1947

Choose by M. de Momet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He bent and kissed her.

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

“No,” she whispered.

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

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

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

The Lonely by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 4

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The Lonely by Gallico, Paul | eBay

I bought a book ten years ago that I thought was called Ludmilla and the Lonely – turns out it is two novellas, the second and longer of which is called The Lonely. That’s what I read today – a rather lovely little wartime story, published shortly after the war in 1947. I say lovely. It starts out not so much, but things definitely improve.

Lieutenant Jerry Wright is an American stationed in England on an airbase. He is young, quite naive, a little inclined to be carried away emotionally – but popular with the men and keen to be liked by them. Back home he has doting parents and a fiancée, Catherine, whom he has known since they were both very young children. His whole life is mapped out for him, and he has never really questioned it.

Jerry has a fortnight’s leave lined up, and a fellow airman boisterously suggests that he might take a woman away for a week of no-strings passion. In his normal life, this isn’t something he’d countenance. But a mix of being in England (!) and being at war begin to make it seem possible. And he decides to ask Patches – real name Patrice – a ‘plain girl’ in the WAAF. She isn’t one of the go-getters that others are taking away for their dirty weeks. She is quiet, sweet and – unknown to him – in love with Jerry.

Now that he was with her again he was aware that there was about her an aura of innocence that made impossible the thoughts he had had of her the night before. For if she was a little nobody, a girl he had met casually through the war, who had helped him to pass the time, yet she was also a person with dignity and some unfathomed inner life of her own, which stood as a barrier between him and the use he wished to make of her.

I didn’t love Gallico’s madonna-or-whore approach to women at the beginning of the novella, though it’s never clear how much is the foolish perspective of Jerry and how much is the author. Certainly, as the story continues, it becomes much more nuanced. Not least because some of the story is told from Patches’ point of view, albeit in the third person.

They do go away together. Gallico becomes suddenly coy about actually mentioning sex, but clearly their relationship has advanced. And, yes, the ending of this story is never in doubt. All the ingredients are there that are still the ingredients of every trashy Netflix romcom, and what fun they are to watch/read.

The exact path to get to the end isn’t entirely predictable, and possibly not entirely plausible, but it was all very entertaining. And, you know what, even quite moving. I don’t often get swayed by a love story on the page, but in not many pages, Gallico has created two characters I really grew to care about. I was cheering them on.

The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh

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I’ve always been intrigued when I saw mid-century novels by authors I’ve not heard of, and that’s particularly true since I’ve been scouting for titles for the British Library Women Writers series – and so I’ve started looking through my shelves for novels that are out of print and a little lesser known. Recently, I read The Unnatural Behaviour of Mrs Hooker by Eileen Marsh, from 1947.

Mrs Hooker lives in a small village where everybody knows each other’s business and usually makes it their business too. In the opening pages we are introduced to the community – vicar and wife, policeman, teacher, local aristocrats. The expected crowd of a village scene, though confusingly the women include Moya, May, Mary, and Maggy, which doesn’t make it particularly easy to remember which is which. Marsh has a light touch and quickly lets us know which characters will amuse and which will frustrate us. Though Mrs Hooker isn’t among this initial crowd.

She lives with her son Jim, who has just become an adult. During the war, they – like most people in the village – took in an evacuee. A young girl called Sylvia. The village – and seemingly the author – have some prejudice against London girls and their forward ways; their swaying hips and eyes that are asking for it, etc. Suffice to say, this sort of description would not be welcome in a novel now, and thank goodness.

Sylvia goes back to London for a bit, where Mrs Hooker visits, looking on her as a surrogate daughter despite the village’s distrust of her. She is rather upset by the indifference shown by Sylvia’s parents, not to mention the poverty she lives in. So when Sylvia unexpectedly returns to the village, she is welcomed by Mrs H. And she comes bearing news: she is pregnant, and Jim is the father. She is also only fifteen years old.

