1940s

Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor #ABookADayInMay No.13

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A short review as I’m just off to a Eurovision party!

I think Palladian (1946) might be my final Elizabeth Taylor novel (though, now I write that, unsure I’ve read In A Summer Season) – it was one of her first and, as the Wikipedia page tersely notes, most clearly shows the influence of Jane Austen.

That’s evident from the name of the heroine onwards: Miss Dashwood (Cassandra) is a young woman whose parents have both died, and who goes off to be a governess at Cropthorne Manor. Governesses in the mid-1940s are not quite what they were in the 19th-century, of course, and she is part of the eccentric family quite quickly.

Who is there? Precocious young Sophy, who will be Cassandra’s pupil and who speaks of missing her mother, though she died in childbirth. There is Sophy’s father, Marion (!) Vanbrugh who is a charming, slightly selfish widower. His cousin Margaret is there, a woman keen to shock others, particularly her mother Aunt Tinty – the housekeeper, of sorts, who is plagued by any number of anxieties. And finally Margaret’s brother Tom, who drinks voraciously and with occasional melancholy. Between them, they feud and make up, they reveal secrets and conceal others, they make life hard for each other for both good and bad reasons. Plenty of incidents happen, but it is the sprawling dynamic between these well-drawn, infuriating and fascinating characters that makes Palladian interesting.

The plot does lean a little towards melodrama, and perhaps the influence of Northanger Abbey is as present as any other of Austen’s novels. But what makes this novel so quintessentially Elizabeth Taylor is her brilliant prose. There are lovely scenes of nature, and then there will be a slyness that undercuts every pose the characters try to adopt. Not many other authors would write ‘Mrs Turner smoothed – or hoped to smooth – her skirt’, or ‘”She has a heart of gold,” she added unkindly’. It was those moments that made this novel most special to me. Another example:

“Did you do all your cooking on it?” She looked at Cassandra with a new expression on her face, of wonderment, perhaps, or respect.

“Well, after my mother died, my father and I seemed to live on bread-and-butter.”

The look faded.

I don’t think this is among Elizabeth Taylor’s very best novels, and I will admit that a lot of the very-good-but-quite-similar ones have merged in my mind, and this will join them. But as I re-read her works, I’m sure they will each become more distinct – and now that I’m getting to the end of my Taylor shelf, it won’t be long before re-reading starts.

Eggs, Beans and Crumpets by P.G. Wodehouse – #1940Club

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There are so many P.G. Wodehouse books in the world, and so many of them are sitting unread on my bookshelves, that I try not to buy more. But I think I must have been tempted by the intriguing title of Wodehouse’s Eggs, Beans and Crumpets, and I’m glad I did because it meant I could add it to the 1940 Club. It’s also one of his books that I’ve never seen anyone else mention, and that’s enough to make me wonder if I’ve stumbled across an overlooked gem among his vast canon.

Well, the title is fun, but completely irrelevant – it’s a collection of stories from a few different gentleman’s clubs, and Wodehouse has decided to delineate different anonymous members of the clubs by types of breakfast food. Is this a joke he did elsewhere? It’s never explained, and the different foods don’t seem to have any associated traits. Here, for instance, is the opening paragraph of the first story:

A Bean and a Crumpet were in the smoking-room of the Drones Club having a quick one before lunch, when an Egg who had been seated at the writing-table in the corner rose and approached them.

Perhaps he thought of the title first? Anyway, while these various figures are unnamed, most of the stories feature names that P.G. Wodehouse fans will recognise. The Drones Club, of course, appears in many collections of Wodehouse stories – and the first few stories in Eggs, Beans and Crumpets star one of their most prominent members, Bingo Little.

Bingo Little will also be familiar to readers of the Jeeves books. In those, he is perpetually falling in love with different women. By the time of Eggs, Beans and Crumpets he is happily married to a rich novelist. There is something sweet and unusual in Wodehouse about their genuinely affectionate love for one another – but the difficulty that inspires each of his stories is Rosie M. Banks’ (his wife) reluctance to give him any money. Bingo Little also needs money to pay debts, and his sure-fire way to earn it is to gamble on a horse so certain to win that it’s basically just collecting money. Except, of course, the horse always loses and Bingo Little gets himself into increasing difficulties – without, in these stories, Jeeves to save him.

Apparently other stories in Eggs, Beans and Crumpets will differ depending on whether you have the US or UK editions. In my UK edition, other familiar characters who appear in later stories are Ukridge and Mr Mulliner, and quite a few minor characters who recur in Ukridge stories. In some ways it doesn’t particularly matter who the story is about. These gentlemen do have different personalities, but the structure of each story is the same: they get themselves into some sort of fix, and then surprising coincidences help extricate them from it.

While I really enjoyed reading this for the 1940 Club, I think that is the reason I prefer Wodehouse at novel-length. Because there will only be one big denouement where all the pieces brilliantly fit into place, and the hero gets away with whatever risks and blunders they have found themselves in. In Eggs, Beans and Crumpets it was all very fun, but rather repetitive. The same patterns took place in every chapter, without long enough space for the plot to have got as brilliantly convoluted as Wodehouse does at his best.

