1940s

Time Will Darken It – William Maxwell

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William Maxwell is an exceptionally good writer; I think that would be difficult to dispute.  Famously he was an editor of the New Yorker (editing, amongst many things, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories – leading to the miracle of wonderfulness that is their collected letters), and it is those skills which he carries over into his fiction writing.  A close eye to detail, an observing nature, and a delicate precision in his prose that makes reading his novels a lengthy exercise in perception and patience.

All of which means that I have to be in the right mood to read Maxwell.  When I am, nothing is more glorious.  I can luxuriate in his sentences and his precise (that word again) cataloguing of human emotion.  If I’m not in the right mood, it wearies me – it requires proper attention, and sometimes I am not a good enough reader to give it.  This, incidentally, is how I feel about many of Elizabeth Taylor’s novels, too – and, like A Game of Hide and Seek (for instance), I started, shelved, continued, shelved, repeat as needed, and eventually finished Time Will Darken It (1948).  It took the best part of four months, but it was worth doing it like this – had I rushed it, I would have resented it.  As it is, I think it was wonderful.  (Thank you, Barbara, for giving it to me back in 2009!)

The focus of the novel is on Austin King and his family in Draperville, as his cousin’s family come to visit, and the aftermath they leave behind them.  There are broken hearts, accidents, threats, arguments – but these make up a patchwork which portrays a community, rather than being of utmost importance themselves.  And the highlight of this community is Austin King himself.  He is a very Maxwellian character – patient, kind, uncertain, and never entirely able.  He lives in the shadow of his great (late) father, having taken on his partnership in a law firm; he lives his wife Martha who seems cold and distant, but is really (as Maxwell scrapes away the layers) confused and unhappy.  And then he lives with his boisterous cousin Mr Potter, his chatty wife, caddish son, and besotted daughter.

One part of King’s life which is largely satisfactory is his relationship with his daughter Abbey, or Ab.  Many Maxwellian characters are good fathers, and even though I am not a father of any variety, I love reading his portraits of these relationships – which always remind me of Maxwell’s lovely relationship with his own daughters, as shown through his letters.  He is always a sensitive writer, but perhaps most of all when it comes to Ab.

The world (including Draperville) is not a nice place, and the innocent and the young have to take their chances.  They cannot be watched over, twenty-four hours a day.  At what moment, from what hiding place, the idea of evil will strike, there is no telling.  And when it does, the result is not always disastrous.  Children have their own incalculable strength and weakness, and this, for all their seeming helplessness, will determine the pattern of their lives.  Even when you suspect why they fall downstairs, you cannot be sure.  You have no way of knowing whether their fright is permanent or can be healed by putting butter on the large lump that comes out on their forehead after a fall.
There are some many characters and events that I can’t begin to list them all, so I’ll just quote one incident I thought rather lovely.  Here Miss Ewing – Austin’s aging legal secretary – is talking to him about his father:

“I’ll never forget how good your father was to me when I first came to work here.  I was just a girl and I didn’t know anything about law or office work.  He used to get impatient and lose his temper and shout at other people, but with me he was always so considerate.  He was more like a friend than an employer.”

Austin nodded sympathetically.  What she said was not strictly true and Miss Ewing must know that it was not true.  His father had often lost his temper at Miss Ewing.  Her high-handed manner with people that she considered unimportant, and her old-mad ways had annoyed Judge King so that he had, a number of times, been on the point of firing her.  He couldn’t fire her because she was indispensable to the firm, and what they had between them was more like marriage than like friendship.  But there is always a kind of truth in those fictions which people create in order to describe something too complicated and too subtle to fit into any conventional pattern.
Maxwell often does this, and does it so well – a specific event will lead into generalised maxim, but one with such heart and such insight that all my wariness of generalisations is washed away.

The only times this approach doesn’t work very well (in my opinion) is when Maxwell gets too homiletic for too long.  There is the odd chapter which might as well be the third act of an Ibsen play, and sometimes he forgets to give us enough of the specifics before he gets onto the reflections.  But they are small flaws in a novel which is extraordinarily insightful and complex.  No character’s action or reaction is careless or implausible – sometimes they are extreme, but only where extremity is believable.  He is truly an astonishing writer – I just wish I were always as capable and adept a reader.

Oh, and the cartoon… a while ago I said I’d start doing pun covers, as a bit of silliness, and promptly forgot all about it.  Well… they’re back!

