1939

Three quick reviews

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I don’t normally write about every book I read, but A Century of Books project means that… well, I do! So here are three short takes on books that I don’t want to write about in full. There are various reasons for that, so this time I’ve decided to give the reason too…

The Disappearing Duchess (1939) by Maud Cairnes

Maud Cairnes is the pseudonym of Lady Maud Kathleen Cairns Plantagenet Hastings Curzon-Herrick (!) who wrote the wonderful body-swap novel Strange Journey, now reprinted as part of the British Library Women Writers series. It is light, fresh, clever, and touching – with the special touch of an extraordinarily adept novelist. Her second and final novel, The Disappearing Duchess, has been extremely difficult to track down – so I was thrilled to finally get a copy.

This is a sort of mystery novel, about a duchess who has gone missing (there is no supernatural element) and whose friends hire a detective to find her. Along the way they find an unlikely doppelganger, various long-lost secrets, and traipse off to France – but sadly lightning didn’t strike twice. There is none of the lightness of touch that makes Strange Journey such a marvel, and we don’t see enough of the duchess before her disappearance to really care.

Why don’t I want to write a full review? It’s almost impossible to find this book, so why write a disappointed review of a book nobody can get hold of anyway!

Basic Black With Pearls (1980) by Helen Weinzweig

There is some dispute online about whether this Canadian novel was published in 1980 or 1981, but my NYRB reprint edition says the former. It’s a curious novel about Shirley who travels the world to track down her soulmate, Coenraad. Shirley is married to another man, living a seemingly conventional life as a housewife in Toronto – but Coenraad leaves her clues to his whereabouts in National Geographic, and she travels around the world as ‘Lola Montez’ to find him – to Hong Kong, to Rome, to Tangier, and even back to Toronto. When she finds him, he is often so heavily in disguise as to have embodied another man altogether. She is recognisable by always being in basic black with pearls.

It’s an exquisitely written novel, where we can trust nothing. Surely none of these things are happening as she says? Coenraad cannot shape-shift. But is she even leaving Toronto? Weinzweig is giving us no answers – this novel is all atmosphere and beauty, and there is nothing firm for the reader to grasp onto. I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t understand it.

Why don’t I want to write a full review? I simply don’t think I understood it enough to write about it at length! But that didn’t stop me enjoying it.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) by Thornton Wilder

The Bridge of San Luis Rey won the Pulitzer Prize and was the best-selling novel when it was published – and I listened to the audiobook recently. It’s about a rope bridge in 18th-century Peru that collapses, killing five people – and a friar who witnesses the tragedy goes to explore the lives of those who were lost, trying to establish if there is any moral reason why they were the victims.

It’s not clear why Wilder chose to set this in Peru (and the Pulitzer Prize is meant to be about American life, so go figure), but it’s an interesting conceit for a novel. But it’s also not really a novel – it’s three short stories, about the different people who will die on the bridge. In each story, Wilder traces the lives of those involved – often unhappy – and the various successful and unsuccessful relationships they have. Each story is very compelling, and Wilder is great at immersing us in the lives of very different people – from a wealthy marquesa whose daughter dislikes her to a devoted pair of twins to an orphan-turned-actress who tires of her Pygmalion-esque benefactor.

It is, as I say, well written and involving – though strange that nothing really coheres between the different strands, and that he chose to make the book so short. Since it’s separate character studies with a sort-of link, I think it would have worked better to have more of them. But what do I know, since the book is still well-loved and well-respected. I liked it too, but it feels like a successful attempt at an idea, rather than a finished product.

Why don’t I want to write a full review? It’s so revered and well-known that I don’t think I have anything much to add to the conversation!

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck #ABookADayInMay No.6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love in the Sun by Leo Walmsley

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If you look at Jane’s 2010 review of Love in the Sun (1939) by Leo Walmsley, you’ll see a comment from me saying that I’d like to read it. And, indeed, I bought a copy in 2012, still remembering Jane’s enthusiasm and how wonderful the novel sounded. Recently for my book group, I read The Village News by Tom Fort – there’s a chapter that mentions Walmsley a lot, and so 2021 finally became the year when he got his moment in the sun(!) Now read Love in the Sun, I can report that it is just as wonderful as Jane says.