Jim denies that he ever slept with her, and says it must be some London dalliance. [Or – call it what it is, which the novel does not – statutory rape.] The village is divided in whom they believe of the pair. But the one person you’d expect to be on Jim’s side, and who isn’t, is Mrs Hooker herself:

“I don’t know why I should doubt the poor child’s word. I reckon she’s speakin’ the truth, poor lamb. No, it was Jim, an’ he’s got to stand the racket. I’d give my right hand for it not to be him – the disgrace of it – well, you know what folks are! But it is him, an’ she’ll make him a nice little wife an’ I’ll look after the baby for ’em an’ she can go out to work.”

This is the unnatural behaviour of the title: that she refuses to believe her son, and will not be swayed.

It’s an interesting premise for a novel, and a spin on the evacuee situation that I haven’t read before but must have been relatively common. The reason the novel didn’t quite work for me is that, after this set up, it’s incredibly repetitive. It’s less than two hundred pages long, but it keeps going in circles. Jim insists he isn’t the father. Sylvia insists he is. Various local people repeatedly refer to Jim as a ‘good, clean boy’. Mrs Hooker maintains that she is going to be a grandmother. I shan’t say what the truth is, but the reader does know it pretty early on – so we aren’t reading to find out the solution to a mystery. It all just got a bit samey – not to mention rather unpleasant to read, when people blame the fifteen-year-old Sylvia for being a hussy etc.

So, an interesting writer and a good village set up – but the theme of the novel hasn’t dated well, and the structure of the plot is severely lacking. But I’d still read something else by her, hoping for the best.

British Library Women Writers #3: Chatterton Square by E.H. Young

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For the third of the British Library Women Writers series, I thought I’d republish a post I wrote for the #1947Club back in 2016, which is when I first read Chatterton Square. It’s also the first of the British Library titles that I chose myself – and the afterword that was most interesting to me to write, as I had to do some new research into 1930s divorce law. I hope also interesting to read about! Anyway, here’s what I wrote back in 2016…

I was really pleased when I heard that Chatterton Square by E.H. Young was a 1947 novel, as I’ve had it on my shelves to read since 2007. Since 21st December 2007, to be precise, which makes it a couple of months after I read Tara’s review of it at Books and Cooks. Tara sadly left the blogosphere many years ago, but this book and she have always been associated in my mind – and it is only now, looking back at her review, that I discover that she wasn’t quite as enamoured with Chatterton Square as my memory had suggested…

This was the first E.H. Young novel I bought, but it’s now actually the fourth one that I’ve read – Miss Mole, William, and The Misses Mallett being on my have-now-read list, with William finding its way to the 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About list. How does Chatterton Square fare on my list?

It was E.H. Young’s final novel, and there is a great deal of maturity here. I would never have mistaken it for a young writer’s first effort – because the characters and their experiences are described so subtly, so gradually and with such sophistication. As usual, I am getting ahead of myself. Who are these characters?

The novel concerns two families living next to each other on Chatterton Square in Upper Radstowe – Young’s fictionalised version of Clifton in Bristol. The families are the Blacketts and the Frasers, and the time is shortly before the Second World War – though obviously the characters cannot know that it is coming. They cannot know, but some are pretty sure – and some are adamant that it will not; I think this sort of dramatic irony might be something we see a lot of in the 1947 Club.

Mr and Mrs Blackett have an unhappy marriage, but only Mrs Blackett knows it. Mr Blackett is an astonishingly real creation: a monster who is never openly cruel or even vindictive. He domineers and ruins the lives of those in his family simply by expecting his needs to be more important than theirs, and respectability to be more important than freedom. He rules with a rod of iron – but one which manifests itself in hurt disbelief if anybody should ever disobey him, and genuine wonderment that anybody could wish to. Their three daughters – Flora, Rhoda, and Mary – deal with this in different ways. Flora is a copy of her father, though has grown increasingly sick of him; Rhoda is a copy of her mother (as they begin to realise as the novel progresses), and Mary – well, she’s not really anything, and could probably have been left out altogether.

Mrs Blackett has tolerated her misery by pretending to be happy, and mocking her husband to herself. This charade is what keeps her sane, and also what brings her amusement. If there is cruelty in her methods, it is because it is a question of survival. The way Young draws this marriage is truly astonishing – in the minutely observed ways each behaves, and the vividly real dynamic that emerges. It seeps into the reader’s mind and won’t go away.