But, while the plots felt hurried, the writing was as deliciously Wodehousian as ever. There is no equal for his mix of understatement, overstatement, and comic twists and turns of sentences. Even something like this is deliciously funny to me:

The Bean asked what the Bella Mae Jobson affair was, and the Crumpet, expressing surprise that he had not heard of it, said that it was the affair of Bella Mae Jobson.

I could type out the whole book, but here is just one more example – on the snobbery of ailments at a health spa:

The ancient Spartans, one gathers, were far from cordial towards their Helots, and the French aristocrat of pre-Revolution days tended to be a little stand-offish with his tenantry, but their attitude was almost back-slapping compared with that of – let us say – the man who has been out in Switzerland taking insulin for his diabetes towards one who is simply undergoing treatment from the village doc負or for an ingrowing toe-nail. And this was particularly so, of course, in those places where invalids collect in gangs – Baden-Baden, for example, or Hot Springs, Virginia, or, as in Sir Aylmer’s case, Droitgate Spa.

Wodehouse has never been equalled – he hasn’t even been imitated as much as you’d expect – and any time spent with him is reliably delightful. I doubt I’ll remember the details of Eggs, Beans and Crumpets and it isn’t a standout from his library of work – it certainly wouldn’t be one of the ones I’d recommend to a newcomer. But a mid-ranking Wodehouse is still a more entertaining experience than almost any other writer, and I enjoyed every moment.

A London Family Between the Wars by M.V. Hughes – #1940Club

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The title to M.V. Hughes’s A London Family Between the Wars is only half accurate, and belies the fact that it is part of a series. You might be familiar with A London Child of the 1870s, which was published by Persephone and is the only other one I’ve read. Along the way she also covers the 1880s and 1890s – before jumping through to the interwar years. In 1940 this was, of course, very recent history.

So, yes, it is about a family between the wars – but by no stretch of the imagination are they in London. The village they live in, Cuffley, is probably firmly within the London commuter belt now – but it is a village, and when the Hughes family lived there it clearly feels very much like a village isolated from the world around it.

Perhaps one of the reasons that M.V. Hughes skipped from the 1890s to the interwar years is because her husband has died. Her only allusion to this is on the first page, ‘I was suddenly left a widow’ – I’m not sure what he died of, though Wikipedia says it was in 1918 so may well have been at war. She doesn’t dwell on the sadness, but she does talk about her sons – with the extraordinary names Vivian and Barnholt, and the rather more common-or-garden Arthur. At the start of the memoir they range from new-adult to early-teenager, and she writes with love and respect of them all. In-jokes are hard to convey in a way that means anything to the reader, but she does manage to give the sense of the best sort of family – the security and affection, and the safety they feel in teasing each other without endangering the relationships between them.

The anecdotes she tells them, and the lives they lead that gradually grow into greater maturity away from the family home, were all very pleasing. But somehow I now don’t remember any of them – Hughes successfully portrays an atmosphere rather than uniquely interesting quotes and incidents.

You might know that one of my favourite things – in fiction or non-fiction – is when people go house-hunting or move house. In A London Family Between the Wars they move across the village once they’ve outgrown their little house – to a new build. But for some reason haven’t quite checked that it is finished before they move in…

The best of a big worry is that it drives out all the little ones. My annoyance at being overcharged for the removal soon gave way to my dismay at the state of our new home.  Of course I had reckoned on our removing-workmen to put most of the furniture in position. But the parquet-flooring of the big room had not been begun. The wooden bricks were occupying the floor in piles. Not a single thing could be placed there. So our piano and Chesterfield-couch, our Welsh cupboard and dresser, oak chest and chairs, all had to be dumped in the garden.

The next revelation was that there were no stairs. A nice big ‘well’ was there, but the ghost of a stair. A ladder was propped up for our use in the manner of Jacob’s dream, and the beds were hoisted up the well by means of ropes. So, at all events, thought I, there will be somewhere to sleep.

That certainly puts any of my house anxieties in the shade! The stairs don’t turn up for quite a while, and they manage to make do. ‘Making do’ is quite a theme of her life, indeed, and relatable to people reading the book in 1940.

Hughes wasn’t making most of her money from writing – she also worked in the education profession. Not much as a teacher herself any longer, but in assessing other teachers’ lessons – and the exam papers that they wrote. Much of the book is taken up with tales from these worlds, and (though I have no personal interest in teaching) I found her discussions of how best to teach really interesting. In a suitably anonymised way, she shares fascinating examples of the best and worst teaching she has witnessed – and some sentences could equally well have been written 83 years later: “Our noble Ministers of Education have probably never in their lives entered the portals of an elementary school. I should like to rub their noses in a few of them.”

Overall, it’s an interesting and engaging memoir, and Hughes’ personality is what holds it together. She is charmed by nature and by people’s foibles, but is also quite no-nonsense herself. She has a few nearby friends but otherwise largely wants to be left alone, cherishing connection with her sons above all. Of course, most of the book is about a time before 1940, so it’s not all revealing about life in the period of the 1940 Club – but modernity is looming towards the end, and there is a sense that the countryside is changing. Every generation believes this, of course, and it is instructive to see something like this written so long ago:

For years after our settling here a great feature of our pleasure was the unusual beauty of our walks. There were two specially shown to visitors with pride: our star turn was a long grassy glade through the woods, with its varying colours; especially when the season was right for striking a secret route across a field into a copse thick with wild hyacinth. A walk in another direction was almost as good, for it was across fields and over stiles, up and down hill, past a real farm, and producing in spring at one stage in the walk a generous show of daffodils.

