1938

William’s Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan

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William's Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan

I’m delighted that Recovered Books is making G.E. Trevelyan’s novels available again, because they have been so very difficult to get hold of. The next (after they published Two Thousand Million Man-Power) is William’s Wife (1938), a novel that is perhaps less ambitious, but I think even more successful.

As the novel opens, Jane has just married William Chirp. We don’t see any of their courtship or really get to understand what ended up with these two fairly unsuited people coming together in marriage. But perhaps we can guess – William is a widower who runs a grocer’s in the town and probably wants somebody at home to make his life comfortable again. Jane is a lady’s maid who is moving up in the world by marrying a man who owns a business and a home. No matter that they have little in common and even less to talk about.

Quickly, Jane learns the dominant characteristic of William: miserliness. He might call it prudence, or living within his means. But he begrudges every penny spent. And he is willing to live in almost any condition, so long as he avoids expenditure. The hints of this come steadily, though at first it’s minor matters about the home (I am borrowing some of the same quotes that Brad included in his review – Brad being the mastermind behind the Recovered Books series.)

“How about that window cord,” she said in a low, Sunday voice, straight forward into her collar. “Did you tell someone about it?”

“Cord? Eh?” He shut the gate behind them and they went on around the drive, still talking in low voices in case one of the neighbours should hear, or someone in the road.

“Yes,” she said. “What I told you. It’s gone in the lower sash.”

“Don’t want to open the lower sash.” He fitted his key in the door. “That don’t matter.”

William is not a violent person by any means, but he has a certainty and a determination that Jane seems unequal to combat. Nor does she try especially hard – any attempts to get money from him, beyond the meagre housekeeping allowance, are met with his rigid logic or by references to the angelic, unquestioning nature of his first wife. Jane, meanwhile, is ashamed of her wearing-out clothes or what people from the town would think if they knew how poorly they lived.

And he wasn’t even looking round. Pointing with his pipe. “Waste not, want not.”

“I know, William, but it’s the best part of two years and….”

“Save something for a rainy day.”

He drew at his pipe for some minutes, then he looked round at her. “My poor wife….” He cleared his throat. “My first wife didn’t go spending on new gowns, not once in ten, no, fifteen years.” He put the pipe in his mouth and turned back to the fire.

Eventually, the worm turns. Jane begins to find ways to save a little money herself. She buys slightly cheaper products and keeps the difference. She drops less in the church collection than William gives her, and keeps the change. Slowly but surely she amasses enough to buy a new dress – relying on his masculine ignorance of women’s clothing to pass it off as a mere adjustment to her previous dress. And then saving begins again. She moves her stash every day, fearful that it be unearthed and her whole scheme tumble to the ground. The reader doesn’t think that William would be violent or throw her out or anything – but somehow Trevelyan builds up the tension so that we are equally afraid of its discovery.

Skip this paragraph if you don’t want to know something that happens midway through the novel – but I think it’s important to an understanding of the novel to mention it (and it’s on the back of the book, so I don’t feel too bad about mentioning it). Eventually William dies. Jane, you would think, is free from his oppression. And yet… somehow she has become too mired in his worldview. The second half of the novel is even more powerful than the first. Her miserliness gets worse and worse – her cutting corners and making savings leaves in a terrible, haunting way to her losing everything that gives her status and dignity. She has truly, in every sense, become ‘William’s wife’. It is horrifying but ineluctable, and masterfully done by Trevelyan.

What makes William’s Wife such a success is Trevelyan’s ingenious pacing. The reader isn’t spared anything. Day by day, month by month, we follow Jane’s decline. There is little that is dramatic or surprising – instead, she sets up her premise and follows it steadily to its natural climax. The blurb calls it ‘the most normal horror story ever written’, and while blurbs that call their book the ‘most’ anything are to be distrusted, it’s not an inaccurate description. It isn’t scary, in the usual sense of scary. But it is haunting. It is a horror story in the sense that it is horribly believable – perhaps the sort of miserable world behind any number of closed doors. Interestingly, it really reminded me of an ostensibly very different Recovered Books novel – Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis. Both take an awful situation and play it out slowly, painstakingly to its end.