She is also unafraid to show parents who don’t idolise their children. Mr Blackett is frustrated and confused by Rhoda, but Bertha Blackett actively dislikes her daughter Flora – while still loving her. But it is touching to see Rhode and Bertha come together as Chatterton Square progresses (and it begins when Rhoda sees her mother give her father a look which contained ‘a concentration of emotions which she could not analyse and which half frightened her. There was a cold anger in it, but she thought there was a kind of pleasure in it too’.)

This family transfixed me, and is the triumph of the novel in my opinion, but we should turn our attention to the other family. Rosamund Fraser heads up the family of five children – her husband is believed by some to be dead, but actually she is separated from him. The family is happier, freer spirits, gravely looked down on by Mr Blackett – but appealing to almost all the other Blacketts (sometimes specifically – Flora fancies herself in love with one of the sons – but more as a unit to be envied.)

Living with them is Miss Spanner – a spinster and friend of Rosamund, who suffers still from the memories and affects of an unhappy childhood. She and Rosamund have a close friendship that yet retains many barriers – not least a one-way emotional dependence. Miss Spanner, in turn, starts to become friendly with Rhoda, who sneaks over illicitly to borrow books.

Young has created such a complex and believable web of relationships between these two houses, and it is an engrossing novel. There is less levity than some of her others (no character leaps off the page like the lovable Miss Mole), and it perhaps requires more commitment from a reader than some. It is not one for speed-reading – but there is an awful lot to appreciate, and slow, attentive reading is rewarded.

And as I said, the threat of war looms. Mr Blackett is sure that it won’t happen, and considers predictions of war to be irresponsible and unpatriotic; Rosamund and Miss Spanner are sure it is around the corner. Miss Spanner has this wonderful moment of musing how war could be:

War was horrible, but there were worse things. Indeed, in conditions of her own choosing, Miss Spanner would not have shrunk from it. The age for combatants, if she had the making of the conventions of war, would start at about forty-five and there would be no limit at the other end. All but the halt and the blind would be in it and she saw this army of her creation, with grey hairs and wrinkles under the helmets, floundering through the mud, swimming rivers, trying to run, gasping for breath, falling out exhausted or deciding it was time for a truce and a nice cup of tea.

In our previous chosen year, war was around the corner but could only be guessed at. Some of the books we read paid no attention to the looming at all; some of the authors probably agreed with Mr Blackett that it would never happen. What I’m intrigued to discover this time around (and this is partly why 1947 was chosen) is – will any of the books ignore the war? Could they? And how differently will they all write about?

Proud Citadel by Dorothy Evelyn Smith

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When I reviewed Dorothy Evelyn Smith’s brilliant, brilliant novel O, The Brave Music – which is being reprinted by the British Library in the autumn, hurrah! – Sarah wrote in the comments that I should try her 1947 novel Proud Citadel. I was very much looking out for my next D.E.S, so I ordered a copy – and it came with this lovely, atmospheric dustjacket.

Like O, The Brave Music, the novel starts with a young girl – but we follow her for about 25 years, rather than to the edge of adulthood. Jess has just lost her mother and is moving to a distant relative in Yorkshire.

Out of the turmoil and hardships and deep devotion of her eleven years had emerged three salient precepts: you must never lie or break a promise, you must never get into debt, and you must never love anybody too much.

Jess has been through an awful lot for her age, and takes this journey anxiously and uncertainly. At every stop, she asks the train guard if they have yet reached Sunday Halt – until he gets exasperated and three young boys start teasing her. One is clearly the ringleader whom the others follow – and Jess wonders at his unkindness but also his charm and magnetism.