And in the autumn we could roam the fields close at hand for mushrooms – more than we could consume; while for blackberries we hardly needed to do more than push out our hand.

But now we are met with barbed wire, notices to keep to the pathway, to beware of the dogs, ‘You have been warned’, and other such chilling deterrents.

Plus ça change…

Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck – #1940Club

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Goodness knows when I bought Bewildering Cares by Winifred Peck, but it was probably the best part of 15 years ago. Thank goodness for these reading clubs for making me pay attention to the books waiting on my shelves, as I really enjoyed this novel – subtitled ‘a week in the life of a clergyman’s wife’.

Parts of it were published ‘in rather a different form’ (whatever that means) in the Guardian before being collected into a book – which must have happened rather quickly, as it is set in the spring of 1940 and published before the end of that year. Of course, the Second World War moves quickly – and the period it is set in is before Blitzkrieg. It was while war might still feel far off, though still affecting everyday lives in numerous ways, of course. As Peck writes in a little author’s note at the beginning, ‘perhaps the thinks she [the diarist] cares for are coming to seem more, and not less, precious’.

The things she cares for are the lives and squabbles of a community of churchgoers. It all feels very like provincial village life, and indeed Provincial Lady-esque, except she mentions in passing that the population of Stampfield is about 60,000 – more than 200 times the number of people living in my village. But somehow, even in a fairly significantly sized town, everybody seems to know one another and be keenly involved in the details of each other’s lives.

Camilla is the vicar’s wife keeping the diary over the course of the week. It’s not really in diary form, except for aping the popularity of the Provincial Lady technique – and we have a similar range of characters. She has done better than the PL in the husband department – Arthur is kind, gentle, and a little incapable. Much of Camilla’s life seems to be spent in stopping him giving away all their money or shielding him from the criticism of locals. They have an adult son, Dick, who is a soldier but not yet deployed. Their maid is Not What Maids Were Before The War, and Camilla seems to do much of the housework themselves, but they consider her part of the family and tolerate her constantly going to see her boyfriend (who dangles the threat that he might be sent to the front at any moment).

One of the chief interests in reading books from 1940 is seeing a particular moment in wartime. There are little details, like ‘”the pink form” (which has, Dick tells me, a far less polite adjective in the Army)’ – which Peck’s original audience would have understood, I suppose, and seems to have been something connected with income replacement for the wives of soldiers? (I’ve only been able to find this post which mentions the pink form in WW1, which is something rather different.) As Camilla writes:

Like everyone else in Europe, we have lived for these last two years as people who know a thunderstorm is coming, and now the storm is raging all the time, though the lightning has not struck Dick nor ruined our cities yet, and the only thing to do is to turn away from the windows at odd moments and try to forget, as best you may, if you wish to keep your reason.

Despite war being a constant, Camilla notes that people aren’t truly interested in each other’s experiences of it: ‘”What news have you of Dick?” (Everyone asks this, and no-one ever waits for an answer, I notice. Soldiers aren’t news in this war.)’ They are rather more preoccupied with their own local issues – and one of the chief of these in Bewildering Cares is the curate Mr Strang, and a sermon he has recently given in favour of pacifism. People are furious, and Arthur and Camilla find themselves called upon to disown the curate or remonstrate with him in some way. Camilla, in particular, has no wish to do anything so drastic, and spends a lot of the book ingeniously disengaging from conversations with irate parishioners.

It is very quaint to imagine a time when a sermon could become the talk of a town. I certainly enjoyed the theme of faith in Bewildering Cares, and the ways that Camilla writes genuinely and undramatically about her prayer life and relationship with God, as well as the behaviour of other people in the church community. It’s so rare to find Christian faith written about sensitively or sincerely – or even unsneeringly – in recent fiction that I really appreciated how Peck incorporates it into the novel as a fundamental and stable part of Camilla’s life. Peck also writes so well about the mixed feuding and kindness of church communities that I have to assume she was part of one. I even expected that her husband had been a vicar, but apparently he was a schools inspector and later Education Minister in Scotland.

Another lovely feature of Bewildering Cares is seeing mention of other middlebrow authors. Camilla, like so many literary heroines whom we are expected to have some affinity with, is a keen reader and mentions Angela Thirkell, Dorothy Whipple, and Charlotte M. Yonge among others. These sorts of things might feel a bit forced in a historical novel, but much more natural from someone at the time.

Overall, Peck doesn’t have quite the charm and humour of the Provincial Lady, but then who does. I still loved reading Bewildering Cares, learning a bit more about the home front in 1940, and spending time in the company of a heroine whom it was easy to consider a friend.

