1948

The Dogs Do Bark by Barbara Willard

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I can’t remember why I bought The Dogs Do Bark (1948), but it’s possible it was seeing a mention in passing on Scott’s Furrowed Middlebrow blog. There, he talked about it being a novel set in a seaside resort, and the title made me think it might be in a boarding house. Sorry, boarding house novel fans, it is not. But it is interesting in its own right.

There aren’t any dogs in the novel. Instead, the title comes from an idiom or poem or something. I’d never heard of it, but it is helpfully put as an epigraph to the book: ‘Hark, hark! The Dogs do bark! The Beggars are coming to Town. Some in rags, and some in tags, and some in velvet gowns.’ Eventually the meaning of all of this is explained, but I’m not sure it ever quite made sense.

The setting is St. Swithin’s-by-Sea, and Willard introduces the community very amusingly. I think her strongest, wittiest writing comes at the outset of the novel – the drama of events somewhat take over the archness with which she begins, but I loved this scene-setting:

The concert hall was full. St Swithin’s-by-Sea prided itself on an appreciation of the arts. It was a small, clean town, swept by south-west gales and great seas in winter-time, swept by trippers and red-faced holiday-makers in summer-time – a small town with a keen municipal conscience, which burgeoned in the shape of neat painted litter baskets, a picture gallery which was the bane of the ratepayers, a repertory theatre with a small subsidy, and fortnightly concerts in the autumn and spring. A visiting orchestra, under the baton of a conductor whisked rather unexpectedly into prominence by the BBC, had today brought forth a tribute in the form of pots of azaleas, which were spaced among the perennial ferns at the edge of the platform. The ladies of St. Swithin’s were very much in evidence, wearing their pearl earrings, their furs, their most responsible and intellectual bearing. The listened, flatteringly rapt, to a programme devoted without stint to the works of Grieg.

At the concert is Christine – an eager and passionate young woman, with the competing emotions of duty, romance, and honour. She is, I reiterate, young – young and naïve. Her sister Rosetta is neither of these things, married to a weak man she doesn’t much respect or like, though perhaps deep down she loves him. And all of them live with their domineering father and his mild, wise sister. Throw into the mix a devoted and slightly creepy butler, and that’s the uneasy household.

Mr Zeal – yes, Zeal is the family name – was injured in the First World War, and is a wheelchair user. He certainly doesn’t let that stand in the way of ruling his family with a rod of iron, particularly sapping the life out of his son-in-law. He is not cruel to them, but his jokes often have a sharp edge and other people’s feelings don’t factor in his decision making. Nobody seems to expect anything else.

With this set up, it’s rather a surprise that the main theme of the novel is… begging letters! It’s certainly a plot that I haven’t read anywhere else. In an era before spam emails and online fraud, the professional begging letter was the way in which the undiscerning kind could be swindled of their money. Of course, no doubt some people genuinely sent out pleas for money they needed. But, according to Zeal’s friend and local political candidate Crowther, there is an epidemic of wicked people using begging letters falsely. (Crowther’s son, by the way, is going out with Christine, and an engagement is on the cards.)

Crowther launches a campaign against such begging; Zeal thinks there is no problem with it. It all leads to the crux of the novel, where Zeal decides to trick Crowther. But there is more going on, under the surface…

I really enjoyed The Dogs Do Bark, and Willard’s writing is certainly very adept. As I hinted earlier, she does get a little melodramatic when the peaks and troths of the plot take over, and I’m not sure the stakes are quite as high as she thinks they are. While begging letters are a fascinatingly unusual topic for a novel, I think I’d have preferred them to have to bear a little less dramatic weight. A novel that just depicted life in St. Swithin’s-by-Sea, maintaining the dry style of the book’s opening, would have been a total delight. Apparently Willard was better known as a children’s historical fiction writer, and I can see that the approach she takes might well suit that genre and audience.

As it is, it was an enjoyable romp and all a bit silly – though not without poignant moments alongside. Certainly worth picking up if you come across it, if only because you’re unlikely to read anything from the 1940s quite like it.

The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov

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I was staying in Edinburgh when I came across the Pushkin Press edition of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf by Gaito Gazdanov, published in 1948 in Russian and translated by Bryan Karetnyk. I’m always drawn to these lovely little editions, but what got this book from the shelf and into my bag – having, naturally, paid – was this blurb on the inside flap:

A man comes across a short story which recounts in minute detail his killing of a soldier, long ago – from the victim’s point of view. It’s a story that should not exist, and whose author can only be a dead man.

Intriguing, no? And then we have this opening line…

Of all my memories, of all my life’s innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.

I’ve kind of given the game away on that line – because, yes, the murder was committed during the Russian Civil War. The unnamed narrator was shot at and his horse killed, and fired in return at his assailant – leaning over him to make the final shot. And then, hearing more people from the opposing side in the distance, took the dead man’s horse and fled. He was only sixteen, and the event has haunted him since.

