1940s

Back on track…

StuckinaBook All , , 9 Comments

Thank you for all your messages of sympathy – I am feeling very drained, but much better. But – to add insult to injury – my laptop chose yesterday to die. Few people understand computers less than I do, so I shall be begging my friend to ‘have a look at it’ (somehow I feel a stern glance from someone who Knows What He’s Doing will cause the computer to work). My housemate has kindly lent me her laptop, but it’s got the world’s teeniest tiniest keyboard. That’s all right for her, because she is herself teeny and tiny, but it will lead to me making all manner of typos, methinks…

I have not been entirely inactive during Persephone Reading Week. I’m not, perhaps, quite as far as I’d hoped to be – but I have managed to re-read Miss Ranskill Comes Home (1946) by Barbara Euphan Todd. I know, I know, re-reading when there are so many Persephones I’ve yet to read – but my book group are discussing the novel this month (and I didn’t even suggest it!) and I felt like revisiting.


Miss Ranskill Comes Home was the third Persephone book I read, after Family Roundabout and Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and it’s just over six years since I read it. Is it as good as I remember? In a word: yes.

Miss Nona Ranskill is returning to England after four years on a desert island. If that sounds far-fetched, then run with it anyway – somehow Todd is able to make you accept the situation and see what happens. She had fallen overboard, whilst trying to rescue a hat (which she didn’t much like anyway) and was washed up on the island – where ‘the Carpenter’, also known as Reid, had been for some time already. The novel opens with Miss Ranskill having a makeshift funeral for the Carpenter, so we never meet him firsthand, but his voice permeates Miss R’s mind and his kind and sympathetic voice recurs throughout the novel.

And so Miss Ranskill heads off in the boat the Carpenter had made, and is eventually rescued and brought back to England. The desert island idea, though interesting, is really just a way of having Miss Ranskill turn up at home in the middle of the Second World War without any idea that it is going on. For this is the main gist of the novel: how surreal and foreign the war seems to one not in the know.

The first person she re-encounters is a school-friend Marjorie, who seems never to have heard of Nona’s ‘death’, and is described as ‘her development being arrested midway through the last term in the sixth form’. She reminds me a little of the women in E.M. Delafield’s The War Workers, who are selfish in their ‘self-sacrifice’, although Marjorie is probably just caught up in the excitement of regulations and hierarchies – able to relive her school days through them. And of course, these are all mysterious to Miss Ranskill. She doesn’t understand rationing or black-out curtains; ‘prohibited area’ or air raid sirens. Having anticipated coming home for so long, she is disturbed to find home so very different.

And alongside all this, of course, Miss R is comparing everything to her island experience. I liked the odd unexpected touch Todd threw in, such as:

A flash of red in a draper’s window caught her eye and she stopped to look. The sight of a jersey-suit in soft vermilion made her realise how much she had missed all the red shades of the world and how tired she was of blue and grey.I think Miss Ranskill Comes Home was a very brave book to publish in 1946, in its unusual perspective on a very recent war: it refers to soldiers as ‘hired assassins’, for instance. And yet, the novel was apparently extremely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. And has it translated to the 21st century? Possibly it is even more appropriate now. For people like me, whose parents weren’t alive in the Second World War, our only knowledge of it can be second-hand. We experience some of Miss Ranskill’s confusion, as she encounters wartime England, and perhaps feel ourselves equally uncertain and alien. While Todd’s 1946 readership would have been amused by Miss Ranskill’s cluelessness, as the years continue the reader can empathise more and more with her uneasiness.

Miss Ranskill Comes Home was chosen for book group after a discussion between myself and another member as to whether or not any of the Persephone books were out-and-out funny. This seemed to me to be the biggest dividing line between Persephone and the Bloomsbury Group reprints – both are excellent, but the latter is, in general, much funnier. And I think that’s probably still true for me – Miss Ranskill has plenty of comedy, but it is comedy heavily dosed with pathos and even a tinge of the tragic. Certain scenes, such as that where Miss R tries and fails to give a speech to a local society on Life on a Desert Island, are painful to read in their awkward sadness. But the novel still manages to have plenty of light-hearted moments alongside – all the rush of emotion of encountering a ‘brave new world’, I suppose.

And, which is more important, there are some very cute kittens. Now, that’s the kind of hard-nosed reviewing you’ve come to expect, isn’t it?