The Bird in the Tree by Elizabeth Goudge #1940Club

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The Bird in the Tree (1940) is the third Elizabeth Goudge novel I’ve read, after The Middle Window and The Scent of Water, but it was the first one I ever owned. Embarrassingly, I was given it back in 2008 – by Jenny, who used to blog with Teresa at Shelf Love. There was something called ‘buy a friend a book’ and lots of bloggers sent books around the world. I don’t remember who I bought for or where I sent it, but I’m delighted I took part because – 15 years later – I really loved this novel.

The Bird in the Tree is apparently the first of a trilogy of novels about the Eliot family – some of whom are living in Damerosehay, a beautiful home that is not an ancestral pile, but has been acquired relatively recently in a somewhat romantic and characteristically determined move by Lucilla. She is the matriarch of the family, loved and underestimated by all. They respect her steely core, but focus more on the sweet wrappings of it.

She did not know why they found her so deliciously funny, but she was glad that they did, for she knew that the people who can be loved and laughed at together are the most adored.

With her is her unmarried daughter, Margaret, a clergyman son and several visiting grandchildren. Two of her sons have died in the war, including her favourite child, Maurice. This favour has continued to the second generation – his son, David, is also beloved by all. As the novel opens, he is returning and his nephews are delighted to greet him.

From this varied cast of characters, alive and dead, Goudge manages to give us distinct understandings of them all – and the relationships between them, whether close, precarious, or faded. Here, for instance, is David’s relationship with his unmarried aunt – and the final word of the paragraphs takes it in a direction I hadn’t anticipated, but which has such truth to it.

But David, standing where all the Eliot men always stood, in front of the fire so that none of the warmth could reach their female relatives (though to do them justice they did not think of this, Lucilla not having the heart to point it out) threw the evening paper quickly aside and went instantly to meet Margaret. He never forgot for how many years she had done for him all the things that it would have bored Lucilla to do; darned his socks, packed his box for school, ministered to him when as a small boy he was sick in the night; he did not forget, and he never failed to show her a punctilious affection that hurt her intolerably.

David has inherited much of his grandmother’s determination and charm, and he finds it easy to make people love him – but he has far greater stores of selfishness than she does. Luckily things that please him tend to please others too, but there is secret he is holding that threatens to hurt many people and damage many relationships. When Lucilla comes to hear of it, her purpose is to try and dissuade him.

Most of what I loved about The Bird of the Tree was the feeling of being swept away to this family estate. I’m not good with visual descriptions and wouldn’t be able to tell what Damerosehay looked like, but I truly felt like I was there. Goudge conveys its gentleness, its familiarity, its cosiness and security and history – and its resistance to change. I felt at home.

I also loved Goudge’s unashamed story of sacrifice for others. Few modern novelists would expect a character to sacrifice something seemingly vital to him for the sake of other people. The narrative of ‘you have to be true to yourself’ is overwhelmingly dominant now, and Lucilla’s advice may seem old-fashioned to many. But I appreciated the morality of The Bird in the Tree, and the uncloaked way it was shown. While I’m not sure I agreed with all of Lucilla’s beliefs, I really liked the sincerity and faith behind them – the unselfish way she lives them out, and hopes others will also live them out.

What prevents The Bird in the Tree feeling saccharine or simplistically moralistic is Goudge’s excellent observational writing. Here, for instance, David is remembering a time of deep upset in his youth, scared of his father’s increasing illness:

Terrified by it he had fled one evening to the dark attic, slammed the door and flung himself down sobbing upon the floor. He had sobbed for an hour, sobbed himself sick and exhausted until at least, childlike, he had forgotten what it was he was crying about and had become instead absorbed in the moonlight on the floor. It had been like a pool of silver, enclosed and divided up into neat squares by the bars of the window. He had counted the squares and the lines, dark and light, and had been delighted with them. He had touched each with his finger, this way and that, and had been utterly comforted.

It’s a tricky balance, but Goudge treads it expertly. I loved the time I spent at Damerosehay and the spread of characters I met – mostly Lucilla, who charmed me as much as she does everyone else. I hope I manage to read the sequels rather more quickly than I read the first.

Final Edition by E.F. Benson – #1940Club

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I have read E.F. Benson novels for previous club years, and they’re always a frothy and fun addition to any reading project. When I saw that 1940 also had a Benson book, and I had it on my shelves, it was a non-brainer. And it was a really interesting and valuable reading experience – but quite different from anything else I’ve read by him.

The subtitle is ‘An informal autobiography’, and the first words we see are a publisher’s note which opens thus:

Ten days after the manuscript of Final Edition was delivered to the publisher, its author died in University College Hospital on the 29th of February, 1940.

There is no indication of this ill health through the book and, since he sadly died of throat cancer, presumably it was something he knew was quite possible would come soon. Well, I say there is no indication of it – but perhaps it explains the contemplative, slightly subdued tone that is there throughout. Certainly he does not write about his own life and circle with the same flippant wit that he shows in Mapp and Lucia and all the books like it.

