1950s

Please Don’t Eat The Daisies – Jean Kerr

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After I read Shirley Jackson’s Raising Demons, I went on a little Google spree to see what others had said about it.  Well, turns out, not an awful lot.  But I did find another name mentioned alongside hers once or twice – and that was Jean Kerr.  She might well be very famous, but I’d not heard of her before… but I was looking for more in that amusing-tales-of-wife-and-motherhood line, of which E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady will always be the doyenne, and so read Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat The Daisies (1957).

It’s very fun.  It isn’t as good as Delafield or Jackson, in my opinion – perhaps because there is less attempt at an overall structure.  Although all three authors were initially serialised, it’s most obvious with Kerr – and her book is really one-note: the exasperated wife and mother.  This sort of thing: ‘You take Christopher – and you may; he’s a slightly used eight-year-old.’  That is more or less what I was looking for, of course, and she is rather brilliant on that one-note – it’s just not going to enter my pantheon of greats.  It was turned into a 1960 film with Doris Day, and later a TV series with Pat Crowley, although I can’t imagine how.

Oh, I forgot, there was one piece which slid onto a very different topic – ‘Touours tristesse’ was a rather amusing pastiche of Francoise Sagan.

I’ll leave you with an example.  I realise I’ve been very brief about Please Don’t Eat The Daisies, but, to be honest, I’m pretty sure you’ll know whether or not you’ll want to read this based on the title and concept alone…   (Oh, and bear in mind, when you read the word ‘pants’, that this is an American book.)

Another distressing aspect of disciplining young children is that somehow you are always left with the flat end of the dialogue – a straight man forever.  It’s not just that you feel idiotic.  The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old.  Let’s say you hear a loud, horrifying crash from the bedroom, so you shout up:
“In heaven’s name, what was that?”
“What?”
“That awful noise.”
“What noise?”
“You didn’t hear that noise?”
“No.  Did you?”
“Of course I did – I just told you.”
“What did it sound like?”
“Never mind what it sounded like.  Just stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Whatever you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
“Stop it anyway.”
“I’m brushing my teeth.  Shall I stop that?”
Obviously this way madness lies.  Personally, I knew I had to win this battle of dialectics or seek psychiatric care.  I don’t promise that my solution will work equally well in all cases, but it does do nicely around here.  Nowadays when I hear that crash I merely call up, clearly and firmly, “Hey you, pick up your pants.”

I am, of course, operating on the absolute certainty that whoever it is will have at least one pair of pants on the floor.  And the mere motion of picking them up will distract him, temporarily at least, from whatever mayhem he was involved in.  As far as that crash is concerned, I never really wanted to know what it was.  I just wanted it to stop.

Raising Demons – Shirley Jackson

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Raising Demons is the 1957 sequel to Shirley Jackson’s hilariously wonderful memoir/novel about being a wife and mother, Life Among the Savages (1953).  I paid a steepish amount for a hideous paperback (pictured), and thus managed to secure Raising Demons, saving it for a treat – and I read it whilst recently beleaguered with a cold.  It is an absurd indictment of the publishing industry that these books are so difficult to find, especially on this side of the ocean.  They are brilliant, and deserve to be classics (please, some publisher or other, please!)  I don’t often laugh out loud while reading, but with Raising Demons (as with Life Among the Savages before it) I sat in the corner giggling away to myself, getting curious and worried glances from my housemates.

I went back and read what I wrote about Life Among the Savages (you can do the same thing if you click here) and basically everything I said for that book is true of this one.  Funny, warm, happy, funny, clever, and did I mention funny?  But I shan’t be lazy; I shall write a new review for this book, and not just send you back to that review…

Despite my enthusiasm for Life Among the Savages, I’m well aware that Shirley Jackson is much more likely to make you think of Gothic, creepy, psychological novels – like the excellent We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  She does that sort of thing incredibly well.  But she also excels at this sort of gentle, family-orientated, self-deprecating writing – a genre which many would dismiss, I’m sure, but which I (and many of you) adore.

By the time Raising Demons starts there are six in the family, plus attendant animals, and they have outgrown the house which was so amusingly bought at the beginning of Life Among the Savages – and so they start hunting for a new house.  Or, rather, everyone tells them which house they should choose – the one with the wonky gatepost, converted into four self-contained flats.  Despite insisting that they don’t want to move, nor rent their house, they find themselves sending all their belongings into storage, and converting the flats into one house.  It is here that they live out their ordinary, hilarious lives.

Jackson has a talent for two types of humour at once: the knowing grin we grant to the recognisable, and laughter at the bizarre and unexpected.  These initially seem like opposite sides of the coin; that authors would have to pick one or the other – but Jackson manages both at once, by taking the everyday, identifiable dynamics of the family home… and exaggerating them.  And then putting them in a pattern, so that events pile on events, creating a surreal outcome.  Yet one which seems entirely possible – had, perhaps, happened to Jackson herself.

Having written about illustrative quotations yesterday, I should provide excellently evocative ones today, shouldn’t I?  I liked this one, about the mother preparing her son for his first Little League game – obviously rather more nervous than he is:

As a matter of fact, the night before the double-header which was to open the Little League, I distinctly recall that I told Laurie it was only a game.  “It’s only a game, fella,” I said.  “Don’t try to go to sleep; read or something if you’re nervous.  Would you like some aspirin?”

“I forgot to tell you,” Laurie said, yawning.  “He’s pitching Georgie tomorrow.  Not me.”

“What?”  I thought, and then said heartily, “I mean, he’s the manager, after all.  I know you’ll play your best in any position.”

“I could go to sleep now if you’d just turn out the light,” Laurie said patiently.  “I’m really quite tired.”