Sprawling Ivy

StuckinaBook All , 10 Comments

I don’t know how many people managed to join in a group read of Manservant and Maidservant, what with the appalling scarcity of copies, and the fact that (in my case, at least) good intentions rarely make the tbr pile any shorter – but it’s November now, and so I’m going to begin talking about the novel. If you have managed to read it, and post about it, please let me know, and I’ll include links in this post – and shout about them in later posts too. Or, indeed, if you had a go and hated it, didn’t get beyond page 2, I want to hear from you too! And if you’ve been reading and don’t have a blog, or don’t fancy posting it on your blog for whatever reason, I’d be more than happy to put your thoughts up on Stuck-in-a-Book.

Right! Let’s get started. Manservant and Maidservant was published in 1947, bang in the middle of Dame Ivy’s writing career, which spanned from Pastors and Masters (1925) to her death in 1969. She did write a novel in 1911, Dolores, but later disowned it – and all of her other nineteen novels are, I believe, more or less the same. (Having said that, whenever she was asked which were her favourites of her own novels, she’d mention A House and its Head and Manservant and Maidservant.) The plots may differ slightly, but the scenarios don’t seem to, nor does her distinctive approach to writing. In Manservant and Maidservant, like so many of her books, there is an enormous family living in an old house, squabbling and calmly interrogating one another. In fact, what I wrote in my review of Parents and Children still stands: Life-changing events are encompassed by lengthy, facetious discussions – gently vicious and cruelly precise, always picking up on the things said by others. Calmness permeates even the most emotional responses, and ICB’s writing is always astonishing in its use of dialogue. More or less all of it is dialogue, and though often sophistry, it is somehow also accurate about family dynamics. Gosh, quoting myself, isn’t that self-indulgent? But it’s true – blink-and-you’ll-miss-it events of enormity will be mentioned in amongst pages of discussing the lighting of a fire, or whether or not the children are entitled to Christmas stockings. Centre of the family is Horace, father and employer – his wife is mysteriously absent from proceedings, though his cousin and aunt are present. He is strict, decisive, given to posing rhetorical questions – and as the novel develops, hints are given of a cruel nature which has only recently subsided. His relationship with his children is uneasy, and you get the sense that they are unsure of his character, and what he will do next. He, of course, does not see things in the same manner: “This room is never damp. It could not be in its situation,” said Horace, who saw in his family house the perfection he had not found in his family. As the title suggests, the world below stairs is as important as that above. Bullivant, the butler, sees both worlds – Mrs. Selden the Cook, George and Miriam slightly further down the hierarchy. I loved the scenes in the servants’ quarters – the dynamics of those thrown together into a strange home/non-home. I especially liked Cook, unnervingly eloquent (how many servants would say “That was quite a superfluous injunction” ?) and with a firm sense of keeping people in their place.
“I could feel to you as to a mother, Mrs. Selden,” said George, on an impulse.
“Then behave to me as a son and hand me those forks,” said Cook, regarding this as the right way to meet excess of feeling.In fact, keeping people in their place, within a strict hierarchy, is of far greater significance below stairs than above – though it is not ignored there, and in vain does Horace try and teach his children the pitfalls of ‘fairness’. But the manservant and maidservant, et al, provided most of my favourite quotations. For example: “Do you take your tea strong or the reverse, Miss Buchanan?”

“Neither one nor the other,” said the guest, using her rather loud voice for the first time.

“That is my own preference,” said Bullivant.

“My bias is also towards the mean,” said Cook, with her eyes on the teapot. “I am not in favour of excess in any direction.”

“How do the young people like it?” said Miss Buchanan, both her utterance and its nature coming as a surprise.

“I am conversant with their preferences,” said Cook, with nothing in her tone to indicate that she would be influenced by these.and: “It was a bad hour for George, when he told the truth about himself,” said Mortimer. “It was sad to see him thinking that honesty was the best policy.”This is fairly indicative of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s style – warped epigrams; small authorial comment casting a cynical eye upon convoluted conversations. I don’t think anybody could call her dialogue naturalistic, but it does put across people’s characters surprisingly well. And there is such a sense of claustrophobia – people always watching, listening, correcting and analysing.

It’s impossible to skim-read Manservant and Maidservant, or even, I found, to read it quickly. Though not a long book, it took me a long time to read it – the prose is so rich, so ponderous and dense, that I’m forced to settle back and let the characters talk at their own pace. And, once I do that, I love it. I love the long discussions which spiral round and don’t seem to achieve anything, because they are so well crafted – each sentence carefully honed, each inflection deliberate. I love the involved ways in which people rebuke each other or put them down. I couldn’t read two Compton-Burnett novels next to each other, perhaps, but I do need to know that some are waiting on the shelf.