She gets out at Sunday Halt and is given unclear directions through the town, out to the moor, and to the cottage where Mary is waiting for her. She is guided by that dominant, cruelly charming boy, whom she learns is Randy – to Jess, he shows kindness. And as she is crossing the moor and catches her first sight of the sea, we get one of the many wonderful passages in the novel that describe the landscape and its effect on the observer:

Jess stood and stared in silent astonishment. In all her wildest dreams of the sea that Mother had talked about she had never imagined such a fierce and turbulent loveliness as met her sight. The lines of white she had glimpsed from the train now revealed themselves as the edges of deep, curling, grey-green waves that rose in incredible majesty and stood poised for a breath-taking instant before hurling themselves with a shout on the sharp black teeth of rock that thrust out from the sandy foot of the cliffs. And then what a boiling and a surging of brownish, foam-flecked water! What a flat, shining floor of sand as the waves retreated, gathering audible breath for the next attack! What a sharp thrill of expectancy as each wave swung slowly up and up and over…

I’m not usually one for landscape descriptions in books, my eye just glides over them unintentionally – but Smith wrote so wonderfully about the moor in O, The Brave Music and writes equally wonderfully about moor AND sea in Proud Citadel. It’s always stunning while also being descriptive – nothing fanciful, but prose from someone who knows and loves the sea and the moor and is able to convey why.

When Jess arrives with Mary, she finds her first loving home. Mary is a delight – wise, kind, mildly witchy, and able to encourage good sense and adventure in Jess. As she grows older, her life becomes tangled with so many members of the community – and especially the three boys from the train and, from them, even more especially Randy.

It took me a while to finish Proud Citadel, which no doubt partly because of coronavirus anxiety. But it was also because of the one major flaw in the novel, in my eyes – there are so many characters, and we spend scenes with so many of them. You eventually realise that all of them are pretty much necessary to Jess’s central story, even though it often doesn’t seem like it at the time, but I found it hard to juggle so many households in my mind and in my sympathies. There are about five characters I’d have cut from being the major focus of scenes – they could still be there, but without interrupting Jess’s story so much.

Because Jess is a fascinating character. She is adventurous and can be as wild as the sea, but she has a deep core of morality – and, having been let down so often in her youth, cannot bear people who break a promise. The novel is in the third person, but I felt like I was let into Jess’s world entirely.

And, while I flagged at times in reading it, I still raced through the final third of the novel and felt bereft once I’d finished it. There’s nobody like Smith for making you fall in love with a community, a landscape, and feel adrift once you are no longer with them. I’m sure I’ll re-read this one, as I have already re-read O, The Brave Music, and perhaps next time it will feel like coming home to the village – and the large cast of characters will be familiar faces to whom I am returning.

The Vanishing Celebrities by Adrian Alington

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I picked up The Vanishing Celebrities (1947) by Adrian Alington in Oxford a couple of years ago, partly because the title sounded fun, partly because I love the look of Albatross paperbacks and partly because I thought it would be a Golden Age detective novel. As it turned out, it was a lot more than that – and a total delight that sadly seems to have become almost completely forgotten. [Sidenote: this is number 5364 in the Albatross paperback series. Who knew they had so many, and how come I so seldom find them?]

The setting is Spindlesby Castle, and the opening chapter has ghostly figures from different periods of the castle’s past congregating – they know something is about to happen, but don’t know what. These ghosts only appear at the beginning and end of the novel and were rather a distraction than anything else – I’d have cut them, though they may have been a satire on something I don’t know about.

Because most of the other characters are clearly satires – either of real people or of types; I don’t know enough of popular culture from 1947 to be certain. But present at the houseparty, organised by the Duchess of the castle and reluctantly permitted by her husband, are…

  • Trackless Butterworth, an explorer
  • Olivia Hitchforth, an actress and Trackless’s wife
  • Aurora Fairground, a tennis player, and her mother
  • Carlotta Trott, a detective novelist who invented Sir Cecil Sweetlip and who is in a bitter rivalry with Fay Peabody, inventor of the detective Aristede Foufoupou
  • Viola Ramshott, MP
  • Virgil D. Schrenkenkraut, an American film magnate
  • The Ambassador of Strubania
  • Len Trooper, a handsome singer
  • Mr Titterways, who is not famous but somehow always turns up where famous people are

You see that Alington has a way with names. Carlotta Trott and Fay Peabody are obviously spins on Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, and there’s a later reference to Tenderly Jones, ‘the man who writes whimsically about gardens’, who I think must be Beverley Nichols. Whether the others are types or real people, they are a delight. My favourite to read was perhaps Aurora Fairground, whose reputation her mother is keen to preserve – whenever anybody asks her about her tennis career, she says that she would rather have babies of her own, and is just a girl who loves England and happens to be good at tennis.