It’s not the most fun book to read, but there is an awful lot to admire here. Trevelyan chooses different canvases and subjects for the three novels of hers I’ve read so far – this one has the narrowest subject in mind, and perhaps that is why it is the most successful novel. It does what she sets out to do with terrible brilliance. It certainly deserves its republication, and I recommend getting a copy – when you can stomach the experience. (Incidentally, at the time of writing it is on sale from the publisher.)

Novella a Day in May: Days 18 and 19

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

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

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

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

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

Day 19: The House (1938) by William McElwee

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excellent Intentions by Richard Hull

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Who doesn’t love the British Library Crime Classics? I’m amassing them far faster than I can read them, but earlier this month I did read Excellent Intentions (1938) by Richard Hull, which is one of their more recent publications. I was beguiled by the description of it being an unusual twist on the detective novel. And the reason it’s a twist is because we start in the courtroom, with the accused in the dock…

“May it please your lordship – members of the jury.” Anstruther Blayton rose to his feet and, as was his habit, moved some papers that were near him in an unnecessary and fussy manner. At the age of fifty-two he was, he knew, comparatively young to have been selected by the Attorney-General to act as leader in a trial which was arousing a certain amount of public interest. Even though he had been known for some time as a leading K.C. on the circuit, it was his chance and he meant to make the most of it.

That’s the opening paragraph, throwing us right into the midst of the trial. But – crucially – we do not know who the accused is.

As the trial continues, the scenes described run parallel to it. So, as the brilliantly-named Anstruther Blayton talks us through the scene of the death, we then jump to seeing it – Mr Cargate, taking snuff on a train, and dying almost immediately. Cargate is that stereotypical murder victim from this genre – universally disliked, and rightly so. All manner of people are suspected, from his household staff to the inheritors to a group of people involved in (of all things) the stamp trade.

I don’t know if Hull was a philatelist or simply did a lot of research, but buckle up to learn a huge amount about stamps. Unless you already know it, in which case… well, I hope he got the details right. I could have done with perhaps less of this information, not least because I spent the whole time marvelling that anybody could care whether or not a particular stamp did or did not have a dot of ink in a particular place. But Hull does a good job of immersing us in this world.

Hull writes with wit, which always helps this sort of novel, and many of his characters are very vivid – particularly in the silent sparring within the courtroom. The actual plot seems like it might be rather flimsy, but don’t form your opinions until the final page… and perhaps not even then. A worthy addition to the BLCC series.

The ABC of Authorship by Ursula Bloom

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ABC of AuthorshipOne of the Project 24 books I mentioned the other day was The ABC of Authorship (1938) by Ursula Bloom – and, just as I couldn’t resist buying it, equally I couldn’t resist immediately reading it. For sound advice in 2017, it’s pretty useless – as a glimpse into the world of writing in the 1930s, it’s great fun.

I say ‘writing’, but I should clarify that she is chiefly concerned with only one small corner of authorship. While she does devote a chapter to novels at the end, and airily passes by poetry in a handful of sentences, this book is chiefly concerned with stories in small magazines. That alone dates it. There was a proliferation of small magazines in the early twentieth century, both regional and national, and they were happy hunting ground for the budding author. Bloom devotes a lot of The ABC of Authorship in advising how best to approach these – down to individual magazines, and whether they would prefer (say) a story about a dashing hero or a domestic scene. I imagine it was fairly useful advice in 1938 – though the editors of those magazines may have been inundated with a certain sort of story.

