Chelsea Barracks. As she approached Waterloo Station, she passed the ongoing draft of guardsmen, about three hundred moving as one, and many women running along by the side of them.

Asquith is clearly a very excellent writer. Her talents seem to have mostly been turned to memoirs and ghost stories, but she turns her hand to novels with a beautiful elegance. Here’s an example of her writing that also helps explain the title:

Slipping a coat over her nightgown, she stole downstairs and out of the back door. It was very mild, but the beauty of the still night made her shiver. The lawns were silver with dew, as silver as the giant soaring stems of the beeches. She hurried to the little wooden hut with a thatched roof that was perched half way up the hill from which one looked down on the House. It had been built for her as a surprised birthday present when she was six. The ‘Spring House’ she had called it as a child, because she preferred spring to summer, and the name had clung. A favourite refuge of her childhood, it always drew her back. Wherever she might be, she felt it was here that she would wish to bring any great perplexity, joy or sorrow. Within its shelter she seemed able to shrink back from the glare of life into the golden haze of her girlhood; or, if she chose to invite them, memories of early childhood came flying back to her heart.

Harder to convey is her excellence at creating place and character. Miranda is such a vivid, rounded character that it feels almost scandalous that so few contemporary readers have had the chance to meet her. You know how some characters are so alive that they should be recognised and celebrated in readerly circles? Elizabeth Bennet, Cassandra Mortmain, Anne Shirley, Mrs Danvers, John Ames and so on. It’s absurd to me that someone as alive as Miranda should only be met by a handful of living readers.

Does the book have flaws? Yes, there is a tendency to self-analysis and philosophising that could wear a bit then. I could see somebody losing patience with the way people openly and unrealistically discuss themselves and others. Love at first sight is also a red flag for some readers, and I did find the romantic relationship one of the least interesting (though still quite interesting). But The Spring House has that special something which overcomes any drawbacks. It’s one of the most immersive, beautiful novels I’ve read in many years and has reminded me what I love so much about interwar writing. Since it’s not set at the time it’s written, I don’t think it could fit into the British Library Women Writers series – but it would be a brilliant find for Persephone or a similar publishing house. We can but hope.

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.

Two final #1936Club titles

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I’ve never read more books for a club year – for the first time, I’ve read more than there are days in the club week. (Or, indeed, in any week.) So I’m going to double up with a couple of reads that I don’t really have that much to say about… sorry to end on an anti-climax, but do check out the links round up for lots more suggestions. My favourites from my reading week were Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons and Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse. I won’t be blogging for a week, but will update with any links I missed when I’m back – and have scheduled a post for tomorrow saying what the next club year will be!

Anyway, onto my final two reads…

Houses as Friends by Dorothy Pym

I didn’t know much about Dorothy Pym – no relation of Barbara – but I bought this in a little bookshop in Fowey because the title intrigued me. I thought it might be about houses in fiction, or houses in general, but it is basically Pym’s autobiography through the different houses she lived in. Edwin Lutyens even wrote the introduction.

The houses are all rather grand and wonderful, and she was certainly brought up in privilege, married someone equally rich, and lived bountifully. I ended up knowing quite a lot of anecdotes, but still didn’t know a lot about who she was in essentials. And all the anecdotes were told rather plainly, without the sprinkle of magic that brings them alive, or makes them sound more exciting than they truly are. All in all, I enjoyed it as a period piece, but I found it lent a little too close to dullness. And I don’t really remember anything in it, already. Not one to rush to.

No Place Like Home by Beverley Nichols

I adore Bev, though have been a bit up and down with his non-fiction. The ups are VERY up, and I love the Merry Hall series to distraction, but others – like his investigation into spiritualism – didn’t really work for me. I’d assumed No Place Like Home would be one of his books about his house, but it turned out to be the opposite: it’s travel literature. Specifically of one long trip through Eastern Europe, to Egypt, to Israel, to Turkey and Greece. Not in that order. Rather than write a full review, I’ve come up with some pros and cons. And please head to Karen’s 1936 Club review of it for more detail – and also less uncertain enthusiasm for it!