I’ve done a bit of background reading online now, and haven’t quite worked out how autobiographical Love in the Sun is, nor how it relates to Walmsley’s earlier novels – but all of that can be put to one side to enjoy what this is: the story of a couple who’ve fled a financial crisis in Yorkshire, arriving in Cornwall with almost no money.

St Jude is a seaport in South Cornwall. It lies near the mouth of a small river, the Pol, whose estuary, shut in on all sides by high land, affords a safe, deep-water anchorage to ships of considerable size. The town itself, while small, straggles along a mile and a half of waterfront, its main street widening out here and there into wharves and jetties. This street continues through the old town into a residential area of hotels, boarding-houses and modern villas, becomes a parade, and ends near the sea in public pleasure gardens, with a golf course extending along the coastline.

[…]

It was the afternoon of a Christmas day that I, a Yorkshireman and a stranger, arrived on foot in St Jude, and, from one of those quays that break its straggling main street, had my first view of its harbour. That view was not specifically attractive. It did not encourage the hope that I was near the end of my peculiar quest: least of all did it suggest the beginning of a great adventure.

And perhaps it isn’t a great adventure, in the literary sense of the word. The plot of the novel is steady and simple, and all the more immersive for that. The narrator and his partner (they are not married because he still has a wife, but this is an incidental strand of the novel) fend for themselves by setting up home in a cheaply-rented old hut. Rain pours through the roof on the first night, when a storm seems almost to remove any possibility of staying. But gradually, resourcefully they make the hut into a home – they start growing vegetables, they adopt a visiting cat. In their quiet cove, they have idyllic beauty in front of them – and anxiety alongside, since they don’t know how they will survive with almost no income.

The solution is for the narrator to write a book, and it was fascinating to follow this process – aggravating at first, because he seemed so certain of its success. And, indeed, he is ultimately published – but the feelings he goes through after his first emotionless rejection are feelings that I recognise 70 years later! The development of his manuscript is perhaps the closest this novel comes to adventure. Unless you count some cat drama, which (thinking about it) gave me more tension than most tales of humans in peril.

Love in the Sun is lovely because it is authentic and beautifully realised, in all its day-by-day details. Walmsley is also wonderful at depicting this corner of Cornwall, making me ache to visit it. But the novel certainly isn’t a sweet tale of escaping somewhere beautiful. Even if it weren’t for the financial difficulties, the community are pretty lukewarm to the new residents – partly because they are new, but also because they are unmarried and eccentric. The narrator and his wife don’t seem unduly concerned about their reception, and it isn’t a dark thread of the book – rather, this is a story of solitary struggles and progress, not a saccharine story. Having said that, there is an unlikely friendship along the way, which is rather touchingly done.

The narrator, whom I think is unnamed but could be misremembering, is certainly the dominant character – but I think Walmsley’s portrayal of the partner is good too. She does have a name – Dain. Dain shares the same vision, capable work ethic and determination of the narrator, with just enough differences to make them work well together – she has a touch more romance, a little more optimism, a bit more willingness to see the best in people. If it is autobiographical, it is an affectionate portrait that still feels honest and accurate.

This novel is relatively long, but it felt even longer – in a good way. Like when I read L.P. Hartley’s brilliant novel The Boat, it’s the slow and steady pace of the novel that helps make it a beautiful reading experience. One to luxuriate in, even if it took me more than a decade to get to it after reading Jane’s review. And, you know… there are two sequels…

Mr Emmanuel by Louis Golding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Priory by Dorothy Whipple

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It’s turning out to be all Whipple all the time on Stuck in a Book right now. Well, long before I started Random Commentary, I was already reading the monster that is The Priory (1939). It’s enormous. My copy is 528 pages – I basically never read books that are over 500 pages, and that’s why I’ve had my copy for nearly 14 years (gasp, how did time pass that quickly?)

I bought it just before I started university, while on a trip to the Bookbarn to buy books for my course. This was, ahem, not for my course – but I couldn’t resist. And it was only when I got home that I discovered that my copy was… signed by Dorothy Whipple!

Obviously my copy is much older than the Persephone edition – which I do also have, as I can’t bring myself to get rid of either copy. And it starts like this…

It was almost dark. Cars, weaving like shuttles on the high road between two towns fifteen miles apart, had their lights on. Every few moments, the gates of Saunby Priory were illuminated. Every few moments, to left or to right, the winter dusk was pierced by needle points of light which, rushing swiftly into brilliance, summoned the old gateway like an apparition from the night and, passing, dispelled it.