Let’s be clear who Bloom was and the sort of market she’s talking about. She is apparently in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most prolific author ever – and wrote (gulp) over 500. I’ve read three of them, all novels she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Essex – she had various pseudonyms, and wrote under her own name too – and they were witty and enjoyable, and pretty good examples of light middlebrow fare. Under other names, and when writing for magazines, I think she favoured writing a little to the south of middlebrow – though certainly not racy. But she is certainly well placed to talk about getting stuff out there – she seems, as far as this book shows, to have written stories and serials every day, as well as those hundreds of novels.

She kicks off with a chapter called ‘Let’s Have a Look at Yourself’ – essentially saying “are you aware that you actually have to do something?” From here, we get chapters on how to find a plot (including, amusingly, plagiarising straight from plays you see), the business side of Fleet Street, writing features (she apparently once dictated 1000 words about a European queen over the phone), writing articles, writing serials, and the vagaries of the Editorial Mind. This last is mostly about editors being real people too – but also advising that you buy all the small magazines out there, make notes as to their contents, and know when styles changed. Thus you may impress editors.

She scatters examples throughout – some that she has had published, some suggestions, and one that appears to be ripped off from Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage – and they occasionally make for entertaining reading. While a lot of her advice is practicable and doubtless useful to those who bought this book in 1938, it’s hard not to smile at some of the things that she thinks make for good inspiration. Her original thoughts include writing an article on ‘Look to your future’, or a piece called ‘Don’t be Lonely’. She advises that any serial, if lagging, can be livened up with a bull that’s got loose.

My favourite gosh-haven’t-times-changed moment came when she advised that you could always make money with ‘informative verse’, adding ‘I have taken household tips from magazines and have set them into two-line verses, for which there has never been any difficulty in the way of a sale’. Imagine finding any editor in the world who’d give you good money for the examples she offers:

The perfect gent knows it’s a sin
To tuck his napkin ‘neath his chin.

A heinous friend I had, called Nelly;
She used a spoon when eating jelly!

What should you not do? I mentioned that she wasn’t racy – I perhaps didn’t go far enough. Amongst other things, she advises not writing about adultery, the Royal Family, or having lost a child.

It’s hard not to warm to Bloom in this book – I hope it’s clear that I’m smiling rather than sneering. She is so positive, so encouraging, and clearly extremely successful. I sincerely hope that lots of young writers found her advice got them on their way to writing careers. She couldn’t have known the window into the past that she’d be providing 80 years later, or how much this man in 2017 would enjoy the book.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier #1938Club Guest Review

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When I told family and friends that I was co-leading the 1938 Club, I encouraged anybody who was interested to contribute their own review. A few of my IRL friends have indeed been doing 1938 reading along with us, and my friend Sarah has written this fantastic review of one of my faves, Rebecca. Do make her welcome!

RebeccaI have strong memories of watching Hitchcock’s film adaptation of Rebecca as a kid – the atmosphere, all in black and white, Maxim driving the heroine around in Monte Carlo, and the fancy dress party at Manderley. A few years ago I read du Maurier’s collection of short stories including The Birds – she has clearly made several strong contributions to the public consciousness.

So I came to Rebecca with some expectation, and also a sense that I knew the story. Neither mattered (and my feeling that I knew what happened was wrong, in any case!) as I was instantly drawn in. I love it when a book is so easy to get into, and you feel like you’ve been reading it for much longer than the first few pages. At various points along the way the book would bring back elements of the story that I remembered, but this didn’t bother me and I happily followed it, expecting some things and being surprised by others.

While the nameless protagonist and narrator is in many ways annoying, I found her very easy to empathise with in the first half – perhaps because I can remember being an awkward, shy girl, but also I think du Maurier does a fantastic job of bringing her character to life and making her inner monologue realistic and relatable. She goes off on involved fantasy daydreams at the drop of a hat, thinks (tamely) bitchy thoughts about her obnoxious employer Mrs Van Hopper, and for me is just the right mix of awkward, hopeful, embarrassed, daydreamy, and sullen, with bouts of confidence that then get shot down. I’ve made her sound awful! She’s not, she’s really quite endearing. And her first love/obsession for Maxim de Winter, the handsome stranger who shows her kindness and attention and entertains her in the absence of any friends at all, is really understandable and well drawn. Of course as readers, you feel that something’s not quite adding up, but it’s how du Maurier wants you to feel. You buy it; you’re along for the ride and eagerly waiting to see what will happen when they get back to Manderley.