Others who got Stuck into this Book:


“This is probably one of the best books I’ve ever read; beautiful, maddening and thought provoking” – Rachel, Book Snob


“The greatness of Maxwell’s writing is that he looks deep inside each character, and he looks with humanity, without judgement, indeed with what I can only call love.” – Harriet, Harriet Devine’s Blog


“I liked the way the town and its characters came to life, as a sepia-tinted photograph does. There is an old-fashioned, autumnal feel to this novel.” – Sarah, Semi-fictional

Six Fools and a Fairy – Mary Essex

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I forgot to take a photo…
This one is from here,
where you can buy a copy

You may remember that, back in November 2011, I wrote about Mary Essex’s The Amorous Bicycle, which was very witty and fun and delightfully middlebrow – and I puzzled over the fact that Essex (in fact Ursula Bloom) had managed to write so many novels (over 500) and still put out quality.  Sometime before that, Jodie (known to us as Geranium Cat) kindly sent me her copy of Six Fools and a Fairy (1948), saying that she’d tried it a couple of times and couldn’t get into it… fast forward a couple of years, and my Reading Presently project has propelled me into finally getting it down from my shelves.  How would I find it compared to The Amorous Bicycle and another Essex novel I’d loved, Tea Is So Intoxicating?

Well, I’m afraid it’s not as good… That sounds like a very ungrateful way to start a Reading Presently review, so I shall also say that it was a fun read, and just what I wanted for relaxing in the evenings after working away ferociously on my thesis, but it’s an idea which doesn’t quite get off the ground.

And that idea is a school reunion where each of the six men recounts a story, relating to each course, about… well, I’ll let Charles Delamere explain:

“I should enjoy it immensely if we each told our own story.  About the woman, the one woman who meant something out of the rut to us.  The one each of us remembers most forcefully.”
The courses are Consomme Paysanne, Sole a la bonne femme, Vol-au-vent, Roast Lamb, Gooseberry fool, and Angels on horseback.  Give or take a few accents that I’m too lazy to find.  I’ll confess, I was already unsure about how things would go when this premise was set up.  Surely it would lead to a great deal of disjointedness?

It’s essentially a series of short stories, each of which relate all-too-appropriately to the course in question, and each of which recounts a lost love.  At one point a character makes a caustic reference to the stereotypical heroes and heroines of an Ethel M. Dell novel, but Essex isn’t far behind – her heroes aren’t swarthy silent types, but they do all fall into much the same mould as each other.  I usually hate the criticism that “He can’t write women” or “She can’t write men”, because it is (usually) silly and reductive, suggesting there are only two types of people – but Essex does seem, in Six Fools and a Fairy, to be under the impression that all men fall in love instantly, are proud, and are quite keen to hop into bed as soon as poss.  And throw into that stereotype that they’re all generally a bit hopeless.  She spends a while delineating her characters at the beginning, but it’s pretty impossible to tell the difference between them when they start talking.

Each chapter tells a difference character’s story, only occasionally returning to reunion dinner, and since they have only about thirty pages to do, we whip through fairly stereotypical tales of misadventure and the-ones-that-got-away without building the characters up enough for the reader to care.  And then the story is over, and we’re onto the next.  The chapters aren’t even structured as anecdotes, but instead are shown through an omniscient narrator.  It’s all a little bit bewildering and unnecessary.

Mary Essex is certainly an engaging writer, though, and it’s easy enough to whip through the chapters.  She has that ability to write a page-turner, even if (once turned) one has no particular wish to mull over what one has read.  For a novelist renowned chiefly now for romance literature, though, this book – the first of the three I’ve read which prioritises romance – is surprisingly less interesting than Tea Is So Intoxicating and The Amorous Bicycle, which are about gossipy villagers and amusing incidents.  For wit has absented itself from Six Fools and a Fairy, creeping only into the odd line, then slinking out again quickly.

So, diverting enough for a quick read, if one doesn’t want to feel at all challenged or invested.  But while her other novels made me think she was approaching the middlebrow joys of Richmal Crompton or even E.M. Delafield, had I read Six Fools and a Fairy first, I’d never have bothered with another.  Thanks very much for giving me a copy, Jodie, but ultimately I’m not too far from your assessment of it – and I think I’ll be passing it on again.

Mr. Skeffington – Elizabeth von Arnim

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A couple of times I have had the pleasure of staying with bloggers, who have kindly put me up (and put up with me) when I’ve needed a bed to crash in while in London.  One of those times I stayed chez Rachel/Book Snob, which was lovely – and even lovelier was that she sent me away with Mr. Skeffington (1940) by Elizabeth von Arnim as a present.  (I did give her a book to say thank you for having me, I should perhaps add, if I ever want bloggers to let me stay with them again.)

Elizabeth von Arnim is one of the most varied writers I’ve read, and there is little to link (say) the fairytale niceness of The Enchanted April with the deliciously biting satire of The Caravaners.  And then there is my current favourite, Christopher and Columbus, which has elements of both.  Where would Mr. Skeffington fit into the von Arnim spectrum?  Well, it turns out I’ve now read one of her more sombre, reflective novels… and, indeed, her last.

