1943

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

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

Image borrowed from Scott’s excellent review

A Garland of Straw (1943) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Will Hold My House (1950) by Marjorie Stewart

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

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

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

Days 9 and 10 of #ABookADayInMay

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Some super quick thoughts about two days of books! Both are books I finished, but did not start, on the respective days.

The Thursday Murder Club (2020) by Richard Osman

What is there to say about this extremely popular novel that hasn’t already been said? Its the first in a series of cosy(?) crime novels set in an old people’s home – Osman says he was inspired by seeing his mother in a similar home, and recognising how older people could observe and deduce while being underestimated by everyone around them.

The best thing about this novel is definitely the characters. Elizabeth used to be in the police, and is now a wise, sharp, kind retiree. Her friend Joyce is less confident of her cleverness and a bit fluffy, but every bit as sharp in her own way. There are several other people in the Thursday Murder Club (the group who gather to solve cold cases in their spare time, not expecting anyone to take notice) but they are the best two.

I will say that the murder plot itself isn’t very good. The red herrings are too red and too complex. Without spoiling the end, there’s really not much reason why it’s that solution over any other – it would be equally convincing if he’d picked someone else at random. One of the brilliant things about someone like Agatha Christie is that the eventual solution, though a surprise, is satisfying: it’s the only one it could have been, you suddenly realise. That’s absolutely not the case with The Thursday Murder Club.

But it works because of those characters, and because of Osman’s warm, funny writing. There were more genuine villains than I was expecting, and perhaps the wider cast isn’t as cosy as I’d imagined, but it was really enjoyable for all that. I’m not sure I’ll necessarily read another, but it’s certainly much better than other books which have runaway bestsellers.

Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1942) by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough

I read this years ago and was all set to link to my review, but apparently I never wrote one? Which is a shame, because it is an absolutely brilliant, hilarious memoir that I have just reread – or relistened to, as part of Audible’s free ‘Plus’ catalogue. It tells of Cornelia and Emily travelling to Europe during the 1920s when they were both young and naive. With a couple of decades’ hindsight, they are willing and able to poke an awful lot of fun at themselves. The people they meet may come in for a joke or too, but it is chiefly self-deprecating – and they are brilliant at self-deprecating humour. They also have a brilliant turn of phrase which, since I listened to it, I haven’t noted down. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Along the way, they have disastrous moments – Cornelia catching measles on the boat across the Atlanic and having to cloak her face to get through customs, for instance, or accidentally staying at a brothel under the delusion that it was recommended for Young American Women Abroad. Incident after incident is described with liveliness. Some are genuinely unusual or embarrassing moments. Others are rather more normal, but feel special because of the way they’re described. Some, I suspect, have been exaggerated out of recognition. I forgive every exaggeration and deception, because I love the book so much.

Reading this in 2011 or so set me off reading everything else I could by the pair, particularly Cornelia Otis Skinner’s comic essays. There’s a lot to love, but nothing will equal Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. It is suffused with nostalgia for a period that was clearly exciting and uncomplicated for the two – and it is also suffused with a friendship that has clearly lasted many, many years. It’s a special book and I can’t recommend it enough.

The Persimmon Tree by Marjorie Barnard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

My favourite novel of the year? (O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith)

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I don’t do a huge amount of re-reading, and I almost never read the same book twice within a year. Hopefully that’s a mark of how I loved O, The Brave Music (1943) by Dorothy Evelyn Smith. I read it back in March, and didn’t write about it for ages because I wanted to do it justice – and I re-read it recently to see if it was as good as I’d remembered. Oh, and it was.

I first heard of Dorothy Evelyn Smith when I was lent a copy of Miss Plum and Miss Penny, which was quite good. For some reason that I can’t quite remember, it didn’t live up to its promise (though Scott had nicer things to say). But I thought I still might as well buy O, The Brave Music when I came across it in a wonderful little bookshop in St. David’s. I was a little put off by the stupid title, which is one of those quotations-as-titles that only make sense if you know the context – and, even then, doesn’t make much sense in this case.