I called Dot later, about twelve o’clock, because I was pretty sure she’d still be awake, and of course she was, although Billy had gone right off about nine o’clock.  She said she wasn’t the least bit nervous, because of course it didn’t really matter except for the kids’ sake, and she hoped the best team would win.  I said that that was just what I had been telling my husband, and she said her husband had suggested that perhaps she had better not go to the game at all because if the Braves lost she ought to be home with a hot bath ready for Billy and perhaps a steak dinner or something.  I said that even if Laurie wasn’t pitching I was sure the Braves would win, and of course I wasn’t one of those people who always wanted their own children right out in the centre of things all the time but if the Braves lost it would be my opinion that their lineup ought to be revised and Georgie put back into right field where he belonged.  She said she thought Laurie was a better pitcher, and I suggested that she and her husband and Billy come over for lunch and we could all go to the game together.

That also gives an example of my favourite technique in the book.  It’s simple, but I find it endlessly amusing: it is what Jackson doesn’t write.  So much of Raising Demons is left to the reader’s imagination.  Not much is needed, to be honest – any reader is likely to deduce that the mother is distrait, and the son calm.  Jackson isn’t trying to be super-subtle with that point.  But I love that it is never quite spelt out – and that other characters thus often miss what is so obvious to the amused reader.  Here’s an example in that vein:

By the Saturday before Labor Day a decided atmosphere of cool restraint had taken over our house, because on Thursday my husband had received a letter from an old school friend of his named Sylvia, saying that she and another girl were driving through New England on a vacation and would just adore stopping by for the weekend to renew old friendships.  My husband gave me the letter to read, and I held it very carefully by the edges and said that it was positively touching, the way he kept up with his old friends, and did Sylvia always use pale lavender paper with this kind of rosy ink and what was that I smelled – perfume?  My husband said Sylvia was a grand girl.  I said I was sure of it.  My husband said Sylvia had always been one of the nicest people he knew.  I said I hadn’t a doubt.  My husband said that he was positive that I was going to love Sylvia on sight.  I opened my mouth to speak but stopped myself in time.

My husband laughed self-consciously.  “I remember,” he said, and then his voice trailed off and he laughed again.

“Yes?” I asked politely.

“Nothing,” he said.
Lovely!  I really can’t recommend this book, and Life Among the Savages, enough.  It’s such a shame they’re so difficult to find – but I promise they are worth the hunt to anybody who likes Provincial Lady-esque books.  (Hopefully you’ll find a nicer copy than mine – I quite like the other image featured, yours for $500.)  Like the PL et al, I know I’ll be returning to this family time and again.  I’m rather bereft that only two were written… and on the hunt for other, potentially similar, books.  And more on that before too long…

The World My Wilderness – Rose Macaulay

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I hope this will turn out coherent.  I wrote most of it a while ago, sent the book away to a friend, and am now trying to complete a review sans book and sans health.  Here goes…

Here, ladies and gentlemen, is my first overlap of A Century of Books.  Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness was published in 1950, a spot which is already occupied on my list by Margaret Kennedy’s Jane Austen.  First come, first reviewed, so it’s Kennedy who’s on the century list.  But I’m still going to talk about Rose Macaulay, naturally…

This is the fifth novel (and eighth book) that I’ve read by Rose Macaulay, and she is becoming one of those reliable writers I know I can pick up and enjoy; the only dud I’ve encountered was Staying With Relations.  Wikipedia tells me that her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond (which I have not read) is ‘widely regarded as her masterpiece’.  I am edging ever closer to it, since The World My Wilderness is her penultimate book, and the other one which people tend to have heard of, if they’ve heard of Macaulay at all.

‘Reliable’ is just another word for ‘consistent’, really, and Macaulay does seem to write in a consistently dry, almost satirical style, pursuing a similar theme in each novel – albeit a theme so broad that she could have written two thousand novels and never needed to approach it from the same angle twice.  It is dangerous to summarise thus (and others may have said this before me – indeed, now I see that Karyn has) but I believe Macaulay’s broad theme across her novels is: ‘What does it mean to be civilised?’  In Keeping Up Appearances this is addressed through literary eschelons; in Crewe Train through the ‘civilised savage’; in Dangerous Ages through psychoanalysis, and so on and so forth.  In The World My Wilderness, the title alludes to this debate – and the setting, postwar France and England, offers the physical destruction and moral weariness that the word ‘wilderness’ suggests.  Macaulay includes an anonymous epigraph, from which she draws the title:

The world my wilderness, its caves my home,
Its weedy wastes the garden where I roam,

Its chasm’d cliffs my castle and my tomb…

The cast of characters is initially broad and confusing (or at least it was to me) and I pesevered by ignoring those who weren’t dominant in the narrative at any one time, then slotting them all together later.  There are so many children and stepchildren and half-siblings that I had to throw my hands up in the air in defeat.  Ok.  Stiffen the sinews, summon the blood.  Here goes.

Helen and Gulliver had Barbary and Richie.  Helen and Gulliver divorced; Helen moved to France with Barbary (leaving Richie behind) and married Maurice, while Gulliver married Pamela.  Helen and Maurice had Roland.  Maurice was drowned in mysterious circumstances, leaving Helen with a stepson Raoul.  Gulliver and Pamela had David, and Pamela is pregnant again.  Phew.  That will do – I’m leaving out mother-in-law and uncle, who make cameo appearances.

There are so many characters, but I’m only going to focus on the two I thought most important.

The novel begins with Barbary and Raoul moving to England (Richie visits his mother in France) and these two form the chief interest of the novel.  Macaulay is often quite playful with names, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that ‘Barbary’ is so close to ‘barbarous’.  She is used to running amok with the French maquis, a group whose aim was to resist the invading Germans, but who extend this resistance to all forms of authority.  She has the same attitude in England, except now her companions are deserters and thieves, living their lawless lives in the bombed out old churches and houses of London.  Her old nurse warns her against being too trusting:

“And I ask, Miss Barbary, that on no account will you ever trust those young men, for of trust they will never be deserving.”

