1950s

From the mouths of babes…

StuckinaBook All , 15 Comments

My book group met tonight to discuss Bonjour Tristesse (1954) by Francoise Sagan (as usual, imagine the cedilla), translated from French by Irene Ash. I hadn’t heard of it, or the author (whom I’d wrongly assumed was a man) and so I went away to the internet to find a copy… and when the images came on the screen, I realised that I already owned it. Bonjour Tristesse was one of the 20 short books collected in my Penguin Great Loves boxset – hurrah! Each one comes with its own tagline ‘Love can be —-‘ on the back; this one has ‘Love can be complicated’.


Sagan (not her real name, but we’ll roll with it) was only 18 when Bonjour Tristesse was published, which is rather sickening for those of us who are only just coming to terms with the fact that we won’t ever be infant prodigies. It concerns 17 year old Cecile (imagine the accent) and I must confess my heart sank at this point. I had a horror of it being a female version of The Catcher in the Rye, a novel I thought hugely irritating and very overrated. If I had to sit through the meanderings of a lovesick, self-indulgent teenage girl… well… I’ll read the first paragraph, anyway:

A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness. In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me, now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I had known boredom, regret, and at times remorse, but never sadness. Today something envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, which isolates me.
This was actually quite promising. True, it is dominated by the introspection so beloved and teenagers (and probably everyone else too, only we learn to mask it better once we pass 19… although I was only 21 when I started this blog, so…) but there is a beauty to the expression of worn sentiments; ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’ as Pope said of ‘wit’, fulfilling his own criterion.

Sagan continues in similar style throughout. Her constant introspection, and detailed observation of everyone around her, never irked me because the prose was often so beautiful, and the thoughts so striking. But perhaps I should mention the plot, and that complicated love.

Cecile lives with her young widower father Raymond, a hedonistic man with a revolving door of mistresses. They are on a holiday in the South of France with Raymond’s latest mistress, a rather stupid young woman called Elsa; they are all enjoying frivolity and (in Cecile’s case) the throes of a first love – when Anne turns up on the scene. Easily the most skillfully drawn character of the novel, Anne is a friend of Cecile’s late mother, the same sort of age as Raymond, and gently, elegantly insinuates herself into their lives.
When exactly did my father begin to treat Anne with a new familiarity? Was it the day he reproached her for her indifference, while pretending to laugh at it? Or the time he grimly compared her subtlety with Elsa’s semi-imbecility? My peace of mind was based on the stupid idea that they had known each other for fifteen years, and that if they had been going to fall in love, they would have done so earlier. And I thought also that if it had to happen, the affair would last at the most three months, and Anne would be left with her memories and perhaps a slight feeling of humiliation. Yet all the time I knew in my heart that Anne was not a woman who could be lightly abandoned.Cecile doesn’t like the way things are going, and hatches a plot to remove Anne from her life and that of her father. Anne is far from an archetypal wicked stepmother, but Cecile sees her as destroying their extant way of life, and unsettling the equilibrium of a superficial but contented life. Anne is, in fact, a determined, kind, ever-so-very-slightly desperate character; in polished control of herself, but aware that it will not be many years before her chances of settling down dwindle away.


As the narrative continues – how much is packed in! – Cecile gradually has a change of heart, and has to choose between derailing her plan or watching it carry itself out. Sagan’s cleverness is in her unreliable narrator. One starts reading the novel assuming that Cecile’s perspective is accurate, or at least the one that a young author wants us to accept. It becomes clear, however, that Sagan is fully aware of Cecile’s blind-spots and limitations; Raymond, Elsa and especially Anne become distinctive characters outside of the peripheries of Cecile’s flawed judgement. Even while we continue to see events through Cecile’s eyes, the reader can look back upon Cecile and discover her deficiencies and incomplete self-awareness. If Sagan isn’t quite so successful with the male characters (Cecile’s beau Cyril is a one-dimensional besotted fool; Raymond has few hidden depths) then that should not diminish from the clever and sophisticated characters she has created in Cecile and Anne.

Ultimately, this summer is a coming-of-age (how I loathe that phrase, but I can think of no other) for more than just Cecile. Anne and Raymond also change over the course of the summer’s events. Elsa might. Cyril probably does, off-stage, as it were. They all have glimpses of futures they could have, and futures they want to avoid; whether or not they succeed in altering their courses – that’s the path we take with them. Bonjour Tristesse is a rich novella which would bear future re-reading. It would be an impressive work for any author, not simply an eighteen year old – but it is especially sickening that an eighteen year old should achieve it.

