1940s

Choose by M. de Momet

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Last year, I decided to watch three films which dealt with oh-so-relatable problem of “Oops! I remarried and my first spouse is still alive!” The first was the execrable modern schlock One True Loves; the second was misogynistic Too Many Husbands (1940) and the third was another 1940 hit and comfortably the best of the lot – My Favorite Wife, starring Cary Grant and possibly overshadowed by him also starring in The Philadelphia Story and His Girl Friday in 1940. Big year for Cary.

I will say this: the oops-remarried genre sparks some very good titles, regardless of the quality of the films themselves. When I saw Choose (1947) by M. de Momet advertised on the back of another 1940s book, I couldn’t resist getting a copy – sadly without the excellent dustjacket above. I forget exactly what the advert said, but it was clearly another novel where someone found themselves in an accidental bigamy pickle.

We rush straight into the heart of the thing. Shelly has been married to Peter for a year when (on page two) she receives a letter from her first husband, John, saying that he is coming home. He went missing during the Second World War and was presumed dead – but has in fact been in a POW camp for years, missing an arm and a leg but otherwise fully alive. Shelly’s friend George offers what I could consider some rather unduly calm advice:

“Try not to worry too much, it may settle itself quite easily. One of these two must have a greater claim.”

“But which? That’s the question. Which? John had the first claim, and Peter has the last. I can’t see the answer to this – I don’t think there is an answer.”

Before John comes home and discovers the truth, we are whisked back to their initial meeting and courtship. Indeed, the next 140 pages of this 200-page novel focus on the development of their romance and their young marriage and happiness together. Reader, any hope I had for Peter winning the husband-off quickly faded. Choose is really a fairly silly romance hung on a conceit that de Momet, for some reason, thinks should be incidental to seeing John be forceful and bold and Shelly be giggly and overwhelmed. As an example…

She held out her hand. He took it and let it lie on his outstretched palm. “What a little hand,” he murmured. “So very little – it’s like a child’s. You’re so young… so young.” His voice was low as if he were speaking a blessing.

Shelly didn’t feel lonely any more – she felt as if someone had wrapped something very soft and comforting about her as a protection from the hashness of the world.

I wondered about ‘M. de Momet’, about whom I haven’t been able to find any info. Is ‘M.’ an initial, or does it stand for ‘Monsieur’, with that French-sounding surname? My suspicion is that it’s a pseudonym – and it certainly feels more like a woman writing for most of the novel, though I was given pause by how much Shelly enjoys John explaining things to her. Surely only a man would have written that part of their wooing?

Choose isn’t badly written, and it certainly isn’t well-written. As you might guess from the excerpt above, it rattles along good-naturedly. There are some enjoyable descriptions of homes and nature and a very idealised version of young love. It toys with being daring at times, though in such an unprogressive way that I can’t imagine anybody being scandalised by the hints at sex – though perhaps we might be more scandalised now by his careless ignoring of consent.

He bent and kissed her.

“Shelly, I am going to sleep with you tonight.”

“No,” she whispered.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s a horrid business for a girl, so we’ll get it over now. I don’t want our honeymoon to be spoilt.”

She turned her head so that her face was buried in his shoulder.

Yikes. Anyway, by the time we’re back in the present, we haven’t learned a thing about Peter or why Shelly chose to marry him – only that she turned him down a fair few times first. He doesn’t stand a chance in the choice of the title – and I’m rather astonished that M. de Momet decided to make that decision such a small part of the novel. It feels like such a waste of an inventive idea – which can be treated comically, tragically, or everything in between. Instead, in Choose it is an afterthought to a very ordinary, silly, enjoyable and forgettable 1940s romance novel.

The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

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Someone in my book group chose The Razor’s Edge (1944) by W. Somerset Maugham after hearing it recommended on a YouTube video – making it my second Maugham of the year, after reading Theatre for the 1937 Club. It wasn’t one I was familiar with, and the paperback that arrived did little to encourage me – isn’t this the drabbest thing you’ve seen? Maybe it faded over time… Anyway, here’s a short and unenthusiastic review of the novel.

The novel is supposedly narrated by Maugham himself, in a conceit that doesn’t quite pay off, and concerns three main characters. The first is an American immigrant in France – a dyed-in-the-wool snob:

During the years that followed our acquaintance became fairly intimate without ever developing into friendship. I doubt whether it was possible for Elliott Templeton to be a friend. He took no interest in people apart from their social position.

Next is Elliott’s niece Isabel – an intelligent but avaricious woman, whom Maugham cannot mention without talking about how wonderful her legs are. Third of the trio (and weirdly the one that the novel’s Wikipedia page thinks is the only main character) is Larry. He is engaged to Isabel, and declares that his intentino is to ‘loaf’. When pressed on his plans, that is all they are: he doesn’t need excess money or company. He will simply exist.