Barbary, experienced in discredited young men, had never thought of trusting any of them.  Lend them something, and you never had it back; leave anything about near them, and you did not see it again.  If they could derive advantage from betraying you, betray you they would; these were the simple laws of their lives, the simple, easy laws of the bad, who had not to reckon with the complication of scruples, but only with gain and loss, comfort and hardship, safety and risk.
[…]
“Oh no, Coxy,” Barbary said, in surprise at the eccentric idea suggested to her.  “I should never trust them.  I mean, trust them with what?  Or to do what?  There couldn’t be anything…”
Barbary is a very Macaulayan character, if you’ll excuse me coining the term: she is something of an outsider, straight-talking, independent, but uncertain of her place in the world.  And the apple hasn’t fallen too far from the tree – but while Barbary’s inability to cohere with society turns her into a restless, waif-like exile from civilisation, her mother Helen is the selfish, self-absorbed type whose callousness hides behind a veneer of grace and elegance.  She claims to have a ‘phobia of being bored’, and very little breaks through to her heart.  Helen is overtly uncivilised, as Barbary is, but she respects none of the values of civilisation – preferring, instead, a reckless and ambiguous love for beauty.

“As to one’s country, why should one feel any more interest in its welfare than in that of other countries?  And as to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals – or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all.  A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?”

“My dear Madame, not almost.  It is a religious ideal.”  The abbe spoke dryly, and did not add anything about the Holy Family at Nazareth, for he never talked in such a manner to his worldly, unbelieving friends.
It is worth noting that Macaulay delights in giving her characters views that are not her own.  She signposts this with a motif running through her novels; that of looking down on writers and novels.  Some readers always want authors to be making a point, moral or otherwise, in their writing; I am happy if a writer can convey characters acting believably.  That is ‘point’ enough for me, and I think for Macaulay too – it would be a mistake to extrapolate too much from her writing, other than an examination of the way that certain characters behave in certain circumstances.  She extends beyond this, to questions as vast as the role of civilisations, but she doesn’t attempt to answer these questions.  Nor could she.

Speaking of her writing… Macaulay has a dry, ironic tone which I’ve preferred in other of her novels.  Sometimes, in The World My Wilderness, she seemed to get a bit carried away with a romanticised, flowing, almost baroque writing style.  Perhaps that fits into the themes – but it did include this section, all of which is one sentence:

In this pursuit he was impelled sometimes beyond his reasoning self, to grasp at the rich, trailing panoplies, the swinging censors,of churches from whose creeds and uses he was alien, because at least they embodied some cintuance, some tradition; while cities and buildings, lovely emblems of history, fell shattered, or lost shape and line in a sprawl of common mass newness, while pastoral beauty was overrun and spoilt, while ancient communities were engulfed in the gaping maw of the beast of prey, and Europe dissolved into wavering anonymities, bitter of tongue, servile of deed, faint of heart, always treading the frail plank over the abyss, rotten-ripe for destruction, turning a slanting, doomed eye on death that waited round the corner – during all this frightening evanesence and dissolution, the historic churches kept their strange courses, kept their improbably, incommunicable secret, linking the dim past with the disrupted present and intimidating future, frail, tough chain of legend, myth, and mystery, stronghold of reaction and preserved values.
This isn’t particularly representative of The World My Wilderness – 200 pages of this would have driven me crazy – but it does pop up now and then, and adds to the richness of Macaulay’s writing, if you can cope with this sort of thing.

I’m afraid this review is going to peter out rather, because I seem to be heading towards semi-consciousness… so, in summary… I liked it, but I think Macaulay newbies might be better off with Crewe Train or Keeping Up Appearances.  Let’s hand over to some other folk, who might have been more conscious whilst writing their reviews…

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“[…]it is despairing, and unrelentingly sombre and pessimistic.” – Karyn, A Penguin A Week 

“It’s a beautifully written and nuanced story that’s filled with amazing (in the fantastic sense) imagery of a post-war London” – Danielle, A Work in Progress

“It’s a stunning, well-written novel.” – Katherine, A Girl Walks into a Bookstore

Jane Austen by Margaret Kennedy

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One day in, and the first book for A Century of Books is completed.  Truth be told, I read the first two-thirds in 2011, but spent this afternoon finishing it off.  It’s a bit of a cheat, because although it was published 1950, it’s one of those not-very-of-its-time books – being Jane Austen by Margaret Kennedy.

I was sorting through my books in Somerset and found a paper bag filled with books from my aunt, which she was either lending or giving to me back in 2004 (Jacq – which was it?!) and discovered this book in it.  I’ve yet to read anything by Margaret Kennedy (despite getting a lovely copy of Together and Apart for Christmas) and I had no idea that she’d written a book about Jane Austen.  Being in the mood for a little quirky non-fiction, I picked it up and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Apparently it was the first in a series called The English Novelists, and it is part-biography, part-criticism.  In fact, it’s mostly an assessment of Austen’s various novels – written by an unashamed fan, but one who is not incapable of pointing out what she believes to be areas for improvement.  Her views are unusual – how many of us would call Mansfield Park ‘the most important of the novels, the most ambitious in theme, and the best example of her powers’? – but it’s a good look through the eyes of an perceptive reader of the 1950s, to see how Austen was estimated sixty years ago.

Jane Austen is scarcely more than a hundred pages long, but Kennedy packs a lot in, with precise organisation.  In fifteen pages she covers ‘The Background’; a wonderfully informative summary of the novels which preceded Austen’s.  Then Kennedy covers ‘The Life’ in fourteen pages, thereby providing as good an overview as you’re likely to encounter in many books ten times that length.  It is a more modern phenomenon to elaborate where details are not known, or invent suppositions where discretion is more flattering.  Austen’s momentary engagement, for example, is not mentioned.  Was it not known in 1950?

The next sections onto ‘The Letters’, which are often held up simply as an example of the biographer’s disappointment.  Kennedy is no different:

To search through these letters for any trace of the novels is a most disheartening task.  It is not merely that the books themselves are scarcely ever mentioned; there is so little trace of the material from which the books were made.  We feel as some archaeologist might, who comes upon some large and promising mass of fragments buried under a lost city once famous for its art, and finds that they are all shards of coarse kitchen ware; that every trace of sculpture, urns, tiles, tablets and inscriptions has been scrupulously removed.  It is with gratitude that we identify a few cooking pots.  There is a Moor Park apricot tree at Chawton; we remember one at Mansfield Parsonage.  Isabella Thorpe advised Catherine Morland to read The Midnight Bell; here is Mr. Austen reading it at an inn.