This is a coming of age novel in the mould of I Capture the Castle and Guard Your Daughters. Though published in the 1940s, the childhood being looked back upon takes place in the late nineteenth century (exact date rather vague). Ruan is the seven-year-old daughter a non-Conformist minister. Her sister is widely considered more beautiful and well-behaved than she, and her bold imagination and love for the moors that surround them are not thought advantages by the society her family moves in. But that family is far from a unified front. We see them through the seven-year-old eyes and the older-and-wiser eyes of the adult Ruan simultaneously. The child can only half understand how poorly matched her parents are – her conservative, absent-minded father and her beautiful, unhappily tamed mother – and can’t really comprehend the dislike her mother feels towards her. Ruan is not daunted by her surroundings. She is confident, thoughtful, determined. She feels much older than her seven years.

Ruan has another sibling – two-year-old Clem. Here’s a passage about him that is indicative of the way Smith writes:

At the back of our house was a long, narrow strip of garden, very much overgrown with weeds, because Father did not care for gardening and had no money for professional help. But it was a garden, at least, and, the weather turning very hot and dry, I was allowed to wheel Clem up and down the weedy path, or sit on the rank lawn and play with him. I had always loved my baby brother dearly, and in those long, quiet June days my love became more articulate and, alas, more sharp of vision. I began to watch Clem more closely; to think and worry and make comparisons; but it was Annie Briggs who finally tore the scales from my eyes, and gave me my first, salt knowledge of the sorrowful thing love can be…

Those final words are so beautifully pitched. In these years, Ruan gains plenty of that ‘salt knowledge’ – but this is far from an unhappy book. She is equally keenly aware of the things that bring her joy. That includes nature, freedom – and David.

David is the son of the local factory owner – a rich man who came from a working-class background. He is five years older than Ruan but sees a kindred spirit in her, calling her Tinribs and treating her without any of the awkward deference she experiences from almost everyone else. In him she sees a new sort of family, and loves him.

The novel covers about eight years, during which Ruan has to go to school – and then later to an enormous, mostly closed-up house, Cobbetts, belonging to a relative. Wherever she is, Smith is brilliant at giving the feeling of the place – whether that’s the dirty claustrophobia of the school or the cold, reassuring Cobbetts – and how it affects Ruan and her personality.

Like all the best coming-of-age novels, the strength of O, The Brave Music is in the empathetic central character and how deeply immersed the reader feels in her life. As Ruan sees and experiences and understands new things, adding them to the catalogue of her impressions of the world, we half feel that we are seeing them for the first time too – and half want to protect this child against the bad and good and overwhelming that life will bring. But whenever it has become too overwhelming – there are the moors, or there is Cobbetts, or there is David – and joy is back.

David is kind, stubborn, generous, and believable – becoming a little more strained as he grows older and goes to school, and they meet less frequently, but warming up and still being the David that Ruan needs him to be. Being children, this is not a romance – but my only criticism of the novel is that the five-year age gap does get rather unsettling when he becomes an adult and she is still a child, and still devoted to him. Considering how she always seems older than she is, I don’t know why Smith didn’t make it only one or two years between them. But I can reassure you now that nothing untoward or icky happens!

I was confident early in O, The Brave Music that is was something special – and a re-read confirms it. It’s going to be my favourite novel of the year, I feel sure – and one I’ll be revisiting often.

We Followed Our Hearts to Hollywood by Emily Kimbrough

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This 1943 book is a play on words that I didn’t spot until I’d finished it, embarrassingly. For it is about following Our Hearts to Hollywood – more specifically, the 1942 book Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, in which Emily Kimbrough and Cornelia Otis Skinner hilariously recounted their tour of Europe in the 1920s. It’s a brilliant book, and I think relatively well known in the US – if you find a copy this side of the Atlantic, snap it up and you won’t regret it.

Hollywood moved fast in the 1940s, and almost immediately a film version was in the works – and Kimbrough and Skinner were asked to go to Hollywood to help write the script. (The film was released in 1944 – things really did move fast! – and there was even a sequel in 1946, Our Hearts Were Growing Up, which Skinner and Kimbrough were unable to prevent despite legal action.)