Pros

  • Beverley is always pretty funny – depending, of course, on what you find funny. I really enjoyed his grumpy take on the Pyramids and the Sphinx.
  • It’s a great snapshot of 1936 across Europe, at least from one man’s perspective – he makes reference to Hitler that show his views were no secret at the time, though Nichols doesn’t seem to realise it’s the last time for a while that this sort of trip would be possible
  • His perspective on being in the Holy Land is very moving, and he does experience genuine connection with Jesus by seeing the places that He went (and railing against those areas that haven’t been upheld)
  • His vehemence against animal cruelty is welcome to me, and some of his views were probably very ahead of their time

Cons

  • …and some of his views weren’t. He is rather xenophobic at times. He is very against antisemitism, and then is antisemitic himself a few pages later… in general, the people of other countries are not as good as the Brits, in his eyes, and it made for some uneasy reading
  • The ‘Irate Reader’ he introduces to have a duologue with every now and then didn’t really work for me. In another mood it might have done, but I found it a little irritating
  • I just don’t love travel writing that much! I find it often leans towards the visual, which I find hard to translate in my head, and I also prefer people writing about their own countries and times – to give a deeper authenticity and grounding to their writing.

SO there you go. Neither of these are my favourite reads for the 1936 Club, but this club has been my favourite one, I think. So many interesting titles, so much going on in the world, and a brilliant cross-section shared from across the blogging community. Thanks, as ever, for reading, reviewing, commenting and sharing in the fun!

Begin Again by Ursula Orange – #1936Club

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Of all the authors Scott at Furrowed Middlebrow has talked about over the years, Ursula Orange is the one who appealed most. So it was very exciting when he got three of her novels reprinted through his Dean Street Press series – and Begin Again is the third of those I’ve read. Orange is a wonderfully witty writer, and this novel is no different.

The novel opens with Leslie (early 20s) explaining to her mother why she feels she must move to London, where her schoolfriends Jane and Florence are living a lifestyle that Leslie considers ideal. Leslie wants to spend all the money she has on an art school – though it will not cover tuition and expenses for all that long – and also thinks she should probably have her own little studio, to be taken seriously. Whatever happens, she has to get away from the privileged and calm life she is currently living with her parents:

She knew, not only from Jane and Florence’s conversation (it had been some time since she had had a really good talk with them) but also from the pages of modern novels exactly the way in which young people living their own lives in London talk together – an attractive mixture of an extreme intensity and a quite remarkable casualness. “Henri says Marcovitch’s new poems are the finest things he’s ever read – will certainly found a school of their own. By the way – hand me the marmalade – Elissa is living with Henri now. He says he needs her for his work at present.” Clearly the sort of person who talked like this lived a much freer, a much wider, a much better life than the sort of person who merely said, “Good morning, mummy. Did you sleep well? When Alice brought my tea this morning she said a tree was blown down in the orchard last night.”

One of the things I like a lot about Orange is that she doesn’t have any throwaway characters. While four young women are at the centre of this novel, the secondary characters are not simply there to serve them. I loved the sardonic dryness of Leslie’s mother – which Leslie totally misses, since she expects her mother to be humourless. The reader is quite like Leslie’s mum – we have a definite affection for all the women at the heart of Begin Again, but also recognise they are young and silly.

The others are the aforementioned Jane and Florence, who work in offices and just about earn enough to pay for their unorthodox food and tiny flat – and Sylvia, who still lives in her parents’ grand home, thinking herself very modern with her thoughts on sexual and social liberation. All the women are very earnest, and their problems are real problems inasmuch as they genuinely feel anxiety about them, but Orange is also very funny about them. It’s also a joy to read about arguments over who used the hot water when you no longer have to house-share.

My favourite story of the four was Florence’s – who works as a typist, despite being pretty bad at it, and longs to be recognised as something more valuable. The other typist has fewer ambitions and class hang-ups, and is also much better at her job. The whole set-up of the office was believably unnerving for Florence, while also a joy to read about. That joy continues when the whole bunch travel over to Sylvia’s house for a party, and things get more dramatic and just as absurd.