An alternative title for The Vanishing Celebrities in some editions was The Room in the West Tower – put those two together, and you’ll work out happens. There are rumours that anybody who slept in a room in the West Tower disappeared by morning. Viola Ramshott, MP, has no time for such nonsense and says she’s will sleep there to no ill effect – and by morning, of course, she is gone.

In the silence which seemed inevitably to follow any observation put forward by Aurora, Carlotta Trott made her first contribution to the discussion. She had been listening to the others with a somewhat cynical smile. Now, thinking that a suitable moment had arrived for the kind of sensational intervention which Sir Cecil enjoyed, she said, adopting her best Sir Cecil drawl, ‘Have you tried draggin’ the lake?’

‘Er – no,’ said the Duke.

Carlotta’s smile became still more cynical.

‘Not a bad idea, what?’

‘A very interesting idea,’ replied the Duke, ‘really a very interesting idea indeed. But as a matter of fact, Miss Trott, there is no lake.

A succession of these celebrities decide to sleep in the room for increasingly unlikely reasons, and they disappear. Various policemen turn up, including people from Scotland Yard with ridiculous nicknames – my favourite was ‘What’s More You’ll Be A Man My Son’ Darby. Fay Peabody pops up to score one over her novelist nemesis.

As a detective novel, it’s not the most impressive. The solution is pretty laughable – but in the good sense as well as the bad. The whole thing is really funny. Alington has a great ear for witty dialogue and, having established the ludicrous characters, frequently made me laugh by dropping in just a few representative words from them. We don’t even have the usual straight man, watching on and being the reader’s perspective on the zany world. Everyone is absurd. It’s a delight.

I suppose the danger in any novel that draws on figures of the period, or even on types of the period, is that they are less relevant when those figures and types have faded. But I loved this even when I wasn’t sure who Alington was drawing on, and the whole thing was a total joy. If you can get your hands on a copy, do – otherwise I hope that it might catch the eye of the British Library Crime Classics series at some point…

Black Bethlehem by Lettice Cooper #1947Club

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the-1947-clubFirstly – sorry I’ve been a bit behind with adding links to the 1947 Club post, but do keep them coming! It’s great to see so many different books being covered – and you have until Sunday to finish reading and reviewing.

This one might be my last for the week, though, and it’s the one I’ve been reading most of the week: Black Bethlehem by Lettic Cooper, probably best known to most of us (if at all) for the novel The New House, which was both a Persephone title and a Virago Modern Classic.  That’s certainly why I bought it whenever I did buy it, which I think might have been almost a decade ago. It’s nice that I’ve been able to do all my 1947 reading from books I’ve had waiting on my shelves for years – though (and sorry to write what will probably be my final review for this club as a bit of a downer) I didn’t really like this one all that much…

The book is quite slim, but the font is tiny and I think it’s actually probably quite a long novel… or, indeed, ‘three long short stories’, as I discovered it was only towards the end of reading (from this not-super-positive contemporary review). Before that, I’d just got rather confused, trying to link the sections together – the only link, so far as I can tell, is the appearance of John Everyman in each part, and that is evidently a not-particularly-coded way of introducing an everyman throughout.

There is a brief Prologue in an air raid shelter in 1944 that wasn’t particularly promising – Cooper very much puts theoretical arguments in different characters’ mouths, without much attempt at verisimilitude. Thankfully it’s pretty brief, and then we’re into Part 1. This concerns Alan Marriott in the final months of the war, invalided out of fighting, and giving an account of his wartime experience as part of a radio broadcast. We then see his uncertainties about his future, how he’s trying to keep his family happy while still trying to understand his role in this bizarre new world – and he’s in the midst of something of a love triangle at the same time.

Part 1 was my favourite section. It’s quite odd to have a female writer describe the life of a soldier – particularly as so many writers were presumably available in 1947 who’d had firsthand experience; it’s in the third person, but very much trying to put across Alan’s views and memories. It’s that slight disjointedness that doesn’t quite ring true. Cooper is describing how she imagines soldiers lived and thought and reacted to the war – and she doesn’t quite hit authentic notes. I am a passionate believer that anybody should be allowed to write about pretty much anything, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be completely successful. BUT this is still the best part of Black Bethlehem – engrossing and detailed.

