1950s

We Were Amused – Rachel Ferguson

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Thanks so much for the wonderful suggestions on my art post the other day; I’ll reply individually soon.  Some of you also liked the pictures I’d found, which was lovely – I really have fallen in love with Korhinta since I posted it, despite not much liking anything else I’ve turned up by Vilmos Aba-Novak.  Right, books.

Anyone who saw my Top Books list for 2012 will know that I love an autobiography, particularly if it’s one by an author from the interwar period.  Rachel Ferguson seems such a complex, interesting novelist (and an actress to boot) that I was excited to read her autobiography We Were Amused (1958).  Well, it was definitely an interesting, involving read – and it’s made Rachel Ferguson seem more eccentric and complex than I could ever have imagined!

I’ve only read a couple of her novels – The Brontes Went to Woolworths and Alas, Poor Lady – which could scarcely be more different.  The former is a madcap tangle about a family who have no boundary between fact and fantasy; the latter is a sombre examination of the fate for aging unmarried women in the period.  Both are excellent – you might all be more familiar with The Brontes Went to Woolworths, and tomorrow I’ll be posting a longer excerpt from We Were Amused which relates to that novel.

Truth be told, I was a bit anxious after the first chunk of the book.  I often write here, when reviewing memoirs, that the author mentions miserable events without creating anything remotely like a misery memoir.  Well, Rachel Ferguson gets close… with her love for the dramatic and heightened, she describes her mother’s childhood as utterly miserable, and her maternal grandmother as a tyrant.  Here’s a typically bizarre Ferguson paragraph:

‘Cumber’, as our Greenwood cousins called her (‘because she cumbers the earth’), was, as Annie Cave, a member of what Wells has termed that essential disaster of the nineteenth century, the large family.  Having married Dr. Cumberbatch, she herself produced five children who lived, a sixth who had the sense to die in infancy, plus at least two who never even succeeded to cradle status.  And all this without anaesthetics, in an era of tight lacing.
Details of Cumber’s ogredom palled a little, and I confess that I couldn’t wait for Ferguson to set aside childhoods – her mother’s and her own – and get to the business of living.  More particularly, living as an aspiring dancer/actress and, later, writer.  These sections were rather wonderful.  Ferguson takes her haphazard life rather casually – all the opportunities and achievements which came her way are thrown in without much explanation, so she’ll suddenly be working for Punch, or having her first novel published, or going on a theatrical tour, without much notice.  It’s definitely better than labouring all these points, but it’s a curious division of spoils considering how many pages she devotes to her experiences judging cat shows…

For most of us, I think it’s this middle section of the autobiography which will most appeal.  It’s so full of intriguing details and behind-the-scenes information (come back tomorrow for background info on The Brontes Went To Woolworths!) which is invariably interesting to those of us who have never published a novel or appeared on the stage.  She does expect a lot of knowledge of interwar actors, dancers, and journalists which I am (alas) unable to provide – but I need no prompting when she talks about E.F. Benson, E.M. Delafield, and Violet Hunt.

Even if Rachel Ferguson had no creative career upon which to reflect, We Were Amused would be special for her striking, surreal turn of phrase.  Here is a couple of examples:

Our hall wallpaper, which for some reason was not replaced when we moved in, was a real caution and an abomination in the sight of the Lord: it suggested fir-trees and pineapples in a very bad thunderstorm indeed.
and

Socially Teddington was still of the epoch which invited its doctors to dinner but seldom, if ever, its dentists.
Very amusing! But, if only one could believe that Rachel Ferguson were sufficiently detached!  Perhaps it is foolish to expect an author to be detached in their autobiography, but her moments of irony and satire are weighed down by her equally peculiar outlook on many topics.  Yes, she may have written that twist about dentists with a grin on her face, but she is deadly serious when she suggests the working class have got too big for their boots and are ‘overpaid’.  Complaining about the lack of live-in servants feels madly outdated for 1958, she seems faintly insane when writing ‘the only cathedral town that doesn’t tire one out is York’ (what can she mean?), and I lost the thread completely when it came to the chapter on ghosts.  Ferguson assumes a level of credulity (not to mention a familiarity with famous hauntings of the 1930s) which left me entirely cold towards her my-sister’s-friend’s-cousin-heard sort of anecdotes about poltergeists and phantom footsteps.

Even stranger, to me, is her total fixation upon London – well, Kensington.  She describes a period spent in a different area of London as though she’d been exploring a South American country, or taken a voyage to Moscow.  She has no time at all for any of Britain’s other cities, towns, and villages.  Life begins and ends with Kensington for Ferguson – she’ll often assert that somebody is a Kensingtonian, and consider it credentials enough to satisfy the reader.  I shall never understand the London-centric mind, and I should probably give up hoping I ever shall.

So, it’s a curious mix.  It’s almost all fun and interesting, but the selection and apportion of pages – not to mention the tone and turn of phrase – certainly mark out Rachel Ferguson as an eccentric.  If you’d wondered how much of a departure she found The Brontes Went To Woolworths, well… if anything, she seems to have toned things down for the novel.

The Winds of Heaven – Monica Dickens

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Firstly, just thought I’d let you know that I’m back in the blogosphere (after two or three days of not reading much) and have replied to all recent comments, including all the wonderful and interesting comments on the On Commenting post.

Having recently got all excited about Persephone publishing their 100th title, I decided to check my unread Persephones against my A Century of Books list, and see how many blank spaces could be filled.  I have loved doing A Century of Books, but there’s no denying that some of those blank spaces are frustratingly elusive.  However, this cross-referencing did fill up two gaps – which happened to cover the whole cross-section of Persephone’s ethos.  Today’s book is at the light, frothy end of the scale – the book I’ll review tomorrow is serious and important.  I’m very glad to have read both.