This was a delightful 1936 read – enough genuine angst to make you take it seriously, and good-heartedness not to mind laughing at the characters. I’m not sure why Furrowed Middlebrow stopped after reprinting three of her novels, but I have my fingers crossed that they bring out the other three at some point…

Little G by E.M. Channon – #1936Club

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Little G is a terrible title but rather a lovely book. It is a 1936 title from E.M. Channon who is apparently well-known as a children’s writer and a detective novelist – this was one of her few adult non-detective novels, or possibly her only one, and was reprinted by Greyladies in 2012. It found its way onto my shelves in 2014, and the 1936 Club has been a great opportunity to finally read it.

In the opening chapter, Furnival is being told that he needs to rest by a doctor. He is a maths lecturer at Cambridge, and the doctor is worried that he is stressed and unhealthy – and prescribes him some relaxation in a little village. Furnival is very keen not to see any women there, as he is horrified by any company that isn’t adult male, child, or animal – and the doctor assures him that the village is bereft of adult women. This, of course, turns out not to be the case.

In case you’re starting to rather dislike Furnival, Channon lays on heavily his good attributes. Installed in his new cottage, he befriends three young siblings who live next door – offering them cakes and goodies that their aunt doesn’t believe they should eat. Holding even more sway with me, he likes cats – and is given one when he passes a house and is concerned for its welfare. Here he is, having slipped it in his coat pocket:

The kitten, though of tender age, had claws like steel hooks, a voice like a bat’s and enough determination for ten full-grown Toms. He objected strongly to imprisonment, and fought with determination to work his way out. Furnival had to keep a tight hand on him, making personal discovery that the needle-like teeth matched the claws for sharpness; but he cared little for that. The warm, fierce, furry little body, wriggling ragefully under his fingers, gave him a pleasant thrill of affection and ownership, such as he had not felt since the acquisition of his first guinea pig, more years ago than he cared to count. He quickened his steps: not half so much for the sake of getting rid of a troublesome pocketful, as because he wanted to take out his purchase and play with it.

The kitten, true to its feline nature, finding that its new owner cared not a jot for all its fury, gave up the unequal contest, curled itself up in a concise ball, and slumbered profoundly. The pocket was warm. Struggling was, obviously, a useless waste of energy; and there is no more profound philosopher in the animal kingdom than Felis Domestica.

Sadly, for me, we don’t see anywhere near enough of the kitten again. But that might be a relief if kittens aren’t your thing. Instead, we see Furnival interact with various villagers – his gardener, the vicar, the women who do turn out to exist, and particularly the three children. He softens over time, but he wasn’t really that un-soft in the first place. The stakes are low, but Channon stays decidedly on the right side of charming – the only part I thought was a little fey was when Furnival starts enthralling the children with stories about gravity, calling it Little G. But it is not the only Little G who turns up…

All in all, this novel was always a delight to read, and is exactly the right sort of book for many occasions when you need something fun, sweet, and very 1930s.

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse – #1936Club

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When I wrote about Strange Journey by Maud Cairnes, a body-swap comedy, I was wondering which others there were. Malie and Constance both mentioned Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse which, as luck would have it, turns out to be have been published in 1936. I have zillions of unread Wodehouses, but I decided to add another – or, rather, to listen to the audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil. And what a wonderful book it is.

The narrator is Reggie Swithin, the third Earl of Havershot. He is 28, has a face that he often compares to a gorilla, and has been sent off to Hollywood by an aunt to rescue his cousin Eggy from getting engaged to a gold-digger. This is all just a way of getting an earl to America, and specifically to Hollywood. Wodehouse himself worked on Hollywood scripts a good deal, I believe, and comes to the movie plot with a great amount of good-natured cynicism. Reggie is the sort of affable and daft hero of almost any of Wodehouse characters – indeed, as he introduces himself, he is ‘just one of those chaps’.

Eggy is engaged, as it turns out, not to the gold-digger but to Ann Bannister – who was previously engaged to Reggie. And Reggie, in turn, falls in love instantly on the train on the way to Hollywood – with April June, the wonderfully named and very beautiful film actress. He is in love devotedly almost before they’ve spoken, but Wodehouse fans know to distrust the sort Wodehouse woman who speaks affectedly of how she is only ever happy in the company of books and flowers, and thinks nothing of money.