The novel is called Mr. Skeffington, but the central character is his ex-wife Lady Skeffington (Fanny to her friends) who divorced him over his affairs when she was still in her twenties, and is now approaching the grand old age of fifty.  In order to get on board with the novel, we have to accept the premise that fifty is terrifyingly old (although, since von Arnim was in her mid-seventies when she wrote the novel, she ought to have known better.)  But for Fanny it is a dreaded landmark, principally because – having been a renowned beauty all her life – a recent illness has taken her beauty from her, and quite a lot of her hair, and a tactless doctor tells her that she may soon be an eyesore.

An eyesore?  Was he suggesting that she was an eyesore?  She, Fanny Skeffington, for years almost the most beautiful person everywhere, and for about five glorious years quite the most beautiful person anywhere?  She?  When the faces of the very strangers she passed in the street lit up when they saw her coming?  She, Noble, lovely little Fanny, as poor Jim Conderley used to say, gazing at her fondly – quoting, she supposed; and nobody quoted things like that to eyesores.
I’ve got to say, reading Mr. Skeffington made me quite grateful that I have never been handsome – it must be very difficult to lose something like that, but especially so for Fanny, who doesn’t have many other character traits to offer – or, at least, hasn’t had to rely on them.

But that isn’t all.  The reason she consults the doctor in the first place is because she keeps having hallucinations of Job Skeffington, her estranged husband.  She can’t think why, since she has barely thought of him for years and years… but he won’t stop appearing before her eyes.

And then the novel takes us back through the men who have courted her since her divorce.  The novel is oh-so-chaste, so none of them have done more than fling themselves adoringly at her feet, and she has done little than laugh politely and ignore them – but she determines to go and find them, to make herself feel young and beautiful again, and reassure herself that she isn’t an eyesore.

So, in succession we see Fanny visit… New College, Oxford, to see an undergraduate who was recently (and somewhat inappropriately) besotted with her – only to see him busy with a much younger woman.  Then off to an older man who once loved her deeply, and still cherishes the letter she writes to him, but is shocked by her appearance after a decade or two (while she, in turn, is shocked by his) – and he, after all, is married to a young woman by now.  And then off to a vicar, living with his sister, who loved her when he was but a promising young curate, and now lives abstemiously on starvation rations.  And possibly more.

It’s an interesting conceit for a novel, but it does end up making everything feel rather disjointed, somehow.  Somehow the different meetings don’t hold together, so Mr. Skeffington is more like a series of similar short stories than a single narrative – and, although there are some interesting or delightful characters (I particularly enjoyed the vicar’s sister, who remained certain that Fanny was a prostitute, but steadfastly determined to look after her charitably, when Fanny is mega-rich) they aren’t given the opportunity to grow or impact the novel much.

And the end… well, I shan’t give it away, but it is so emphatically a tribute to a famous Victorian novel that, if it isn’t deliberate, it’s plagiarism.

This is Elizabeth von Arnim, so of course the novel is good – she is always an excellent writer – but I think it might be a novel I’d be better off reading in about fifty years’ time.  Perhaps then it would feel like a paean to youth and a empathetic mixture of nostalgia and regret… but, though I enjoyed it, and appreciated von Arnim’s writing, I missed the raucous humour of her satires.  I’ve now encountered another facet of von Arnim’s myriad writing talents… and I’m not sure I’m quite ready for it.

Of Love and Hunger – Julian Maclaren-Ross

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It’s no secret that the novels I tend to like are by women, about women, and (some would say) for women – just think of the Provincial Lady, the novels of Jane Austen, and any number of other examples.  Of course, my favourite novel is by a man (Miss Hargreaves) but I don’t think anybody would guess that from reading it.  And yet, dear reader, I seem to be developing an affection for a new variety of British literature: men of the 1940s.

The first Proper Grown Up novel I ever read (besides teenage books and the odd Agatha Christie) was Nineteen Eighty-Four, at the relatively late age of 13.  I loved it then, and I loved it on re-reading it a few years ago.  It’s entirely plausible that my tastes would have developed along Orwellian lines first, rather than wavering off – but better late than never, I have discovered a deep admiration for quite a few novels of the downtrodden, 1940s, lower-middle-class-hero[ine] variety. Most notably Patrick Hamilton’s extremely brilliant The Slaves of Solitude – and it was my love of this novel which led Dee (from LibraryThing’s Virago Modern Classics group) to send me a distinctly non-Virago novel: Of Love and Hunger (1947) by Julian Maclaren-Ross.