My parents gave me The Winds of Heaven (1955) for my birthday a year or two ago, and it’s been on my large pile of books I’m looking forward to reading – especially since I am already a huge fan of Monica Dickens’ semi-autobiographical, very hilarious One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet.  But haven’t yet, somehow, read Mariana.  Anyway, The Winds of Heaven is very different from those – gone is the humour, gone is the absurdity, and present instead is one widower’s lonely, awkward life, bustled from pillar to post (those pillars and posts being represented by three rather selfish daughters.)

Lest we be in any doubt that those heavenly winds of the title be metaphorical, the opening paragraph is this:

When the winds of Heaven blow, men are inclined to throw back their heads like horses, and stride ruggedly into the gusts, pretending to be much healthier than they really are; but women tend to creep about, shrunk into their clothes, and clutching miserably at their hats and hair.
Louise Bickford is certainly of the creep-about variety.  She is recently a widow, left with enormous debts by an unscrupulous and selfish husband, and must spend her days living with one or other of her three daughters, on rotation.  In this novel, Monica Dickens draws her characters with broad strokes.  Having recently read V.S. Pritchett’s complex and brilliant delineation of his father, it was even clearer that Louise’s husband Dudley is essentially a cartoon villain.  Louise is downtrodden by him, and throughout the novel he looms in her memories like a bogeyman, apparently unkind and cruel from their honeymoon onwards.  Indeed, nobody would read The Winds of Heaven for its range of subtle character portraits – every marriage in the novel has at least one ‘bad’un’, and sometimes two.  On the flipside, some characters are just hopelessly nice.  Here are the various daughters and families:

1.) Miriam – sharp, pre-occupied, but not cruel.  Husband Arthur – cross, irascibile.  Daughter Ellen – sensitive, withdrawn, kind.  Other children Simon and Judy – young, excitable.

2.) Eva – bohemian.  Lover David – unreliable.

3.) Anne – lazy.  Husband Frank – adorable.

I’m being a little unkind to Monica Dickens, and I should point out that none of this prevented me enjoying The Winds of Heaven to the utmost.  It just isn’t a finely-drawn, perceptive novel – it’s light and broad and completely, wonderfully entertaining.  It reminded me a great deal of Richmal Crompton’s novels, which I love but which (I now recognise) are far from great art.  Indeed, the relative staying with various families is a plot Crompton uses more than once, and to great effect in Matty and the Dearingroydes.

Having called this novel entertaining, I should add that its themes are often sombre.  Chief amongst these is Louise’s situation – being loved but unwanted by her family, an awkward imposition wherever she goes.  In the hands of Elizabeth Taylor this would be a subtly crafted, very moving story – in the hands of Monica Dickens, it is moving but never heartbreaking.  Serious themes do not a serious novel make.  Indeed, the novel is still more entertaining than it is cautioning or saddening.  In fact, I’m trying to work out why it was so fun to read, when there is almost no comedy in it, and the events are all rather melancholy – from miserable affairs to accidents with farm machinery.  I think it’s the same experience one has when watching a soap opera – the events are so over the top, and the characters embodying individual traits (Anne might as well just be a sign saying Selfish and Lazy) rather than complex personalities, that it’s impossible to feel distraught for them, and instead you can settle down to guiltless enjoyment of the spectacle.

All of which sounds like I’m damning Monica Dickens with faint praise – but I have admiration for authors who can create an action-packed, page-turning novel, with underlying seriousness, and still produce a credible narrative.  Dickens’ writing is never poor, and Louise herself is rather a well-drawn character – just one surrounded by characters who aren’t particularly.  And which of us lives on Elizabeth Taylor alone?  It is no mean feat to produce a loveable, engaging novel.  It’s the light end of the Persephone scale, but it’s perfect for a winter evening when you want something relaxing and enjoyable, with just the right amount of thought-provoking paragraphs laced into the mix.  Thinking about it, The Winds of Heaven is the literary equivalent of The Archers… and that, my parents would assure me, can be no bad thing.

A few little reviews…

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It has come to my notice that it is December, and there are only 27 days left this year.  I have almost 20 reviews to write for A Century of Books… oops, didn’t work this out very well, did I?  (Well, I still have 10 books to read – but I have 4 of them on the go already.)  So I’m going to rush through five of them today – books that, for one reason or another, I didn’t want to write whole posts about.  But do still free to comment on them!

Daddy Long-Legs (1912) by Jean Webster
An orphaned girl is given a scholarship by a mysterious, anonymous man – she has only seen his back – and one of the conditions is that she must write updates to him, without getting any replies.  She nicknames him Daddy Long-Legs.  Can you guess what happens?  Well, I shan’t give away the ending.  I was mostly surprised at how modern this children’s book felt, despite being a hundred years old – a lot of it would have been at home in a Jacqueline Wilson story.  I enjoyed it, but did find it a little creepy, and rather repetitive, but these are probably signs of not having read it when I was the target age.

Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he is an enormous bug.  Which is going to make his job as a salesman somewhat difficult.  The reason I’m not giving this novella/short story its own review is that I don’t feel I have anything new to say about it.  Kafka is famed for his matter-of-fact approach to the surreality in this story, and rightly so.  What surprised me here was how middlebrow it all felt.  It is definitely comparable to David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox – which actually seems to have greater pretensions to literariness.