Anyway, all of Reggie’s plans are put on hold by bad toothache, and he goes to a dentist. In the waiting room, he meets Joey Cooley – a golden-haired child who is considered the idol of American motherhood. Michigan mothers are en route to lavish praise on him as they speak.

Both go into their respective dentists for their respective operations, apparently of the sort that require being knocked out by gas. And, while under gas… they swap bodies.

The first Reggie knows of it is when he comes to, and his chair is surrounded by eager journalists. And so set in motion his life as a child star – with a strictly controlled routine, domineering protectors, and (most chillingly) diet of prunes for almost every meal.

We don’t see much as Joey-as-Reggie for the rest of Laughing Gas, but follow Reggie-as-Joey. Being Wodehouse, the stakes are hilariously low. He takes the metaphysical anomaly pretty well, and doesn’t waste too much time philosophising. Instead, he is chiefly anxious about having to kiss someone at the unveiling of a statue, and where he can procure some substantial food (leading to perhaps my favourite line – ‘I had had a rotten lunch, at which the spinach motif had been almost farcically stressed’).

Then, of course, there are various love entanglements – he has the opportunity to see April June in a less flattering light, and may just fall in someone else along the way…

Wodehouse is always wonderful, but some novels are better than others. For my money, this is one of the best I’ve read. He is so consistently brilliant in turn of phrase – the sort of thing he does that nobody else can do; a brilliant mix of hyperbole, litotes, inversion, and all manner of other linguistic tricks that somehow never get old. He was a comic genius.

It’s hard to remember exact quotes from an audiobook, but here are three that bat about online a lot:

  • If Eggy wanted to get spliced, let him, was the way I looked at it. Marriage might improve him. It was difficult to think of anything that wouldn’t.
  • I shuddered from stem to stern, as stout barks do when buffeted by the waves.
  • It was a harsh, rasping voice, in its timbre not unlike a sawmill.

One I liked was along the lines of ‘It would have been alright if things were other than they were, but that is just what they, in fact, weren’t’. But line after line are brilliant, and I laughed my way through this. The plot is really just decoration for his unparalleled turn of phrase, and I’m delighted that the 1936 club has given me the opportunity to read another of his masterpieces.

The Enchanted Voyage by Robert Nathan – #1936Club

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Reading Robert Nathan is one of the relatively rare times when I know what it must be like to be an Anglophile-bibliophile outside of the UK. His books are pretty easy to stumble across in the US and pretty tricky to find here – but on both my visits to Washington DC, I managed to come away with a couple of his books. I bought The Enchanted Voyage in 2015 and, as luck would have it, it’s a 1936 title.

Nathan’s novels are always pretty short and whimsical, and The Enchanted Voyage is no different. The font is enormous and even so it’s something under 200 pages – telling the story of Mr Pecket, a carpenter who is disliked by his wife and cheated by his neighbours. Or perhaps ‘cheated’ isn’t the right word, since he walks open-eyed into situations where he will build shelving (say) and be hectored into being paid rather less than the value of the wood.

But, as the opening lines tell us, Mr Pecket has one eccentric passion:

Mr Hector Pecket had a boat. He had built it himself; it stood squarely on the ground in the yard of his little home in the Bronx, very far from the water. But it would scarcely have floated anywhere else, for Mr Pecket had neglected to  caulk it, and it had no keel. Nevertheless inland and to the eye, it was a boat; a little like an ark, but with a mast for sailing, an anchor, a windlass, belaying pins, a cabin, and a cockpit. It was named the Sarah Pecket, after his wife.

Mrs Sarah Pecket is not sensible of having received a compliment. Rather, she would live to have some household income – and sells the boat to a neighbour to run as a restaurant. She puts wheels on it, to transport it round the corner. In another sort of novel, we would have a lot of sympathy for Mrs Pecket. But in the fanciful and carefree world of Robert Nathan’s heroes, this is a crime – and we cheer Mr Pecket on when, in the middle of the night, he commandeers the boat and sails – no, rolls – away. The wheels move him on the ground, and the sail determines his direction.