The not-quite-right feeling that you get from the start of the relationship between Maxim and the narrator is continued and built upon once we get to Manderley, with the creepy staff, the disused wing of the house, the ‘blood red’ rhododendrons, and the obsessive references to Rebecca – for a good portion of the book it feels like she is mentioned on every page, which is obviously a device to make you feel like our narrator – to feel the oppressive, overwhelming force of Rebecca everywhere and in all the characters you meet. Here, I started to feel slightly frustrated by the spinelessness of our narrator, and the crappy attitude of Maxim (I don’t care if you’re Troubled and Brooding, you can pull yourself out of it enough to know you’re being horrible), but it didn’t really matter as I was invested in the story. I found myself trying to second guess the plot developments and the truth about Rebecca – but in an enjoyable way; trying to pick up on clues and events to work out what they meant. That sustained suspense is what du Maurier has done really effectively in this novel.

There are some lovely observations that stand out as being very much of their time – like when a dead body is discovered and an investigation must take place – and part of the ensuing chaos is that the lady of the house misses lunch, and decides they won’t change for dinner that evening. Similarly, when her husband comes under suspicion of murder, and our narrator frets that his scone is going cold. The party they host, too, sounds fabulous – if you had servants to run it for you in your stately mansion – hundreds of people in fancy dress dancing to the live band in the ballroom, with food and drink laid out, games rooms, fairy lights throughout the extensive grounds, and a fireworks display; all cleared away by the staff first thing in the morning.

In the end, the characters are not completely believable (although maybe they were more so in 1938; but I’m still genuinely puzzled by facts such as that Maxim and the second Mrs de Winter actually seem to love each other), and much of the plot is a little thin (why did Maxim marry Rebecca in the first place? Are we to believe that the sole reason why Rebecca was so despicable, so wicked, was simply that she was sleeping around and threatening to bring shame upon Manderley?! Why doesn’t Frank, Maxim’s confidante who shows the most kindness to our narrator, tell her the truth about Rebecca?).

The writing isn’t brilliant or outstanding, but it’s really good – solid, clean writing with enough description and atmosphere but that doesn’t get bogged down, and feels more modern and fresh than a book that’s nearly 80 years old.

It’s not the scariest or thrilleriest thriller that you’ll read, but despite all of the misgivings above I found it really enjoyable – a well written, compelling, interesting story that has left a fresh impression on me. I think it will continue to stand out as leaving a lasting memory, even if it’s just a sense of the suspense created, the atmosphere of Manderley, or some of the characters, like I had from watching the film around 20 years ago. I’ll definitely look forward to reading my next du Maurier.

The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham #1938Club

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

I read the Persephone, but couldn't resist sharing this Puffin cover.
I read the Persephone, but couldn’t resist sharing this Puffin cover.

According to the pencil note inside of my copy of The Children Who Lived in a Barn, I bought it on 18th June 2009 in London, though whether that was at the Persephone shop or not, I couldn’t tell you. As I said before, one of the lovely things about this sort of theme week is that it gives me the opportunity to take down books from my shelves that I have left too long neglected – and The Children Who Lived in a Barn was precisely the sort of book I wanted to read over the past few days, feeling sorry for myself with a cold.