Part 2 was my least favourite… We hop back to 1941, and a first person narrator whom we eventually learn is called Lucy. I spent most of this centre chunk of the book trying to work out who she was and how she related to anybody else in the first section, and perhaps I’d have enjoyed it more if I’d known from the outset that there were no connections… Lucy’s work in an office was quite interesting, but mostly this part (in diary format) felt a bit tedious, and I didn’t care enough about the characters to get overly bothered when she found herself in a love triangle. Though there was the odd moment that will stick with me – such as this depiction of being in a house when a bomb hits:

After the second stick the raid seemed to shift farther off, and we all got rather drowsy sitting by the hot fire. Mrs. Everyman murmured something about taking the children back to bed. The baby was asleep. Muriel was half asleep, leaning against her mother’s knee. Marta sat smoking and staring into the fire. I began to tell Peter a story. Suddenly there was a whistle, not a very long one, and the floor heaved under our feet. I knew, – I don’t know how, – that it was a stick coming towards us. I jumped up and leaned over Peter in a futile attempt to keep him safe. We could never decide afterwards whether it is true or not that you don’t hear the whistle if the bomb lands very near you. I don’t think I did hear it. Mrs Everyman said she did. The whole room seemed to come up through my stomach. There was a loud explosion, and then a long crash of falling stone. The black-out blew in, the glass cracked, the lights went out. The room was full of smoke and choking dust.

The third part is much shorter – about a boy called Simon (of all things) and him coming to terms with the arrival of his baby brother, in 1935. It was pretty good, but quite different from the tone of the rest of Black Bethlehem, and by that point I was rather tired of the whole thing.

So – not a 1947 book I’d recommend, though also one that I suspect others would enjoy, going into it eyes open. Maybe I read it too quickly to get it finished this week. And I’m still not sure why it’s called Black Bethlehem. Oh well – it still adds to a perspective of the year, which we wouldn’t get if we only read the best books of the year!

The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

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I’ve really enjoyed the serendipity (if that’s not too great a stretch) of finding 1947 books that have been on my shelves for ages, waiting to be read – and particularly glad when it happens to be a Persephone title. The Blank Wall has been on my radar since Persephone reprinted it in 2009 – and it was nice to finally read it.

Not the cover I had. Purloined from Book Snob.
Not the cover I had. Purloined from Book Snob.

The Blank Wall concerns Lucia Holley, left with her teenage daughter Bee, son David, and her father while her husband is away ‘somewhere in the Pacific’; left to manage the home and the emotional tangles of Bee, who fancies herself much mature than she is, and who is involved with an older man. (When I said ‘manage the home’, I should add that her maid Sibyl is also there – The Blank Wall is a fascinating depiction of the relationship between a white employer and a black maid in 1940s America; a loving and close relationship that is yet divided by the rules and restrictions of the period.)

After this, Lucia gets involved in some dodgy dealings – feeling out of her depth, she somehow manages to take control of the situation nonetheless. Despite a few rather doubtful moments, the novel does a good job of showing ordinary people experiencing extraordinary events – and, somehow, the power of that ordinariness overcoming everything. That is, Lucia always feels like she is experiencing real life – even when that life is far from normal reality. That shows an impressive strength in depiction of an everyday wife, mother, and daughter – who earns our affection along with our respect and our anxieties. In some ways, this is far more a domestic portrait than it is a thriller.

Oh, and the brief depiction of New York – where Lucia travels, from her lakeside rurality, to try to raise funds for blackmail (yes indeed!) – is equally interesting for its snapshot of the time and place.

I read it in its entirety on the plane back from Siena – well, probably with time sitting in the airport added on too – which gives you an indication of how quickly I was able to race through around 230 pages. It is certainly a page turner – maybe even a thriller, though there is nothing particularly tense or terrifying here. There is very little in the way of a mystery to solve (though the reader does wonder if the carpet will be pulled from under their feet). Raymond Chandler called her ‘the best character and suspense writer (for consistent but not large production)’ and particularly championed this one and – though his judgements are not always to my taste; he was no fan of A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery – but in this case he has picked a charming writer. Her strengths perhaps lie more in character than in suspense (though I suspect suspense has taken more of centre stage in the decades since he made that pronouncement), but The Blank Wall was certainly an extremely entertaining way to pass a flight.