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
Another one which surprised me – I’d always heard that Marie Stopes started a sexual revolution in the UK, offering knowledge about sex to the everywoman for the first time.  Turns out she is much more conservative, and less revelatory, than a lot of the other guides written around the same time, and earlier.  I read these guides for my current DPhil chapter, by the way – my favourite so far being the person who argued that sexual intercourse and reproduction were acceptable as separate impulses, because protozoa separated them.  Sure, why not?  (I wonder if I’ve just made all sorts of inappropriate search terms for this blog now…)

Miss Hargreaves: the play (1952) by Frank Hargreaves
This is something of a cheat, since it was never published – but it was performed, with Margaret Rutherford in the lead role.  Tanya tipped me off that copies of all performed plays were in the Lord Chamberlain’s archives in the British Library – so I had the great privilege and pleasure of reading the play, with Baker’s own penned changes.  It’s pretty similar to the novel, only with the action restricted to a few settings.  Such fun!

V. Sackville West (1973) by Michael Stevens
I’m a sucker for a short biography, and I hadn’t read one of VSW before, so I gave this one a whirl.  It’s a critical biography, so Stevens discusses and analyses the work while giving an outline of VSW’s life.  About halfway through I thought, “this feels way too much like a doctoral dissertation.”  Turns out it was a doctoral dissertation.  I think I’ll be turning to a more charismatic writer for my next biography of Vita, as this one was rather prosaic and charmless, although very thoroughly researched.

Right, well that’s five down!  How are the other Century of Bookers getting on?

Guard Your Daughters – Diana Tutton

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41. Guard Your Daughters (1953)

What a heavenly book!  What a glorious find!  It has gone into my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.  There was never any question that it wouldn’t.

Occasionally I started a book and, after a page or two, know that I will hate it *cough* Mary Webb *cough – less frequently, it takes only the first page to tell me that a book is astonishingly brilliant (step forward Patrick Hamilton.)  Rarest of all is the book where, before the end of the second page, I know I will read and re-read it for many years to come.  We all recognise the difference between a book we admire and a book we love.  Often these overlap, but there are very few novels which feel like loved ones, so deeply are we attached to them.  Guard Your Daughters is on that list for me, now.

First off, I have to acknowledge how similar it is to Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle.  I mentioned that the other day, but I don’t think I can really write a review without acknowledging it again.  Guard Your Daughters was published five years after I Capture the Castle, and I think Tutton must have been influenced by it – or perhaps there was something in the zeitgeist?  (Disclaimer: I’m going to make two big assumptions – that you’ve read I Capture the Castle, and that you love it.  I won’t give away any significant spoilers, but my references to Dodie Smith’s novel might not make complete sense if you’ve not read it…. ok, disclaimer over!)

Here are some of the similarities: The narrator is a young girl (Morgan Harvey is 19, to Cassandra’s 17) who lives with her eccentric family in the middle of rural nowhere.  Her father is a writer (although Morgan’s father is a successful and prolific detective novelist, not an avant-garde sufferer from writer’s block) and there are posher folk living nearby.  Tutton even seems to make reference to Rose’s disastrous attempts to dress up for her neighbours, when Morgan and her sisters are preparing to visit theirs:

Luckily, if you bother to read a few illustrated papers you can always find out what to wear when, so that we didn’t make any crashing faux pas, such as wearing long dresses or flowers in our hair.

The most significant similarity is the feel of the novel.  Just as I Capture the Castle has a warm, nostalgic feel to it (don’t ask me how), so Guard Your Daughters feels like a novel one read repeatedly throughout childhood, even though I hadn’t read a word of it before this week.  Without being like those mawkish Edwardian children’s books where everyone Learns A Lesson, Tutton has created a wonderful family of people who love one another and, somehow, make the reader feel included.  ‘About fifty years out of date’, as one sister cheerfully confesses, and ‘living in a completely unreal world’ as another admits, but this isn’t a realist novel.  This is a novel which glories in its own delightful eccentricity – but not without serious undercurrents.

Right, the family.  While Cassandra was blessed only with one sister and one brother, Morgan has four sisters.  Dreamy, shy Teresa is the youngest (at 15) – she warmed my heart by her forthright hatred of sports.  Next is Cressida, the only one of the unmarried sisters who craves a normal family environment – she rather blended into the background, but that turns out to be important.  Morgan is the middle sister.  One year older than her, Thisbe is dry, sardonic and loves to make visitors feel awkward – the only thing she takes seriously is her poetry.  Oldest is Pandora, recently married and thus absent from the home.  When she visits, her perspective on life has changed…

“The thing is–” said Pandora.

“What?”

“I realise now – I never did before –” She hunted for words and I turned and stared at her.

“What are you trying to say?”

“I realise now that we’re an odd sort of family.”

“Well of course we are.”

“But I mean – Oh, Morgan, I do want you all to get married too!”

“Five of us?  I doubt if even Mrs. Bennet managed as well as that, unless she fell back on a few parsons to help out.  However, dearest, we’ll do our best.”

It is obvious that life cannot be normal for these five – but Guard Your Daughters isn’t self-consciously wacky or absurd.  The events are entirely plausible – there are very amusing scenes where Morgan and Teresa try to run a Sunday School lesson, or Morgan and Thisbe attempt to negotiate a cocktail party, or the girls try to put together a meal for a visiting young man while subsisting on rations (and finer things illegally given by a nearby farmer.)  The various relationships between sisters aren’t unlikely either – except perhaps the standard of their conversation and wit.  What makes the Harvey family eccentric is their detachment from the outside world, and their complete absorption in the feelings and doings of the family unit, to the exclusion of almost everybody else.  (The family unit is completed, incidentally, by their father and mother.  No Mortmain-esque step-parents in sight.  The father is only mildly absent-minded, and the mother… well, she has sensitive nerves… it’s not all easy-going in this household or this novel.)