But, of course, the point of a group read is to find out what you all thought… and I can’t wait. Let me know! And, if you haven’t managed to join in this time, perhaps this post will have inspired you to consider ICB next time you spot her in a secondhand bookshop. Or, indeed, in Hesperus’ new reprint of Pastors and Masters. For my money, she is one of the twentieth-century’s greatest and most important writers – but let’s see what everyone else says…

 

“I abominate fuss…” Miss Hargreaves and Me

StuckinaBook All , , , 74 Comments

I’ve already written about Miss Hargreaves before on Stuck-in-a-Book, but I felt that a new edition warranted a new review. I’ve just finished reading the novel for the fifth time since 2003… and I love it all over again.

Just to say at the beginning – this review doubles as a prize draw. I have two copies of Miss Hargreaves to give away, and a set of Bloomsbury bookmarks for a runner up. Of course, if you already have a copy of Miss H and would prefer the bookmarks, just say that in the comments.

I usually try to put a positive spin on the books I read, so there is a real danger that I’m going to go wildly overboard with superlatives on Miss H, because – along with Diary of a Provincial Lady and Pride and Prejudice – it is the novel I could happily read over and over again, starting as soon as I’d finished.

Norman Huntley and his friend Henry are on holiday in Ireland, when they wander into a hideous church, led by a sexton with a squint.

I turned to the chancel, hoping to find something – however slight – that I could praise. But it was worse up there. Seaweed green altar frontal; dead flowers; lichenous-looking brass candlesticks; pitch-pine organ with a pyramid of dumb pipes soaring over a candle-greased console; ‘Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus,’ splashed in chrome Gothic lettering over the choir walls; mural cherubim reminding you of cotton-wool chicks from Easter eggs; very stained glass; tattered hymn books, tattered hassocks – it was a horrible church. But there were, mercifully, two redeeming features; those were the dust sheets spread over lectern and pulpit. Somehow you felt a little safer with those dust sheets.
Meanwhile, Squint was rhapsodizing.
“I beg you to observe the beautiful lettering and decoration on the chancel wall. ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon a Throne.’ You like it?”

He had a habit of hissing like a goose, particularly when he was eager about something.

“Very pretty indeed,” I said.
“Original,” said Henry.
“Unusual, in a sense.”
“Full of feeling.”
“Filthy,” I said.

The awkwardness of the subsequent conversation forces Norman, on the Spur of the Moment, to make up a mutual acquaintance with a previous clergyman – that acquaintance is Miss Hargreaves.

‘And this lady, this Miss Hargreaves, she is still alive?’

‘Ten minutes old, precisely,’ said Henry.

I trod on his toe brutally.

‘The soul of youth,’ I said. ‘She is a poet,’ I added dreamily.

‘She would be an old lady,’ said Squint. ‘Over eighty.’

‘Nearer ninety,’ said Henry.

‘A touch of rheumatoid arthritis,’ I said, ‘but no more than a touch.’

Having left the church, Norman and Henry continue to embellish Miss Hargreaves’ character. A keen musician, she is the niece of the Duke of Grovesnor, has a cockatoo called Dr. Pepusch and a dog called Sarah. Perhaps most wonderful of all, she travels with her own hip bath. Proud of their creation, they continue the joke by sending her a letter, inviting her to visit Cornford…

… and she does.

A telegram arrives, telling them to expect her. Disbelievingly, they wait at the train station:

Limping slowly along the platform and chatting amiably to the porter, came – well, Miss Hargreaves. Quite obviously it couldn’t be anyone else.

‘At Oakham station,’ we heard her saying, ‘we have exquisitely pretty flowers. The station-master is quite an expert horticulturist. Oh, yes, indeed!’

‘Shall I have all your luggage put on a taxi, Mum?’

‘Just wait! Kindly stay! A moment. Accept this shilling, I beg of you. I am a trifle short-sighted, porter – oh, did I give you a halfpenny? Here you are, then. Can you see a young gentleman anywhere about? If so, no doubt but it would be my friend Mr. Norman Huntley.’

I flopped weakly on to a chair.

‘Can’t see no one, Mum,’ I could hear the porter saying.

‘Then let us wait! Do not go. What a handsome train – what a most handsome train! I wrote a sonnet to a railway train once. In my lighter moments, porter; in my more exuberant moments. My Uncle Grovesnor was good enough to say it recalled Wordsworth to him. Do you read at all, porter? Tell me. Tell me frankly.’