Books to get Stuck into:

I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith: I’ve mentioned it in this section for another review, but it really is the coming-of-age novel par excellence. A lot of similarities with Bonjour Tristesse, albeit rather more amusing and less philosophical.

Brother of the More Famous Jack – Barbara Trapido: another bright young girl, growing up amongst unconventional types, this novel extends the scope beyond a dizzying summer to many years of after-effects.

Just Kidding

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

It’s no secret that I love the Bloomsbury Group reprints – many of which are crowded eagerly on my tbrvvs (to be read very, very soon) shelf – but today I’m going to talk about the only one I hadn’t previously read from the first batch of six. All my reviews of Bloomsbury Group reprints can be read here, and the latest to add to the fold is Wolf Mankowitz’s A Kid For Two Farthings. (Fact fans: Mankowitz was born on the same day I was, albeit sixty-one years earlier.)

It’s the shortest one so far, I think, coming in at 128pp. of fairly big type, and it’s not set in the 1930s domestic world which perhaps defines the series in my mind. Instead, this is 1950s and the East End of London. We see this world through the eyes of Joe, age six. Rather than Lady B., china tea cups, and bring-and-buy sales, we see a boxer desperate to afford an engagement ring for his girl; a poor mother longing to join her husband in Africa; and this sort of scene, picked more or less at random to give a glimpse of Joe’s surroundings:
Near Alf’s stall there was a jellied-eel stand with a big enamel bowl of grey jellied eels, small bowls for portions, a large pile of lumps of bread, and three bottles of vinegar. There was also orange-and-black winkles in little tubs, and large pink whelks. People stood around shaking vinegar on to their eels and scooping them up with bread. A ltitle thin man in a white muffler served them and sometimes dropped a large piece of eel on the ground. Behind the stand a very fat man with a striped apron and an Anthony Eden hat waved a ladle in his hand and shouted, “Best eels, fresh jellied; buy ’em and try ’em.” Over the stand a red, white and blue banner flapped. “The Eel King,” it said. The King himself never served.
What is so wonderful about the setting Mankowitz creates is that it doesn’t fall into one of two familiar traps. It’s not salt-of-the-earth, honest-‘umble-poor (thank you Mr. Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell) nor is it aiming to shock with its gritty realism and the gratuitously unpleasant (thank you Irving Welsh et al). I have never lived in the East End of London in the 1950s, but Mankowitz has – and was born in Spitalfields in 1924. (Incidentally, for a great and incredibly varied blog on Spitalfields, see Spitalfields Life). As such, his portrait in A Kid For Two Farthings is certainly fond, but not saccharine.

And ‘saccharine’ might be a word on the tip of your tongue when you read the first sentence: ‘It was thanks to Mr. Kandinsky that Joe knew a unicorn when he saw one.’ For Joe spots one at the market, and persuades Mr. Kandinsky to help him buy it. What nobody tells Joe, of course, is that his unicorn is simply a slightly deformed kid (i.e. young goat). He’s a six year old, and they don’t disillusion him – which makes him all the more certain that the unicorn’s horn will magically grant his wishes, and those of the people around him. His wishes – naturally – tie in with the everyday romantic troubles, professional anxieties, and recreational competitions that his mother and his neighbours undergo. Gradually everything falls into place…

So there are definitely fairy-tale elements to A Kid For Two Farthings, but it is Mankowitz’s observational humour – always kind, mind, never mocking – and his refusal to deny his characters their flaws, that stop the novella being too sweet. The lives of the characters are too ordinary and empathetic for that. Instead, it is affectionate and affecting – something of a treasure, and one to re-read. It may not have the instant appeal that Joyce Dennys’ Henrietta books had for me, but I can still recognise a gem that I am delighted Bloomsbury chose to reprint.

Books to get Stuck into:

The Harp in the South – Ruth Park : my favourite Australian novel, and one I read before the days of blogging, we’re in 1948 and in a slum on the other side of the world, but again amongst a flawed, realistic, and affecting family and their neighbours. Sometimes humourous, sometimes sad, always captivating.

Speaking of Jane

StuckinaBook All , , 11 Comments

The book I’m talking about tonight is one of those lovely books which just doesn’t seem to be written anymore. I bought it in Colchester as one of my first books under Project 24, and it’s as lovely as it looks and sounds: More Talk of Jane Austen (1950) by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern.

Now, of course, I’ve done things in slightly the wrong order, because I’ve not read Speaking of Jane Austen, the volume preceding this one. Nor, in fact, have I read anything by Kaye-Smith or Stern, though Stern’s A Name to Conjure With has been on my bookshelf for about a decade. But no matter – for anyone who has read Austen’s novels (and it is important that you’ve read all six before opening this book) More Talk of Jane Austen is delicious, self-indulgent fun.