The Museum of Cheats by Sylvia Townsend Warner #1947Club

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In 2011, probably around the time I was writing my doctoral chapter on Sylvia Townsend Warner, I madly bought up all her collections of short stories. And, let me tell you, some of them are not easy to find affordably – but I wanted to stock up my shelves. Fast forward five years and I’ve read… none of these collections. And possibly none of the stories, thinking about it. So hearty cheers for the 1947 Club sending The Museum of Cheats up my tbr pile – it’s absolutely brilliant.

Warner tends towards the brief, with short stories, which is exactly how I like them – presumably because she had to fill certain spaces in the New Yorker, and anywhere else that housed these. The only exception is the title story – and I’m actually going to gloss over that one, as I found it much my least favourite story in the collection; it is on the model of The Corner That Held Them (a Warner novel I found intolerably dull, though it has many devoted fans), concentrating on the history of a building rather than the details of people’s everyday lives.

But, setting that one aside, Warner has an expertly observant eye. I was reminded a little of Katherine Mansfield – in terms of the searing through to the centre of a matter, and the potentially life-altering moments among the banal; indeed, how the banal can be life-changing. We see a hostess curious about the unkind caricature she finds on a notepad by the telephone; a woman show paintings to an uninterested visitor; a returning solider discover his books have been given away. The most striking story, perhaps, is ‘Step This Way’ – about abortion.

Warner opens each story with confident finesse, immediately taking the reader into her unusual view of the world. Here is the opening of ‘A Pigeon’:

The two large windows of the room on the first floor looked straight out into the trees of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A pigeon was cooing among the greenery. Tears rushed into Irene’s eyes. She had a sentimental character, and how sad it was, really, a girl of her age, as innocent as that bird, and all by herself, sitting opposite a solicitor called Mr. Winander and having an interview about her divorce.

The balance of that sentence and those clauses, ending on the word ‘divorce’, strikes me as so cleverly done. And she is not simply concerned with drama; I love the way Warner finds a gentle humour in the curious patterns of normal speech. This is in the same story:

“Mrs. Johnston, you must forgive me asking this. Are you quite sure that you wish to go forward with a divorce?”

“Oh yes, definitely. I never was one to stay where I wasn’t welcome.”

I suppose we have to acknowledge that these stories were probably written and published in 1946, at least some of them, but the collection certainly came out in 1947 – and, yes, the war looms large. I wasn’t expecting it to, actually. It seemed the sort of thing that would pass Warner by in her concentration on the minute. Having said that, she still looks at the war as it affects individual relationships and minds – nothing so dramatic as a world stage. This, from ‘To Come So Far’, is representative of the way Warner uses the war for her own quirky angle:

She was worn out with getting on her husband’s nerves, being alternately too strong or too weak – like tea. If he were a returned soldier, all this would be natural. Magazines were full of stories about manly nerves unable to face the return of civilian life or articles on How to Re-Acclimatise Your Man, and newspapers were full of accounts of murdered wives. But throughout the war Arnold had been an indispensable civilian, jamming enemy broadcasts, and throughout the war they had got on together perfectly, complaining of the discomforts of living and giving each other expensive presents because to-morrow we die. Now, in 1946, Arnold was mysteriously as indispensable as ever and they hadn’t died.

She has such a great turn of phrase. It’s there throughout Lolly Willowes and, twenty years later, her style remains unmistakably hers – and these sorts of unexpected stylistic quirks seem to me to be even more appropriate in a short story. It’s the sort of context that can carry the weight of something slightly bizarre, without it distorting a full-length character study. For example, in ‘Story of a Patron’ – all about the discovery of a ‘primitive artist’ – she includes this:

Mr. Haberdone asked to see more examples of Mr. Rump’s art, and Mr. Rump produced a portrait of Mrs. Rump. It was a remarkable likeness, quite as accurate as the portrait of the cactus but more dispassionate, as though Mrs. Rump had been grown by a rival seedsman.