And having said that, I did find he started out the book in his most sparkling mode…

I read not long ago in some essay full of witty fireworks that by the time that most autobiographical writers address themselves to their task they seem to have forgotten, through the lapse of memory, everything in their lives which was worth recording. That discouraging verdict haunted me: I turned it over and over in my mind while I was meditating on the pages that follow, but came to the conclusion that, however just it might prove to be in the case that now concerned me, a court of appeal would not, in nine cases out of ten, uphold it. Indeed, as I thought over various very entertaining volumes of the sort which I had recently read, it appeared to me that not only had their writers retained their recollective powers in the most amazing manner, but that some of them had brought up, as an unnecessary reinforcement to memory, imaginations of the most magical kind.

He then goes on to give a few examples of memoirists who wrote in detail about events that couldn’t actually have happened. Is it a warning of what we are expect, or is he setting himself from the sort of autobiographer who gets carried away into greater detail than memory can guarantee?

Certainly, in the pages that follow, Benson keeps himself to stories that couldn’t easily be checked by an external verifier. Final Edition is his chance to reminisce about the places he has lived and the people he knew, and there is surprisingly little about his writing. Only a handful of books are mentioned, and the longest period he lingers on his work is during an extended lament that he spent too much time on frothy books that don’t matter and not enough on well-written books with a point. (I should mention that he doesn’t dismiss the craft of light-hearted, funny novels – but believes he published too many sub-par titles. He doesn’t give any examples of the ones he regrets, so I can’t say if I agree with his assessment or not.)

Thankfully, he does write a bit about Mapp and Lucia. I remember the delight I felt when I first heard that this was a brilliant crossover – Lucia had already appeared in two novels, and Miss Mapp in one, before he decided to bring them together. Can you imagine how fun that would have been as a contemporary fan? Here’s what he says about the genesis of the idea:

I outlined an elderly atrocious spinster and established her in Lamb House. She should be the centre of social life, abhorred and dominant, and she should sit like a great spider behind the curtains in the garden-room, spying on her friends, and I knew that her name must be Elizabeth Mapp. Rye should furnish the topography, so that no one who knew Rye could possibly be in doubt where the scene was laid, and I would call it Tilling because Rye has its river the Tillingham… Perhaps another preposterous woman, Lucia of Riseholme, who already had a decent and devout following, and who was as dominant as Mapp, might come into contact with her some day, when I had got to know Mapp better. 

These reflections come from another vein that flows through Final Edition – Benson’s experiences with Rye. He started as a visitor, to Henry James, and ended up living in the same house that had previously been home to James. Two more different novels it would be difficult to imagine, so it’s fun that they both knew each other and called the same place home. I always love people writing about their homes, and Benson is engaging and touching when writing about Lamb House, about local Rye lore, and about his tenure as mayor.

Otherwise, the main focus of Final Edition is the people that Benson has known – particularly his brothers, A.C. Benson and Robert Benson. While there is clearly some deep-seated love between the three, there were minimal affinities between them. E.F. Benson lived rather longer than either of his brothers, so he has the last word on their reputations – and certainly doesn’t appreciate the modes in which they chose to specialise. A.C. Benson wrote essays and academia, and EFB believes that he quashed his natural spiky wit to turn his hand to something toothlessly comforting. Robert Benson, meanwhile, became a Catholic – later a Catholic priest – with a fervour that EFB obviously can’t appreciate. He also wrote a good deal of fiction, which EFB doesn’t think highly of – perhaps an unfortunate choice as literary executor. He tells a story of a time when they all impersonated one another’s writings, at their mother’s suggestion – and everybody enjoyed the satires that were not of their own work. A fascinating demonstration of how brothers can be so different, and the slanted ways they view one another.

Other people that E.F. Benson concentrates on are largely people I haven’t heard of. It is perhaps self-indulgent of a memoirist to write at length about his friends, but somehow Benson does it in a way that is fascinating even to the stranger. I think, perhaps, because he builds them like literary characters – albeit with more realism than his most witty creations. He does not spare them by being dishonest. Here, for instance, is his take on a friend called Brooks whose dream was literature and whose output was poor:

Browning tells us of the scholar who aimed at a million and missed it by a unit. Brooks aimed at a million and missed it by a million. But I respect that aim; it was sincere, and, though utterly barren in result, there was no sort of pose or sham about it. I daresay that if instead of aiming at a million, he had aimed at a unit, he would have missed that too, and in that case I should have found nothing to say about him that could warrant pen on paper, for a man who aims low and is eternally incompetent of hitting his mark, does not arouse either pity or interest. But to aim high, though with whatever futility and indolence, is a different matter.

Benson obviously takes writing intensely seriously, and I’ll end with a couple of passages I enjoyed on that topic – chiefly the ‘modern’ mode of writing in 1940 (which goes to show that every generation ends by thinking the next generation is choosing shock over beauty, even within the relatively unshocking world of 1940s fiction). I could have read Benson’s thoughts on writing for many more pages:

My other business, that of getting some sort of status again as a writer, was proving very difficult. The back-water into which my industrious laziness had drifted me, had carried me a long way, and by diligently reading some of the admired authors of the day I perceived how completely, as regards fiction, I had dropped out. Some I found hard to follow, and others, as regards style, had acquired lucidity by a blank disregard of euphony: they were full of jerks. To make your meaning clear, as everybody knows, though your meaning may be difficult to grasp, is an essential of decent prose, but I did not care so much about this jerkiness. I had always found an aesthetic pleasure in appreciating with the ear the sentences which the eye followed, and my ear was offended by the abrupt noises which it sensed below the print. I demand — for myself — that prose should have a certain intrinsic beauty of its own quite apart from the meaning it conveys. This beauty is quite consistent with the utmost lucidity and does not depend at all on decoration. The best example I know of it is the Gospels in the Authorised Version of the New Testament: their style reminds one of Holbein’s portrait of the Duchess of Milan.