I do not entirely agree with this estimation of Austen’s extant letters, but I love the image Kennedy devises.  I also love the sensitive way she explores the difference between Austen’s early and later letters.  Like everything else in Kennedy’s book, it’s a speedy but excellent summary and assessment.

And then the chapters for which I was waiting.  ‘The Novels – First Period’ and ‘The Novels – Second Period’; ‘Some Criticisms’ and ‘Jane Austen’s Place in Literature’.  It’s no secret that I love Austen’s novels, and I especially like reading about her novels – an area understandably skirted around by those with a strictly biographical outlook.  In these, Kennedy gives quick outlines of the novels, before delivering her own verdict – always admiring, but never gushing.  She knows Austen’s characters as well as her own friends and family – watching their actions, carefully considering their qualities, and understanding the work of the author all the while.

At twenty-one she has served her term.  She knows what she wants to say.  She has discovered how to say it.  First Impressions, afterwards called Pride and Prejudice, is written with all the fresh exhilaration of that discovery.  It has faults which are to disappear in the later books, but never again is she to write with quite the same vitality and high spirits as she does in this first spring of her powers.  They give it a quality which makes very many of her readers choose it as their favourite.

We are told that it was extensively polished, corrected and revised between 1796 and 1813, when it was published.  But its great merit must have been inherent in the first draft, since characters spring to life at once or never, and truth is one of the things which cannot be “put in afterwards.”I’m not sure I agree with this somewhat whimsical statement, but I would very much like to.  However, what makes Kennedy’s analysis of the novels so worth reading is her own status as a novelist.  She writes of the characters with an authorial eye; she critiques their well-roundedness or believability with the voice of one who has striven at the same tasks and encountered the same obstacles.  I especially liked her imagined scenario of Austen considering Jane Fairfax as a heroine, and being gradually swayed to focus instead upon Emma Woodhouse.

In the final sections of the book, Kennedy considers views of Jane Austen from her death onwards, and is especially good on Charlotte Bronte’s notorious bad-mouthing of Austen (without getting as vicious and biting as I would.)  I’m once again amazed that Kennedy can write so economically – covering such ground in so few words.

I cannot think of a better person to write a book like this.  Being both a novelist and an Austen addict, she has both the authority and the affection to write a book which is knowledgeable and perceptive, but never cold or detached.  Anybody who could write the following wins my approval:

Kitty is better managed; her complete insignificance is so well relieved by the untimeliness of her coughing fits.

Austen isn’t lacking in admirers and there is no shortage of words written about her.  A slim 1950 hardback will probably get lost amidst the Tomalins, Jenkins, Le Fayes etc. – but I would definitely encourage you to seek it out.  As a reader and a writer, Kennedy has written a beautiful little book which is a stone’s-throw away from an appreciation – but with an authorial acumen which prevents it being the enthused ravings of someone like me, who, without Kennedy’s restraint, would doubtless fill all 107 pages with the single sentence I LOVE YOU, JANE AUSTEN, I FLIPPIN’ LOVE YOU.

A Century of Books has got off to a good start!

Here’s How – Virginia Graham

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One of the best, and certainly one of the funniest, books I read in 2009 was Virginia Graham’s Say Please, a faux etiquette guide from 1949.  (I wrote about it here.)  Foolishly, I did not investigate whether or not Graham had followed it up – and it was a joyful coincidence that I happened across Here’s How (1951) in London a while ago, and an even more joyful discovery that it’s perhaps even BETTER than Say Please.

Rather than a guide to etiquette, Here’s How purports to be an instruction manual on many and various activities – from singing to redecorating to playing the piano to laying a carpet.  Needless to say, Graham has very little of great use to impart on these topics, but the voice she adopts is one of unswerving self-confidence, coupled with a devastating lack of confidence in the abilities of her reader. It’s all deliciously tongue-in-cheek and her tone is expertly judged. Sadly Osbert Lancester doesn’t do the illustrations for this one, but Anton’s are amusing too – as shown by this DIY Henry Moore impersonator, on the cover.

I could chirrup on forever about how much I enjoyed reading this, but I think instead I’ll simply give you some excerpts. There are quite a few, but I couldn’t resist. If they meet with your approval, I’ll type out a whole section tomorrow (probably the first, ‘How To Sing’) rather than just the sentences/paragraphs which caught my eye.

How To Play The Piano
However beautiful a melody may be it requires bolstering with an accompaniment, and this does not mean, as so many people seem to think, hitting bottom C repeatedly in the hope that it may, on occasions, coincide with the tune.

How To Ride
In a clash of wills between horse and man it is imperative that man should win; otherwise horses will just go browsing about eating grass in a nonchalant fashion instead of taking people places and pulling things.

How To Paint
Unless you are made of some steely inhuman stuff or unless you have a stingy and really not very attractive streak in you, you will insist upon giving yourself a very beautiful, heavy wooden box, smelling richly of cedar, satin to the touch and containing dozens of tubes of paint.  Separate from these rotund and glistening torpedoes will be ranged, in neat compartments, brushes, turpentine and oil.  If you are zealous in your work and really want to get on you will find, in a few weeks’ time that the tubes have not only become misshapen but that most of them exude paint from both ends; that all their screw caps are lost and that the orifices thereby exposed to the open air are clogged.  In consequence the box refuses to shut and, having primarily been a portable asset becomes an encumbering fixture.  Now is the time to go out and buy the capacious mackintosh shopping bag which you could have bought right at the beginning if you hadn’t had such ridiculous delusions of grandeur.

How To Skate
In recent years, since the knack of freezing chemicals into a passable imitation of ice has been acquired, skating has become very much the vogue.  Even the “lower orders” who, in more natural circumstances would be employed sweeping snow from the pond’s surface or feeding coke into braziers are now able to skim like birds from one end of Earl’s Court to another, only pausing on their way to circumnavigate an orange.

How To Plumb
Lagging pipes is one of those things you read about in the weekly magazines and it isn’t normal for a householder to get around to lagging his own. Indeed it isn’t normal to do anything until it is far too late, and even then action is often confined to ringing up one’s mother to ask if one can go along to her and have a bath.