The first chapter is called ‘What is it about Jane Austen?’ I don’t know if the scenario is real or imagined, but the question is posed by Barbara (age 17 and a half) to G.B. Stern, as Barbara’s beloved is mad on Austen: ‘”It’s his thing.” And Barbara added, being a tolerant girl: “Nobody can help their thing.”‘ Of course, the same misconceptions Barbara has are those which fly about nowadays – that she’s for ‘maiden aunts in drawing-rooms’ and so forth. And naturally Stern disabuses her – excuse the lengthy passage, but it’s too lovely not to quote in full. “She’s neither bitty nor boisterous about her people; instead, she has irony, tenderness, clear vision, and most of all a gorgeous sense of their absurdity which is never really exaggerated into more than life-size. You’re absurd, I’m absurd, and so in some way or other are most of the people we meet. She does not have to distort or magnify what they’re like; she just recognises them, delights in them herself, and then re-creates them for our benefit without illusion or grandiloquence, and without any array of special circumstance, of drama, for instance, or horror, or even topical events of the day; luckily for her and for us, to leave them out was natural and not forced for her period, unless you were a gentleman actively involved in war and politics and religion and the struggle for existence; at her period you could be one of an isolated group living in the same country neighbourhood in England, without in any way meriting the reproach of escapism. Escape need have no ‘ism’ when we escape into Jane Austen; and when we have to return there’s no wrench, no jolt, no descent from the aeroplane, no bump back to life with a shock, no subsequent daze and resentment; it’s escape from our reality into her reality, and we can fuse our world with hers which is curiously and essentially ‘unrubbishy’. So there they are, her characters, concentrated for our benefit into a small circle of time and space, deliciously giving themselves away not only in action but by the smallest working of their motives and pre-occupations; absolutely unaware, of course, that anyone is catching them out at it. It’s no crime to be a lover of Jane Austen; but if you aren’t, you can’t understand why we find her so restful, because you’re much too inclined to translate ‘restful’ into ‘soporific’; if we just wanted an author who would send us nicely to sleep, we should not go to Jane Austen; she’s restful from exactly the opposite reason: we’re alert all the time when we’re reading and re-reading and re-re-reading Jane, otherwise we might miss something, some tiny exquisite detail, an almost imperceptible movement in the mind of her characters. Her poise is unassailable; you can trust it, and that’s restful in itself. The same with her judgments; you can trust them, and relax; mind you, to be able to relax wit an author isn’t the same thing again as to say she’s relaxing; the air of Bath is relaxing, but the air of Jane Austen isn’t; she’s pungent, she’s bracing; you’re breathing good air while you read Jane, and so you feel well. Apart from her gorgeous sense of humour, her vision is so fairly and evenly adjusted that you don’t have to get distracted all the time by the author’s own prejudices and neuroses subconsciously creeping in to distort the whole thing, and having to make allowances for environment —“

“Darling, do you think you could stop talking like a handbook on psycho-analysis? Because if it’s just to please me —“

“Dear little girl, I’d forgotten for the moment that you were there.”
That should be required reading for any Jane doubters. In truth, the rest of the book doesn’t really have this tone – it’s not done ‘in conversation with’ anyone. Stern and Kaye-Smith take alternate chapters, and address topics like letters, beauty, servants etc. etc. It is well-researched but not unduly scholarly – More Talk of Jane Austen can only be described as an appreciation. There isn’t a hint of objectivity, nor would I have there be: this is the unashamed indulgence of Janeites keen to delve into every detail of Austen’s novels. Not with the mad (and maddening) conspiracy theories or secret-subtext theories so beloved of Edward Said and his chums, but a simple gleaning of all the details Jane Austen actually put in the novels.

The book never feels over-zealous or superfluous – perhaps it would, were they examining any lesser writer than Austen. Or perhaps, as a Janeite, I cannot see clearly – for I revelled in this delight of a book, and only wonder why such things seem to be so out of fashion. Or, perhaps, they’ve just transferred to the blogosphere?

ETA: after posting this, I saw Rachel’s abundantly lovely Janeite post here – transferred to the blogosphere indeed!

Things to get Stuck into:

Howards End is on the Landing – Susan Hill: unquestionably my favourite book-about-books, even if Jane Austen gets short shrift within these pages (everyone has their faults).