Isn’t she simply wonderful? Frank Baker has given her a voice so unmistakably hers, she is a unique creation and every word she says is a pleasure to read. To have seen Margaret Rutherford play her on stage and screen! I have hopes of the 1960 film turning up one day. Or Maggie Smith to play her now – she would be perfect. And, oh, Miss Hargreaves’ poetry! It is as strange and unique as she is, yet has undeniable panache.

Oh why must I go with my green tender grace
To lay all my eggs in one basket?
If I were a mayor I could carry a mace;
My card and address in a casket.

[…]

All this goeth on and my mind is a blank,
A capriciously prodigal hostage.
What care I when comforters tell me the Bank
Will pay death-duties, homage and postage?

But Miss Hargreaves is not all frothy excitement and delight – she “abominates fuss”, wants things to be just-so, and is unlikely to let decorum of convention prevent her from carrying out her good intentions. ‘She had the gift of being able to do unconventional things in the most casual manner, never losing her dignity thereby.’ As the novel progresses, while she may retain her dignity, Miss H manages to cause all sorts of trouble for Norman, with his family, his girlfriend, and his colleagues and acquaintances at the Cathedral where he plays the organ. (Music is a hugely important element of the novel – anybody who loves the organ, harp, or violin will find plenty to enjoy here.) She becomes something of a Frankenstein’s monster – as Norman’s mother says, ‘I think one would get quite fond of her, and yet never want to set eyes on her again.’

Miss Hargreaves may be the most extraordinary inhabitant of Cornford, but the others are by no means normal. Frank Baker is not satisfied with the creation of one exceptional character – he has made another, in the form of Norman’s father. Constantly talking at cross-purposes to everyone around him, and utterly absent-minded, he throws the most deliciously irrelevant things into conversation: ‘”Parrots are intelligent birds,” said father. “Knew one once that could recite a Shakespeare sonnet. All except for the last line.”‘ He gets irrationally worked-up about a new teapot, uses Browning as firewood in the bookshop he erratically runs, but is also the only person in Cornford who really believe Norman’s tales, and, in his own bizarre way, comforts him. ‘”Get it off your chest, boy. I may not listen, but I shall gather the trend of it.”‘

I have probably written far too much, and quoted at length, but I just love this novel so, so much. My quotation on the back of the Bloomsbury edition says ‘Witty, joyful, and moving but above all an extraordinary work of the imagination’ – and indeed it is. Endlessly surprising and captivating, Baker keeps the novel pacy all the way through. The idea could have grown stale, but there are enough twists and turns to keep you hooked. Sometimes sinister, sometimes sad, sometimes hilariously funny – Miss Hargreaves covers more or less all the bases, always written in the sort of delicious writing which is hardly found anymore. Miss H is one of the best characters of the twentieth century, in my opinion, and I really cannot encourage you enough to find this extraordinary book.

Don’t forget, for a copy of this wonderful novel – pop your name in the comments. Two winners will be announced later in the week, and a runner-up will get the bookmarks. If you’d prefer the bookmarks to the novel, just say.

Links to other reviews of Miss Hargreaves:
Cornflower
Random Jottings (warning: a lovely review, but gives away quite a lot)
Oxford Reader
Harriet Devine
Fancy Day

Parents and Children

StuckinaBook All , 12 Comments

Few authors inspire excessive amounts of love and hate as Ivy Compton-Burnett. I first swore my love for ICB on this blog a year ago, but I do space out my ICB novels (they do have a tendency to be similar) and whilst on holiday I read Parents and Children (1941).

And what a lot of children there are – nine of ’em. I’ve left the book in Somerset, so I can’t remember all their names – actually, there’s a challenge, how many can I recall… Honor, Gavin, Graham, Daniel, James, Nevill [sic?]… and three others. They split neatly into three groups – three in the nursery, three in the schoolroom, three adults. As usual in ICB novels, not much happens – but when it does, it’s pretty drastic. Life-changing events are encompassed by lengthy, facetious discussions – gently vicious and cruelly precise, always picking up on the things said by others. Calmness permeates even the most emotional responses, and ICB’s writing is always astonishing in its use of dialogue. More or less all of it is dialogue, and though often sophistry, it is somehow also accurate about family dynamics.

Alongside the nine children, two parents and two grandparents are three governesses, various maids, a visiting family of three and a neighbouring family of three siblings. That makes at least 23 central characters – somehow each of them is individual, with their own distinct dialogue and personality. How she does this in fewer than 300 pages is astonishing.