But, despite Pandora’s fears, they do manage to meet a couple of young men.  Gregory’s car fortuitously breaks down outside their gate (remind you of any novel?) and, later, Patrick offers Morgan and Teresa a lift in his car while they’re on their way to a nunnery to learn French… Aside from owning cars, these young man share bewilderment at the Harvey family, and both become objects of desire for one sister or another.  Unlike I Capture the Castle, the romance plot never becomes of overriding importance.  Far more important is the family, their love and rivalry, and definitely their comedy.  There are many very amusing scenes, and a few quite moving and difficult ones, but the main wonder of the novel is the family, and Morgan’s voice.  She is not so self-conscious as Cassandra, but has an inviting, charming, slightly wry outlook on her sisters – coloured, of course, by her love for them.  I have no idea how Tutton has created such a lovable character – if I knew, I’d bottle it.

These aren’t the sisters in the book, of course… but they could be.
(picture source)

It’s so difficult to write about a book when I have simply loved it.  I want to shelve any critical apparatus (not that I usually drag it out on my blog) and substitute rows of exclamation marks and smiley faces.  Guard Your Daughters is so warm, so funny, so lively and delightful.  It’s a warm blanket of a novel, but never cloying or sentimental.  Basically, if you have any affection for I Capture the Castle, you’ll feel the same about Guard Your Daughters.  I’m going to go one step further.  I think it’s better than I Capture the Castle.  There.  Said it.

Bizarrely, unbelievably, criminally, it is out of print.  But I’ve seen the edition I have (the Reprint Society, 1954) in lots and lots of bookshops – I think they may have overestimated the demand!  I would love people to read it, so I’ll probably buy up copies when I see them, and force them on friends and family… if it’s languishing on your shelves, then go and grab it asap.  I’m so grateful to my friend Curzon for initially recommending it to me, and later Nicola Humble (author of the absolutely essential The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920 to 1950s) for reminding me about it at a conference earlier this year.  It’s probably my book of 2012 so far, and if you manage to get a copy, please come and let me know what you thought.

Oh, what a heavenly book!

All The Books of My Life – Sheila Kaye-Smith

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I recently read one of my favourite ever author autobiographies, Sheila Kaye-Smith’s All The Books of My Life (1956) without having read any of her novels.  I have read two volumes about Jane Austen which Sheila Kaye-Smith co-authored, and now I have read her autobiography (of sorts) – but I have still yet to read any of her fiction.  Should I?  Being ‘rural novels’, I have an unreasoning terror that they will be exclusively in cod-dialect, and feature sturdy (but honest) young men and flighty (but honest) young women.  Everything, in fact, that Stella Gibbons warns there might be, in Cold Comfort Farm.  My experience with Mary Webb has done nothing to assuage these fears.

Most of us turn to author’s biographies or autobiographies to elucidate their novels, or simply because we want to learn a bit more.  My way of doing things seems a bit contrary, but I happened to flick through All The Books of My Life in the Bodleian the other day (somehow it has found its way to the high-use open shelf collection – who could possibly have been reading it?) and I knew I’d have to get myself a copy.  As the account of writing and living as a novelist, it is deeply interesting.  As the perspective of a reader in the first half of the twentieth century, it is a joy.

Kaye-Smith apparently wrote an earlier autobiography about ‘my marriage, my home and my religion’, and decided that, turning seventy, it was time to dedicate an autobiography to the books she has read.  It’s like My Life in Books, I suppose.  From the book about Charles which taught infant Sheila to read, to the latest developments in her reading taste, Kaye-Smith threads the narrative of her life with the books which have influenced her.  Naturally, perhaps, the quotations I have jotted down are those which deal with the books, rather than the life.  Her life is interesting, but I found myself nodding in agreement so enthusiastically at her readerly opinions that I couldn’t help but mark them down.  Excuse a torrent of quotations… beginning (let’s keep this chronological, shall we?) with her early affection for Lewis Carroll’s Alice:

My delight in Alice in Wonderland, which I feel with increasing strength every time I read it, dates from the very dawn of understanding.  It is surely a wonderful achievement to have written a book that does not lose a spark of its magic in the re-reading of sixty years.  As I grew up I came to prefer Through the Looking-Glass – the adventures and characters are more significant and I am increasingly amazed at the brilliance of its construction – but my first introduction was to Wonderland, by means of a version specially prepared for small children and called The Nursery Alice.  This had the Tenniel illustrations, but they were all in colour, and the book must have been an expensive one for it was always kept in the drawing-room.  I remember the panic with which I saw my mother lock the drawing-room door when a thief was supposed to be about, for I felt sure that his main design was to steal my Alice.

There is something rather adorable about that, isn’t there?  I love how Kaye-Smith is able to recall the perspectives she held at various stages of her life.  Not only does she remember the books she read, but how she felt about them and the impact they had.  She covers all manner of obscure novels and esoteric books, but my next two excerpts concern well-known writers, and I’ve selected them purely because I agree with them so whole-heartedly…

I do not think a full-grown sense of humour is required to appreciate Dickens, but it is advisable to read him as I did for drama and pathos.  He is primarily a comic writer.  His character-drawing – and no one more signally then Dickens has given honorary members to the human race – is the drawing of a humorist, that is of a caricaturist, who can often show more of his model’s essential quality than a ‘straight’ artist, but certainly requires a mature mind to appreciate him at his full value.  I read Dickens not to laugh but to cry, for in those days I wanted most of a novel was the gift of tears.