Eleanor Graham isn’t one to cloak the story of her book. It is, indeed, about children who live in a barn. The children are Sue, Bob, Joseph, Samuel, and Alice – in that age order, with Sue the eldest at 12. Joseph and Samuel are twins known as Jumbo and Sambo, or Jum and Sam, and are the sort of storybook twins who speak in unison and share a single character. As for the rest, Sue is resourceful and domestic, Alice is feminine and a little spoiled, and Bob is adventurous and a bit stubborn. Graham hasn’t reinvented the wheel when it comes to the children’s characters. She is particularly, if not surprisingly, old-fashioned when it comes to gender roles (“Why on earth were we made girls, Al? Boys can always run off and do things outside, but we always have to tidy up indoors”.) But her premise is rather unusual.

The children’s parents are called suddenly away to visit an ailing relative – and are taking the then-modern and relatively unusual step of flying there. But the children don’t hear back from them… and then they are evicted by the obstreperous man who leases their house… There are threats from local busybodies (more on them soon) that the children will be divided up, until a kindly local farmer offers them the use of his barn. And they take him up on it.

The barn is a bit less basic then one might imagine – it has a stove, a tap, and other bathroom requirements are mysteriously never mentioned. Still, it stretches credibility a touch to believe that parents would blithely leave five children of 12 and under to their own devices, even without the possibility of eviction on the horizon. But this, of course, is fantasy – and nobody (in 1938, at least) turned to children’s literature for gritty realism.

There are some locals who share my mistrust of the situation – but the District Visitor (‘the D.V.’) and her ilk are treated with short shrift by Graham. Without exception, they perform their duties with rudeness and rigorous unkindness. Here’s Mrs. Legge in action:

“We have been working very hard indeed on your behalf and have now decided on a plan of action. Oh, yes, you got here first – but we had actually arranged for you to do something of the sort, for a time at least. The summer lies ahead of us and you won’t suffer any great hardship in camping out here for a few weeks or even months. You must not, of course, just run wild. But we shall see that that does not happen. We must know that you are observing the decencies of life, that the place is being kept clean and in order, that you have enough to eat and that you are attending properly to hair, teeth, nails,and so on. So for the present you may stay here and we have appointed Miss Ruddle to come here and inspect every Friday at half-past-four.” 

It is clear that the reader is supposed to cheer on the situation of the children living in the barn, looking after themselves, and I was more than willing to suspend disbelief and everything else, and get behind Sue et al. It was just too enjoyable and charming a story not to.

Once they’re in situ, the book is quite episodic – as many children’s stories of the period were. So we see Alice’s interactions with poor Miss Blake (who spends a great deal of time making her an ugly frock; the ugliness and Miss Blake’s strict manner are enough for us to dispose of her pretty swiftly), Bob’s apprenticeship at a barber’s, Sue’s education in washing clothes – and they are all dealt with and left behind as the next adventure rears its head. I don’t recall the twins doing much besides speaking in unison, but presumably they had their own adventures at some point.

The one that everyone seems to remember, and which I had come across in the Persephone Quarterly (as was) and other discussions was… the haybox! Apparently this is a legitimate way to cook things, more or less like a slow-cooker, and has beguiled generations ever since the book first came out. I was more interested in ‘Solomon’, a passing tramp whose use of any and all wise saws earns him his nickname. Graham wrote him wittily, and I have a penchant for characters who use aphorisms willy-nilly.

Being a 1930s children’s book, it perhaps won’t surprise you that nothing particularly awful befalls any of the children and (spoilers) the parents turn out to be fine too – but the events and stakes scarcely matter. If Journeying Wave was a comforting rollercoaster for adults, this is the same for children. I can see myself reading and re-reading this delightedly had I first come across it as a child – and, to be honest, I’d happily revisit it now. The Children Who Lived in a Barn is charming fun, and must have been very welcome respite at a time when the world was clearly about to change.

Journeying Wave by Richmal Crompton #1938Club

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richmal-cromptonThis review is part of the 1938 Club: add your reviews to the comments here.