A long intro to a short book – Of Love and Hunger (which takes its title from Auden and MacNeice’s Letters From Ireland) concerns Richard Fanshawe, a vacuum cleaner salesman who is always in debt and never in luck.  I don’t believe the novel has a ‘message’ (it’s too sophisticated for that) but this quotation does rather set the tone:

Straker said: “Doesn’t seem much place for fellows like us, does there?””No.””What I mean, we’re kind of out of things.  Nobody seems to want us much.  Fellows who’ve been out east, I mean.  We don’t seem to belong any more.”
Fanshawe has spent some time ‘out east’, and found that the return home is not a welcome for heroes.  He is stuck in a dead end job, behind with the rent on his flat, and without any particularly close friends – but, before you vow never to read a word of Of Love and Hunger, this isn’t a particularly despondent novel.  Maclaren-Ross was a few years too early to be an Angry Young Man, and instead is one who embraces the bohemian, and shows the fundamental ordinariness of man.  Not the fundamental goodness – Fanshawe is not good – but nor is he bad.  He lives day to day, trying to earn his keep (and, if possible, keep his keep), and being friendly with people when he gets the chance.

One of the people he befriends is Sukie, who is (I quote the blurb) ‘dark, desirable – and married to his friend’.  Which makes the novel sound a bit like a love triangle – and, although it is a bit, it’s not pivotal.  More important, to my mind, are the men he meets through work.  There are some very amusing depictions of the bureaucracy and farce of vacuum selling that reminded me of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (albeit rather less hyperbolic) and I had a soft spot for Heliotrope – larger than life and twice as crooked – who is full of gusto and deceit, but a friendly face (and prolific offerer of raw onions.)

For the most part, nothing momentous happens.  Maclaren-Ross depicts an ordinary life that can’t get much better and won’t get much worse – the daily trundle to keep the wolf from the door, and the lack of ambition or drive that means Fanshawe will never be a rags-to-riches story (not least because he’s never been as low as ‘rags’ implies).  But somehow Of Love and Hunger isn’t hopeless.  It isn’t a celebration of the everyday, or raging against it, but simply a depiction of it – and it is the truly great writers who can show us the ordinary, and wish to do no more.  I’m used to many exceptionally good (and not so good) writers doing that when ‘the ordinary’ is a tea table in a drawing room – I’ve only recently started finding them elsewhere.

It’s always nice, not to mention a little ego-boosting, to read an introduction and discover that one has had the same thoughts as the Noted Expert (in this case, D.J. Taylor, who writes cogently and informatively, all too rare in introductions). I read it after I’d finished the novel, of course, and was pleased to see that he also mentioned Patrick Hamilton and George Orwell.  Of course, it was really Dee who spotted the connection, and she was right.  And fans of those writers will find much to admire in Of Love and Hunger.

Agatha Agatha

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Sometimes you just need to read an Agatha Christie, don’t you?  Well, I do.  When I was getting bad headaches still (they seem to have worn off now, for the moment at least) I needed something that didn’t require much thought, but which still would be good – and so I picked up Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie.  You may remember, from my report of a talk at Folio HQ, that Christie’s biographer Laura Thompson considered Five Little Pigs her best novel, and so I had to give it a go.

I shan’t write that much about the novel, because I really want to use this post to find out which one you think I should read next, but I’ll give you a quick response to Five Little Pigs (1942).  Well, for starters, I don’t think it’s her best.  Laura Thompson admired the way in which character and plot progressed together, and depended upon one another.  I agree with that in the abstract – but not in the way that the novel actually reads.
Poirot is investigating a murder that took place 16 years previously – on the commission of the daughter of the woman who was convicted.  Carla is the daughter, Caroline is the supposed murderer, and Amyas – Caroline’s husband; Carla’s father – is the artist who died of poisoning.  Shortly before she died in prison, Caroline wrote to her daughter to say that she was innocent… Carla, although only a young child at the time, believes her mother is telling the truth.  Poirot agrees to investigate… and narrows down the search to five people.  
The title Five Little Pigs is based on a nursery rhyme.  To quote Wikipedia: “Poirot labels the five alternative suspects “the five little pigs”: they comprise Phillip Blake (“went to the market”); Philip’s brother, Meredith Blake (“stayed at home”); Elsa Greer (now Lady Dittisham, “had roast beef”); Cecilia Williams, the governess (“had none”); and Angela Warren, Caroline’s younger half-sister (“went ‘Wee! Wee! Wee!’ all the way home”).”
The conclusion is clever and believable, and the characters well drawn (especially the contrasts between their present personalities, and the personalities shown in everyone’s accounts of the fateful day.)  The big problem with the novel, for me, is how repetitive it is.  Poirot goes to interview each of these five in turn, and he then receives written accounts from each of them (which are given in full).  That means we get ten accounts of the day, one after another.  Ten.  Five felt like it was pushing it; ten was simply dull by the end.  I get that Agatha Christie wanted to show how perspective can shed different lights on events.  But… too much.
Still, this is Agatha Christie.  It was still very enjoyable, and pretty compelling reading, but I don’t usually want to skip chunks when I read her.  Contrary to what Laura Thompson said, this is probably one of my least favourite Christie novels…
…and now I want you to suggest which one to read next.  Whenever I read one Christie I want to read more straight away.  I asked on Twitter, and got some great recommendations which I’m definitely keeping in mind, but I want to see which one would be most popular – so do comment with a recommendation even if someone else has already mentioned it.  To help you out, the following are the novels by Christie I HAVE read, so you don’t need to suggest these… oh, and I know the twist to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, so I don’t really want to read that one just yet.  Over to you (thanks in advance!)
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder at the Vicarage
Peril at End House
Murder on the Orient Express
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
The ABC Murders
And Then There Were None
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
The Body in the Library
Five Little Pigs
The Moving Finger
A Murder is Announced
They Do It With Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
Hickory Dickory Dock
4.50 From Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Endless Night
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder

The Egg and I – Betty Macdonald

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There are some authors, because of the influence of the online reading group I’m in, that I stockpile before I get around to reading them.  Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth von Arnim were among the number for years (and I love them now, of course) – on the other hand, so were Margaret Drabble and Iris Murdoch, and now I’ve tried them without success, I’m left with piles of their books to keep or give away…

Anyway, long-winded introduction to: Betty MacDonald.  I believe it was Barbara or Elaine who first mentioned Ms. MacDonald to me, and her books were definitely compared to E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady novels – which is, of course, a surefire way to get me to try them.  It’s taken me a few years, but I’ve finally read one – The Egg and I (1945), which I bought in Edinburgh in 2009.

You might be disappointed – but you’ll probably be relieved – to learn that no supernaturally large egg features in the novel, but it does feature farming. Indeed, that is what The Egg and I is about – an account of being a farmer’s wife in 1920s America. As with the Provincial Lady books, and my other favourites by Shirley Jackson, it’s memoir thrown to the wolves of exaggeration – or fiction tempered by reality, depending on which side you see it.

And it is very amusing.  MacDonald realises the comic potential in the astonishing workload of running a small holding with an ambitious husband, and there is plenty to delight the reader in accounts of a recalcitrant stove, suicidal chickens, and uncooperative bread.  My chief reaction was gratitude that the shifting class system in Britain meant that my father and I could go to university and pick our careers, and that I didn’t end up in the great tradition of Thomas farmers (which stretches back as far as anyone knows, I believe.)  Nothing wrong with being a farmer, of course, only I have always suspected that I would be totally hopeless at it – a suspicion confirmed by reading The Egg and I.  You have to assume that Betty MacDonald deeply loved her then-husband Bob, because nothing else could possibly persuade a sane woman to embark on this venture with him.  It is a mark of her exceptionally good nature that, even when she is being teasing about the chores Bob suggests, there appears to be no deep-seated malice (which would be entirely justifiable):

By the end of the summer the pullets were laying and Bob was culling the flocks.  With no encouragement from me, he decided that, as chicken prices were way down, I should can the culled hens.  It appeared to my warped mind that Bob went miles and miles out of his way to figure out things for me to put in jars; that he actively resented a single moment of my time which was not spent eye to pressure gauge, ear to steam cock; that he was for ever coming staggering into the kitchen under a bushel basket of something for me to can.  My first reaction was homicide, then suicide, and at last tearful resignation.
Did I mention that she has a baby in the middle of the four years spent on this farm?  Betty MacDonald basically IS superwoman – and with a sense of humour too.

Then there are her neighbours – on one side is a large, lazy couple with about a dozen children.  Mrs Kettle seems quite good-natured (if not wised-up to the etiquette of everyday living), but Mr Kettle and his progeny seem to have no object in life but getting other people to provide food and assistance – and they do charmingly awful things like burning down their barn and starting a forest fire.  On the other side is the direct opposite: a farm kept so spotless you could eat your food off the floor.  All these secondary characters seem like exaggerations, but that didn’t stop the Macdonalds’ old neighbours filing lawsuits, according to the Wikipedia page.

The Egg and I doesn’t have the same laugh-every-page that I found in the Provincial Lady books, has a slightly slow start, and the workload is exhausting even to read about, but I still loved reading it.  Anybody drawn to self-deprecating, cynically optimistic accounts of a person’s everyday life (albeit an everyday life few of us would recognise), then this is a great book.  As so often, reading about the author’s real life changes things a bit – she was divorced from Bob, and remarried to Donald MacDonald, by the time the book was published (one wonders quite what her current husband thought about her achieving fame writing so fondly about her ex-husband) – but it’s easier simply to let The Egg and I be the simplified, all-American tale it wants to be.  As I wrote before – it’s neither fiction nor non-fiction, but a delightful amalgam of the two.

Books lost in the mind

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Do you ever read a book so slowly, over so many breaks, that you sort of lose any sense of what you thought about it?

No?  Really?

Well, I do.  (And maybe you did say ‘yes’ too.)  This is a side effect of reading so many books at once – some will, inevitably, be lost along the way – and picked up later – and finally finished, some months after they were started.  Dozens of books will have been read in between, and even a short narrative will have had hundreds of other characters tangled into it.