We Followed is pretty slender in terms of plot. It essentially shows how the two women are a bit like fish out of water in the dizzying whirl of Hollywood. Imagine what it would feel like to them now! But it’s good fun to see them get overwhelmed by the grandeur of their hotel, starstruck by various stars they encounter (few of whom meant anything to me now, I’ll confess), and try to get their heads around writing the dialogue. Or, more precisely, holding off writing the dialogue as any number of other meetings take place to determine an outline – once anybody realises that the two have even arrived.

Throughout, Kimbrough documents the sort of affectionate ribaldry and rivalry that only good friends can have – with her own ironic dose of teasing Skinner about her theatrical background (clearly, simultaneously, admiring it). There is no real butt to any of the jokes – everything is very good-natured, and witty in a self-deprecating way rather than anything more malicious.

It’s always interesting to read a book written by two people, and wonder how they did. Having now read quite a lot of Cornelia Otis Skinner’s books and this by Emily Kimbrough, I can make an attempt at piecing together how their different styles cohered so gloriously in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. And I think it’s fair to say that Skinner provided all the sharpest wit and the funniest lines. Kimbrough is more delicately amusing, and brings the sense of wonderment and almost naivety. Don’t expect any exposés of famous people, or any people – there is no dark side to this Hollywood. There is perhaps an inefficient side, but that’s about as dark as it gets.

I’m having a really good year for books about the film industry, thinking about it. Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet, Darcy O’Brien’s A Way of Life Like Any Other, the extraordinary non-fiction The Devil’s Candy by Julia Salamon, and now this. Four very different perspectives on movie making, but somehow working very well together – and all very good.

If Kimbrough is at her best alongside Skinner, this is still a wonderfully enjoyable book to read. (I wonder why it wasn’t written by both of them?) If you’ve loved Our Hearts Were Young and Gay then I think you’ll relish following them to Hollywood with this one – to see a bit about the book’s afterlife, and to enjoy a snapshot of Hollywood in the 1940s.

Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali

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Madonna-in-a-fur-coatMy first Turkish book, I believe! This is one I read for Shiny New Books last issue (which reminds me, I should really start organising books for the next edition… if anybody knows of any reprints coming out soon, let me know!) Read the whole review, or here’s the beginning…

Madonna in a Fur Coat, translated by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, was first published in Turkish in 1943. This translation is the first time this Turkish classic has been available in English, so the book cannot strictly be called a reprint – but we are bound by the restrictions of WordPress (only 4 categories allowed for the menu!) and the fact that new translations make up only a tiny percentage of new titles. We hope Freely and Dawe – and Ali – will forgive us; this is certainly a glimpse back into the Turkey of the 1940s, whichever way we look at it.

 

Popcorn by Cornelia Otis Skinner

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I read this one before the Cornelia Otis Skinner that ended up on my 50 Books You Must Read list, but somehow didn’t get around to reading it – but Popcorn (1943) is the book which started off my devotion. And it’s such a lovely copy, too. Even if I hadn’t already known the name Cornelia Otis Skinner, I think I’d have nabbed this book – the condition, the feel of the boards, and the lovely detail on the front basically sum up everything I love most in literature. As you can see in this photo which, lamentably, I’ve taken at dead of night instead of in the glorious sunshine.

Popcorn

Like Nuts in May, this is a series of comic episodes in the life of a hapless wife, mother, and actress. It’s a heightened version of C.O.S.’s own life, complete with the admirably silly illustrations of Alajalov and Soglow, whoever they might be. And it comes with a preface by F. Tennyson Jesse, no less.

The best way to show her is by quotation, of course, and here is a fun example of her visiting a parent of one of her son’s friends, and feeling completely out of her depth:

Once, harbouring the quaint notion that it might be a maternal duty to catch an inside glimpse of the houses to which my son has entrée, I committed the grim error of calling for him at a residence whose marble exterior and wrought-iron garage-door should have forewarned me of the exclusive nature of the juvenile goings-on within. A butler answered the bell. Butlers not only frighten, they have an over-refining effect on me, and I hear myself using the broad “a” on words like “hat”. I murmured my son’s name and the fact that I had come to fetch him. He took me for a governess and started in the direction of a waiting group of nursemaids when I managed to gasp out that I was the child’s mother. This overt confession shocked him considerably and for a moment I wondered if I should send home for my marriage licence. Reluctantly he led me up a staircase that can only be described as palatial and, opening a period door, thrust me into a room of complete darkness.