As I said, giving plot would be a waste of time, especially since most of the major events happen in the last fifty pages or so. In fact, the blurb to my copy gave away more or less all the plot. What I will say is that any ICB fans will also love this one – I don’t think it as good as Mother and Son or A House and Its Head, so I’d recommend ICB newbies should start with one of those. But any ICB novel is so unlike any other author’s, and a real treat. Or, alternatively, a nightmare. Only one way for you to find out…

Tripping Over

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

One of the books which I should have included in my Top 15 last year, but somehow didn’t, was Emma Smith’s excellent memoir of a Cornish childhood, The Great Western Beach. I wrote about it here, complete with a jaunty picture of a little bucket. When I heard Maidens’ Trip: A Wartime Adventure on the Grand Union Canal was being reprinted by Bloomsbury in the same format, I hurriedly asked for a copy, and the journey to and from London enabled me to read it.

Last time I praised David Mann’s jacket design, and I can only do so again – The Great Western Beach and Maidens’ Trip sell well for the content, I daresay, but there must be lots of casual browsers who picked it up on the basis of the brilliant design. And then there might be people like me who have a liking of Maidens’ Trip simply for the excellent apostrophe use. It’s reminiscent of some of Bob Dylan’s best work. Man, I love Bob Dylan.
[I should add that I left the computer unattended for a few minutes, and it was sabotaged by Colin.]

I knew approximately nothing about the Grand Union Carrying Company and the wartime work which happened. Women were employed to ‘make use of boats lying idle’, and transport goods up and down the canal. Emma Smith did this in 1943, with several other girls at different points, but with authorial licence she condenses these trips into one trip, and the girls into three girls – Nanette, Charity, and Emma. Yes, Emma is Emma Smith, but an edited version. In The Great Western Beach Emma Smith had a slightly surreal narrative voice – the vocabulary of an adult, the ignorance of a child. Maidens’ Trip demonstrates that she always used an unusual angle – though she always uses ‘we’ and ‘us’ to describe their experiences, there is no ‘I’. Emma, like Nanette and Charity, is always referred to in the third person, even though she alone has thoughts and reflections revealed. It took me 60 pages to discover why the book was a little unnerving, and then I realised what was going on. ‘We’ but never ‘I’.

There are too many mini-adventures in Maidens’ Trip for me to describe them all, and each feels representative of a boating life. Their interaction with professional boating fraternity shows a world now lost. These families would travel up and down the canals all their lives, marrying within the fraternity, bringing up their children in the same ways, with little knowledge or care about the world away from the water. Their friendships would survive on seeing people for only a few minutes a week, passing on the canal. Still Nanette, Charity and Emma made friends – and made enemies. Though the girls have distinct characters, each also has the stubbornness needed to battle the elements, the privations, and the locks. The overriding impression is of dirt, weariness, hunger and a constant triumph that they were succeeding at all.

Just like The Great Western Beach, Emma Smith writes in a continually captivating and energetic manner in Maidens’ Trip. Her experiences were unusual, but it is her writing voice which makes them fascinating. A sparse honesty pervades, and the book is without a drop of sentiment. Though perhaps not as good as The Great Western Beach, which deserves to be a classic of memoir for generations to come, Maidens’ Trip is a wonderful journey into the bizarre episode in the life of a very interesting woman.

“The trouble is,” said Charity, hearing, as always, only what she wanted to hear, “that no one knows a thing about canals till they come on one. People have said to me so many times: ‘But what do you do?’ and I can’t explain. They seem to think you do nothing but lean on a tiller all day.”

Perhaps we can’t share the same experiences as Charity, Nanette and Emma – but Maidens’ Trip is a close second best.

Say Please

StuckinaBook All , 6 Comments

I’ve recently finished one of the funniest books I’ve read this year. I bought Say Please by Virginia Graham because (a)it was a nice old hardback, (b)Virginia Graham is both a Persephone author, and co-author of the wonderful letters to and from Joyce Grenfell, (c) I read the Foreword. Which I will now quote in full:

‘This is a book on Etiquette for Ladies, neither of which or whom now exists, as everybody knows; so the whole thing, both from my point of view and from yours, is the most shocking waste of time, and I have really no idea how it happened. The only thing that can be said for it is that it will not help you in the least to be a lady, which is all to the good as I believe it is not a desirable status, but it may make you laugh, which is always nice, even if this, also, is a waste of time. It may, of course, do nothing of the kind, which will be an enormous pity.’