One of my favourite stories in the collection was also one of the most curious – ‘The House with the Lilacs’. Most of the stories in The Museum of Cheats capture moments in ordinary lives, showing how extraordinary they can seem to the people experiencing them. In ‘The House with the Lilacs’, the reader is left uncertain – Mrs Finch reminds her family of a house they looked at when choosing where to live, and recalls it in perfect detail, but not where it was. The rest of the family know that neither they nor she have ever seen such a house. And that is more or less where we leave it. Even more intriguingly, in a letter Warner wrote to William Maxwell, she describes Mrs Finch as ‘my only essay at a self-portrait; her conversation and her ineffability’.

Sadly, The Museum of Cheats is pretty scarce – though more copies seem to be available in the US than in England; despite living in Dorset, Warner’s stories always found a more appreciative audience in New York. I can only imagine that her other stories would be equally rewardingly tracked down (if not as appropriate for the 1947 Club). I’ll certainly be making sure I read more from my Warner shelf before too long.

 

Mr Whittle and the Morning Star by Robert Nathan

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Mr Whittle and the Morning StarRobert Nathan was one of the authors I was keen to keep an eye out for when I went to Washington DC earlier in 2015. On my previous trip, I’d found Portrait of Jennie by Nathan in a bookshop nearer the Folger Shakespeare Institute – a book I’d read about during my DPhil research but hadn’t been able to track down – and found it very enjoyable (and subsequently also enjoyed the film). He’s not at all easy to find in the UK, and much more common in the US, but often found around the mass market paperbacks and the second-class hardbacks…

Anyway, after scouring the shelves I managed to bring back two: The Enchanted Voyage and Mr Whittle and the Morning Star. My weekend away in Shropshire was an ideal time to treat myself to reading one of them – Nathan struck me as that sort of indulgent, probably not-very-high-quality, eminently-readable author. Either would have done, but it was Mr Whittle and his morning star that accompanied me to the house.

Well, both Robert Nathan novels I’ve read have taken me less than a day. Granted, both were short – but they are also both novels with the perfect balance of lightness and wit. They’re not great literature, but they’re also not trash; Nathan has a turn of phrase that puts him above the dross, even if it doesn’t get him into the greats.

So, what is the premise for Mr Whittle and the Morning Star? It’s the sort of quirky thing that I like: Mr Whittle is sure that the world is about to end. Not from any spotting of the four horsemen of the apocalypse or anything like that, but because of the threat of nuclear war. He tries to warn his students (he is a university professor), his wife, his 12 year old daughter – but none of them are particularly perturbed. Much like Shirley Jackson’s brilliant novel The Sundial, his announcements are met without drama, and it makes for very amusing reading. While Whittle is musing on the end times, his wife replies with anxiety about buying a new dress for their daughter.

His mind strayed into dreamy speculation. How hard it was to imagine nothingness – to realize, for instance, that no one would ever remember anything that had happened. To think that music and the alphabet and noodle soup would simply disappear into thin air, never to be mentioned anywhere again – and after such a short existence, geologically speaking. All man’s knowledge, from the wheel to penicillin…

This element of the novel was handled beautifully; Nathan apparently has quite a way with the eccentric and unusual (as I discovered in the fantastic-themed Portrait of Jennie). Sadly – for my reading enjoyment, at least – there is another element of the novel which somewhat takes over. Forty-something Whittle becomes infatuated with one of his students, the beautiful Penelope Andrews. Mrs Whittle, meanwhile, develops something of a brief relationship with one of the couple’s friends. It’s all very naive and old-fashioned (so far as affair storylines go) but also not particularly interesting – and rather distracts from Nathan’s more innovative plot.

And (spoilers) the ending is frankly bizarre – God turns up in the clouds and has a chat with Mr Whittle. Nathan more or less has enough charm to carry it off. Indeed, it is the charm of his writing that keeps me hooked throughout. I’m already excited about reading my next Robert Nathan novel, and sad that so few of them are readily available in book form (though plenty of them can be found as ebooks, some of you will be pleased to know).

Has anybody read Robert Nathan? Is anybody tempted? He was very prolific, but there isn’t that much info out there about him or his work…