Obviously this isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it is very much mine – and I think Here’s How would make a fantastic present for anybody like-minded. This is exactly the sort of book which doesn’t seem to appear any more (I suppose the nearest comparison are those quick-flick books flogged at Christmas – how much more wonderful Graham’s collection is!) and exactly the sort of book I love to discover and stack up on my shelves.

Remember, You Must Die

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It’s been so long since I wrote a proper review that I’m wondering whether or not I can still do it… I don’t know about other bloggers (I would be interested to know, actually) but it usually takes me an hour or more to write a full-length book review on here. And whilst I love doing it, I do seem to come to my laptop most evenings too tired to do anything that complex! So, if this turns into a series of zzzzzzzz somewhere in the middle, you’ll know why. Still, I am always amazed, flattered, and delighted that anybody would want to read my musings on the books I read – so thank you in advance!

In fact, that’s as much as I managed to write last week, before getting too sleepy and going to bed. I didn’t even get as far as writing the title of the novel – which is Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959). Congratulations to Terri for correctly working out the book from my clues.

Giving Muriel Spark a second chance is one of the best results of blog-reading, for me. The enthusiasm of Simon S and Claire led me back to Spark, after finding a couple of her novels a bit underwhelming six or so years ago – and, as regular readers will know, I now adore her. Over the past couple of years I’ve read The Driver’s Seat, Loitering With Intent, and Not to Disturb – and I have plenty on my tbr piles. I fancied seeing what my book group in Oxford would think of Muriel Spark, and so picked one almost at random because I liked the title. Memento Mori it was.

Despite coming quite early in her career, when Spark was only just over 40 years old, the novel concerns almost exclusively old people. Many of these live on a ward, where their different classes and personalities are swept away into being termed ‘Granny Duncan’, ‘Granny Barnacle’, ‘Granny Trotsky’ etc. But others amongst the sizable cast of characters still live in their homes – notably Dame Lettie Colston, her philandering brother Godfrey, and his wife Charmian, once a famed novelist and now suffering Alzheimer’s. These three are all heading towards their three-score-and-ten. In the first few pages, Lettie is visiting her sister-in-law, and their choppy dialogue reveals both the extent of Charmian’s declining faculties, and the irreverent but grounded approach Spark takes.

“Did you have a nice evening at the pictures, Taylor?” said Charmian.

“I am not Taylor,” said Dame Lettie, “and in any case, you always called Taylor Jean during her last twenty or so years in your service.”

Mrs. Anthony, their daily housekeeper, brought in the milky coffee and placed it on the breakfast table.

“Did you have a nice evening at the pictures, Taylor?” Charmian asked her.

“Yes, thanks, Mrs. Colston,” said the housekeeper.

“Mrs. Anthony is not Taylor,” said Lettie. “There is no one by the name of Taylor here. And anyway you used to call her Jean latterly. It was only when you were a girl that you called Taylor Taylor. And, in any event, Mrs. Anthony is not Taylor.”

Godfrey came in. He kissed Charmian. She said, “Good morning, Eric.”

“He is not Eric,” said Dame Lettie.

What makes me love Spark – and, indeed, what made me underestimate her six years ago – is her style. It is understated, so that a fast read through reveals little of its richness – Spark can even feel a bit bland at that pace. But once I’d stopped and begun to appreciate her writing, I realised how brilliant it was. Unsentimental, a little discordant, wry, ironic, and ever so slightly surreal. The first words of chapter five illustrated what I mean: ‘Mrs. Anthony knew instinctively that Mrs. Pettigrew was a kindly woman. Her instinct was wrong.’ Spark keeps the reader of his/her toes – conventional emotions or responses are dangled before the reader’s eyes, then turned on their head. We had an interesting discussion at book group about whether or not Spark’s style was funny. I suppose it isn’t. Certainly not in the way that Wodehouse is, or Stella Gibbons is, or Austen can be. But it’s an experience – a tone which diverts and engages and draws me in.

But I have yet to address the central momentum of the novel. On the opening page, Dame Lettie receives an anonymous phone call; a voice simply saying ‘Remember you must die.’ In fact, it is the ninth time she has had this call. But she is not the only victim – increasing numbers of people get the same phone call, with the same words (even if they cannot agree on the voice). Everyone from Charmian to the Inspector investigating the case receives the same message – each responding to it in different ways. Some are scared, some indignant. Mrs. Pettigrew (involved in a very Spark-ian blackmail plot) simply wipes it from her mind. Charmian gives the best response: “Oh, as to that, for the past thirty years and more I have thought of it from time to time. My memory is failing in certain respects. I am gone eighty-six. But somehow I do not forget my death, whenever that will be.” The response of the anonymous caller? “Delighted to hear it. Goodbye for now.”

If this were an Agatha Christie novel, then the Inspector would gradually eliminate characters from suspicion, and we’d witness an elaborate denouement, discovering that the least likely person had actually done it because they were the twin sister of someone who everyone thought had died decades ago, etc. etc. Whilst I love Dame Agatha, I’ve now enough experience with Dame Muriel to suspect it wouldn’t work quite like that. I shan’t spoil the surprise, but suffice to say that the outcome is unmistakably Spark-like.

There are any number of subplots in this slim novel, and dozens of characters. Memento Mori, whilst excellent, isn’t quite as accomplished as some of the other, later books I’ve read by Spark – and I agree with the original New York Times reviewer that she could have achieved more had she included less. Occasionally I had to flick through the pages to work out which character was which. But there are a central few (the ones I have already mentioned) who are striking and memorable – with starkly human qualities coming through the veneer of quirkiness.

I don’t think I’d recommend Memento Mori as a starting point for somebody wanting to try Spark – it might just be a bit overwhelming. Having said that, several people at my book group were reading Spark for the first time, and wanted to read more. I’d still put Loitering With Intent into the hands of anyone eager to sample Dame Muriel – but Memento Mori, for the Spark fan, is a wonderful slice of the bizarre and acerbic. It is not quite unsettling, but it certainly isn’t cosy. There is humour, but mostly there is the delight of being carried along by an author who is entirely in control of her tone, with never a misplaced word or errant sentence. Perhaps, were I fifty years older, I would also embrace Spark’s profundity – but, for now, I’m going to place it back on the shelf, anticipating picking it up again in a few decades’ time. I rather suspect it will have changed a lot.