Thus set up, how could I resist? Published in 1949, Say Please is a tongue-very-much-in-cheek guide to everything from leading committees (‘A very good Chairman never lets anybody speak at all but assumes with perfect confidence and with a perfect disregard for the truth that everybody is in agreement’) to dealing with an ill relative (‘any information he cares to give must be regarded as puerile… If a patient insists on being spoken to, then he must be addressed in the third person as though he were a baby.’)

This book, though obviously not meant to be an accurate reflection of everyday life, does still give a snapshot of the obstacles faced by the 1940s woman. Still sections on huntin’ shootin’ fishin’, and servants – but also how to deal with rationing and post-War discussions. Not forgetting the Tennis Party, present in so many books of the early twentieth century, now a thing of the past. The section on Tennis included an epigraph from Harry Graham (her father): “She also served but mostly stood and waited”. A-ha-ha-haaa, if you’ve read your Milton.

A pseudo-etiquette guide may not seem immediately your cup of tea, but any fans of The Diary of a Provincial Lady are advised to get a copy of Say Please: the humour is often quite similar. There are quite a few cheapish (£2-3) secondhand copies on Amazon and abebooks, and doubtless elsewhere. A few editions appear to have been printed in the late ’40s and early ’50s, but nothing since… it seems to linger on only in collections of sporting quips. Say Please could be a good candidate for a reprint, only which market would it fall into?

One of the funniest books I’ve read this year, and might well make my top ten of 2009… I’ll leave you with a quotation from the section on Invitations.

After reaching a certain age it is legitimate to throw etiquette to the winds and be frank. In society, and indeed out of it, frankness is considered very bad-mannered, and that is why one has to be of a certain age before one attempts so drastic a measure. (How certain the age is can only be ascertained when one reaches it.) Then, in a voice nicely balanced between self-depreciation and arrogance, one can say: “No, Jane! It is sweet of you, but you know how stupid I am? I simply loathe the country in the winter and nothing in God’s earth will make me come to Norfolk in November! I’m sorry, darling. I love you, but NO”. This type of remark, firm but loving, resolute but begging sympathy is unfortunately dreadfully wounding, but on reaching that certain age (curse the thing) one prefers, alas, to wound rather than go to Norfolk.

Remember that to get a name for not going out eventually means you will not be asked out. This is rather a bore, for the whole charm of life lies in being asked everywhere and going nowhere. When you are a very old lady living in one tiny room with only one tiny frayed aspidistra for company, you may wish you had gone to Norfolk after all and kept up with dear Jane, who is still being photographed blowing, with her last remaining breaths, down a hunting horn at local Hunt Balls.

Sisters By A River

StuckinaBook All , , 10 Comments

Continuing my Barbara Comyns interest, I spent my train journey back from Liverpool reading her first novel Sisters By A River. I bought the novel in Somerset, but there are loads available on Amazon. I say ‘novel’, but there is no structure to this book, really – lots and lots of little essays or vignettes or really just anecdotes. They’re vaguely chronological. I was especially interested by this novel as it’s openly based in Bidford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, where my very close friend Lorna was brought up, and I’ve been several times.

I can’t stand books which use incorrect spelling to reproduce the mind of a child (which put me off Our Spoons Came From Woolworths a bit) but I discovered in the Introduction that Barbara Comyns couldn’t actually spell as an adult, and the publishers decided not to edit her manuscript (the Intro says she couldn’ spell because her mother went deaf when Barbara was young… I couldn’t really see the connection).

This book is actually autobiography – never sure how accurate, and it certainly has all the surrealism I’ve grown to expect from Comyns. Her childhood makes the Mitfords seem dull. Quite similar, actually – six daughters in her case, in a rambling old house with an angry, mad father. The mother is also pretty mad, and the children are fairly uncontrolled, running riot over the house and area, making their own rules and creating their own world. This is representative of the insanity (spelling mistakes intentional! ):

‘Things at home were getting pretty grim about this time, Daddy was particularly mororse and glum through money worries, then he would drink and try and forget but it only made things worse, he never got jolly when he drank, just miserable, I can’t think why he did it. Mammie was always quarreling with him, they were the two best people at agvergating each other I have ever met, she was getting awfully sick of us too, more even than usual, she had got an awful new habit of thinking people were falling in love with her, it was very trying and embarising, we would come on her gazeing into space, her lips moving in an imaginaru conversation with a ficticious lover, she even went so far as to tell Daddy she had lovers and was unfaithful to him, this caused the most frightful rows, usually ending in him throwing all her clothes out of her bedroom window or Mammie running down to the river bank screaming and saying she was going to drown herself, sometimes waving an unloaded revolver above her head, but she never did commit suicide, sometimes the maids, if they were new, would run after her and drag her back to the house, but we would just sit on the chicken pen roof or somewhere peaceful.’