Many years later, he picks up a collection of three short stories – two of which are well written tales of love and mischance, but the third unmistakably relates the events that happened to him. He decides he must track down the author, Alexander Wolf, and discover how this Englishman knows anything about what happened.

I shan’t give away any plot details, but it is a brilliant premise that is handled well – largely because Gazdanov is so good at maintaining the emotional and character-led responses to the ultimate explanation, rather than because it is necessarily the most believable in terms of plot. The psychological intensity and reality of the novel is unwavering, and the narrator is such a well realised character, with the same shifting and nuanced morality that actual people have.

The only complaint I have about the structure is that it dives away from the central mystery into a seemingly irrelevant plot about boxing and a budding romance that the narrator explores. I don’t really mind the inevitable coincidence that links it back to the main plot, but the sudden shift to introduce it – during which the narrator apparently forgets the drive he initially had to unearth Wolf – doesn’t quite make sense.

I’ve read very few Russian authors, being largely put off by the evident length of the books and the probable misery within them. This one is fewer than 200 pages (hurrah!) and emotionally complex. It’s a brilliant idea that is sustained and manipulated in a sophisticated way.

The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald

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The nice people at Post-Hypnotic Press gave me some codes for review copies of their Betty MacDonald audiobooks… approximately forever ago. I listened to The Egg and I (which I’d previously read) and finally remembered that the codes were still kicking around somewhere – so I recently downloaded and listened to The Plague and I (1948). As with The Egg and I, it was narrated by the excellent Heather Henderson.

I did a little poll on Twitter to try and establish whether ‘plague’ rhymes with ‘egg’ in American English – it sort of does when Henderson says it – to work out whether or not the title was intended to be a pun on The Egg and I. Jury’s out. But the ‘plague’ in question in TB. Back in the days when this was a much more real threat in America, Macdonald caught it from a man in her office – who, it turned out, had known he had TB and hadn’t bothered to do anything about it. The only cure is to go and rest in a sanatorium – not in the Swiss alps, as one might imagine, but in an American facility that was free to those who couldn’t afford the enormous bills of most places. As a young single mother, Macdonald was shunted high up the waiting list.

But we don’t get there for a while. I’ve discovered that Macdonald likes to ramble around a topic for a while before she gets to the gist of a book. And so we hear all about her family’s history of hypochondria and illness for a while – for rather too long a while, in my opinion, as by the time we get to the main point of The Plague and I, it feels as though we’ve been waiting impatiently in the wings for hours.

Once we get there, though, The Plague and I is dependably funny – Macdonald writes wonderfully about all the different roommates she has – but also rather harrowing at times. Fans of The Egg and I will know that Macdonald can write very amusingly about hardship, but there is a distinction between calamitous events on a farm and the Kafkaesque cruelty of the sanatorium. On the one hand, they are trying to save their patients, and perhaps have to be cruel to be kind. On the other hand, there are so many draconian rules (no talking, no coughing, no using the bathroom) – that they won’t tell people until they break them – and patients never have anything explained to them. To be suddenly moved into solitary confinement, or taken for an operation without being told what it will be – it must have been terrifying, and Macdonald manages to convey that, while also finding (with hindsight) the ridiculous in each situation, and laughing at it.

Her fellow patients include Kimi, a Japanese girl who is kind, delivers occasional sharp humour, and forever mourns that she is too tall to find a husband. I could have done without Henderson’s impersonations of a Japanese person – it felt a little uncomfortable – but I don’t really know what is usually done in such situations with an audiobook. And then there’s another sympathetic patient, whose name escapes me for the moment – who complains a lot, but is intelligent, and sees Macdonald as a comrade in arms. Besides them, most of the others get short shrift from Macdonald – whether the femme fatale type, forever talking about how sleepy she is, or the young woman who doesn’t take any of it seriously.

We know, of course, that Macdonald survived TB – but, from within, she never knew how long she’d be there, or how well she was. The whole experience sounds maddening and horrifying, but she turns it into an entertaining and often laugh-out-loud book. Henderson’s narration wonderfully judges the frustration, bonhomie, and nervousness that make up Macdonald’s persona in The Plague and I. If you haven’t read this, or any Macdonald memoir, I very much recommend listening to the audiobook.

The Road Through The Wall by Shirley Jackson

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Road Through The WallI knew there was a reason that Shirley Jackson Reading Week included the 18th – because I have only just got around to finishing my choice (thanks to two book group books read earlier in the week): I read the only Shirley Jackson novel I hadn’t previously got around to, which is also her first novel, The Road Through The Wall (1948). It’s fitting that this was a gift from lovely Lisa/Bluestalking Reader – well, bought with an Amazon gift certificate she was sweet enough to send me after I finished my DPhil – as Lisa was the one who first introduced me to Shirley Jackson, back in about 2006, with We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

I approached The Road Through The Wall with some trepidation. How would a first novel, written even before ‘The Lottery’ was published and Jackson became a sensation, stack up against her later triumphs? I already knew that her second and third novels, though great, weren’t quite as wonderful as her final books. And yet, though The Road Through The Wall isn’t her best work, it is a fascinating look at how her style and modus operandi hit the road running. Indeed, it is pretty much a companion piece to ‘The Lottery’, in its depiction of small town America.