Having set the ball rolling with these three, the narrator meets them at various times and in various places. Occasionally they feel the need to update the narrator with what he’s missed in the meantime, meaning that many long, long chapters are relayed to him. One of the things I hate in storytelling is when one character says, “Let me tell you about the past…” and then goes on to remember every single word of dialogue uttered many months earlier. On and on and on, all of it deadened because it’s happened and we, the reader, weren’t there. I complained about that fatal flaw in the first 80 pages or so of Theatre – in The Razor’s Edge it’s even worse, and even more monopolising the narrative. If only somebody had told him to show not tell.

It’s particularly a shame, because when the reader is present for scenes, they are much more vital and interesting. Some are even funny. Isabel’s unfortunate choice of husband leads to some fascinating, well-drawn scenes some years into marriage, while there is a protracted scene about Elliott being shunned from a socialite’s party that felt vibrant, funny, and moving. When he wants to, Maugham can do it. Why did he bog so much of the novel down in dullness and conversations we can’t possibly care about?

The Razor’s Edge wastes the talent of an author who didn’t know how to wield it. If he’d told it all as it happens, in the moment, it could have been an engaging book with brilliant characters. As it is, the brilliant characters have to fight their way through total tedium.

A couple more #ABookADayInMay books (Sylvia Townsend Warner + Marjorie Stewart)

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We’re nearly there, everyone! The end is in sight, and it looks HOPEFUL that I’m going to make it. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been harder this year for various reasons – but we can save those thoughts for another day. Today, let’s look quickly at my choices for Day 27 and Day 28.

Image borrowed from Scott’s excellent review

A Garland of Straw (1943) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

I bought most of Warner’s short story collections in one fell swoop in 2011, and since then I’ve been rationing myself – and I have hardly any left. This collection was published in 1943 and most of the stories are war-centred, and chiefly set in the UK. Because they were published in the New Yorker rather than at home, she doesn’t assume too much knowledge about the home front in England – which means they can be accessed easily by the 21st-century reader.

Some of the best stories in here are very much wartime experiences. I loved ‘From Above’, about a woman evacuating her home because a time-bomb has been discovered nearby. ‘Noah’s Ark’ – about child evacuees in the countryside, and their disdain for rural animals in comparison to the city zoo – is brilliant on the spitefulness that can lie deep in adults. There is a sly horror in a story about a woman returning to her ancestral home, which was requisitioned for soldiers to be stationed there, and finding it so badly damaged that people think it’s been bombed. She’s excellent on the bland, friendly truisms that cannot forge any emotional comfort in a crisis, however kindly meant. Another strong story, very Warner, is on a political firebrand who cannot stop himself getting Jane Austen novels out of the library.

At their best, the stories have Warner’s inimicable airy sharpness. She can so incisive about people without any malice – a searing description with the objectivity of a photographer and the subjectivity of a gossip. This isn’t quite an example of that, but it is a very Warner opening (to ‘Out of My Happy past’):

When I was young there were two thigns that I lived for. One was music and the other was advice. In the matter of music I was fairly eclectic; I liked listening to it, performing it, transcribing it, and composing it. In the matter of advice my tastes were purer; I only liked giving it and, to itnerest me, it had to be uncontaminatedly my own.

The stories in A Garland of Straw seem shorter than most of her work (though I’d have to flick through some others to check that) – and it is a little to their detriment. Some short story writers really thrive on the incredibly brief story (Marjorie Barnard was great at that), while others make full use of 40-50 pages (Alice Munro, anyone). I think Warner is best at about 20-25 pages, and most of the stories in A Garland of Straw are under 10 pages. It doesn’t quite give her enough room to breathe, in some cases. She doesn’t really do stories that rely on shock or the striking moment. Rather, her stories are representative pieces of lives.

Some of the stories in A Gardland of Straw are a bit forgettable, and others don’t have time to flourish to their potential. And then there are some that are brilliant. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, and not a collection which shows her at her absolute best – for that, I’d recommend Swan on a Autumn River (published in the US as A Stranger With A Bag). But middling Warner short stories are still a good read, and there’s a lot to admire.

I Will Hold My House (1950) by Marjorie Stewart

I Will Hold My House is one of those novels that could be brilliant if it had been rather less ambitious. Or maybe the issue is with my memory. There are just SO many characters that it’s impossible to keep track of them all.

The novel is about a series of houses along the coast in Sussex, each with occupants facing their own crises and triumphs and regrets and hopes. I counted 26 major characters. We go in and out of the houses for the first chapter or two, and I made copious notes on the inside cover of what the houses were called, who lived in them, which was next to which. Often we learn these things in several stages…

There are so many that, each time Stewart cycles through them, they barely have time to do more than express a single motion before the whole whirl starts again. Gradually, some stood out more than others – but I can’t say I particularly cared about any of them. The writing was good enough – a better-than-average domestic novel, but without any bite or sharpness to set it apart. I enjoyed it enough to finish it, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone.

A delightful reread for #ABookADayInMay – Day 4

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I read Ashcombe (1949) by Cecil Beaton back in 2012, sitting in the Bodleian Library. I quickly knew I needed my own copy – and this beautiful edition arrived. Here we are, 12 years later, and I have re-read and re-loved Beaton’s tale of finding, renovating and loving a beautiful countryside home in Wiltshire. Will I still feel the same as when I first wrote about it?