Laura, who joined my book group this month, later emailed a link to a really good article by David Lodge on Memento Mori, which I recommend you read – here it is. If I haven’t convinced you, then I think Lodge might.

Well, I guess I don’t have much choice.

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I bought Nicolas Bentley’s book How Can You Bear to be Human? for its excellent title, and because I had seen some of his artwork elsewhere, and quite liked it. I’ve got to say, the title is probably the best thing about this book – but it passed an entertaining hour.


I don’t know the provenance of the book, but it must be collected from somewhere. It consists of brief, humorous pieces and cartoons – but often the cartoon doesn’t seem to bear any relation to the writing. Which is quite confusing, to say the least.

Bentley’s strength is definitely in his drawing, rather than his writing, but that is to be expected. His sketches aren’t ornately detailed, but with exaggeration which is not too exaggerated, he manages to convey exactly what he wishes – and is rather more subtle in his artwork than his prose. The prose is rather a mixed bag – it starts well, but the editor (perhaps Bentley himself?) probably decided to put the best things at the beginning.


My favourite piece was ‘Strange Interlude’, which is Provincial Ladyesque in its dealings with an awkward social occasion, including this exchange between the narrator and an offensive approaching couple:

“Well, my deahr?”

To which, in tones somewhat lower than his, she flashed the riposte: “Well?”

Again silence fell between them and they stood smiling mutely at each other.

“You have tried the punch?” she said at last.

Unable to block my ears in time, I caught his shrill response.

“I have indeed and I pronounce it capital.”

He grinned at me shyly with teeth that were rather too far apart. I noticed his hand had been surreptitiously exploring his pocket, and I guessed what for. He lent towards me and said sotto voce, with a look that appealed for my support and failed utterly:

“Do you suppose our hostess would permit a pipe?”

“I don’t smoke, so I wouldn’t know,” I said, lapsing through sheer nerves into the affectation of the conditional. He peered about him with a look of wildly exaggerated consternation and then, in order, I suppose, to keep up the conspiratorial pretence, tiptoed away.

Most of the pieces in How Can You Bear to be Human? are structured as humorous essays, rather than scenes like this – the essays being on topics from Hockey to Ballet to Hats Suitable For Dictators. Quite.

It’s all good fun, and the sort of Penguin book you could easily give someone as a present, or keep in the smallest room of the house. I had rather hoped for a flash of genius, which there was not, but it’s a nice glance into the humour of the 1950s.


Oh, and I have to finish by sharing this quick excerpt, for my brother (and Wolves fan) Colin:

[…] simple though I may be compared to, say, Professor Bronowski, compared to the man who delights more in Wolverhampton Wanderers than in Wordsworth, I am a creature of infinite complexity.

Life Among the Savages – Shirley Jackson

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I already knew that I loved Shirley Jackson – I did from the time I was about a chapter into We Have Always Lived in the Castle back in 2006, courtesy of Lisa – but now I love her for a whole new reason. Whilst at home in Somerset I indulged by reading her ‘memoir’ part numero uno Life Among The Savages and fell completely in love with it. Think Provincial Lady transferred to America (Vermont, I think) in the mid-1950s, with no servants. It’s havoc, but it’s brilliant.

I had Shirley Jackson in a box. Not literally, that would be creepy – but it isn’t too far away from the sort of thing I’d expect from Jackson territory. The three novels I’ve read by her (We Have Always Lived in the Castle; The Haunting of Hill House; The Bird’s Nest) and the odd short story (very odd short story) had led me to expect Gothicky, creepy, interesting angle on mental illness sort of stories from Jackson. When I started Life Among The Savages, in which Jackson wittily documents the day-to-day life of a wife and mother, I had to adjust how I responded to her. It’s odd that certain paragraphs can go either way… this one, for example, is wry and whimsical in context. But read it with your Jackson-in-horror-mode hat on, and it feels rather different…
There was a door to an attic that preferred to stay latched and would latch itself no matter who was inside; there was another door which hung by custom slightly ajar, although it would close good-humouredly for a time when some special reason required it. We had five attics, we discovered, built into and upon and next to one another; one of them kept bats and we shut that one up completely; another, light and cheerful in spite of its one small window, liked to be a place of traffic and became, without any decision of ours, a place to store things temporarily, things that were moved regularly, like sledges and snow shovels and garden rakes and hammocks. The basement had an old clothes-line hung across it, and after the line I put up in the backyard had fallen down for the third time I resigned myself and put up a new line in the basement, and clothes dried there quickly and freshly.
Anyone who has read The Haunting of Hill House will know how easily Jackson could have turned this into something terrifying – but there is nothing remotely creepy about this book. The narrator – a version of Shirley Jackson, no doubt, but only a version – evinces none of Jackson’s neuroses or agoraphobia; instead she is a housewife and mother in the self-deprecating, amused mould of the Provincial Lady.

She starts off the book with two children, Laurie and Jannie. About halfway through the book Sally comes along:
Sentimental people keep insisting that women go on to have a third baby because they love babies, and cynical people seem to maintain that a woman with two healthy, active children around the house will do anything for ten quiet days in the hospital; my own position is somewhat between the two, but I acknowledge that it leans towards the latter.
Obviously I don’t have children, and very few of my friends have reached that stage of their lives, so I’m new to the world of child-anecdotes. Maybe I wouldn’t have loved this so much if I’d spent ten years hearing people recount the adorable things their children do, but I’ve got to say I laughed out loud a lot whilst reading Life Among the Savages. More at the narrator’s reaction to things, to be honest – like taking children to see a Santa Claus who promises rather too much to Laurie and Jannie; learning to drive with an instructor who is ‘undisguisedly amused at meeting anyone who could not drive a car’; coping with the influence of a teacher who tells Jannie that more or less everything is either ‘vulgar’ or ‘unwomanly’. And her husband is there all the time too, loving and affectionate and just as inept as his wife. Having said that, what comes off the page is as happy a family as I’ve encountered in fact or fiction – and her husband is rather more helpful and on-board than the Provincial Lady’s Robert.