And how could I resist this account of her experiences reading Ivy Compton-Burnett?  Not only do I agree with her assessment of Dame Ivy, but it shows that a false-start with her needn’t be the end of the story… encouraging words for any of you who have tried and failed to enjoy ICB!

For many years I found her unreadable, and the praise of her admirers was as the meaningless clamour of those who worship strange gods.  I myself bore all the marks of the Philistine – I complained that her novels were only dialogue, that the characters all talked alike, that they did not belong to the story and so on.  When J.B. Priestley in one of the Sunday papers investigated her cultus and found it more of a craze, I murmured ‘the Emperor’s clothes…’

Then came what can only be called my conversion.  It was one of those mental switch-overs in which a pattern that had seemed meaningless as black on white is suddenly filled with meaning by the discovery that it is really white on black.  I. Compton-Burnett’s novels are not pictures, they are designs, and bear the same relation to life as the stylized rose on the wallpaper bears to the realistic illustrations in Flowers of the Field. One does not quarrel with the wallpaper flower because it has a symmetry and formality which the model lacks.  We obtain both from the book and from the wallpaper the essential meaning of a rose – indeed there may be more abstract meaning in the wallpaper design than in the naturalistic picture.  I. Compton-Burnett is definitely an abstract novelist.
[…]
When with a deep sigh of satisfaction I closed Mother and Son I did not at once, as I should have in the case of any other author who had so delighted me, rush to order more books by the same hand.  I shall doubtless read them all in time, but they must be spaced out – probably as far apart as their actual dates of publication.  To sit down and read, say, six I. Compton-Burnett novels in succession would be like sitting down to a six-course dinner consisting entirely of caviare.  The addict would find that bad for the palate as well as the digestion – time must pass and other food be eaten if he is to recapture the original savour.  So promising myself a treat in the future not too far away, I open a novel by Monica Dickens.

Sheila Kaye-Smith (photo source)

I shouldn’t be giving the impression that All The Books of My Life is simply a collection of reviews tacked together.  When Kaye-Smith subtitles the book ‘an autobiographical excursion’, she means just that – the books really do frame an autobiography and, especially in the second half, anecdotes and reflections prompt or are prompted by comments on the reading Kaye-Smith undertook at any point in her life.  For example, there is a fascinating account of a friend in early adulthood who suffered a psychiatric-disorder which made her believe in her own false double-life.  Details of fan letters and increasing literary celebrity will appeal to anybody intrigued by the status of authors in the mid-century.  Towards the end of the book, there is quite a bit about Kaye-Smith’s Catholicism and various theological and spiritual books, which will appeal to some readers (although mostly went a bit over my head, as her spiritual reading seems rather more learned than mine.)  And any well-known admirer of Jane Austen could hardly craft a book without humour – it is a subtle wit, found chiefly in the turns of phrase Kaye-Smith uses, or wry conclusions to paragraphs…

Love and violence also swelled the sales of another spinster novelist, E.M. Hull, author of The Sheik, whose remarkable picture of desert life started a public demand for sheiks that was fostered by the cinema until it died of its own absurdity.

We all love reading the words of bibliophiles, otherwise we wouldn’t be reading blogs.  All The Books of My Life demonstrates that you don’t need to have the remotest interest in an author’s work to find their autobiography engaging, and I found herein the dual pleasures of agreement and discovery.  For all the head-nodding passages, there were two or three about books and authors I have yet to encounter.  It is perhaps surprising that more authors do not choose this bookish format for their autobiographies, and I wish more would, but I am delighted to have found (entirely by good fortune) so sublime an example.  But I still won’t be throwing my hat into the ring and trying one of her bain’t-youm-be-alost rural novels.

Mrs. Harris Goes To Paris – Paul Gallico

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The Bloomsbury Group set of reprints remains, I believe, the best selection of reprints out there.  It doesn’t have the range of Penguin or OUP Classics; it doesn’t have quite the unifying ethos of Persephone or Virago, but there simply are no duds in their number.  Miss Hargreaves is obviously their finest publication, in my eyes, but as I work my way through the few I haven’t read, I continue to marvel at the treats they’ve brought back to a new audience.

For some reason, Mrs. Harris has been sitting on my shelf for two years without me getting around to reading her.  I even had a copy of Flowers For Mrs. Harris (the original UK title of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris [1958]) before the Bloomsbury Group existed, but hadn’t read that either.  How could I have waited for so long?  Mrs. Harris is a joy, and her little novel is bliss.

Mrs. Harris is a London char, whose job is to clean other people’s houses.  She takes a deep pride in her work, is very good at it, and can pick and choose her clients.  She, and her good friend Vi, are much in demand, and when she decides that she has had enough of a client, she simply drops her key through their letterbox, and moves on.  Mrs. Harris is the dictionary definition of indomitable.  Nothing phases her, and she is an eternal optimist.  She also speaks somewhat like Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins, par example:

“Ow Lor’.”  The exclamation was torn from Mrs. Harris as
she was suddenly riven by a new thought.  “Ow Lor’,” she repeated, “if
I’m to ‘ave me photograph tyken, I’ll ‘ave to ‘ave a new ‘at.”
Now, although she is a wonderful character, it would be a lie to say that she has many layers of complexity and an inner introspection dying to emerge.  Gallico’s novel is simple and sweet, and he doesn’t overburden himself with psychological strife etc.  There is one central motivation of the novel, and that is Mrs. Harris’s desire for a Christian Dior dress…

It had all begun that day several years back when during the course of her duties at Lady Dant’s house, Mrs. Harris had opened a wardrobe to tidy it and had come upon the two dresses hanging there.  One was a bit of heaven in cream, ivory, lace, and chiffon, the other an explosion in crimson satin and taffeta, adorned with great red bows and a huge red flower.  She stood there as though struck dumb, for never in all her life had she seen anything quite as thrilling and beautiful.