I think I must have been drawn the book initially because of its inclusion of Edith Olivier – I certainly read it during my DPhil, which included a chapter on her novel The Love-Child. It was while staying with Olivier in 1930 that Beaton made the decision to go and visit Ashcombe – a sizeable house left in some disrepair, hidden at near-inaccessible lengths in the depths of the Wiltshire countryside. (It is clearly a mansion, however homely Beaton tries to make it sound.)

I do not know if the others spoke during the trek up the hill. I was perhaps vaguely conscious of their eulogoies, but I was almost numbed by my first encounter with the house. It was as if I had been touched on the head by some magic wand. Some people may grow to love their homes: my reaction was instantaneous. It was love at first sight, and from the moment that I stood under the archway, I knew that this place was destined to be mine. No matter what the difficulites, I would overcome them all; considerations of money, suitability, or availability, were all superficial. This house must belong to me.

As it happened, the house never did belong to Beaton. The subtitle to Ashcombe is ‘the story of a fifteen-year lease’ – and Beaton did indeed lease the house and its significant grounds from its owner, who hadn’t thought it quite habitable. And indeed it wasn’t. The nominal rent of £50 per year was so low because Beaton would spend so much money on restoring the house – and, in the days before listing restrictions (or maybe even planning permission?), he went much further than restoring. Ashcombe has lots of (black and white) photographs included, and some of these are before and after sets – where he’s clearly extended windows, added walls and doors, and knocked things about at whim, as well as extensive landscaping. The landlord certainly got good value, but also seems incredibly tolerant for Beaton to pursue any whim at all. How many of our landlords would let a tenant have every visitor sketch their hand on the bathroom wall?

The photographs also show many of the people who came to stay. While Beaton leased Ashcombe for 15 years, he never lived there full-time. It was a retreat from a week in London, and he was often away abroad for months at a time. But while he was there, he brought packs of the great and the good from London (and even, before he was sure of the cook’s ability, all the catering from London too). We get to sneak into their lives, which seem to be a whirlwind of costume parties, charades, artistry and camaraderie. Quite what the locals thought we never discover – these are privileged, wealthy, often titled men and women who have seemingly endless energy and opportunity for antics. Many are names you’ll probably recoginse – Augustus John, Salvador Dali, Rex Whistler, Siegfried Sassoon. Even Tom Mitford gets a look-in, which he seldom does in books about his sisters. Naturally, I relished the times he spoke of Edith Olivier – older than most of her famous friends, and relatively new to this world, having been oppressively sheltered until her father died when Olivier was already firmly middle-aged, if not old.

Of the neighbours on whom I grew to rely more and more, Edith Olivier was perhaps the most cherished. It was she who, by bringing me into contact with so many new friends, was so largely responsible for my having blossomed into a happy adult life: and it was she who continued, without effort on her part, to discover your people of promise and bring them to her house. So many of the young writers, painters and poets came to her with problems about their work and their life, and they knew that after she had listened intently to their outpourings, her advice would be unprejudiced, wise and Christian. Edith’s youthfulness and spirit were of all time: she had unlimited energy, vitality and zest for life. Interested in every strata of humanity, she had never been known to be bored. After a strenuous day she would retire to bed, not to sleep, but to read at least three books, one of which she was to review, in addition to writing a most detailed journal of all that had happened to her during the previous twenty-four hours.

Having sat in Wiltshire Record Office with volumes of the journal, I can attest that it is ‘most detailed’. She wrote at enormous length and in horrendous handwriting.

So much of Ashcombe is joyful: the joy of home and the joy of friends. Beaton writes brilliantly about the pull of a beautiful place, and about the frenetic happiness that a group of carefree people can bring out of each other. They are unafraid of simple silliness. But the book does have its mournful edge. Nine years after the lease began, the Second World War started.

I remember I was about to step into a hot bath when I was informed that Poland had been invaded. The news was like a death knell. We had to wait one endless day more before we heard, from a calm but tired voice on the radio, that Hitler had refused the last request for a peaceful solution to his demands.

At Ashcombe, as we sat listening to the Prime Minister in the small parlour, my mother wept a little. The speech was soon over. We were now at war.

Beaton writes with sensitivity about the impact on war – mostly on fatalities among his friends, particularly Rex Whistler, since Beaton’s own wartime experience was clearly easier than others. Ashcombe is something of a retreat from the worst of the bombing and devastation in London, but is not left unaffected.

Almost equally sombre is the end of the lease. Beaton hoped to continue living there (at least for some of the year) for the rest of his life – but, after the lease had been extended a few times, I finally came to an end. The landlord wanted it back and there was nothing Beaton could do. Houses are often important in fact and fiction, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a better account of the heartbreak of leaving a home you have truly loved, against your will. It only happened to me once (when all my housemates rather suddenly chose to leave Oxford), but it is devastating and takes a long time to get over.