The novel focuses on the small community of Pepper Street, which is almost entirely made up of families with young children. Those are certainly the family units that interact the most, leaving maiden aunts and single men rather alienated. But alienation seems to be a key factor of almost all the other interactions on the street too, whether that be Tod Donald, ignored by his family and the other residents on the street, or the mothers and daughters of Pepper Street, in the wake of the novel’s first event: the girls have all been writing romantic letters to boys. This is unearthed when Harriet returns home to find her mother has looked through her desk.

Harriet went upstairs away from her mother’s sorry voice. Her desk was unlocked; instead of eating dinner, she and her mother had stood religiously by the furnace and put Harriet’s diaries and letters and notebooks into the fire one by one, while solid Harry Merriam sat eating lamb chops and boiled potatoes upstairs alone. “I don’t know what its all about,” he said to Harriet and his wife when they came upstairs. “Seems like a man ought to be able to come home after working all day and not hear people crying all the time. seems like a man has a right to have a quiet home.”

Alone in her room again Harriet sat down by the window. Outside,in the eucalyptus trees in the first rich darkness were quiet and infinitely delicate, a rare leaf moving softly against the others. Harriet was accustomed to thinking of them as lace against the night sky; on windy nights they were crazy, pulling like wild things against the earth. Tonight, in their patterned peacefulness, Harriet rested her head somehow against them and stopped thinking about her mother. Lovely, lovely things, she thought, and tried to imagine herself sinking into them far beyond the surface, so far away that nothing could ever bring her back.

That passage should show you Jackson’s skilful depiction of both family life and descriptive passages. And those are the two main strengths of The Road Through The Wall which, paragraph by paragraph, is extremely good. Jackson understands (and, what is more, can portray) feelings of anxiety, fear, loneliness, competition, isolation, and so on and so on. Nothing in this novel is glib or unconsidered, and the way she writes about both the claustrophobia and camaraderie of small town life is on par with anything she achieved later.

So, I can’t fault the writing or the tone. What didn’t work as well in this novel I think, is structure. Very little happens in The Road Through The Wall, which is fine, but novels which are just about daily life need to have perhaps even firmer a grasp on structure and balance than those that are plot-dominated. This one meandered a bit, and though there was definitely a sinister edge throughout which justified the sudden rush towards a dark denouement (to avoid spoilers, don’t read Penguin’s blurb), I don’t think she had complete control over the pacing of the novel. For instance, the road of the title makes a very late appearance, and I could never entirely work out why it was so significant. And there are also too many characters, not all of whom ever quite become distinct.

Not up there with her finest work, then, but an astonishing first novel, and demonstrates what a talented prose writer Jackson was from the outset.

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor by Gertrude Stein

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If Swallows and Amazons is a great book to be reading while the brain is a bit confuzzled, then Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1948) probably isn’t.  But it came to mind the other day when Dorothy Richardson was mentioned – simply because I’d mixed up who wrote it – but by then I’d pulled it off the shelf, and the fab Picasso cover, combined with the book’s brevity, meant I thought I’d give it a whirl.

Every great writer has, I imagine, been called a fraud – and many frauds have been called great writers.  Which is Gertrude Stein?  I haven’t read anything else by her, and the introduction to this edition more or less says that Blood on the Dining-Room Floor wasn’t a success, but I spent the whole time thinking ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’.  But then I thought… there are plenty of people who say that about Virginia Woolf’s fiction, which I think is sublimely brilliant – so it’s just as likely that this novella is brilliant and I simply don’t get it.  Here’s a sample sentence:

A little come they which they can they will they can be married to a man, a young enough man an old man and a young enough man.
Well, sure, Gertrude, why not?  Not all the novella is that obfuscatory, but it’s also far from unique in the narrative.  In theory, I’m not anti experimental writing – but as I get further and further from my undergraduate days, my tolerance for unconventional grammar and deliberately cloaked meaning gets lower and lower.

And what’s it about?  Well, the writer of the blurb optimistically calls Blood on the Dining-Room Floor a detective novel, but since it’s more or less impossible to work out who any of the characters are, up to and including the person whose blood is on the dining-room floor (a more prominent death in the book is the maybe-sleepwalker who fell out a window), then it can only be called a detective novel in the loosest sense conceivable.

An interesting experiment to read, and it’s always possible that my cold-ridden delirium played its part, but… I can’t call myself a Stein fan as of yet.  Anybody read this, or any of Stein’s more famous work?  Could I be yet persuaded?

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.