It’s a fascinating idea, actually – the narrative, which should ideally go from page to brain in a more or less straightforward matter of read-interpret-remember, actually encompasses many other characters and stories along the way (and is clever enough to separate them) – and that’s not even thinking about the millions of other stimuli along the way.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I enjoyed The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright, very kindly given to me by Nichola (an internet book friend, whom I have met a couple of times, but who seems to have disappeared – Nichola, are you out there?), but I didn’t read it in ideal circumstances.

Which is to say that I didn’t simply lose the book in my mind… I literally lost it.  For about 18 months, it disappeared – and turned up when I moved house, as things tend to.  I was about two thirds of the way through when it disappeared, so… I just finished it, without going back to the beginning.

The Saturdays is a children’s book about a family of siblings who form a club, to pool their pocket money and do something exciting together with the proceeds each week, taking it in turns to decide.  It’s good fun, very charming, and with all the over-the-top events and mixture of morals and cynicism which characterise the best children’s books.  It’s probably better read as a child, or to a child, but I certainly enjoyed it a lot.  I think I finished it off during one of my headachey periods, and it’s the perfect sort of light book for that.

But I’m not equipped to write a proper review, so this is instead mostly a pondering on how the reading (and losing) process affects the way we take in a book.  And how each novel comes with the illusory promise of a narrative we can ingest – but that no reader is ever the ideal reader in that sense; stories and characters must weave their way around all the other narratives (real and fictional) in our lives, and cope with all the broken moments of reading, and distractions and forgetting.  And, out the other side, we usually still think of the book as a whole, entire and separate from our haphazard methods of reading.

All a ramble, and not put together with any forethought (I have broken up my blogging as well as my reading; I have been answering people on Facebook and writing a murder mystery party) but perhaps something interesting to think about and to discuss…?

Consider the Years – Virginia Graham

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You’ll see that I’ve tagged this as post as ‘Persephone’, for this Consider the Years (1946) by Virginia Graham is available in a dove grey volume – but my copy is the beautiful one you see below (and the gorgeous bookmark was made by my friend Sherry):

Having read, and loved, Virginia Graham’s hilarious spoof etiquette and ‘how to’ books Say Please and Here’s How (click on those titles to read my reviews – or here for an excerpt from the latter on ‘How to sing’), I thought I’d branch out and read some of her poems.  Consider the Years is a collection of poems which were written between 1938 and 1946 and so, of course, primarily concern the Second World War.

Dear reader, what we have is a case of frustrated expectations.  Having read Graham in fine comic mode, I was hoping that Consider the Years would be a collection of comic verse.  And, goodness knows, many authors have found much to laugh at amidst the horrors of wartime.  Unfair as it is to judge an author by standards which they they didn’t agree to, the only poems I really loved in this collection were those that were funny.  Here, for example, is one called ‘Losing Face’:

This is my doodle-bug face.  Do you like it?
It’s supposed to look dreadfully brave.
Not jolly of course – that would hardly be tactful,
But… well, sort of loving and grave.

You are meant to believe that I simply don’t care
And am filled with a knowledge superal,
Oh, well… about spiritual things, don’t you know,
Such as man being frightfully eternal.

This is my doodle-bug voice.  Can you hear it?
It’s thrillingly vibrant, yet calm.
If we weren’t in the office, which isn’t the place,
I’d read you a suitable psalm.

This is my doodle-bug place.  Can you see me?
It’s really amazingly snug
Lying under the desk with my doodle-bug face
And my doodle-bug voice in the rug.
Would that the whole collection had been along these lines!  And I mean that both in tone and metre.  I know it’s a terribly unscholarly thing to say, but I have to confess a fondness for poems with rhyme and scan.  (This is why I have only studied prose at graduate level, I suspect.)

When Graham wanders into free verse, or to scanning verse that doesn’t rhyme (or, sometimes, rhyming verse that doesn’t scan), I lose interest.  Her poems are never particularly experimental, I should add – her free verse isn’t unduly free – but I, with my reluctance to read poetry, had come hoping for pages of poems like ‘Losing Face’, and Graham does not intend to provide that.

But… it’s is a beautiful little book, isn’t it?

Yours Sincerely – Monica Dickens & Beverley Nichols

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When my e-friend Sarah mentioned that Monica Dickens and Beverley Nichols had co-authored a selection of light essays called Yours Sincerely (1949), can you really imagine me not immediately buying a copy?  If you answered ‘yes’ then you’re either new around these parts, or you have a stronger sense of my self-control than is just.

So, back in autumn, it arrived – and I started reading it in a gradual way, such as befits this sort of book.  It is great fun.  I don’t know quite where the articles came from – they’re quite varying lengths, and don’t seem to have been written specially for this volume, but cover topics in the same line as Rose Macaulay’s Personal Pleasures.   Everything from ‘Planting Bulbs’ (reminiscent of Provincial Lady, no?) to ‘Sensuality’; ‘Talkative Women’ to ‘Coddled Men’; ‘Losing Your Temper’ to ‘Brides in White.’  All the sort of topics of middle-class chatter in the 1940s – but feeling, somehow, old-fashioned even for the 1940s.