Beaton may have had other homes and I daresay they were palatial and beautiful – but Ashcombe clearly caught and kept his heart. In this delightful, poignant, effervescent book, he has given the house an excellent tribute.

Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts

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I picked up Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts in a wonderful, cavernous bookshop in Whitehaven, Cumbria, when I was there last year. I bought it off the strength of the title, and the fact that I’ve never quite disentangled Norah Hoult and Norah Lofts. The novel is from 1945, but if I’d found an original edition (rather than this reprint) then I wouldn’t have known it was by any Norah. It was originally published under the name Peter Curtis, perhaps to distinguish from the historical novels for which she was, and is, best known.

The lady of the title is Penelope Shadow (what a name!) She is ‘one of those women who is never described without the diminutive: a sweet little thing, a funny little thing, poor little thing’ – and she is not unattractive, but she has never been married. She is reaching the onset of middle age, or at least what was considered middle age in 1932 (when the novel is set), and realising that she is likely to remain single.

And again, however much women may wish to deny this fact, it is a fact that a woman who wishes a man to marry her must do a little – especially in the initial stages, towards bringing this desirable state of things about. After all, Pygmalion, falling in love with a beautiful and unresponsive statues, is unique enough to be remarkable; and even those women who most ardently wished matrimony upon their little friend could hardly say that Penelope ever ‘tried’. She didn’t; she hadn’t; and for the very simple reason that to be married was never one of Penelope’s ambitions.

OK, you might think, but how is Miss Shadow going to survive financially as an unmarried women in 1932? Well, she has recently come into a lot of money – because she turned out to be so chaotically bad at every job she turned her hand to, and decided as a last resort to write fiction. Her first efforts went unnoticed, but the latest novel – Mexican Flower – has become a runaway success. She can certainly afford to live alone. But she has an absolute terror of it.

In a convincing and delightful novel, this is a conceit that takes a bit to swallow. You can understand why someone might not like long stretches on their own, but Penelope Shadow cannot abide a single night. Rather than be alone for a full evening, she will wander the lanes and fields. Let’s assume this trait is believable, and move on.

Being the 1930s, Penelope Shadow has household staff – she can avoid being alone, because she always has a live-in servant who does more or less all the work needed to keep a single-person household going. But they routinely quit or have to be fired. Lofts is quite funny about some of the absurd ways these servants behave, and we rattle through a few. Indeed, particularly at the beginning of Lady Living Alone, Lofts has a delightfully amusing turn of phrase – a mixture of exaggeration, ridicule, and realism that makes a fun concoction. For instance…

The great future opened, as it was bound to do, with a happy burst of generosity towards Elsie and the children – now big enough to enjoy substantial presents. There was a car, too. And to everyone’s surprise and carefully suppressed horror, Miss Shadow herself learned to drive it. That is to say, she mastered the mysteries of making it start, increasing its speed, and bringing it to a standstill; nervous, inattentive, impulsive and completely lacking in road sense, as in most other kinds, she was quite the worst driver in four counties.

I love Miss Shadow’s combination of ineptitude and power. She is evidently, if accidentally, very good at writing a bestseller. She is single-minded in what her spirit needs and forgetful about what necessities she actually needs. She’s great fun to be around.

One evening, keen to evade a night’s loneliness, she sets off as chaotically as ever in her car. Eventually she ends up at a fairly rundown hotel, perhaps closer to a motel. For lack of other options, she decides to stay the night. The proprietress is unhelpful and unfriendly, but she becomes friendly with a young man who works there as a chef – but also as a general dogsbody. When they first meet, he goes off to find some help.

He disappeared, still calling, and several moments passed. Miss Shadow occupied them in staring about the hall. Empty it would have been lovely with its elegant proportions and creamy panelling; but its furnishings were hideous; the carpet looked as though pounds of liquorice all-sorts had been stamped viciously into mud; there was a fiercely bristling hatstand. a Windsor armchair painted a bright sticky red, and the panels were defiled by pairs of Victorian pictures, hung irregularly; Beckworth Bridge in summer and in winter; lovers parted and re-united, married couples quarrelling and making it up again.

Hopefully you can see why I enjoyed Lofts’ writing so much. She is brilliant at this sort of teasing, deprecatory fun. But the tone of the novel slowly becomes something else.

Spontaneously, after a disastrous night and breakfast, Miss Shadow asks this young man – Terry – if he would like to come and work for her instead. He is industrious and kind, clearly equipped for more than his role. Yes, he is muscular and good-looking, but Miss Shadow hardly has that on her mind – she simply sees a solution to her eternal problem. Here is a young man who will not abandon her. She need not be a lady living alone anymore.

I shan’t spoil what happens after that – but Lofts takes us from the funny, fun style at the beginning of the novel through something with more pathos – through to something closer to a thriller. Is Terry the man to protect her? And will their relationship remain one of mistress and servant?