I’ve written about her a few times now, but Richmal Crompton still feels like an author who lives chiefly in my pre-blogging days. In those heady days, probably around 2002-4 mostly, there were few enough authors on my radar that I could afford the luxury of delving into everything a single author had written. In Crompton’s case, it wasn’t everything – partly because so many of her books were unfindable or unaffordable; partly because I read about twenty over a short space of time, and needed a bit of a breather. My blog may not have reviews of all the many Crompton novels I read and loved, but it’s beginning to reflect what a substantial part she played in developing my reading life: I went into that in more depth in a blog post entitled ‘Richmal Crompton and me’.

Journeying Wave is now readily available, thanks to Bello, but I have actually had a 1938 edition on my shelves for a little while. The 1938 Club was an excellent excuse to take it down, and I even read it a few weeks ago in an effort to be super prepared. Naturally that means I’ve forgotten some of the finer details – but, truth be told, I’d forgotten some of them before I’d even got to the end of the book. On the scale of Crompton novels, I’d place it in the top half – it was quite moving and very gripping in that must-read-on-even-though-there’s-not-really-any-tension way that Crompton was expert in – but, gosh, what a lot of characters and plotlines.

The event that kicks them all off is the revelation of Humphrey’s affair. Crompton’s theme here – thesis, even – is the ‘journeying wave’ that a single action can create. I think she made up the term ‘journeying wave’, but it’s essentially the butterfly effect. How will Viola asking Humphrey to leave affect their children and wider families?

The same ‘types’ of many Crompton novels are here. There is the studious young woman who never thinks about men (until one particular man makes her rethink her priorities). There is the man who is in business when he would be better suited for the rural world. There is the selfish mother who uses her children as props to her own social success.

And, most typical of all for Crompton, there is the pair of women, one dominant, one weaker; the dominant one is controlling the life of the other, always thinking it is for her own good. In this instance, it’s elderly twins Harriet and Hester. Hester clings to the recollection of the one day she could call her own, and starts to rebel. It’s curious that an archetype as specific as this sort of pairing should recur in almost every Crompton novel, but there it is – and it is just as moving as usual.

For some characters, the discovery that Humphrey could have a child from an adulterous affair rocks their sense of trust. For others, it shows that life can change, and that they need to grab opportunities. For others, simply having Humphrey or Viola on the scene, offering a fresh perspective, changes things that way. The ‘journeying wave’ motif is quite cleverly done; it makes it more realistic that so much would change in the lives of so many characters over a relatively brief period. In Crompton’s novels, often the same number of things (and sometimes exactly the same things) happen to as many people, but with less obvious justification for such a meeting of incident.

The one unusual portrait in Journeying Wave is Humphrey himself, and he is perhaps the least successful portrait at the same time – because he seems both too decent and too simple to commit adultery. Not ‘simple’ as in stupid; he just comes across as plainly happy with the life he has, and unwilling to rock any sort of boat. He has to, in order to set off the motions of the novel, but it never seems quite believable that he would have done.

But credibility hardly matters. More important is the joy of being in the surrounds of a Crompton novel. Nobody writes as captivatingly as she does, though even when the stakes are high for the characters, they feel low for the reader. We race through the novel, but we know that the high drama is happening in some sort of relief; there will probably be a happy ending and, even if not, very similar characters will appear in the next Crompton novel we read. But as soon as that first page is opened, and I get an opening paragraph like this…

The light filtered softly through the drawn curtains, grew stronger, and flooded the big square bedroom, which, despite the up-to-date furnishings, still retained a vague suggestion of Victorianism. The bay window, the high ceiling, the ornate marble mantelpiece, struck the note of more settled spacious days, and the chintz pelmeted curtains and chintz skirted dressing-table seemed tactfully to bridge the gap between the old and the new.

…I know that I’m going to have a wonderful few days of reading, and will enjoy every moment.

(Oh and, somewhat to my surprise, someone else read Journeying Wave during 1938 Club week! Do go and read the thoughts of the aptly-named RichmalCromptonReader.)

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.

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.