Mrs. Darcy’s Dilemma – Diana Birchall: one must tread carefully when it comes to Austen sequels – but Diana Birchall’s witty and loving sequel is very respectful and an entire delight.

Watch out for The Sea, The Sea…

StuckinaBook All , 12 Comments

Ages ago I piled up a set of books to read on a week-off from studying, and (predictably enough) failed to finish all six. In fact, I’ve only recently finished the fourth of them, so let’s call it an ongoing project…

That book is The Sandcastle by Iris Murdoch, published in 1957 and Murdoch’s third novel. I’ve been meaning to read some Murdoch ever since I saw the phenomenal film Iris back in 2001 or 2002, and have accumulated a few different novels on my shelves – this one coming from the brilliant Amnesty bookshop in Bristol, always worth a trip. Why this one came off the shelf, I’m not quite sure, although my dear friend Lorna has it as one of her favourites on Facebook so perhaps that had stayed in my memory somehow.

For years I used to confuse Iris Murdoch and Ivy Compton-Burnett. Before I’d read either of them, that is – somehow, in my mind, they were similar authors. It was only later, after having read and adored ICB, that I realised the general view was that ICB was difficult to enjoy, and Iris Murdoch was very good but much more accessible. Well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I wish to disagree. This reader found Iris Murdoch much less accessible than ICB, and – although I could see that The Sandcastle was a good novel, and found certain sections gripping and brilliantly observed, overall I must confess it was… a bit of a slog.

Before I go any further, I must concede practicalities – the font in my copy was tiny, and I did get a headache when reading the novel. Such things ought not fetter learned critics, naturally, but… I am not a learned critic, and I was fettered. Recently I read Images in a Mirror by Sigrid Undset (which I’ll hopefully write about at some point) which had such a large font that I found myself reading the novel far too quickly and not taking in the details – prosaic issues such as font can really affect a reading experience, don’t you think? Is that just me?

But back to the novel in question. The Sandcastle takes place in a boarding school. Mor has taught there for years, and lives on site with his wife Nan and their two children. Murdoch is masterful at the brief incidents or asides which sum up a relationship. Everything you need to know about Mor and Nan’s marriage is presented here: Liffy had been their dog, a golden retriever, who was killed two years ago on the main road. This animal had formed the bond between Mor and Nan which their children had been unable to form. Half unconsciously, whenever Mor wanted to placate his wife he said something about Liffey. To make matters worse, along comes a painter called Rain. Her task is to paint the retiring headmaster Demoyte – ‘As for morality, and such things, Demoyte took the view that if a boy could look after his Latin prose his character would look after itself.’ That sort of man. I love it when authors write about artists – so often they use this to explore the idea of artistic creation… and I find talented painters, especially portraitists, fascinating.
“When you go,” said Demoyte, “you will leave behind a picture of me, whereas what I shall be wanting is a picture of you.”

“Every portrait is a self-portrait,” said Rain. “In portraying you I portray myself.”

“Spiritual nonsense,” said Demoyte. “I want to see your flesh, not your soul.”But Rain’s role is not just as resident painter. As the cracks in Mor and Nan’s marriage become more evident, Mor falls in love with Rain…

And so The Sandcastle unfolds, with this evolving love affair and the various reactions to it. In fact, the novel’s not as sensational as that sounds – a lot of pages meander through emotions and everyday events, rather than drop-a-vase-on-the-floor shocks and surprises.

Something Murdoch does very well, on the strength of this novel anyway, is the big set pieces. The scenes which really stay in the memory. I can think of quite a few sections which are excellently structured, with appropriate climaxes and nuances; pathos and bathos, so on and so forth. A car is edging towards a river and falls in; a boy must be rescued from the tower; Nan finds out about her husband’s affair and can’t stop hiccoughing. These are all brilliant scenes, incredibly well written not simply sentence by sentence, but on a wider, structural level. But – oh yes, but – between the big set pieces, this novel rambles interminably. Perhaps, as I said above, it’s simply the fault of the font… but I found so much of The Sandcastle difficult to wade through. Not that it was badly written as such, indeed she writes conversations about love well (and that is difficult, judging by some books I’ve read) but there are so many pages which felt like a chore. Not much happening, on the level of plot or character. I don’t mind plotless sections – I welcome it – but only if there is something to captivate my attention.