I loved Lady Living Alone, and the way that Lofts expertly manages the shifting tone. It’s not a particularly long novel, but it takes the reader on a long and vivid journey. There are brilliant scenes later in the novel that could be from a psychologically tense film – but because we are bedded in the silliness of Miss Shadow and her whims, Lofts tethers her novel to the domestic and everyday. Her writing style continues to be brilliantly done, and the way she structures sentences is so well observed. It keeps anything from feeling over the top.

This is my first Norah Lofts. I’m not particularly interested in the historical novels, but I’ll certainly be looking out for the three other novels she wrote under the Peter Curtis pseudonym. In my opinion, it’s something unusual and special.

Death and Mary Dazill by Mary Fitt

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With a title like Death and Mary Dazill (1941) and the cover you see above, I knew I couldn’t resist reading this novel. It went on my wishlist, and my friend Clare gave it to me for my birthday last year. I’ll have seen it mentioned somewhere in the blogosphere or on Instagram etc, but I don’t remember where – reveal yourself, if you are the one! It’s a reprint from Moonstone Press, a little publishing house specialising in detective novels, who have published a lot of Fitt’s books in lovely new editions.

Mary Fitt was the pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman, and this is her tenth detective novel under that name in a mere five years – but calling it a detective novel is misleading. There is a (at least one!) murder and there are people trying to work out who did it, but all of this has happened many years ago. The whole novel feels less like detective fiction and more like an elegy to a shadowy group of people whose vibrancy and passions have dulled over the decades – leaving only the legacy of long-ago decisions and acts.

We start in the present day, where Superintendent Mallett (apparently a series detective for Fitt) and two friends are attending the funeral of a friend. As they are leaving, they see something that strikes them:

As the Vicar reached the lych-gate, two tall old ladies entered: he swept off his hat to them, and paused for a moment to speak to them. Mallett and Jones slackened their pace, and, unwilling to be drawn into the encounter, stopped as if to wait for Fitzbrown. The two old ladies, after a few minutes’ gracious conversation, bowed to the Vicar, or rather inclined their heads like two queens, and passed on. They were followed at a respectful distance by a chauffeur in wine-coloured livery: he stopped when they stopped, and moved when they moved, keeping exactly the same distance between himself and them, as if drawn by an invisible wire. He carried an enormous circular wreath of hothouse flowers: arum lilies, scarlet amaryllis, gardenias.

These ladies are, it turns out, the fancifully named Lindisfarne and Arran de Boulter – sisters who are leaving flowers by the grave of their father and brother, who died a week apart. They bring a large wreath every week for these men who died half a century earlier – but, notes one of the observers, leave none at all on the nearby grave of Mary Dazill.

At this point, we go back to the past – knowing the three people who will be dead by the end. I was a bit worried that we would have to spend the whole novel with modern-day characters telling anecdotes about the past, but instead we are taken straight there. Lindisfarne (Lindy) and Arran are beautiful and naïve young women on the cusp of adulthood – so much on the cusp that you wouldn’t have thought they needed to replace a leaving governess, but their father decides they must. Enter Mary Dazill – lovely, not much older than the sisters, clever and a little mysterious. Perhaps her mystery is really only the contrast with everyone else in this late-Victorian period, as they are thoughtlessly open with one another.

That’s not quite true – among the mix is a secret engagement, secret romances and secret hopes. But even those with secrets tend to find someone else to confide in, and emotions are running high. By contrast, Mary Dazill is not driven by her emotions. It makes her seem manipulative by comparison with those who can’t control themselves, let alone others.

At first, I was a little unsure of the writing. There is a fey artificiality to it, in excerpts like this, that make it feel more like actors in a melodrama than real life:

“You can’t,” said Arran, in a voice so low that he could scarcely hear. But his hearing was acute enough, then, to catch every shade of Arran’s voice. He leaned forward and said, with his lips almost touching her hair:

“Forgive me, darling. I can’t help it. I love you.”

But I quickly decided to forgive it. The artificiality perhaps comes from these characters’ youth and inexperience. The passions are real, and have real consequences, but they don’t have mature language to express themselves.

It is these passions that lead to deaths… but who killed whom, and why?

Superintendent Mallett doesn’t get much to do in this novel, and if it’s only one of Fitt’s output that you’ve read then you wonder why these three random men are returned to so often in the narrative for their discussion and deduction. Their personalities are adroitly drawn but don’t really matter to the emotional thrust of the book. Since their detective work is based on memories of one of the women, passed on by her mother, and some fragments of evidence, it doesn’t really match what the reader is experiencing. It’s all to the good that we are transported to the past rather than hearing it all secondhand, but it does mean that the deduction element doesn’t quite make sense. Rather, we see events unfold and discover the answer ourselves.

It’s a short novel and, as mysteries go, I didn’t find I particularly cared who the culprit was. But that didn’t matter at all. I really enjoyed it for the atmosphere and for taking me back into that late-Victorian period so well. I was reminded of The Go-Between more than of any detective novel – Fitt is excellent at the atmosphere and world she creates, and this was a lovely time spent in striking company.