I love it so much! This collection has quite a lot on the perils and pitfalls of motherhood, but also looks at topics as varied as yoga, the telephone, being ‘the paintable type’ (it isn’t a compliment), sailing, and astrology. This last is not an activity she relishes (as in Nuts in May, many of the short accounts detail her incapabilities and inaptness for various undertakings), and the opening of it is an example of her particular: the amusing employment of simile.

Of the many varieties of bore, one of the worst I know is the person who wants to point out the stars and constellations. This is a form of midsummer pest which, like the sand-fly, tends to ruin beach parties.

And another from the same section…

Then too there is something about lying prone on the shore beside the type of creature who is generally a star-gazer that I find peculiarly distressing. It’s a little like dancing a tango with someone who is studying for the ministry.

It’s been a while since I read it, and any elaboration I would give would simply be repetitions of the same enthusiasm, but… if my previous excitement about Cornelia Otis Skinner didn’t make you dash out and get something by her then, this time, DO! Well, do if any of the quotations above amuse you, or if you find the Provincial Lady books amusing. Go on go on go on go on go on.

F. Tennyson Jesse’s preface starts off with an acknowledgement that ‘it may seem a strange time in which to publish such light-weight articles as go to make up this collection […] are we not all, including that vast country of which Miss Skinner is a citizen and which she has toured so often, engaged in a struggle for survival?’ The answer (of course) is yes – World War Two was waging, and America had entered it, but, like so many writers of the period, refuge was found in humour and an acknowledgement of the absurdity of everyday life at a time when it must have felt remote. ‘They stand, in their light-hearted way, for the very principle for which we are all fighting. There could not be a German Cornelia Otis Skinner – outside of a concentration camp.’ If this is not quite true, there certainly couldn’t have been a Nazi Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Popcorn certainly must have been not only a welcome diversion at the time, but a symbol of those who loved peace and longed for freedom. Today, whether for the same or different reasons, it is equally welcome.

A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain – A.C. Ward

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Back in April I read A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain (1943) by A.C. Ward, very kindly given to me by the always wonderful Karen/Kaggsy, but I have only just got around to reading it. I can’t remember where this first came up (maybe in person; before her lovely review anyway) but I was extremely happy to be presented with a copy. What a fascinating little book it is, and so perfect for somebody with an interest in the early 20th century.

A.C. Ward has a special place in my heart because of his book The Nineteen-Twenties (published, I think, in 1930 – so a very immediate retrospective). I was reading it at the beginning of my DPhil, just to get a sense of how somebody contemporary might have characterised the period. Lo and behold, he had a chapter on ‘The Refuge of Form and Fantasy’, where he discussed the vogue for the fantastic in the period. Since I’d already decided to write my thesis on this, it was wonderful confirmation that it had been significant in the 1920s – as well as providing an invaluable quotation from a talk by Sylvia Townsend Warner that doesn’t appear to have been quoted anywhere else. Research mad skillz.

Anyway, in A Literary Journey Through Wartime Britain Ward does exactly that, whether figuratively or not – he takes the reader on a journey through Britain, showing the literary sites that have been saved from bombing, or those that have been irrevocably changed by war. I can only imagine how poignant and moving this would have been in 1943; it is certainly moving enough now.

Plenty of his narration takes place in London, unsurprisingly – it was undoubtedly the area of Britain most physically affected by war – and in between commemorating Keats in Hampstead and Dickens in Doughty Street, he turns his attention to pre-war Bloomsbury (in a passage, incidentally, which would have been very useful in my first chapter):

After the last war ‘Bloomsbury’ became a synonym for intellectualist inbreeding and highbrow snobbery. But it is as difficult to define (or even to find) the pure ‘Bloomsbury’ type as it is to define or isolate ‘Victorianism.’ There is an old Punch joke, ‘”You can always tell a Kensington girl.” “Yes; but you can’t tell her much.”‘ his, if given an intellectualist twist, might be applied to Bloomsbury in the nineteen-twenties. The authors who wrote and/or published their books in Bloomsbury then were not susceptible to instruction. They instructed. The hallmark of ‘Bloomsbury’ was a tart intellectual arrogance; and in their literary style Bloomsbury writers affected a dryness which was intended to have the vitrue of dry champagne, yet the product was, often, sandy on the palate. The Mother Superior of ‘Bloomsbury’ was Virginia Woolf, but, beside her, the rest were mostly novices lacking a vocation. Her one vice was preciosity; her virtues were legion.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a more incisive and concise depiction of the Bloomsbury group.