[…]

I should have liked some of these authors, just for a change, to expose (even with a furtive air of betraying guilty secrets) fine impulses and high endeavour. The mirror which it is the function of Art to hold up to Nature, seemed to be always adjusted to reflect what lies below the belt: the heart and the brain (with the exception of the department of sexual urge) were outside the field of vision. I did not miss the message that this literature conveyed: it said, plainly enough, that sexual desire is as natural a craving as hunger or thirst, which everybody knew before.

So Final Edition wasn’t at all the sort of autobiography I was expecting from E.F. Benson, but I wholeheartedly enjoyed it. More sombre and steely-eyed than I was expecting, and a bit of a revelation into the nature and perspective of a witty novelist whose creations I have so enjoyed.

Babbacombe’s by Susan Scarlett

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Writing about my latest Furrowed Middlebrow / Dean Street Press read, I have to mention the recent, tragically early death of Rupert Heath – the brainchild behind Dean Street Press. He leaves behind him an extraordinary legacy of reprint publishing – thanks for everything, Rupert. You can read more about this at Scott’s blog.

And this blog post will be yet another tribute to what he has achieved, because Babbacombe’s (1941) by Susan Scarlett is a lovely book. It was recommended to me many years ago, but at that point it was impossible to lay hands on a copy – thank goodness it’s now available as a Furrowed Middlebrow book. And it is right bang in the middle of middlebrow – totally predictable, but all the more enjoyable for that.

If you don’t recognise the name Susan Scarlett, you may well known the writer behind the pseudonym – because this was the name under which Noel Streatfeild wrote her lighter novels. In this one, Beth has just left school and is getting her first job. She manages to secure one at Babbacombe’s – the department store where her father has worked for decades. It’s a large, tightly organised place where young employees have to quickly find their place in the whirring cogs of the machine, and Beth is keen to do her best in the frocks section. Less keen to please is Dulcie – a cousin who moves in with them. She considers herself a cut above because she is paying them board and has a small private income, and is keen to be a model in the shop – but instead finds herself as a ‘lift girl’. She is vain, impractical and selfish, and hung out to dry by the narrative in a way that did feel a bit uncomfortable to read in 2023.

Beth, on the other hand, is filled with decency and morals – but also, in order to make her lovable, a tendency to speak her mind to anybody. And that includes the curious young man she ends up stick in a lift with. (Being stuck in a lift with someone seems such a 1990s romcom trope, so it’s oddly reassuring to know that it’s been around since at least the 1940s.) She had previously caught his eye when she tripped over his brilliantly named dog, Scissors. And she tells him how much she loves Babbacombe’s and admires the owner, Mr Babbacombe, a self-made man who has worked his way from obscurity to riches – but, naturally, kept his salt-of-the-earth character. Not that she says all that; we see that for ourselves a bit later.

Little does she know – though the reader has probably suspected from the first time the man was introduced – that this is David Babbacombe, the son of the owner. He is an affluent idler, on his way up to ask his father for some more money. And, let me tell you, this way of life doesn’t strike Beth and her work ethic as being very noble:

Beth examined his lean, athletic figure in shocked surprise.

“Don’t you work at anything?”

“No. A little beachcombing now and again, and I’ve a hoard of silver cups won for this and that.”

Beth forget he was Mr. Babbacombe’s son and only felt that she liked him too much to want to despise him.

“I should have thought doing nothing but playing games was pretty dull.”

He tapped some ash clear of his coat.

“Oh, it’s all right.”

Beth hated that.

“But it isn’t. It’s miserable. You might as well be a cabbage.”

Rather chastened, David changes his mind when he gets to his father. Rather than asking for a handout, he asks for a job – and starting at the bottom.

The rest of this lovely novel is David winning Beth’s heart, and then convincing her that the class difference between them is immaterial. She takes some winning over, and in real life he would seem pretty appalling for how little agency he gives her, but Babbacombe’s is not real life and we all know the ending that we both want and are going to get. Along the way there is some fun mistaken identity business, stuff with a shoplifter, a rather tense section about an eye operation, and much more. The stakes may be high for the characters, but they are never particularly high for the reader because we know what sort of book this is.

You wouldn’t necessarily want to read a book like Babbacombe’s every day, but there is indisputably a talent in creating something this perfectly frothy and engaging. Even besides the delightful storyline, this is a wonderful novel for period detail on the inner workings of a department store – and I suspect there are many of us who can’t resist that.

When I posted a photo on Instagram, the comments were filled with other people saying how much they’d enjoyed this book. An absolute triumph and a perfect example of the sort of book it’s trying to me. Vale, Rupert, and thank you for all the lovely books like this.