I can’t really quote any of the choicest bits because the anecdotes tend to blend into one another, taking up many pages – they’re built up so that the family becomes recognisable, rather than a series of one-liners. Apparently it was all published separately before, but you can’t see the joins. Having said that, the first section of the book is my favourite, perhaps because it includes their hilarious attempts to rent a house (everyone is determined that they should buy instead) – a similar section was my favourite part of D.E. Stevenson’s comparable Mrs. Tim of the Regiment, so perhaps this betrays my adoration of people looking at properties – yes, Kirstie and Phil are basically my surrogate parents. Or would be, if I knew them.

Oh, and if you’re not sold on the book yet, there’s a delightfully contemptuous and pitying cat called Ninki. Loved her.

While I haven’t read anything in this line of books which is as good as the Provincial Lady, Life Among the Savages is certainly one of the closest runners-up. I thought it was incredibly funny as well as being quite sweet. I’m not sure it quite deserves to be called a memoir, as Jackson is incredibly selective about which side of her personality gets filtered into the book, but that’s her prerogative, and the result sure beats any number of angsty misery memoirs. It’s sunny, funny, and… er, runny. In that it’s made me run off to buy Jackson’s other memoir, Raising Demons.

Books to get Stuck into:

Mrs. Tim of the Regiment – D.E. Stevenson: the first half of this book is brilliant, and owes a huge amount to the Provincial Lady. The second half is fun, but not as good… however, it’s worth it for the first half alone.

Provincial Daughter – R.M. Dashwood: although Provincial Lady is the better book, this sequel by E.M. Delafield’s real-life daughter is much closer to Jackson’s book in date of publication, and it’s delightful to hear from ‘Vicky’ all grown up.

Everybody wants to be a cat…

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When I was grabbing a book for the train down to Somerset, I decided upon Jennie by Paul Gallico. I bought it nearly three years ago, and have had numerous recommendations for it – especially from the appropriately nicknamed Dark Puss. After recently loving Love of Seven Dolls (more here) it seemed sensible to try more Gallico – with the bonus that Jennie would fit into the themes of my doctoral research even if, published in 1950, it’s a little too late for my period of study.

And I decided, since I was at home, it would be nice for Sherpa to pose sitting alongside my copy of Jennie. Sherpa had other ideas… as documented through this post.


There is a very simple story behind Jennie – an eight years-old boy called Peter suddenly discovers that he has turned into a cat. As you do. Unlike metamorphosis tales like Lady Into Fox, the novel isn’t focalised through those who witness the change – nor do we witness Peter trying to live alongside his family as a cat. They are quickly left behind, as Nanny throws him into the street (“Drat the child! He’s dragged in another stray off the street! Shoo! Scat! Get out!”) Peter dashes through the streets, is beaten unconscious by a territorial cat who doesn’t want to share his shelter, and by the time Peter comes to, he is in the company of Jennie.
Peter rolled over and behled the speaker squatted down comfortably beside him, her legs tucked under her, tail nicely wrapped around. She was a thin tabby with a part white face and throat that gave her a most sweet and gentle aspect heightened by the lively and kind expression in her luminous eyes that were grey-green, flecked with gold.
Jennie gives him a bath and a mouse (‘To his intense surprise, it was simply delicious’) and sets about teaching Peter how to be a cat – as, after a little hesitation, she believes his account of how he became a cat.


It is this vein of Jennie which gives it both its charm and somehow rescues it from being too fey or whimsical. Gallico captures the behaviour of cats so exactly (the first rule, at all times: WASH). If he’d kept an eye on the human observers, laughing at how cats misunderstood such-and-such, or inventing witty reasons for cats behaving so-and-so, then Jennie might well have been unbearable. Instead, it is… well, ‘realistic’ is hardly the word, but Gallico shows Jennie in as workmanlike a manner as possible under the circumstances. Her explanations of how strays must loiter in every doorway when exiting, to check the street for safety, make sense. The way she uses humans, and doesn’t trust them, chimes in with many of the timid cats one sees on the streets. I didn’t love the idea of cats greeting one another with faux-18th century decorum, nor the idea of some sort of feline telepathy, but in general Gallico didn’t overstep the mark.

Sylvia Townsend Warner, who wrote her own fantasy in the form of Lolly Willowes, said this in a 1929 lecture:
Since [the fantasist’s] main thesis surprises by itself, he must deny himself further surprises…. The novelist not only may niggle away with small licences all the time, he is a dull dog if he doesn’t. But the fantasist, having taken his initial liberty, must mind his Ps and Qs for the rest of his adventure…. The fantasist who has begun by asking for one vast initial credit must do on that credit to the end.Well said, Sylvia. And Gallico is almost always content to let the turning-into-a-cat liberty be the main one. True, there are some unlikely dramatic incidences as they board a ship to Glasgow, and Gallico sprinkles coincidences through the novel like nobody’s business, but…


When I wrote about Love of Seven Dolls I mentioned that it had something of the atmosphere of a fairy-tale – which didn’t hinder the pathos, but rather made the evil streak of the novel less striking. Jennie is even more like a fairy-tale – in fact, at times it felt like a Disney film. The characters are drawn with surprising reality, but the events are not. Easily the most interesting chapters were those where Peter was learning how to be a cat, or contemplating the relationship between owner and pet. I was less interested when merry escapades took over, and there is one spectacularly superfluous chapter about Lulu – an excitable, flirty, irreverent cat with whom Peter is briefly smitten. I think Gallico perhaps felt his initial conceit was flagging a bit, and so introduced this little ball of fire – but Lulu sticks out so obviously as a distraction to enliven proceedings that I feel she should either have arrived much earlier, or not been introduced at all.