The gates were from time to time illuminated, but the Priory, set more than a mile behind them, was still dark. To the stranger it would have appeared deserted. It stood in dark bulk, with a cold glitter of water beside it, a cold glitter of glass window when clouds moved in the sky. The West Front of the Priory, built in the thirteenth century for the service of God and the poor, towered above the house that had been raised alongside from its ruins, from its very stones. And because no light showed from any window here, the stranger, visiting Saunby at this hour, would have concluded that the house was empty.

But he would have been wrong. There were many people within.

So – what’s The Priory about? The house in question is called Saunby Priory, and is the vast home belonging to the Marwood family. There is grumpy widower Major Marwood, who lives only for the cricket season – which he throws large sums of money at, while the rest of the year he is a fierce penny pincher. There are his daughters Christine and Penelope, still in the nursery though now newly grown up. And there is a handful of servants who occasionally war with each other and occasionally sleep with each other (in a tactful 1930s way, of course).

Curiously, the Priory never felt very big to me. After that introduction, the scenes inside the house are rather claustrophobic – people worrying about space, getting in each other’s way, or being moved to make room for others. I wonder how deliberate that was.

There are a series of stages, where the entrance of a new character into the scene changes things – the first being the shy, anxious woman who will become Major Marwood’s new wife: Anthea. She is old enough that she believed she would always be a spinster, and is keen to accept his fairly ungracious proposal – which he makes by phone, because he doesn’t want the bother of going around to her in case she says no. There are also men who enter stage left to woo the girls; there is a passage of time in London. It is all very involved, and spaced evenly throughout the hundreds of pages – like an ongoing soap opera of events, neatly paced and always meeting the anticipated dose of emotion. There is also humour, particularly at the beginning, though the tone of the novel grows a little more melodramatic as the pages go by.

The Priory doesn’t have the psychological nuance of some of Whipple’s other novels. (That’s my view anyway – see review links at the bottom for different opinions!) Because her tapestry of events is so protracted, and must be filled, each one gets its moments of alarm and pathos, and everybody reacts in heightened dialogue before neatly moving onto the next moment. For instance, Anthea moves from being a timid new bride to ruthlessly running the household for the protection of her new babies, but settles into the new role so comfortably that it doesn’t feel as though a psychological shift has taken place so much as a new set of characteristics has been introduced. The same is true for the daughters as they experience marriage, parenthood, and adult woes.

Which is not to say that what is here isn’t a joy to read. It is – I moved through the novel very happily, enjoying every page for the entertaining soap opera that it was. I suppose my only point is that Whipple can do better, in terms of insight and depth – but not every novel needs to be insightful and deep. Some can just be engagingly written and immersively enjoyable – indeed, that is no mean feat. Yes, it could have been 200pp shorter without losing very much – I’d have advised staying in the Priory and not wandering off around the country – but I can’t disagree with the tribute that E.M. Delafield gave the novel in The Provincial Lady in Wartime:

What, I enquire in order to gain time, does Mrs. Peacock like in the way of books?

In times such as these, she replies very apologetically indeed, she thinks a novel is practically the only thing. Not a detective novel, not a novel about politics, nor about the unemployed, nothing to do with sex, and above all not a novel about life under Nazi régime in Germany.

Inspiration immediately descends upon me and I tell her without hesitation to read a delightful novel called The Priory by Dorothy Whipple, which answers all requirements, and has a happy ending into the bargain.

Mrs. Peacock says it seems too good to be true, and she can hardly believe that any modern novel is as nice as all that, but I assure her that it is and that it is many years since I have enjoyed anything so much.

 

Others who got Stuck into it:

“The best thing about this book is the characters. Whipple develops them so skillfully, and I loved how she did it by showing the reader through their words, thoughts, and actions, not just telling us.” – Books and Chocolate

“It is a beautiful novel, worthy of the highest praise and Whipple is an author, whose writing I look forward to reading more of, in the near future.” – Bag Full of Books

“Not a lot “happens” in this novel; most of the action centers around emotion. It’s all about subtlety here.” – A Girl Walks into a Bookstore

There is also an enjoyable write-up in the Persephone Forum.