Embers by Sándor Márai

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I picked up Embers (1942) by Sándor Márai in a London bookshop a little while before the pandemic, drawn by the striking cover design and intrigued by the premise. Not many books are primarily about friendship, and the small sample I read in the shop seemed beautifully written. And so it came home with me – and I really loved my experience of writing it.

Sándor Márai wrote Embers in Hungarian as A gyertyák csonkig égnek, which means ‘candles burn until the end’, and is presumably a Hungarian phrase that we don’t have in English. Embers also works very well as a title, and it was the title of the German translation (Die Glut) which was then translated in English by Carol Brown Janeway. I’m not sure why they didn’t get someone to translate straight from the Hungarian, but there we are.

The novel opens with an old General in his palatial home, which he shares only with servants and an ex-nurse Nini, who is in her 90s and a wise, all-knowing companion. He never leaves the place – he keeps only to a handful of its many rooms. And he receives a message that an old friend, Konrad, will be visiting for the first time in more than four decades.

Normally this is a conceit that puts me off a novel: a scene in the present day that then zips back to a long, chronological sequence of the past. It usually makes everything that follows feel anticlimactic. Here I think it worked – because the General’s present day is so stultified. He doesn’t even seem to live in memories most of the time, just in a protracted period of apathy.

Before Konrad arrives, Embers takes us back to the friendship between Henrik (the General in his youth) and Konrad. As young children they were inseparable, and this bond never wavered. Through school and beyond, they were as close as it is possible for two people to be – as close as twins in the womb, the novel says.

Nothing is so rare in the young as a disinterested bond that demands neither aid nor sacrifice. Boys always expect a sacrifice from those who are the standard-bearers of their hopes. The two friends felt that they were living in a miraculous and unnamable state of grace.

There is nothing to equal the delicacy of such a relationship. Everything that life has to offer later, sentimental yearnings or raw desire, intense feelings and eventually the bonds of passion, will all be coarser, more barbaric.

Henrik is usually referred to as ‘the son of the Officer of the Guards’ in the narrative, when dealing with his younger days, and we can never forget his privileged and prestigious position. By contrast, Konrad is from poverty – and refuses any financial help. His pride is so frustrating to read about. Not least because he determines he must still move in the same milieu as his friend – must have the right coat, the right gloves, the same tipping of servants, however difficult it is to find money for this. The friendship persists because Konrad doesn’t owe Henrik anything – but this disparity is always present.

I loved the way Márai writes about friendship. He recognises its value, not relegating it to a distant cousin of romantic love. He also sees how it can be as troubled as any romance – and the reader is continually trying to piece together why there has been a gap of 41 years in this friendship that started so boldly and deeply.

The reasons are unfolded at their reunion – again, Márai breaks novelistic rules and gives the General enormous amounts of dialogue for more or less the whole second half of the novel, revealing why the friendship broke off. But, again, somehow it works. Possibly because Márai’s writing is beautiful and his building of character so brilliant.

There are no neat conclusions in Embers, and yet I came away totally satisfied. An exceptionally good short novel, moving and dramatic, and addressing deep emotions and relationships that are usually disregarded in literature.

Rolling in the Dew by Ethel Mannin (Novella a Day in May #30)

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If you read about middlebrow women writers of the interwar years, you’ll doubtless have come across Ethel Mannin’s name. I don’t know if she had one book that was particularly well-known, but she was astonishingly prolific, as you can see on her Wikipedia page. I have three of her books but hadn’t read any, until Rolling in The Dew – one of three books she published in 1940.

The title comes from a George Orwell quote – Google tells me it’s in Coming Up For Air, but Mannin’s dedication gives the game away: ‘To George Orwell, who so abominates ‘the bearded, fruit-juice drinking sandal-wearers’ of the ‘roll-in-the-dew-before-breakfast’ school.’

Though published after war had started, it is set in the summer of 1939. Our hero, Pierre Mirelli, is a Frenchman living in England who stumbles across a colony living in the middle of nowhere.

“My name is Dewberry,” the big man informed him, “Rudolf Dewberry. You’re French, aren’t you? I thought do. We’ve no French here. Some Austrian and Czech refugees. And we did have some Basque children for a time. But no French.” He seemed sad about it.

Mirelli did not know what to say to this, his country not yet having produced refugees, so he merely smiled with an air of apology.

Dewberry continued heavily, “The world is in a sad mess, my young friend. The nations of Europe are as the Gadarene swine. Here in this community we have created an ideal world in miniature. But a practical ideal. Here we live in the spirit of Kropotkin’s mutual aid, each co-operating in the common good, yet each respecting the sanctity of the individual.”

One thing leads to another, and Mirelli finds that he has agreed to join the community at a conference in Geneva, where they will be addressed by Dr Krang, a pupil of Freud’s. Mirelli mostly wants to go because it means his passage will be paid to Europe, where he will be able to visit his fiancée Marthe. He has been asked to deliver a lecture, seemingly just on the strength of representing a nationality that haven’t yet got covered. Dubious, amused, nervous – he goes.