Drab and colourless as her existence would seem to have been, Mrs. Harris had always felt a craving for beauty and colour which up to this moment had manifested itself in a love for flowers.
Yet now, flowers have been replaced by this longing for a dress that costs £450 – and in 1958, of course, that was an astronomical sum.  Coincidence, luck, and much determination (for Mrs. Harris is pretty much built out of determination) and three years later she is on her way to Paris…

It’s such a fun story.  Scarcely a jot of it is realistic – Mrs. Harris’s good humour and spirited nature act much in the manner of fairy dust, transforming all those she meets – but the novel is so enjoyable and light-hearted (albeit with occasional kicks) that the reader allows him/herself to be whisked along for the ride.  The contrast between shabby London char and elegant Parisian fashionista is, naturally, wonderful – and Gallico makes full use of the potential comedy in the situation.

Oh, it’s lovely!  It certainly isn’t very deep, even with an attempt for A Moral at the end, in the way that American sitcoms like to conclude events – but writing something sprightly and enjoyable is probably rather more difficult than writing something introspective and traumatic, and is certainly rarer.  Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is great fun, very short, and is a perfect way to spend a summer afternoon.

M for Mother – Marjorie Riddell

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Why is it that I love books about motherhood from 50+ years ago?  I’m not likely ever to be either a mother or a time traveller.  I blame the Provincial Lady books, which set me off on a literary path from which I have never looked back.  I can’t remember who mentioned Marjorie Riddell’s M for Mother (1954) – was it you? Own up! – but I enjoyed adding it to the fold.  This one is actually from the other perspective – the daughter narrates.  She has recently left home, and each short chapter begins ‘My mother writes to me and says’ – it’s all good fun.  There are lots of gossipy aunts who cause trouble, and Mother doesn’t believe the daughter can possibly live a successful life without a mother’s tender care.  


It’s not in the same league as Diary of a Provincial Lady or Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, but it’s definitely a book you’ll enjoy flicking through, if you’re a fan of those books by Delafield and Jackson.  I thought it would make sense to give you a taste – here’s a chapter picked more or less at random: Chapter 17 – Holiday at Home.

My mother said she was glad she had got me at home for a fortnight because she was going to feed me up.  She knew that when I was away in London I lived on baked beans.  She wasn’t surprised my eyes were dull.  She had warned me every time I came home but it was like talking to the Sphinx.  She had always thought that if I insisted on starving myself to death I would just have to get on with it, but now she had changed her mind.  Mrs. Plant’s daughter was the picture of health and my mother wasn’t going to have people making comparisons.

I said I don’t live on baked beans.

My mother said yes, you do.

Now, eat your supper, my mother said.  You’ve got to eat it all.  I’m not going to let you die of starvation.  I’m just not going to let you whether you like it or not.

There, she said when I had finished, you look better already.  You don’t look haunted.

On the following day we went to buy a tonic.

A tonic for putting on weight, my mother told the assistant.  Yes, you are rather thin, madam, said the assistant.  For my daughter, said my mother coldly.

Then we had me weighed.  I was nine stone.  See, my mother said.

And you’ve got to go to bed early, my mother said.  I can’t do anything about it if you will never go to bed before two in the morning when you are away.  But I can while you are home.  I am helpless when you are in London and am forced to stand by and watch while you wear your nerves to trembling shreds.  I’m only glad I can’t see you.  If you will tire yourself out like this the next thing will be you will lose your job, and you know you won’t like that.

I said I don’t stay up until two every morning.

My mother said yes, you do.

And another thing, my mother said.  You are going to take things calmly and slowly while you are home.  When you are in London you spend your time rushing like a mad thing from place to place without pausing for breath.  Tearing about like that without breathing isn’t good for you.  You will have a gastric ulcer and then where will you be?

Aunt Ethel had one in her old house at Tunbridge Wells, my mother said.  She was in hospital for weeks and when she came home her roses were thick with greenfly.

I said I don’t rush about like a mad thing.

My mother said yes, you do.

You whole attitude towards things is wrong, my mother said.  Your money, for instance.  Your father is going to talk to you about that.  I told him only last night he is going to.  I shall leave it to him and not say a word myself.  But what I want to say is that you simply must not carry it all about with you at once.  And don’t say you don’t because you do.

I know I do, I said.  Do you want me to leave half a crown under my mattress and carry a shilling round wih me?

There’s no need to be sarcastic, my mother said.

I’m not being sarcastic, I said.

You carry pounds in your handbag, my mother said.

No, I don’t, I said.

Don’t argue, my mother said.  I remember, she went on, when Aunt Gertrude went to London in 1938 to see Aunt Dora and somebody stole her handbag.  Aunt Gertrude has never forgotten it.  Since then she has kept her money in a woolly bag tied round her waist under her clothes.  It has never been stolen again.  If you won’t leave some of your money locked up in your room, my mother said, I will give you a woolly bag like Aunt Gertrude.

Now, eat your suet pudding and stop arguing, my mother said.  I’m going to keep you alive if it kills me.