Along the way, he picks up a disaffected waitress and a curious dentist – sure, why not – and they continue to trundle along with the aim of getting to Florida. But the real aim is just to get away from everyday life – the humdrum, the unkind, and the unimaginative. This isn’t an escape from reality – their boat is slowly wheeling along the roads, not floating off into the sky – but it is an escape nonetheless. There is a sort of Peter Pan esque tone to the whole thing. Emotions are broad and simple things in Nathan’s work, but there is something touching about seeing them so close to the surface.

This reading club year is really interesting, because by 1936 it seems to have been rather an open secret that a major conflict was coming. While plenty of politicians were famously trying to avert it, you get the sense from reading books of the period that the general population would not have been enormously surprised to have found themselves in the middle of a world war a few years later – at the very least, the prospect of it was a dominating conversation. So how would the topic find its way into the novels we’re looking at this year?

This is the nearest that The Enchanted Voyage gets to contemporary commentary:

Mr Pecket walked down the street, carrying his shelves and his tools. He looked into the faces of men and women, and what he saw made him feel anxious and sad. It seemed to him that a new feeling had come into the world since he was young; that people no longer felt kindly disposed toward one another. Now that the bad times were over, and it was possible to work again, they seemed to be looking for someone to blame for everything.

You – you have a sharp look, you dress too well. Doubtless it was you who made all the trouble in the world. Well, just keep out of my way after this.

And you, over there – you have no money and no work. To the devil with you. Perhaps you are a communist.

Interestingly, he is seeing this is as a period when the Great Depression is largely over – but senses that there are difficult things on the horizon too. In context, it hammers home Mr P’s dissatisfaction with the world, but it’s still very much of its time. Those are the sorts of details I love discovering in these club years.

Is Robert Nathan great literature? No, not really – but he is reliably diverting, with a joyful imagination and I love spending time in his eccentric and sweet worlds.

Thirteen Guests by J. Jefferson Farjeon – #1936Club

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There are a whole bunch of British Library Crime Classics from 1936, and I have quite a few of them on my shelves. Which to choose? Murder in Piccadilly, The Sussex Downs Murder, and The Santa Klaus Murder were options, but I chose Thirteen Guests because I’ve enjoyed other J. Jefferson Farjeon novels.

It starts really promisingly. A jovial young man arrives at a country station, and leaps from the carriage – in so doing, he injures himself quite badly, because the train was in motion. A witty young woman takes pity on him – John and Nadine, for such are their names, at a delightful pair. Farjeon is great at fun dialogue that doesn’t feel forced, and I’d have loved a rom-com where they overcome their obstacles – e.g. Nadine is very funny about the fact that she is ten years older than John. That’s not what this novel is, of course.

John is persuaded to take shelter at a house where Nadine is staying – and he is the thirteenth guest. That means that, as well as the hosts, there are 13 more characters. Among them are a famous painter, a famous actress, a man who manufactures sausages, a gossip columnist, a trashy novelist, an MP…  goodness, there are so many of them.

And guess what guys? The first body that turns up is NONE of them!

I won’t write too much about this one because I’m going to put it in the ‘disappointment’ pile of British Library Crime Classics – because the writing is so good at the start, and I was so into the world he created. And I suppose the writing continues to be good, but before long I stopped noticing that because I was so confused. There are SO many characters, and the police who get involved – while very amusing – are the sort who like to list timings and places and variables over and over.

Anyway, if you have a mind for this sorts of complex detective novels than I do, then you might well love it. Perhaps very slow reading with a notebook and pen would be rewarding? But, for me, I’m afraid this one left me still have no idea who, what, why, where, or when even when I turned the final page.

Miss Linsey and Pa by Stella Gibbons – #1936club

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Lots of Stella Gibbons’ novels have come back into print in recent years – from Vintage and from Dean Street Press – but Miss Linsey and Pa (1936) has been notably missing from their lists. Having read it for the 1936 Club, I can sadly see why it wouldn’t fit into 21st-century publishing. And yet it’s my favourite of her non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels that I’ve read so far.