I don’t know about you, but my opinions when reading (and consequently my reviews) are probably more generous to authors of whom I’ve heard nothing. So you might see quite enthusiastic reviews for writers I know won’t enter any sort of canon – doesn’t stop them being good reads, of course, but I lay no claim to them having lasting notoriety. Whereas with Iris Murdoch… I know before picking up the book that she has a great reputation, so I’m expecting more. If she was a complete unknown, I daresay I’d be bowled over by her prose at times, and definitely enthusiastic about those occasional scenes of brilliance. But, without doing down these attributes, I must confess I’d hoped for much more. I’d hoped I’d love Murdoch and rush out to read more – as it is, I’m not sure when I’ll return to Iris.

Do her later novels fulfil the promise which is undoubtedly here? Or does Murdoch always have great scenes with a lot of filler? Fulfil or full of filler – that’s what I need to know before I venture further…

Books to get Stuck into:

The Honours Board – Pamela Hansford Johnson : I haven’t blogged about this novel, but it’s good. Also set in a school, there is a cleverly drawn cast of teachers, assistants, and pupils in a boarding school keen to gain prestige.

Pastors and Masters – Ivy Compton-Burnett : another school setting, and ICB-lite, this novella is a great litmus test to see whether or not you’ll get on with Dame Ivy – as well as an adroit depiction of schoolmaster rivalries.

(P.S. Apologies for the big gap in the middle of this – are any other Blogger users having trouble with puttings pictures in the bottom half of posts?)

The Vet’s Daughter

StuckinaBook All , 9 Comments

Right, then – The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns. Hopefully you’ve managed to find yourself a copy, and maybe even read it. I’ve already seen one or two reviews cropping up around the blogosphere, but there’s still plenty of time to get involved – let me know if you’ve blogged about The Vet’s Daughter (or even another Comyns novel, if that’s what you could find) and I’ll do a round-up post on Friday or Saturday. Polly (Novel Insights) and Claire (Paperback Reader) are also heading up this informal readalong, so pop over to them this week too.

I’ll hang my colours to the mast from the off, and say that I am a big Comyns fan. You can see my thoughts on four other Comyns novels here, and The Vet’s Daughter is vying for top place at the moment. In a slim novel, an awful lot seems to happen. Alice is the vet’s daughter in question, and starts the novel living with her sickly, scared mother and her unpredictable, violent father. There is little happiness in this depiction of home life, but nor is it a portrait of Dickensian bleakness. Alice’s father refuses to see his wife while she is dying, sells off people’s pets to a vivisectionist instead of putting them down, and has bountiful meals while keeping his family on strict rations. But, though selfish and unkind, he is not barbaric. Comyns knows, despite her often surreal style, that to create a truly cruel character there must be no exaggeration. Alice’s father is not an ogre, and he is all the more evil for it.

The slow dying of Alice’s mother is drawn perfectly – as is her fear, to the last, of causing her husband any annoyance. Once she is gone, she is swiftly replaced by Rosa – a selfish, silly, and bawdy barmaid with plans to use Alice as bait wherever possible. Eventually Alice manages to leave, but the house she moves to (half burnt-out; run by cacklingly insolent servants and occupied by the melancholic mother of a locum vet) is no romanticised escape. Even when a potential suitor comes along, Comyns privileges her surreal version of reality over a fairy-tale ending.

And I haven’t even mentioned the most surreal aspect (though one which feels completely congruous when reading the novel): In the night I was awake and floating. As I went up, the blankets fell to the floor. I could feel nothing below me – and nothing above until I came near the ceiling and it was hard to breathe there. I thought “I mustn’t break the gas glove”. I felt it carefully with my hands, and something very light fell in them, and it was the broken mantle. I kept very still up there because I was afraid of breaking other things in that small crowded room; but quite soon, it seemed, I was gently coming down again. I folded my hands over my chest and kept very straight, and floated down to the couch where I’d been lying. I was not afraid, but very calm and peaceful. In the morning I knew it wasn’t a dream because the blankets were still on the floor and I saw the gas mantle was broken and the chalky powder was still on my hands.
As Barbara Trapido said at a talk I attended the other day, “Some people criticised me for having a character levitate in Juggling, but I just thought – yes, he would levitate.” Something about Barbaras, obviously.

As with all the novels from the first half of Comyns’ writing career (she wrote eight books between 1947-1967, and a further three in the 1980s) the words ‘matter-of-fact’ come to mind. The Vet’s Daughter is told in the first person, and Alice’s naive and ingenuous voice never over-elaborates the cruelties she and her mother suffer. ‘One morning a dreadful thing happened’, for example, is how she introduces the fact that her father has prematurely sent a coffin-maker to measure her mother. This style is a diluted version of the child’s-voice in Sisters By A River, but is still strikingly unlike most novels’ style, and a remarkable gift of Comyns’.