Indeed, Beverley Nichols has no qualms in describing himself as ‘old-fashioned, out-of-date, and generally encrusted in lichen’.  Even when I agree with him, he’s so curmudgeonly that I felt like I wanted to distance myself from him…  it’s enjoyable to read, but not quite the laugh-out-loud, self-deprecating whimsy that I’d expected – and which Monica Dickens delivers in spades.  Sometimes he was just too saccharine and worthy for my taste…

You can’t bruise a plant and feel aggrieved because it grows up stunted or deformed or “odd.”  The slightest twist or wound, in it infancy, grows and swells, till in the end the plant is an ugly wretched thing that you have to throw onto the rubbish heap.

It is the same with children.  A lie, an injustice, a cruelty – these get under the skin.  And they too grow and swell, till at last a miserable man or a wretched woman is rejected by society.
Undeniably true, but… am I bad person for wishing that he’d been jollier?  I still haven’t read any of his books, and now I’ll be rushing towards them a little less eagerly.

Whereas Monica Dickens, after getting all serious in The Winds of Heaven, is on fine form in Yours Sincerely.  Lots of smiles all round, and never too earnest.  Just the sort of light essay which I adore, and which doesn’t seem to happen any more.  Here she is on proposing…

We’ve all dreamed much the same dreams, I expect.  You know – you’re in a diaphanous evening dress of unearthly beauty.  You’re the belle of the ball.  You’ve danced like a disembodied fairy and now you drift out on to a moonlit terrace, mysterious with the scent of gardenias. 

He follows, in faultless evening dress, no doubt (mine sometimes used to be in white monkey jackets), and says – IT.

Or, he says IT on the boat-deck of a liner gliding through phosphorescent tropic seas, or on a Riviera beach, or sometimes at the crisis of some highly improbable adventure.  He’s just rescued you – or you him – from a fire.  You’re besieged in an attic firing your last round at the enemy now battering at the door below.  You’re a beautiful nurse and he’s a dying soldier – but not irretrievably dying.

There are endless variations but always the same theme song : “Will you marry me?”  The implication is that when one is very young the actual moment of proposal is one of the high-spots of marriage.

I used to pester my mother over and over again to tell me how my father proposed.  I couldn’t believe she wasn’t holding out on me when she swore that he never really had.  She couldn’t remember when he started saying and writing : “When we’re married we’ll do so and so.”
I have a small section of a shelf devoted to light essays – it is only a small section, because I haven’t managed to find very many.  Alongside this and some by Rose Macaulay are Angela Milne’s Jame and Genius, A.A. Milne’s various offerings in this genre, J.B. Priestley’s Delight, Anne Fadiman’s Ex Libris, Christopher Morley’s Safety Pins, and probably one or two others which have slipped my mind.  Any suggestions?

In the meantime, Yours Sincerely isn’t groundbreaking or even exceptionally good, but it’s a jolly, enjoyable contribution to that often-overlooked form of the familiar essay, and so steeped in the mores of the early 20th century that a flick through fills me with nostalgia for an age in which I never lived.

Elders and Betters – Ivy Compton-Burnett

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“Dear, dear, what clever talk it all is!”
“It sounds so,” said Jenney, on a puzzled note.  “And yet it is all about nothing, isn’t it?”
It’s canny of Ivy Compton-Burnett to incorporate into Elders and Betters (1944) the main criticism aimed at her novels – it shows a self-awareness, but somehow also deflates the common argument (from those who have read her unadmiringly) that her work is all surface and no depth.  I’m going to do my best to defend her, but… I do have to concede that a lot of what I love about Ivy Compton-Burnett’s exceptional writing is the surface wit.  A lot, but not all.  

Elders and Betters starts off on moving day for the Donne family.  Anna has chosen a house for them, and the various members of the family are moving in, in dribs and drabs.  Since we started off with only three, I thought that Ivy Compton-Burnett had been uncharacteristically frugal with her cast – but more and more arrived, and then we were introduced to a second family.  I’ll save you some time, and rattle through them.  Skip the next paragraph if you want to – it’s deathly dull, but needs must.  Here goes.

Father: Benjamin, children: Bernard, Esmond, Anna, Reuben (ages about 30 to 13, in that order). Benjamin’s cousin Clara Bell ‘known as Claribel to the family, and to as many people outside it as she could contrive’; housekeeper Maria Jennings (Jenney to all), Cook (nobody seems to know her name) and Ethel, the maid.  Benjamin’s sister Jessica lives nearby, along with her husband Thomas, adult children Terence and Tullia, and young children Dora and Julius. Benjamin’s other sister, Sukey, also lives there – and is dying of a vague heart condition, without any apparent time-limit on its fatal nature.  Finishing things off are Miss Lacy (the young children’s teacher) and her niece Florence.