Miss Bertie Linsey and her Pa move to London to be near Bertie’s uncle – Mr Petley – and his son Len, realising that they need family connections now that they are falling on harder times. They leave behind an idyllic countryside home that comes with plenty of beautiful trees and green spaces, but no source of income. They are emphatically not invited to live with Mr Petley and Len above their tobacconist’s shop, but Mr Petley goes as far as to find them accommodation at the nearby home of the Fells. Mr Petley doesn’t trust any accommodation outside of Radford Street, and thinks that Miss Linsey and Pa will manage to make do with the dingy, beetle-infested home run by Mrs Fell. Mr Fell, meanwhile, keeps birds in the upper rooms and seldom communicates with anybody at all.

Gibbons has given us a wonderful cast here, even if we got no more (and we get some great other people). Miss Linsey is resilient, managing to be both enthusiastic and rather sad. Pa is happier than she to get to know the Fells, but is also drawn to know the local pub. Mr Petley is quite hardened and wants little to do with his in-laws, and is affectionately controlling of his son – whose life, and love, was left in France in the First World War two decades earlier.

There is quite an emotional core to this novel, particularly in Len’s storyline of the woman he loves in France – I found a lot of it very moving. But there are also plenty of opportunities for Gibbons’ satirical streak, that I haven’t seen have such a delightful outing in any of the other non-Cold-Comfort-Farm novels. In Miss Linsey and Pa, she has her sights on spearing Bloomsbury – because Miss Linsey finds work first as a cook-housekeeper at the home of Dorothy Hoad and E.V. Lassiter, and later as a sort of governess for a household with very strict rules on not telling the child stories and always calling everything by its proper name. These were my favourite sections – here’s how we first meet Miss Hoad, coming into the tobacconist and meeting Miss Linsey:

She nodded and, turning her back, stared out into the street with her dark unhappy eyes. What would E.V. be doing? She looked down at her platinum watch, of so fiercely modernist a design that it suggested a short story by Ernest Hemingway. Half-past three. E.V. might be trying to write, with the wave of hair falling into her eyes.

She turned round again as the drab man came back into the shop with a smaller and even drabber woman. G*d, how awful it must be to be that kind of person and live that kind of life!

And here is one of the many very funny snapshots of Bloomsbury life:

The women friends of Dorothy and herself used frequently to announce that they must have a child.

They would plomp themselves on the sofa, fling up their feet and put their elbows behind their heads and stare at the ceiling. Then they would say abruptly ‘I must have a child.’

‘You ought to have a child,’ they would say bluntly, when one of their number complained of a headache or an inability to finish writing a novel. Sometimes they had the child (they never called it a baby), sometimes they got no further than plomping on the sofa and announcing that they ought to have one.

For quite a short novel, an awful lot goes on – perhaps because there are four central characters who get our attention and sympathy, and plenty of secondary ones who are equally interesting. The combination of satire and pathos works because we aren’t asked to combine those feelings for any particular individual – rather our laughter at Bloomsbury, say, is part of what makes Miss Linsey’s difficult life so moving. And the climactic moment of the novel succeeds in being dramatic and poignant in a way that feels honest to everything that has preceded – including layers to Mr Fell, who could easily have been a one-note character experiencing unspecified mental illness.

And why wouldn’t it be published now? Well, sadly Gibbons includes portraits of a Black character, a Jewish character, and a lesbian that are all inappropriate to differing degrees. Some in that well-intentioned ‘You won’t believe this character is from X minority and yet isn’t Y’ way that is hardly any more palatable than out and out racism. These elements are very much not the main thrust of the novel, though it would also be hard to neatly excise them.

There’s a conversation to be had about the moral responsibility of reprint publishing, and perhaps that’s a topic for another day – but no author is ‘owed’ reprinting, and any publisher is likely to decide this isn’t worth the fight. And it’s a shame that these parts pull Miss Linsey and Pa back, because it is otherwise a wonderful triumph of a novel – and, with those caveats, perhaps my favourite read of the year so far.

Keep The Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell

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I’ve been reading D.J. Taylor’s enormous overview of 20th-century English literature on and off for four or five years. It’s called The Prose Factory, which isn’t a great title for a book that also covers poetry, but it’s certainly been interesting. Like anybody with a private interest, some things loom larger than perhaps they ought – and with Taylor it is George Orwell. He’s obviously a significant figure of the 30s and 40s, but it’s astonishing how often Taylor manages to mention him.