I’m keeping a close eye on my depleting stock of Comyns novels – it will be sad once I’ve reached the end of them – but I know I shall return to The Vet’s Daughter as well as Comyns’ other books. It is a truly remarkable book, and she is a truly remarkable writer. The surreal meets the domestic, and the result is quite extraordinary.

The Man Who Planted Trees

StuckinaBook All , 9 Comments

As part of Project 24, I’ve been browsing through bookshops and then high-tailing it to the library. This won’t help Waterstones stay afloat, but it’ll stop be exceeding my book allowance… Anyway, today I was looking at the table of Books in Translation and was rather intrigued by The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono. Oxford Central Library didn’t have it, but the Bodleian did, so I read it today… (and incidentally, although Giono was French, as far as I can tell the story was originally published in English.)

It’s more or less a short story – the copy I read had 50 pages, but the font was large and their are lots of woodcuts by Michael McCurdy. In fact, it’s these woodcuts which make the book really special – the edition I saw in Waterstones had a different illustrator, who was quite good, but make sure you find the edition with McCurdy’s work if you’re tracking down a copy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself – The Man Who Planted Trees was originally written when Giono was asked to contribute to the Reader’s Digest on ‘a memorable person’, or something like that. His contribution was, however, rejected – when they found out what he had never tried to conceal: that it was fictional. And instead it was published in Vogue in 1953. Don’t stop reading there – Virginia Woolf contributed to Vogue back in the day, so it can be a credible publication.

The Man Who Planted Trees tells of a narrator who hikes to a place of ‘unparalleled desolation’ – a village where the few inhabitants quietly loathe one another, and where nature has more or less given up. But he encounters Elzèard Bouffier, a shepherd who rarely speaks, but is kind and offers him somewhere to stay.

The shepherd went to fetch a small sack and poured out a heap of acorns on the table. He began to inspect them, one by one, with great concentration, separating the good from the bad. I smoked my pipe. I did offer to help him. He told me that it was his job. And, in fact, seeing the care he devoted to the task, I did not insist. That was the whole of our conversation. When he had set aside a large enough pile of acorns, he counted them out by tens, meanwhile eliminating the small ones or those which were slightly cracked, for now he examined them more closely. When he had thus selected one hundred perfect acorns he stopped and we went to bed.
Elzéard, as the title to the book suggests, is planting trees. Thousands and thousands of them. At this stage, he estimates that of the hundred thousand acorns he has planted, ten thousand will grow successfully. And he carries on and carries on, with many varieties of tree – quietly transforming the area.


The narrator fights in World War One (off the page) and returns to find Elzéard’s life unaffected by such matters – the trees abound, and the countryside is being changed in more ways than one. Streams which had been dry flow once more; people move to the village and it becomes vibrant again. The narrator leaves and returns a couple of times, and is astonished by what the unassuming shepherd has achieved.

The Man Who Planted Trees is a beautiful book, both visually and in every other way. McCurdy’s woodcuts have such energy and really enhance Giono’s simple and elegant story. It is described as an allegory – I’m not entirely sure what the allegory is, other than of creation, but that doesn’t diminish it being a delicately-told and affecting story. Giono doesn’t pluck at the heartstrings or delve into the characters’ psychology – instead he lays before us the simplicity of their acts, and allows the reader to engage and respond. And he has entirely succeeded in creating his original brief: a memorable character.

Do pop over and read Karen’s lovely review of this book… and you can read the beginning of it, including some more McCurdy images, courtesy of Google Books here.

Books to get Stuck into:

The Runaway – Elizabeth Anna Hart : this is a similarly enchanting story, with beautiful woodcuts by Gwen Raverat. One of my favourite Persephones, it is more whimsical than Giono’s story, but equally engaging.

Matty and the Dearingroydes – Richmal Crompton

StuckinaBook All , 8 Comments

I spent most of my childhood reading Enid Blyton (before I moved onto Goosebumps and Point Horror… eugh, don’t remind me) and thus missed out on quite a lot of classic children’s literature. But one series I did include alongside a diet of all things Blyton is the William series by Richmal Crompton. I’m sure everyone knows about the escapades of this eternal eleven-year-old, but if not – hie thee to a library. Anarchic without being too anarchic, and always well-meaning, William Brown is one of the great creations of children’s – indeed, any – literature.

It was about eight years ago that I started reading Richmal Crompton’s novels for adults, and I was hooked. (This all fits in nicely with Polly’s post that I highlighted at the weekend.) There are over thirty, and plenty of them are very scarce, so it gave me a treasure hunt with wonderful rewards. Frost at Morning is one of my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About, over in the right-hand column, but there are plenty of other wonderful books by this neglected novelist. They are a bit patchy, and the quality is variable, but at her best Crompton is infectious and very comforting.