The community is not in-line with the life Mirelli would wish to lead. He discovers that they all follow the brilliantly-named Haybox-Schnitzel diet: vegetarian, non-alcoholic, and largely consisting of what looks like sawdust to Mirelli. There’s one character who lives off bran and fruit, and is hoping to wean herself off the fruit. (As a vegetarian who doesn’t drink, I could live with this diet – but the foodstuffs that are mentioned are still very unappetising.)

Of course, it is all very old hat to tease health groups and hippies and people who advocate getting back to nature, swimming in cold water before breakfast, doing yoga etc etc. In 1940, I imagine it was a little newer (if not entirely new). But it is not mean-spirited humour, and Mannin interestingly links it to all manner of contemporary sociopolitical conversations – from religious faith to Freudianism to capitalism to fascism. While her tongue is always in her cheek, she does take the delightfully over-the-top premise and sustains it into something very interesting. And it helps that Mirelli is such an endearing, sympathetic character in the midst of this maelstrom.

Mannin’s writing is a joy, too. She has some wonderfully dry lines, which reminded me of E.M. Delafield. Like when she introduces Mrs Dewberry, ‘for she was that, however much her Rudolf might seek to lessen the bourgeois shamefulness of it by referring to her as his female companion’. I suspect Rolling in the Dew is something of an outlier in her work, inasmuch as she doesn’t appear to have usually been a satirist, but it has encouraged me that her enjoyable writing style will be transferred to more ‘ordinary’ topics. I have Proud Heaven and Cactus waiting for me, so watch this space.

Novella a Day in May: Days 22 and 23

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Day 22: Grand Canyon (1942) by Vita Sackville-West

I re-read Vita Sackville-West’s novella set in an alternative 1942 where Nazi Germany has successfully taken over Europe, and refugees have fled to America. This book focuses on the occupants of a hotel on the edge of the Grand Canyon – and what happens when bombs come to the hotel. I won’t say anymore because Rachel and I will be discussing it on an upcoming episode of ‘Tea or Books?’.

Day 23: The Empty Room (1941) by Charles Morgan

In about 2003, a lady in the village called Marion lent me three books that she thought might set me off on paths of discovery. She knew I liked older books and, being 17, hadn’t formed my taste as an adult yet. The three books were Bulldog Drummond by Sapper, Strong Poison by Dorothy L Sayers, and A Breeze of Morning by Charles Morgan. I liked the Sayers, disliked the Sapper, and really liked the Morgan. Over the years since, I have owned and given away a few Morgan novels, but it’s taken me almost two decades to finally read my second book by him. Which I have in a proof copy – this is what proofs looked like in the 1940s!

Like Sackville-West’s novella, this was written in the midst of war – though Morgan’s is set in the contemporary world, rather than an alterative version of it. Richard is working on the development of a bomb-sight – I had to look up what that was, but essentially something that helps bombs be dropped more accurately. The novella starts with him working alongside other men who are in kept professions, most of whom fought in the previous war.

“I assure you, Flower,” Cannock answered, “this is paradise compared with the last war. And yet, you know, it’s extraordinarily like; that’s the devil of it. People wasting the same time and talking much the same nonsense. The same jokes, the same optimism – it’s like going to a play by a dramatist who may produce an exciting plot but whose style bores you to death. As yet we aren’t half-way through Scene One…”

Morgan is very, very good at describing the experience of finding oneself in the midst of war, and how it affects different people. All the quotes I noted down were about that, I now realise, and it’s particularly impressive to write so vividly about something that, even in 1941, had been described endlessly. Though The Empty Room turns out not really to be about the war – instead, it is about a family Richard meets because of it. There is a fellow worker whom Richard recognises from an earlier acquaintance, who invites him to move in rather than find impersonal barracks. Henry is a widower with a daughter who has not long become an adult. She, Carey, never knew her mother, but there is a portrait of her on the wall showing how similar her daughter looks. Besides this image, little is said of her – though the empty room of the title is Carey’s mothers bedroom, left as a sort of silent shrine to her.

Richard and Carey are about 20 years apart in age, but become close. It’s less icky than it sounds, though perhaps not ick-less. Anyway, it’s another opportunity for Morgan to write so perceptively about the war:

His was a generation different from hers in more than the years that divided them. This was his second war; after it, there would be for him no starting again, only a continuance to the end of a life already doubly broken; but for her it would become an incident of her youth, a point of departure from which her life would stretch ahead, still limitless, still expectant of an ordered fulfilment.

And here’s another example, about the end of the phoney war:

Every good thing became more precious; even things that were, in themselves, neither good not bad – an account-book lying on the table, a packet of old letters in a drawer – became extraordinary because they were inanimate, because they had existed before the break and lay in their places, still unconscious of it. There was a stab of wonder in every carefree movement of a bird, in the stream’s unbroken continuity, in the aloof and unswerving process of Nature.

What starts as a novella about wartime activity turns into a domestic psychological tale – the sort of thing Henry James would write if he could have composed a readable sentence. I did find it weird that such a short book would have the lengthy framing – I think it would have worked equally well, or perhaps better, if Richard had been more quickly introduced to this household. From here, it is a tense and well-written story – what really happened to Carey’s mother, and what is the mystery of the empty room?