Long sentences, as you see! Everything in the book is told with a child’s calm indifference and no sense of causality. Difficult to know how disingenuous the writing is – either way, it is very effective, and this bizarre autobiographical- novel-anecdotal- chat is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read. At first I thought I’d find it too affected, but in the end I loved it. Would make great reading alongside Mitford stuff.

The tone throughout was rather surreal – ‘Daddy very much dislike finding odd human bones about the house, they had a habbit of getting tucked down the sides of the morning-room chairs’ is the comment on an archeological dig in the garden – but even more surreal when you realise it’s mostly true. Tales of ugly dresses and bad haircuts are told in the same captivating, undemonstrative style as those of Grannie dying and Father throwing a beehive over Mother. If this motley assortment of remembrances were made-up… well, I don’t think they could have been. Such a bizarre childhood, so of its time, and yet utterly fascinating. Completely devoid of charm, but somehow, in a way, it charmed me. I still think Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is Comyn’s best book, of the five I’ve read (standardised spelling for a start!) but Sisters by a River is mesmorising, and a book I’ll return to many times from sheer incredulity and amazement.

Thought I’d just finish off these thoughts by quoting the blurb Barbara Comyns wrote herself in 1947:

The river is the Avon, and on its banks the five sisters are born. The river is frozen, the river is flooded, the sun shines on the water and moving lights are reflected on the walls of the house. It is Good Friday and the maids hang a hot cross bun from the kitchen ceiling. An earwig crawls into the sweep’s ear and stays there for ten years. Moths are resurrected from the dead and bats becomes entangled in young girls’ hair. Lessons are done in the greenish light under the ash-tree and always there is the sound of water swirling through the weir. A feeling of decay comes to the house, at first in a sudden puff down a dark passage and the damp smell of cellars, then ivy grows unchecked over the windows and angry shouts split the summer air, sour milk is in the larder and the father takes out his gun. The children see a dreadful snoring figure in a white nightshift, then lot numbers appear on the furniture and the family is dispersed…

Put Out More Flags

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments
I’ve always vaguely connected Evelyn Waugh and E.M. Forster in my mind – not sure why, other than that ‘E’, since they didn’t really overlap in their writing periods. Having quite liked A Passage to India (which would have been better as a short story, I think) and A Room With A View, but failed to be overwhelmed by them, I’d also placed Mr. Waugh on the backburner. Which, I discovered as I read Put Out More Flags on the train journey down to Somerset, was a mistake. The writers have more or less nothing in common, and whilst I could read Forster for months without any danger of laughter lines, Waugh is really rather funny.

 

 

I don’t really know how popular Put Out More Flags is – certainly not one of Waugh’s more famous novels, and I hadn’t heard of it until someone mentioned it a few months ago. I found the title irresistible. It just sums up the earnest patriotism with no outlet for full venting – how shall we solve it? Put out more flags. Reminds me of a car Colin and I saw during the last World Cup, where someone had stuck seven British flags on their car. You could just imagine looking critically at their car festooned with six flags, and thinking “But will people realise that I love Britain?” Mentioning Colin gives me opportunity to shame him – when he found out I was reading Evelyn Waugh, his faux-intellectual response was “Evelyn Waugh? I love all her books.”

 

Put Out More Flags was published in 1942 and is about the phoney war which preceded the war proper. The central character is Basil Seal – and, through him, his mother, mistress and sister. We see the interior, informal and jokily malevolent workings of the war offices (who continually send all the volunteers and insane visitors to other departments), the recruitment and training of soldiers, responses of the rich and elderly, the bohemian socialists, the unfit, unlikely soldiers. Basically the upper-middle and upper-classes dealing with a strange situation. Barbara (Basil’s sister) features in my favourite part of the novel, and a central focus, placing evacuees:

 

Evacuation to Malfrey had followed much the same course as it had in other parts of the country and had not only kept Barbara, as billeting officer, constantly busy, but had transformed her, in four months, from one of the most popular women in the countryside into a figure of fear. When her car was seen approaching people fled through covered lines of retreat, through side doors and stable yards, into the snow, anywhere to avoid her persuasive, ‘But surely you could manage one more. He’s a boy this time and a very well-behaved little fellow.’