I’ve recently re-read one of my favourite Crompton novels, Matty and the Dearingroydes. The title is a bit of a mouthful, but it does what it says on the tin. Matty Dearingroyde makes her living buying clothes door-to-door, and selling them in a secondhand shop. Her method of going door-to-door is a little unusual:

“We’ll go down this street and we’ll go into the first house with blue curtains.”… “We’ll go into the first house we come to with a bird-cage in the window.”… “I’m going to say the beginning of Paradise Lost to myself and we’ll go into the house we’ve got to when I’ve reached ‘And justify the ways of God to men’.”
You begin to sense the sort of character Matty is: irrepressible, a little eccentric, and exactly the sort I always love. Anyway, she knocks at a door and gives her card… and by coincidence she has stumbled upon her extended family.

The rest of the Dearingroydes are well-to-do, and Matty is something of poor relation crossed with a family secret. Some misplaced family loyalty, and some inherited guilty, prompt supercilious Matthew Dearingroyde to ‘welcome’ Matty into the family circle. But it would be too burdensome for her to live solely with his family, and instead she is to spend a section of the year in various different households.

The plot and its many characters would be too much to summarise here, because Crompton always wields huge casts in fairly short novels, but it’s all well drawn. There are parents using their daughter to battle with each other; aging members of respectable families forced to live in a hotel; a shop-owner who pours a little too much alcohol into her cups of tea; a pair of teachers in a silent power struggle – a whole canvas of characters.

Crompton does often use the same sorts of characters across her novels (the pair of friends, one sucking the other dry of energy, crops up a lot and is always affecting) but they’re so involving that I can forgive her. In Matty and the Dearingroydes, because Matty is peripatetic, characters do tend to be left and forgotten once Matty has moved onto the next house – but so, I suppose, they would be. As long as exhuberant Matty is always in the foreground, then that’s fine.

Crompton will never be a prose stylist of genius, or even of a very high standing. Her writing certainly isn’t bad – it will never make you squirm – but it is mostly just functional. It gets the job done, without being in itself memorable. But Crompton’s novels are, and they are definitely comfort reads. I have a stock of ones I’ve yet to read, and I love knowing they’re there waiting for me. Matty and the Dearingroydes is quite tricky to track down, although Oxford country library has it and probably others do too, but you can pick up one of many Richmal Cromptons and be equally diverted. As I said, they are variable, but ones I’ve loved include Family Roundabout (published by Persephone; currently reprinting), Frost at Morning, Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle, Narcissa, Millicent Dorrington, Four in Exile, There Are Four Seasons, Linden Rise, Westover, The Ridleys…

Books to get Stuck into:

So many suggestions I could make for this sort of book, but looking back through my past posts, I’m going to plump for…

Miss Mole – E.H. Young: similarly irrepressible older woman encountering a staid and jaded family…

Miss Hargreaves – Frank Baker: always popular here, can’t blame a boy for trying – if you haven’t read this novel yet, and the idea of an eccentric lady appeals, then you can do no better than this novel which is hilarious, moving, and even sinister, in turns.

A Game of Hide and Seek

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I promised a Virago Modern Classic, and a Virago Modern Classic I will deliver. I’ve already read a couple Elizabeth Taylor novels, Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (click on the titles if you fancy reading my thoughts on them, but to summarise – they’re very good) and Nicola Beauman’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor, but there’s plenty of way to go – and when my supervisor told me I should take a look at A Game of Hide and Seek, how could I resist?

The ‘game’ in question is both literal and metaphorical. The novel opens with Harriet and Vesey (query: is this actually a name?) playing a game of hide-and-seek – and this game follows them throughout the rest of their lives… they chase each other, misunderstanding each other’s emotions and failing to say the right thing at the right times, and often saying the wrong thing. Vesey goes to Oxford; Harriet remains behind – and marries somebody else. Later, of course, Vesey reappears – and the same old feelings reappear as well.

I didn’t really want to write out the plot of A Game of Hide and Seek because, like so many of the best novels, the plot isn’t that important. A thousand novelists have written novels with this plot (for another good one, see EM Delafield’s Late and Soon) and explored the emotions that such a recrudescence can have. But few of them will have Elizabeth Taylor’s talent.