Books I Borrowed…

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There are a few books I’ve borrowed from friends and libraries which have now been returned, and so I’m going to give each one a paragraph or two, instead of a proper review.  Partly so I can include them on my Century of Books list, but partly because it’s fun to do things differently sometimes.  Of course, it’s entirely possible that I’ll get carried away, and write far too much… well, here are the four books, in date order.  Apologies for the accidental misquotation in the sketch today… I only noticed afterwards!

Canon in Residence – V.L. Whitechurch (1904)
This was surprisingly brilliant. Rev. John Smith on a continental holiday encounters a stranger who tells him that he’d see more of human life if he adopted layman’s clothes.  Smith thinks the advice somewhat silly, but has no choice – as, during the night, the stranger swaps their outfits.  Smith goes through the rest of his holiday in somewhat garish clothing, meeting one of those ebullient, witty girls with which Edwardian novels abound.  A letter arrives telling him that he has been made canon of a cathedral town – where this girl also lives (of course!)  He makes good his escape, and hopes she won’t recognise him…

Once in his position as canon, Smith’s new outlook on life leads to a somewhat socialist theology – improving housing for the poor, and other similar principles which are definitely Biblical, but not approved of by the gossiping, snobbish inhabitants of the Cathedral Close.  As a Christian and the son of a vicar, I found this novel fascinating (you can tell that Whitechurch was himself a vicar) but I don’t think one would need to have faith to love this.  It’s very funny as well as sensitive and thoughtful; John Smith is a very endearing hero.  It all felt very relevant for 2012.  And there’s even a bit of a criminal court case towards the end.

Three Marriages – E.M. Delafield (1939)
Delafield collects together three novellas, each telling the tale of a courtship and marriage, showing how things change across years: they are set in 1857, 1897, and 1937.  Each deals with people who fall in love too late, once they (or their loved one) has already got married to somebody else.  The surrounding issues are all pertinent to their respective periods.  In 1897, and ‘Girl-of-the-Period’, Violet Cumberledge believes herself to be a New Woman who is entirely above anything so sentimental as emotional attachments – and, of course, realises too late that she is wrnog.  In 1937 (‘We Meant To Be Happy’) Cathleen Christmas marries the first man who asks, because she fears becoming one of so many ‘surplus women’ – only later she falls in love with the doctor.  But the most interesting story is the first – ‘The Marriage of Rose Barlow’.  It’s rather brilliant, and completely unexpected from the pen of Delafield.  Rose Barlow is very young when she is betrothed to her much older cousin – the opening line of the novel is, to paraphrase without a copy to hand, ‘The night before her wedding, Rose Barlow put her dolls to bed as she always had done.’  Once married, they go off to India together.   If you know a lot more about the history of India than I do, then the date 1857 might have alerted you to the main event of the novella – the Sepoy Rebellion.  A fairly calm tale of unequal marriage becomes a very dramatic, even gory, narrative about trying to escape a massacre.  A million miles from what I’d expect from Delafield – but incredibly well written and compelling.

Miss Plum and Miss Penny – Dorothy Evelyn Smith (1959)
Miss Penny, a genteel spinster living with her cook/companion Ada, encounters Miss Plum in the act of (supposedly) attempting suicide in a duckpond.  Miss Penny ‘rescues’ Miss Plum and invites her into her home. (Pronouns are tricky; I assume you can work out what I mean.)  It looks rather as though Miss Plum might have her own devious motives for these actions… but I found the characters very inconsistent, and the plot rather scattergun.  There are three men circling these women, whose intentions and affections vary a fair bit; there are some terribly cringe-worthy, unrealistic scenes of a vicar trying to get closer to his teenage son. It was a fun read, and not badly written, but Dorothy Evelyn Smith doesn’t seem to have put much effort into organising narrative arcs or creating any sort of continuity.  But diverting enough, and certainly worth an uncritical read.

The Shooting Party – Isabel Colegate (1980)
Oh dear.  Like a lot of people, I suspect, I rushed out to borrow a copy of The Shooting Party after reading Rachel’s incredibly enthusiastic review.  Go and check it out for details of the premise and plot.  I shall just say that, sadly, I found it rather ho-hum… perhaps even a little boring.  The characters all seemed too similar to me, and I didn’t much care what happened.  Even though it’s a short novel, it dragged for me, and the climax was, erm, anti-climactic.  Perhaps my expectations were too high, or perhaps my tolerance for historical novels (albeit looking back only sixty or seventy years) is too low.  Sorry, Rachel!

Authors on Authors (Part 3)

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A lot of books I’m mentioning this year seem either to be about Jane Austen or by Sylvia Townsend Warner… so it is appropriate that one of them is Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner!  It’s in the same Writers and Their Work series as Pamela Hansford Johnson’s pamphlet, mentioned yesterday, and I’ll write a similarly swift post about it.

PHJ on ICB nabbed the Century of Books slot for 1951, so STW on JA will just have to wait on the sidelines… but I rather suspect it will appeal to more of you.  Austen has more adoring fans than Dame Ivy, but are also significantly more spoilt for choice… This is, perhaps, hardly the only or foremost resource for information about Austen’s life and work, but I am a sucker (as this mini-series demonstrates) for authors talking about authors.  The combination of Warner and Austen is my favourite yet, and I loved reading Warner’s thoughts on the various novels.  She more or less bypasses biographical detail, which was fine by me – there are plenty of other places to go for that.  Instead we get to read Warner’s insightful responses to Austen’s work.  She doesn’t propose dramatic or revisionist readings of the novels, but there are lots of gems along the way.  I loved this:

though
sense distinguishes Elinor Dashwood and sensibility her sister
Marianne, the contrast is between two ways of behaving rather than
between two ways of feeling

and, a bit longer, this:

Of all Jane Austen’s novels, Emma must fully conveys the exhiliration of a happy writer. As the arabesques of the plot curl more intricately, as the characters emerge and display themselves, and say the very things they would naturally say, the reader – better still, the re-reader – feels a collaborating glow.  Above all, it excels in dialogue: not only in such tours de force as Miss Bates being grateful for apples, Mrs. Elton establishing her importance when she pays her call at Hartfield, but in the management of dialogue to reveal the unsaid; as when Mr. John Knightley’s short-tempered good sense insinuates a comparison with his brother’s drier wit and deeper tolerance; or as in the conversation between Mr. Knightley and Emma about Frank Churchill, whom neither of them know except by repute: Emma is sure he will be all that he should be, Mr. Knightley’s best expectation is “well grown and good-looing, with smooth, plausible maners” – and by the time they have done, it is plain that Emma is not prepared to fall in love with Frank Churchill, and that Mr. Knightley has been, for a long time, deeply and uncomfortably in love with Emma.

It is a shame, given Warner’s sensitive and alert
reading of Austen’s writing, that she does not recognise the irony
dripping when Austen wrote about her ‘little bit (two Inches long) of
Ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect
after much labour.’  Read in context – or even out of context –  it is clear that Austen has tongue firmly in cheek, and it’s curious that Warner (herself so often ironic) does not spot this.  Never mind.

What I think I love most about Warner’s writing in any context – her novels, letters, this pamphlet – is her exuberant use of imagery.  I probably mention it every time I review something by her, but it is delicious – usually quite surreal, but somehow fitting, and often animalistic.  She writes extensively about Austen’s juvenilia, and says that they ‘have a ringing brilliancy, like the song of a wren’.  Lovely!  And later she writes:

G.H. Lewes, when he recommended Charlotte Bronte to “follow the counsel which shines out of Miss Austen’s mild eyes”, was unaware of Lady Susan, where Miss Austen’s eyes are those of a hunting cat. 

Oh, Warner – you and cats!  She can turn anything around to cats, given enough time – and is thus, in my eyes, a kindred spirit.

As I said earlier, there are many other places to read about Austen.  This pamphlet was issued at a time when a more or less complete bibliography could still be compiled (and one is included – with less than three pages of critical material) but now it proliferates.  The reason I would recommend Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner amongst this extensive canon is for the particular insight one excellent novelist is able to shed upon another.  STW and JA have been perfectly matched.

Authors on Authors (Part 2)

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A series of pamphlets called Writers and Their Work was issued by British Book News in the early 1950s, and I happen to have got my hands on two of them.  In fact, they were amongst the books I bought during Project 24.  As you’ll be gathering from this week (as if you didn’t already know) I love authors writing about authors – especially when both sides of the equation are authors whom I love.  I. Compton Burnett by Pamela Hansford Johnson was a no-brainer for me – I love ICB, and I like PHJ, so I had to get hold of this.  Plus it ticks off 1951 on A Century of Books in under fifty pages.  I’ll try to make my post appropriately brief.

I bang on about Dame Ivy quite a bit here – basically, I want everyone to try her, and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that at least four-fifths of those who give Ivy a whirl will be unimpressed.  But the final fifth… oh, boy, we love her!  As Hansford Johnson writes, ‘She is not to be mildly liked or disliked.  She is a writer to be left alone, or else to be made into an addiction.’  Reading this pamphlet has made this addict desperate to read another ICB novel, and I imagine it won’t be long before I’m writing about one.  I love reading another author’s enthusiasm for ICB, especially when she describes so perfectly what it is that I love about the Ivester.  (Sorry.  That won’t happen again.)

The peculiar charm of Miss Compton-Burnett’s novels, the charm that has won her not merely admirers but addicts, lies in her speaking of home-truths.  She achieves this by a certain fixed method.  One character propounds some ordinary, homely hypocrisy, the kind of phrase from which mankind for centuries has had his comfort and his peace of mind.  Immediately another character shows it up for the fraud it is, and does it in so plain and so frightful a fashion that one feels the sky is far more likely to fall upon the truth-teller than the hypocrite.  In these books there is always someone to lie and someone to tell the truth; the power of light and the power of darkness speaking antiphonally, with a dispassionate mutual understanding.
I can’t add much to that, except ‘agreed!’  A perceptive reader is always such a joy to read – that’s why we love blogs, isn’t it? – and Hansford Johnson writes as a reader, rather than a critic.  She shares the joy of the ICB addict; she recommends which novel to start with, and which to save for later; she even writes what amount to mini blog reviews of each novel – and, be warned, she gives away most of the plot, although plot is easily the least essential ingredient of a Compton-Burnett novel.  Drastic and shocking events occur, but only incidental to a lengthy discussion about grammar or, as PHJ points out above, the hypocrisy of a common phrase.  There is the occasional sense that PHJ wrote this quickly and could have done with editing a bit – one particular sentiment about service being unpleasant is repeated three times in 43 pages – but we can forgive her that.

What makes this pamphlet even more intriguing is that it was written in the middle of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s career.  In 1951 she still had seven novels yet to write, including my introduction to her, Mother and Son.  So this is not the place to go for the final say on Dame Ivy’s work, but it is fascinating to read a response in media res, as it were.

There is one description in this pamphlet which I will cherish – which so perfectly sums up ICB’s peculiar genius, and which I will finish on.  (Come back tomorrow for the final in this mini-series of Authors on Authors – and one which is rather less niche.)

This is why Miss Compton-Burnett’s writing appears so strange to the reader who comes upon it without warning, a gentle tea-cosy madness, a coil of vipers in a sewing-basket.