 

There are touches of EM Delafield – especially, unsurprisingly, The Provincial Lady in Wartime, which also features the War Office and its internal ‘workings’ – but where Waugh diverges from Delafield territory is where I had problem with Put Out More Flags. I found Basil Seal one of the most repugnant, malicious and dislikeable characters I’ve encountered since Heathcliff. Throughout the novel there were punches of nasty, unkind humour which laughed at ruining the treasured home of an elderly couple, sending an innocent man in exile to Ireland for Basil’s own ends, betraying friends for the sake of promotion. Whilst we probably aren’t supposed to see Basil Seal as a moral guide, it did seem that we were supposed to be fond of him, look on the character as something of an amusing rascal – whilst in fact he is selfish, vicious and cruel. Give me the self-deprecating humour of EM Delafield, or the affectionate, harmless fun-poking in Mapp and Lucia – Waugh’s idea of humour is mostly on the mark, and he uses comic language superbly (I laughed out loud several times) but too often the undercurrent was too nasty for me. I need to read a Wodehouse or two as an antidote.

Jolly Hockeysticks

StuckinaBook All , 18 Comments

Oh dear, did everyone go when I was in Northern Ireland? Hope someone is still reading! Perhaps this will get you to say something… I’m afraid I’m going to take a literary nosedive, and return to that which I mentioned a few days’ ago – Enid Blyton and the St. Clare’s stories!


I’ve probably mentioned here before that I grew up on Enid Blyton, reading little else for quite a few years – it does mean I missed out on some gems of children’s literature, but can always catch up now (I don’t believe you can ever be too old for a good book). Those doom-mongerers who wanted Blyton banned and thought she would provide nothing but illiteracy to generations of youngters would find it hard to say I don’t like books now… Blyton provides addictive, but harmless, stories which feed young imaginations and are almost limitless in their quantity.

I loved the St. Clare’s series, largely because the central characters are twins. Pat and Isabel actually shun the book stereotype of being either absolutely identical or wholly opposite – though perhaps they are a little too like each other. Neither want to go to St. Clare’s; within minutes of arriving they learn to be good eggs and to be true to their school and honest with their friends ya-dah-ya-dah. All enjoyable tripe. Blyton appears to have had a pathological hatred of ‘tell-tales’ (which always seems to me to be invented as an excuse for teachers to ignore the majority of children’s squabbles) and a fervour for sport, and Janet (in the ‘good egg’ category) is so bluntly rude that I wanted to push her down a well – despite all these things, I’ve been joyously reliving my youth through these books. Any Blyton fanatics out there? Any children’s books which can take you right back to your infancy – or do you avoid them on principle, in case your memories would be tarnished? I, for one, had no notion that Blyton used such a flood of exclamation marks…

Off to Somerset tomorrow, will be there for three weeks. On Friday I will hear whether or not Magdalen have granted me any funding… wish me luck!

Holiday Reading Round-up

StuckinaBook All , , 1 Comment

I never quite finished telling you all about the other two books I read in Cornwall… well, let’s do a little round-up, for those dying with suspense. You already know the two which were 50-Books-Author-Repeats, if you get my meaning, One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens and A Winter Book by Tove Jansson. Well, the other two were banned from the list for other reasons…

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford was deemed too well known to make the list, and its renown is well deserved. Narrated by Fanny, this comic novel documents the exploits of the, erm, something-family. I can’t remember their names… will give some blog reader a chance to look well-read(!) Linda’s love adventures form the central focus, and as she dashes around Europe, making unsuitable matches, the reader is enthralled and amused in equal amounts. Uncle Wotsit is a brilliant creation, though a loathsome man, and if the novel is stuffed with upper-class references no longer relevant, Mitford at least shows that they’re on the way out, and treats them with fondness. The family might seem hyperbolically strange… if it weren’t for the strangeness of Mitford’s own family.

And Elizabeth Myers’ A Well Full Of Leaves doesn’t make the ’50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About’ because any life could be lived quite contentedly without reading a page of this novel. Shame. Myers’ letters were my favourite read last year, but my chief impression of this novel, published in 1942, is that it could have done with some heavy editing. Almost everything that anyone says is accompanied by an exclamation mark, however mundane, and the whole novel is simply too earnest for me, especially coming straight after Monica Dickens. Nothing wrong with earnestness, per se, but not to this extent.
The narrator is quite like Fanny in Mitford’s novel, inasmuch as she alone is left unaffected by a whirlwind of melodrama – in A Well Full Of Leaves, the effects of a loveless mother are seen on a family of working class children. Before her time, perhaps, since Waterstones now seems to sell little other than ‘Tragic Life Stories’. I can see why people write these things, cathartic and so forth (though Myers makes no pretence that hers is based on fact), but why on earth do people want to read them?