The Persimmon Tree by Marjorie Barnard

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I hope you’ve had a wonderful Christmas, if you celebrate – indeed, I hope you are still having it, since we are still in the 12 days. I love Christmas and I intend to make the most of every moment of it! I’m now back home after a lovely week with my brother and parents, and glad to be reunited with Hargreaves.

Unusually for me, I was very much in the mood for short stories in the days leading up to my Christmas holiday – including the Margaret Laurence collection I reviewed recently, and The Persimmon Tree and other stories (1943) by Marjorie Barnard. I read the Virago Modern Classics edition, which includes a handful of stories from other Barnard collections too. I couldn’t remember when or where I bought it, but that is the joy of keeping a blog for many years – I did some searching, and it turns out I bought it in Bristol in 2012.

Marjorie Barnard is apparently a big name in Australian literary history, sometimes collaborating with Flora Eldershaw under the name M. Barnard Eldershaw – perhaps, in 2023, she is best-known for writing a novel called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow long before Gabrielle Zevin did. But she should be far better known in this hemisphere too: I thought the stories in The Persimmon Tree were excellent.

They reminded me of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories, in the sense that they are snapshots in the minutiae of women’s lives. The most successful ones don’t try to do more than that: they look at the everyday, and see the searing emotions that are always there under the surface, sometimes conscious and sometimes not but seldom revealed to anybody else. One of my favourite stories was ‘Beauty is Strength’, about a woman going to a beauty salon and hoping it will equip her for dealing with an unfaithful partner.

The girl adjusted the drier like a high Egyptian helmet, laid the copy of ‘Vogue’ in her lap, and departed briskly. Her hair stirred in the hot blast, the noise droned in her ears. The headache which she had beaten back with aspirin began again. There was a patch of wimpering nerves in her right temple the size of a penny and slowly spreading. But the worst thing was looking in the mirror. Her face suspended between the helmet and the mackintosh cape was just face, without aids or garnishings. It was from moments like these, when you saw your face isolated, that you learned the truth about it. Her mouth looked hard and disappointed, and round each corner there was clearly discernable, in this impartial light, a little bracket of wrinkle. You can’t, she had read somewhere, do anything about wrinkles once they are visible to the naked eye. Her cheek bones looked high and stiff and on her throat, where age first shows itself, the working of the muscles showed too clearly, and the skin just under the chin was ever so slightly puckered.

‘The Dressmaker’ is an extremely good story that contrasts the way we see ourselves with how we are perceived. Miss Simkins has had one great romantic tragedy in her life – she tells it to her client almost like she is the narrator of a short story herself. It has pathos, beauty, a narrative arc. But we know from the way Barnard introduces her that Miss Simkins will not be received in the way that she imagines. It’s a story about class, but mostly about self-delusion.

Miss Simkins did not see very much of life but what she saw she inspected very closely and she kept an exact debit and credit account between herself and life. She always observed her employers’ conduct and utterences minutely with a view to keeping this statement up-to-date. She was, she felt, one of life’s principal creditors.

These thoughts were habitual, automatic, and, of course, unvoiced. She merely took off her hat, which collapsed into immediate shapelessness, gave two pokes to her hair and sat down to the work-table. From her suitcase she produced a sheaf of battered fashion journals.

(Incidentally, various of the words with red squiggly underlines as I type – utterences, wimperings, discernable – are Barnard’s own uses, retained by Virago. Other typos are probably my own.)

I’m using lots of big chunks of text, as I kept being captivated by entire paragraphs. Barnard writes quite simply, so you’d be unlikely to find single sentences that mesmerise with beauty – but she has a way of building up a picture that is precise and beautiful, and somehow much more insightful than they might appear at first. Here’s a paragraph where she does use various metaphors and similes, but what moved me was the slow pan out at the end, and the words ‘each flat a little box too small for the life it house’:

She moved on. She hadn’t noticed the door behind the curtain. It came to softly behind her, leaving her in sudden quiet and enlargement. It was as easy to escape as that. The balcony, hanging like a bird cage on the clifflike facade of the flats, was as far from the party as Cape York. It was early dusk with its false evanescent clarity beginning to melt at the edges, a light that blent the noonday incompatibles into a scena. In the foreground, blocks of flats set at all angles, each flat a little box too small for the life it housed, so that it bulged out of the windows, hung over the balconies, burgeoned up through the roofs. Strings of coloured washing were as natural as vines. In William Street, narrow and living as an artery, coloured taxis moved like corpuscles. Over to the left, Woolloomooloo, pouring down the hill, houses, terraces, narrow streets fused into a solid mass, a grape bloom on its slates, a veil of light on the mediocrity of its stones and bricks. Beneath the swept stretch of the waterfront, the wharves running neatly out into the bay. Beyond the lovely, unreal drop scene of the harbour, blue water, timbered headlands, even the bridge etherealised, a grey bow drawn across the blue.

I can see why she titled the collection after ‘The Persimmon Tree’, as it is one of the strongest. The final paragraph reads simply ‘I turned away. The shadow of the burgeoning bough was on the white wall. I thought my heart would break.’ Even without context, it’s moving and its simplicity works very well. Like many of the stories, it’s very short. Some in the collection are so short as to only really be impressions, and those didn’t succeed quite as much as others, in my view – but overall, I found it a beautiful and moving collection.