Phew!  At one point I did sketch out a family tree, but they actually all have quite distinct personalities and affinities, and it wasn’t too tricky to keep them all sorted in my mind.  Back to the plot.  As I say, we start with visiting a new house – the sort of scene I always warm too, especially when one character is trying to convince others that it’s a great choice, and they remain firmly unconvinced.

“The drawing-room and dining-room are what we should expect,” said Anna, throwing open the doors.  “The kitchens are below them.  The staircase leads to those above.”

“A natural use for a staircase,” murmured Claribel to Jenney, as she set foot upon it.  “I am glad we are to be allowed to put it to its purpose.”
Oh, how I adore the witty pedantry which informs so much of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s writing.  And the backtracks and change of tempo brought about by her authorial asides.  How can you not adore a writer who constructs so perfect a sentence as this? :

Ethel tried not to smile and entirely succeeded.
Round and round the conversations go, seemingly to lead nowhere, but actually forming brilliant portraits of family dynamics, and exposing the barbs and bitternesses behind people’s facades – as well their occasional generosity or kindness.  For her characters so rarely have facades – they say what they think, or (more often) contradict what others think.  There is one utterly wonderful scene where nothing more complex happens than someone notices there are thirteen sitting down to dinner – and they deliberate who shall sit down first (or last; they cannot recall the superstition correctly.)  It is a scene which should be anthologised time and again.

But Elders and Betters is not a novel where nothing happens.  Ivy Compton-Burnett was always keen to stress that novels must have plots, and hated those which seemed not to.  In Elders and Betters, the pivotal point could be borrowed from any detective novelist, even if the treatment could not.  Aunt Sukey has written two wills – one inheriting her sister Jessica, one her niece Anna. She asks Anna to destroy the will which would benefit her; Anna destroys the other.  Sukey, of course, dies shortly afterwards of her heart condition.  And this propels the happenings, and (more importantly) the conversations, for the rest of the novel.

Recently, on my very positive review of Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris, Rachel commented “I’m sure you’ll entice some more people to read Bowen – she’s streets ahead of ICB!!!”  Those exclamation marks show me that she was teasing, but I do have to say – I still think Ivy Compton-Burnett is a better and more important writer than Elizabeth Bowen.  These author-vs.-author battles are probably rather silly, and will end up going in circles, but the reason I think ICB is more important is that Elizabeth Bowen does, very well, what a lot of other authors try to do; Ivy Compton-Burnett does brilliantly what nobody has really tried to imitate.

“It is a modest but pleasant house,” said Reuben’s voice, “and a home is where a family is gathered together.”

“That is what makes family problems,” said Bernard.

“We have none of those,” said Benjamin, in a tone that defied contradiction.

“None,” muttered Esmond. “Problems imply a solution.”

“Jenney is proud of me for being able to talk like other people, though I cannot walk like them,” said Reuben, rightly interpreting the expression on Jenney’s face.
It is not true that Ivy Compton-Burnett’s narrative voice is absent – although her novels are mostly dialogue, she very often gives speech this sting in the tail, offering a flash of insight into a character’s mind, and darting away again just as quickly.  Hopefully I have given some examples of what makes her so special, so different, so important a novelist.

But, while musing about Ivy Compton-Burnett on the bus (for such is my glamorous life), I wondered why I believed her to be such a significant author, considering she seemed to inspire no one and take inspiration from no one.  There appears to be no distinct literary tradition that she adapted or futhered, besides the vague quantities of the domestic novel.  And then it struck me, the author she most reminded me of – which is, curiously perhaps, Shakespeare.

Characters who speak as no person would ever speak (for who ever spoke in blank verse?) but who perfectly represent how people feel and think.  Characters engaged in large-scale comedy and tragedy, but bound by the familial ties, and rarely missing the opportunity to philosophise in the midst of anguish or (more rarely) joy.  And of course, with all that dialogue, Ivy Compton-Burnett’s books are as much plays as they are novels.  The deal was sealed when, in the final act (if you will) a flurry of unexpected engagements occurred.  Perhaps with these criteria I could compare Ivy Compton-Burnett to any playwright in a Shakespearean tradition, but it seemed to me that it was William S’s particular mantle that Dame Ivy was seeking to inherit.  This only struck me towards the end – with my next venture in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, I shall keep it in mind from the outset, and see what it brings out of the text and reading experience.  Elders and Betters, to conclude, is not my favourite of the Ivy Compton-Burnett novels I’ve read (More Women Than Men retains that crown), nor is it in the top half, but she seems incapable of writing a novel that I will not thrive upon and relish – Elders and Betters is no exception.