It is the plotting and tone which made Jennie a bit of a disappointment to me. The characters of Jennie and Peter are great – and, as I’ve said, Gallico has really closely observed cat behaviour. But the tone is too sprightly, even with the sad aspects of the story. What I loved in Love of Seven Dolls was the dark, subversive tone intertwining with the whimsical. If Jennie doesn’t become too whimsical, it also never wanders into darker territory – it felt a lot like a children’s tale which wouldn’t stray too far from an accessible storytime-voice.

It is a really fun novel to read, and I’m sure a similar idea has been done much worse. But Lady Into Fox demonstrates how subtle and moving the metamorphosis novel can be; Love of Seven Dolls shows Gallico is capable of more – Jennie just didn’t live up to the hopeful expectations it had accumulated after three years on my bookshelf. But do give it a go – it might be just the novel you’re after.

Love of Seven Dolls

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Well, I didn’t finish any other books on my second day of novella reading. It was quite a busy day, what with church and a talk by Henrietta Garnett (more on that soon) and I also fell asleep at 9pm, in the middle of Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington. Then I woke up at half midnight… and went to sleep again at 5am. Not best pleased with my head and its ideas about sleep cycles, but I’m hoping to be back to normal tonight.

Paul Gallico’s Love of Seven Dolls seemed to raise the most interest, of the novellas I have mentioned, and I also said I’d lend it to Verity tomorrow – so I’ll get writing about it right away!


35. Love of Seven Dolls – Paul Gallico

As I mentioned at the weekend, I haven’t read anything else by Gallico – so this might be a case of me later wishing I’d chosen something else by him – but I’m going to go out on a limb and put Love of Seven Dolls on my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. I suppose it’s one that doesn’t get mentioned much in the blogosphere. Jane (aka Fleur Fisher) has written a lovely, compelling review of it here, but I must confess I hadn’t remembered her review when I picked up Love of Seven Dolls in Oxfam a few weeks ago. (Indeed, I’d forgotten that I’d read Jane’s review until I read my comment on it just now! So many blogs read does addle my brain somewhat…)

Right, let’s kick off. We’re in Paris, and Marelle (known as Mouche – ‘fly’) is off to drown herself in the Seine. Orphaned, she came from Brittany to make it as a singer, dancer, or (if that failed) rely on more worldly assets. But she has met with no success at any of these pursuits (‘Mouche excited pity rather than desire’) and – terribly hungry, sad, and alone – she decides to end it all.

Not the cheeriest start for a story, but you’ll be pleased to know that she is interrupted – by a doll in a puppet booth. Carrot Top gets into conversation with her, steering her away from the Seine. He, supposedly, manages the others – and is caring and wry. He is only the first of the dolls to make Mouche’s acquaintance – there are six others, each beguiling in the extreme. There’s Ali the gentle, rather stupid, giant; vain Gigi; pompous Dr. Duclos the penguin; maternal Madame Muscat; Monsieur Nicholas the mender of toys, and listener to woes. And then there’s my favourite of all – crafty, wily Reynardo – who is, of course, a fox.

In her naivety, without truly believing the puppets to be real, Mouche talks with them. Her ingenuous nature – for her conversations are not forced or false – soon draws passers-by, and she becomes part of the puppeteer’s act. But, lest this sound too whimsical for your tastes, let me assure you it is nothing of the kind. For here is the puppeteer:
It was like a chill hand laid upon her heart, for there was no warmth or kindliness in the figure lounging against the pole, his fists pressed deeply into the pockets of his jacket. The shine of his eyes was hostile and the droop of the cigarette from his lips contemptuous.

Mouche, in her marrow, knew that this was the puppet-master, the man who had animated the little creatures who had laid such an enchantment upon her, yet she was filled with dread. For a moment even she hoped that somehow this was not he, the master of the dolls, but some other, a pitch-man, a labourer, or lounger from a neighbouring concession.
How can this man be the voices of such endearing puppets? Well, it seems he is not entirely sure himself:

For in spite of the fact that it was he who sat behind the one-way curtain in the booth, animated them, and supplied their seven voices, the puppets frequently acted as strangely and determinedly as individuals over whom he had no control. Michel never had bothered to reflect greatly over this phenomenon but had simply accepted it as something that was so and which, far from interfering with the kind of life he was accustomed to living, brought him a curious kind of satisfaction.

Once Mouche has joined the troupe, a pattern sets in. Michel is increasingly cruel and violent, desperate to remove her innocence through any means possible; the puppets are kind and restorative. Gallico creates a kind of mad cacophony – the magical enchantment of endearing puppets; the bitterness of a cruel man; the emotions of a girl who is experiencing both the greatest loneliness and the greatest friendships of her life. There is never the suggestion that Mouche is mad, and the reader accepts unquestioned her relationship with Reynardo, Carrot Top and the others. At the same time, somehow, Michel’s cruelties – though sad – are not deeply unsettling, nor even as shocking as they should be. Is it the fairy-talesque tones which thread throughout the narrative? I think it must be. Gallico, after all, draws from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and Beauty and the Beast. The evil stepmother’s behaviour, in the former tale, does not shock us in the way that it would in a modern novel. Love of Seven Dolls is not a fairy-tale, but it borrows some of the atmosphere of them.

The story is bizarre, but it is not bewildering. Gallico weaves together the dark and light so skillfully that they do not jar – nor does either take precedence. We aren’t permitted to rest upon either, and are pulled along for the strange, captivating experience.


All the while, reading this novella, I thought that it would make a brilliant film – perhaps one with Tim Burton at the helm. Only after I’d finished did I investigate the history of Love of Seven Dolls. Gallico wrote a story called ‘The Man Who Hated People’ (1950), which was adapted into the film Lili (1953). Only then did Gallico complete the circle, after the success of the film: rewriting and extending the story to become the novella I have in my hands.

Love of Seven Dolls exemplifies many of the reasons I cherish novellas over longer works. There is no need for extemporaneous matter when a writer can create such a powerful and complex work in under a hundred pages. It really is an extraordinary little book, written so cleverly and compellingly. Do seek it out, if you possibly can – and Gallico has also been favoured with many beautiful covers. The top one is my copy; the other images I’ve tracked down online – aren’t they great?