 

 

One Year’s Time by Angela Milne (British Library Women Writers)

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I’m delighted that One Year’s Time by Angela Milne has been out for a month now, and I realise I’ve mentioned it a few times but haven’t ever actually written a review of it. I’ve only seen one or two online so far, so I want to spread word more about this marvellous book.

And, gosh, it so nearly didn’t happen! I may have told this story before, but it bears repeating. It was all lined up a couple of years ago, and I think it was even in the catalogue, but it was proving impossible to track down the family. The British Library are brilliant at finding estates and negotiating publications, so it did feel like a lost cause. With the thought ‘well, it can’t hurt’, rather than any real expectations, I put a plea out here. And it turned out that one of Angela Milne’s nephews had once commented on Claire’s blog, so she got in touch with him – and he was able to connect us with Angela Milne’s children. How wonderful! The blogging world stepped in where every other attempt had failed – and the result is that One Year’s Time is back in print.

This was Angela Milne’s only novel, published in 1942 but set in the 1930s – the exact year isn’t clear, but war is clearly on the horizon. It tells of a year in the life of Liza, particularly her romantic entanglements with a young man called Walter (!), and of her work in an office. It’s rare to get the career angle of a woman’s life in a novel from this period, and I particularly enjoyed that.

As the book opens, Liza is painting the floor – rather unsuccessfully. She surveys her flat, and feels a bit sad about being single.

There was a scrubby patch on the carpet where she had washed the ink out; and two cushions hardly counted as heaping a divan, and chintz curtains weren’t necessarily chintzy, and they weren’t gay, they were just curtains hanging up. She thought, oh, all these things the newspaper say about what they call Bachelor Girls.

‘Bachelor Girls’ is a term that recurs throughout the novel. Liza feels some disdain for women who are unmarried, particularly those who have settled into lifelong friendships with other women (and one does wonder how much she might be missing about lesbians…) But she also stands up to Walter when he mentions the same topic:

“You have to wear a collar and tie and have square legs to be a bachelor girl.”

“It’s awfully unfair that they don’t call men spinster boys. I mean, men who aren’t married. Why do you think they don’t?”

“I suppose they aren’t a new enough invention,” said Walter.

We chart the ups and downs of Liza and Walter’s relationship, and what I most enjoyed about it was the dialogue. It’s very hard to get flirtiness and wit onto the page, but I think Milne does it brilliantly. A lot of what they say is quite stagey, and reminded me of Noel Coward, so it gives the sense of what their relationship is like – rather than being actual conversations that real people would have. And that, to my mind, makes it much more entertaining.

As I wrote in my afterword to the new edition, two themes that dominate One Year’s Time, or at least preoccupy the characters, are sex and money. It is surprisingly frank for a 1942 novel, particularly one probably aimed at a wide audience rather than a small literary elite. Walter casually says that the thing he likes best in the world is sex, and Liza and Walter go speedily from meeting each other to ‘me in bed with nothing on, and him kneeling there with only socks’. They have no qualms about discussing their past sexual history with each other, and Walter even casually mentions having had an affair with a married woman. 

And then there’s money. Liza earns a living and has a small legacy from an uncle, but she is very conscious of not having quite enough to live the lifestyle she’d like. We get the details of her salary, her potential raises, her rent – even how much different food items are in shops, and her silent indignance when a friend spends more than others at a restaurant then splits the bill. Such things are perennial.

So much about this book feels fresh and modern. It’s also, of course, a snapshot of the late 1930s – in a way that helps us remember that human nature doesn’t changed very much, and we all have more or less the same concerns that our parents/grandparents/great-grandparents did. Most of all, I think it’s a very funny book with a memorable pair at the centre who are often frustrating but always compelling. I’m so pleased it’s back in print, and I finally have my own copy.

Divorce? Of Course by Mary Essex #ABookADayInMay No.30

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What a way with titles Mary Essex had! One of Ursula Bloom’s many pennames, she seems to have saved her best titles and best books for when she was writing in Mary Essex mode – though, confusingly, she later used ‘Mary Essex’ to write a series of uninspiring-looking medical romances. ANYway, it was as Mary Essex that she wrote the British Library Women Writers reprint Tea Is So Intoxicating and the brilliantly-named The Amorous Bicycle, as well as books I’ve not been able to find copies of – like Marry To Taste, Domestic Blister, Haircut for Samson, and Eve Didn’t Care.

And naturally I love the title Divorce? Of Course (1945) – a book lent to me by my friend Barbara. The first thing we see is a list of characters, starting with Mr Justice Forrester, Judge. It becomes clear that the list is a bunch of people in a divorce court. The petitioner is Imogen Clark; the respondent is Peter Clark. They have various legal representation and others mentioned.