I’m actually thirty years further forward in The Prose Factory, but picking it up reminded me of its Orwell-dominance, which in turn reminded me that I wanted to read more Orwell. I’ve read the big-hitters – Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm – and I’ve read Homage to Catalonia. I thought all of them were brilliant, and have had several others for many years. Simply because it’s been on my shelves the longest, seventeen years, I took down Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936) recently.

I think Orwell might fall in that category of author you don’t see mentioned that much in the blogosphere, simply because we all read him long before we started book blogs. I don’t remember seeing a review of this one, or any of the lesser-known novels, and it’s a pity because it’s rather brilliant. I’d love it for the opening scene alone.

Gordon Comstock is the ‘hero’ of the novel, and as it opens he is working in a secondhand bookshop that also functions as a library for twopenny books. He is working on his own poetry, and has had a volume published that the Times Literary Supplement said showed promise. The extended scene in the bookshop/library is effectively to set up Gordon’s position on a scale of intellectual snobbery. I’m glad I read it now rather than seventeen years ago, because I think most of the names in the passage below would have meant nothing to me then – whereas now I can understand them as Orwell intended the reader to: as a barometer of the reading taste Gordon is setting himself against.

Eight hundred strong, the novels lined the room on three sides ceiling-high, row upon row of gaudy oblong backs, as though the walls had been built of many-coloured bricks laid upright. They were ranged alphabetically. Arlen, Burroughs, Deeping, Dell, Frankau, Galsworthy, Gibbs, Priestley, Sapper, Walpole. Gordon eyes them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place. Pudding, suet pudding.

Some of these names might only be familiar if you’ve studied popular culture of the period – does anybody read Warwick Deeping now? – but others have lingered. It’s a mix of the middle-class and the lower-middle-class, all with pretensions above their stations. Those who read Galsworthy thought themselves intellectuals; those who read Ethel M. Dell probably thought themselves above those who read westerns. All of it makes bitter Comstock feel angry and repelled – and bitterness is the keynote of his personality.

He lives in poverty – or, at least, poverty for someone of his education and intelligence. The only people he sees are a rich friend called Ravenstock, who tries to help get his poetry published and offers (and is refused) to lend him money, his girlfriend Rosemary, and an aunt Julia who is ever poorer than him, but from whom he still borrows money. It fits his code of pride that he cannot borrow from a rich friend, but will from a poor relative.

Pride is the other keynote, alongside bitterness. His stubbornness is infuriating. He won’t let Rosemary pay for dinner when they go out, because the man must pay for the woman – even if it means he can’t pay his rent or can’t afford to eat for the rest of the week. Rosemary puts up with an awful lot, and sticks with him despite all his moroseness.

Iterated through the novel, either in Gordon’s dialogue or in his internal dialogue, is that everything comes down to money. He can’t marry Rosemary because he doesn’t have money. She won’t sleep with him – so Gordon argues – because he doesn’t have money. He can’t work as a poet because he doesn’t have money. And he doesn’t have money because he left a relatively well-paying job in advertising in order to get out of the capitalist machine.

What’s so impressive about Keep the Aspidistra Flying is that Orwell has a mouthpiece for a point of view with which he evidently has substantial sympathy – and bravely chooses to make that mouthpiece objectionable. As well as bitter and proud, Gordon is stubborn, selfish, and often unkind to the long-suffering Rosemary. But there is also enough good in him to make the reader (this reader, at least) not hate him. He loves the beautiful and noble. He partly cares so much what people think of him because of his own low self-esteem, and his recognition that others have achieved much more. On the whole, he falls down on the side of being unpleasant. But it is so well-judged a portrait that he does not become a villain – rather, he is a friend that we are frustrated by and beginning to be sick of, even if we agree with him in essentials.

Orwell apparently thought little of the novel, and didn’t want it reprinted. I don’t agree with him. It doesn’t have the sophistication of Nineteen Eighty-Four but it does have the same brilliant prose. He is the best writer I’ve read for writing that is entirely unshowy and is yet superlatively good. The plot is simple but perfectly judged, and I’m all the keener to read those other Orwells I’ve got on the shelves. In some ways, it’s a shame that his dystopian novels are the only ones that are widely remembered, because he so strikingly observed the real world too.