Along with the text (and I should re-emphasise that he does sweep through other counties, and not just southern ones either) there are two types of illustration – pencil sketches and photographs. The photos are amazing. We see Westminster Abbey with rubble, Milton’s statue knocked off a plinth, Canterbury ruins, etc. A trove of poignant (yes, that word again) images which bring to life a period that even the greatest description inevitably keeps at some distance.

Thanks, Karen, for sending this my way! A unique perspective on wartime Britain that I will really treasure.

Two Serious Ladies – Jane Bowles

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This is another fairly long review, but a few of you were kind enough the other day to tell me not to apologise for long reviews – so I shan’t!  I certainly enjoyed writing it, and formulating my thoughts.

Eighteen months ago John Self very kindly offered me a copy of Two Serious Ladies (1943) by Jane Bowles, in its beautiful reprint by Sort Of Books (responsible for the recent Tove Jansson editions too, most of which are newly-commissioned translations.)  He thought it might be my sort of thing – and he was definitely right.  It just took a while for me to get around to reading it…  (By the by, Sort Of Books – I love you, I love your production standards and your choice of titles – but… only one lady on the cover of a book called Two Serious Ladies – really?)

I know John Self read the novel, but can’t find a review of it on his blog, so perhaps it never got that far.  In fact, despite being a celebrated novel, there isn’t a great deal of coverage of it in the blogging world – perhaps because it is essentially a very strange book.  You know I love me some strange, now and then, so I was more than happy with that – but it isn’t one that I would recommend to everyone.  Bowles writes quite like Muriel Spark, but without the ironic authorial comment.  The unsettling dialogue never settles into the expected, the sparse narrative offers very little guidance, and the whole novel is deliciously disconcerting and unusual.  And yet it’s still often very funny.  If you like beginning-middle-end and naturalised conversations between characters, then look away.  If you like Muriel Spark, Barbara Comyns, or even Ivy Compton-Burnett – then you could well be in for a treat.

The females of the title only meet twice, briefly, in Two Serious Ladies – towards the end of the first and third sections, of three.  The ladies in question are Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield – always called, by the narrative, Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield; one of the novel’s most subtle strangenesses.  Lorna Sage’s excellent introduction reveals that there was once to have been a third serious lady, Senorita Cordoba, which might have made the unusual structure less striking – but would have thus robbed Bowles.

We first see Miss Goering as a child, attempting to inveigle a straightforward friend into an elaborate and invented religious ritual.  The reader might, not unnaturally, expect to follow Miss Goering throughout her life – but we quickly fast-forward to Miss Goering as a “grown woman” (age unspecified) and stay there.  She is unsociable, uncompromising, selfish and violently honest – yet not truly malicious.  Her character is so open and amorally direct that she reminded me of Katri from Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver.  Oddly, suddenly (so much in this novel is odd and sudden) Miss Goering invites Miss Gamelon, the cousin of her governess, to live with her.  They are never amiable companions, and although they depend upon one another to an extent, their relationship is never reliable and neither even attempts to understand the other.  It is a mystery why either would want to live with the other – but a mystery neither of them care to address.  Here is the sort of conversation they have:

“I don’t like sports,” said Miss Goering; “more than anything else, they give me a terrific feeling of sinning.”
“On the contrary,” said Miss Gamelon, “that’s exactly what they never do.”
“Don’t be rude, Lucy dear,” said Miss Goering.  “After all, I have paid sufficient attention to what happens inside of me and I know better than you about my own feelings.”
“Sports,” said Miss Gamelon, “can never give you a feeling of sinning, but what is more interesting is that you can never sit down for more than five minutes without introducing something weird into the conversation.  I certainly think you have made a study of it.”