But the novel starts with Mr Justice Forrester and a domestic matter:

The morning started badly, entirely due to a little altercation on the painful subject of Mr Justice Forrester’s umbrella. Mr. Justice Forrester, having reached that age when faces go melon or nutcracker (his was nutcracker), believed that if he went out without the umbrella, he was not entirely dressed and therefore, to the judicial eye, slightly indecent. His wife, the daughter of a sporting canon, of the hunting, shooting and fishing variety, thought umbrellas were – well, let us draw a veil over that particular word as used by Lady Forrester when very much annoyed.

You can see that Mr JF is not going to simply be a background character. That’s one of the things I appreciate about Mary Essex – that she will always give us humorous and arguably unnecessary details about side characters, which helps build up the world and (more importantly) amuse us. She is very good at little side-swipes and eye rolls.

Imogen and Peter have only been married a short while, but a fight has got out of hand and now they are both trying to divorce each other for deserti0n. One of the lawyers does point out that desertion has to last three years to count, but this is quickly ignored both by the characters and the plot of the novel. It was also a relatively recent addition to divorce law, spearheaded by novelist and MP A.P. Herbert and popularised by his book Holy Deadlock. One of the side characters who hears about the divorce finds it sadly unscandalous:

“Oh!” said Emily, with extreme disappointment, for that really had spoilt it! Emily considered that ever since A.P. Herbert had started messing about with the divorce laws, he had succeeded in making them uncommonly dull, which they had never been before. It was just like Imogen to be aggravating, and get a divorce on something quite harmless, like desertion.

After this set up, we travel back to see a bit of Imogen and Peter’s courtship and hasty wedding. We learn more about their respective parents, and there is plenty of detail to enjoy there – including Peter’s respectable, unaffectionate father and his enjoyably willful mother, and Imogen’s mother who is perennially shocked and shocking. Onwards we go to the scene of their explosive disagreement, which starts when Imogen spends too much on wine for a dinner party – though, as she explains, Peter had asked her to get wine, and hadn’t said how much. Infuriated, he throws an ink pot at her. Subsequent attempts to reconcile from both sides all go amiss, and thus the divorce courts get involved.

In the latter part of Divorce? Of Course, we are back in the divorce court and witness the questioning, cross-examining and so forth. I don’t know how accurate a portrayal of 1940s divorce courts it is, but it is delightful. Among my favourite moments are those where Ivy, a rather unreliable witness as their maid, refuses to repeat some of the words she overhears and has to write them down for the judge. “Oh, I think you might have said that one,” he says at one point.

The plot is thin and the ending predictable, but it’s such fun on the way. Noticeably, for a book published in 1945, the war doesn’t seem to exist and it would have been delicious escapism for her audience. Mary Essex / Ursula Bloom was a really expert middlebrow writer, easily equalling some of the better-known domestic novelists when it comes to verve and wit. Someone should have coached her not to use so many exclamation marks, and there is one character who is unfortunately referred to as a slur for an Italian throughout – those two things aside, I loved spending time in Divorce? Of Course and will keep hunting for more Mary Essex novels.

Nothing Dies by J.W. Dunne #ABookADayInMay No.25

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I meant to read Nothing Dies (1940) during the 1940 Club earlier this year – somehow, even though it is only 98 pages, I didn’t get around to finishing it. And now I have!

J.W. Dunne is one of those names that you might be familiar with from reading about the 1920s and ’30s, even if you haven’t read him directly. As the cover above says, he was known for An Experiment With Time – one of those books which was influential far beyond the reach of people who actually read it. It crops up in all sorts of places, including a mention in Miss Hargreaves, and was something of a byword for theories about time – much like Einstein or Freud are mentioned by people who never read their original works.

But, unlike Einstein and Freud, I don’t think J.W. Dunne is a household name now. I certainly haven’t read An Experiment With Time (1927) in the many years I’ve owned it, and probably should have read it for my DPhil. And, let me tell you, if Nothing Dies is a ‘brief and simple outline of the author’s famous Time theory’ (as the cover alleges) then I’m never going near An Experiment With Time. I didn’t really have a clue what was going on.

After a chapter about ‘sense data’ that is clearly intended to ease us in, Dunne starts in on his idea or time that relies on various questions of perspectives. This is one of the diagrams to elucidate matters:

In short, Dunne rejects the idea of time as something linear and one-way. We can perceive all of time from a second vantage that shows it is all available at once, and… well, I don’t really think I understood any of Dunne’s conclusions.

I haven’t quoted anything from Nothing Dies, and perhaps it will make sense to others. Certainly there was an audience in 1940 who could grasp this version – or at least enough presumed demand that this book was published. I can’t say I understood what Dunne was trying to say, let alone being convinced by it, and I have no idea how he is considered as a time theorist nowadays.

It’s always intriguing to go to the text behind the cultural phenomenon, though usually (to me) it is less interesting than the discussion of those cultural figures that filtered down to the middlebrow. I’ve always found reading about Freud more interesting than reading Freud’s writing, and I definitely get more from seeing Dunne pop up in contemporary conversations than I got from reading Nothing Dies itself.