I know I shouldn’t be attempting a piece of close reading, as that’s not what you’ve come to read, but I think that excerpt would be fascinating to analyse.  One example – that word ‘certainly’ in the final sentence.  How many authors would have included that?  And what a transformative effect it has on the sentiment, and on the character speaking it – she becomes that much more combative, and idiomatic, and faux-dramatic.  She is speaking for effect, for drama, rather than with simply honesty.  Even if I’d only read these sentences, Miss Gamelon would stand fully-formed before me.

Nearly all the characters and their conversations are piercingly honest, unswervingly self-absorbed, and insistently irrelevant.  Rarely do they seem to have paid the remotest attention to what their interlocutor has replied.  If they have, it is solely as a means of flatly refuting it.  Forster’s Howards End is renowned for the mantra ‘only connect’ – Two Serious Ladies proffers the opposite doctrine, especially where Miss Goering is concerned.  She does go out with a weak man called Arnold, whom she openly despises – although, again, without intending malice.  Jane Bowles excels at portraying awkward conversations and unhappy exchanges – if they lean too much towards the morosely disjointed to claim verisimilitude, then at least it makes a change to the neat patter of many novels.

“Since you live so far out of town,” said Arnold, “why don’t you spend the night at my house?  We have an extra bedroom.”
“I probably shall,” said Miss Goering, “although it is against my entire code, but then, I have never even begun to use my code, although I judge everything by it.”  Miss Goering looked a little morose after having said this and they drove on in silence until they reached their destination.

Miss Goering bumps into her acquaintance Mrs. Copperfield at a party, and the narrative passes the baton on.  Mrs. Copperfield is about to embark on a trip to Panama with her husband.

This section of the novel is equally interesting, although I jotted down fewer notes while reading it… where Miss Goering is indifferent and jaded, Mrs. Copperfield has an ingenuous lust for experience.  She is not an intelligent woman, but is easily captivated, and dashes around Panama – befriending the inhabitants of a brothel along the way.  Here she has just met a flighty girl named Peggy, whose appearance in the novel is fleeting:

“Please,” she [Peggy] said, “be friendly to me. I don’t often see people I like. I never do the same thing twice, really I don’t. I haven’t asked anyone up to my room in the longest while because I’m not interested and because they get everything so dirty. I know you wouldn’t get everything dirty because I can tell that you come from a nice class of people. I love people with a good education. I think it’s wonderful.”
“I have so much on my mind,” said Mrs. Copperfield. “Generally I haven’t.”

How are these ladies serious?  Lorna Sage suggests that Bowles uses the word to mean ‘risking the possibility that you were meaninglessly weird’.   I think perhaps it is these ladies’ choice not to laugh at life, but determinedly to live it, and see what happens.  But, truth be told, Jane Bowles doesn’t seem to have a grand theme to Two Serious Ladies.  Miss Goering and Mrs. Copperfield are not part of a philosophical quest; there is no sense of purpose or conclusion.  Questions are not answered; they are scarcely posed.  In many ways the novel doesn’t follow any progression at all – the ladies merely experience a great deal, whether grasping at it enthusiastically or raising an ambivalent eyebrow at life.  Bowles’ astonishing talent is creating a dynamic that, if not unique, is highly unusual – strange, surreal, and yet grounded to the mundane.  Her ear for dialogue is astonishing – dialogue which is almost never realistic, but always striking.

And Two Serious Ladies is a brilliant novel.  As I said, it would not suit many readers – but anybody who chose writing style over plot in my recent post on the topic would be quite likely to appreciate this book.  It is a huge shame that Bowles only wrote one novel.  The one she has created ought to be enough to assure her a sort of immortality – Bowles is one novelist we should be taking seriously.

Others who got Stuck into it:

 “There’s something interestingly off in the way the characters in this book make choices; they are all inscrutable.” – With Hidden Noise

“At its heart, it is a book about people who feel quite often unrooted and alone, even in their own parlor, surrounded by friends.” – Margaret, The Art of Reading

 “It’s essentially an absurd tale and not one I really got into.” – Verity, Verity’s Virago Venture