Confession time: I read the first half of this on the bus to and from London, and wasn’t very excited about it. I was tired, I had a headache, I was reading the words but not really getting anything out of it. It was only when I returned, busless, to my reading that I understood what an exceptionally well written novel A Game of Hide and Seek was. Taylor excels at the metaphor which is unusual and yet exactly conveys an image. One of my favourites was this:
Harriet tried to put on a polite and considering look. She loved the music, but could not allow herself to enjoy it among strangers. Sunk too far back in her too large chair, she felt helpless, like a beetle turned on its back; and as if she could never rise again, nor find the right phrases of appreciation. How many authors would think of that image, of a beetle turned on its back? And yet it works so very well. That is, to my mind, what sets Taylor apart from other authors – and makes it hard to explain exactly why – that she writes the sort of novel that many could write, but concentrates so much on avoiding cliche and finding new life in her characters, that she is on another level. Another example? It’s always difficult to ‘show’ good writing, isn’t it? But this is a paragraph I highlighted as being representative – the sort of writing which one has to read slowly, to enjoy it fully. The fog lay close to the windows. The train seemed to be grovelling its way towards London, but the banks on either side were obscured. Harriet wondered if they were passing open fields or the backs of factories, and she cleaned a space on the window with her glove, but all she could see reflected were her own frightened eyes.You can just tell that every word is carefully chosen, can’t you? This is all sounding a bit earnest, so I’m also going to quote my favourite line from the novel, which is often humorous as well as serious: “The meat has over-excited them,” Harriet thought. She had always heard that it inflamed the baser instincts.Quite so, Elizabeth, quite so.

I won’t go over the top, this isn’t the best novel I’ve ever read – but it is some of the best writing that I’ve read for a while. If you chose novels for their plot, you might not think too much of A Game of Hide and Seek. If you chose novels for their writing style and characterisation, this may well be something you’ll love – and admire. Not often that those two can go hand in hand – but Elizabeth Taylor is the woman for the job.

In the Frame

StuckinaBook All , 3 Comments

Thanks for all your contributions on the previous post, that was both interesting and reassuring – I thought I might be single-handedly holding up the biography market! I couldn’t think of any better way to express why I chose to read biographies (and their ilk) except the rather obvious one ‘to find out more’ – but Karen put it so adroitly when she wrote in the comments “A good auto/biography tempts a different part of the appetite from that which fiction satisfies.”

Onto another section of that appetite tonight – short stories. Those in the collection The Lagoon by Janet Frame, to be precise. I’ve said it before – every time I blog about a book of short stories, I come up against a brick wall, and find it more or less impossible to write coherently (or, rather, cohesively) about the book. But I’ll do my best…

I have Lynne (aka dovegreyreader) to thank for bringing Janet Frame to my attention, which she did with one of these posts. I’d been meaning to read more New Zealand authors, and so the name was stored in the back of my mind… when I found The Lagoon in an Oxford charity shop, I pounced. And I thought it was very good. This is Frame’s first published work, from 1951, and it went on to win the Hubert Church Award – which basically saved her from a leucotomy operation, which had been due to take place at the psychiatric hospital where she’d been diagnosed as schizophrenic. Gulp. As I wrote yesterday, an author’s life and experiences probably oughtn’t overly influence how I read their work, but with Frame she makes no secret of it. A lot of the stories take place in institutes, and the themes are often of seeking mental freedom, of experiencing life in independent and rich ways. This excerpt from ‘Snap-Dragons’ is quite representative: If you were free did you always fly away? Or were you ever free? Were you not always blundering into some prison whose door shut fast behind you so that you cried, let me out, like the bee knocking in the snap-dragon, or the people beating their hands on the walls of their ward.Frame often uses a sort of off-kilter stream-of-consciousness intended to reflect an mind going through imbalance, using structure to unsettle. Sometimes it works, sometimes it gets in the way of the narrative a little… it was a technique which didn’t really succeed for me in Emily Holmes Coleman’s A Shutter of Snow, but with Frame it is more subtle, and only sometimes irksome rather than effective.

A more successful way of unsettling the reader is Frame’s technique of disconcerting endings to her stories. They often end disjointedly, suddenly touching another topic or emotion. For example, ‘The Pictures’ is about a girl and her mother visiting the cinema. All the emotions they feel in response to the film are explored, and the world outside once they leave the cinema, and then the final words are: ‘But the little girl in the pixie-cap didn’t feel sad, she was eating a paper lolly, it was greeny-blue and it tasted like peppermints.’ It introduces a new tone, and shows that the close of a short story is only really the reader turning to face something else, it isn’t really an end.

I usually write in reviews of short story collections that they’re not as good as my first experience, with Katherine Mansfield – Janet Frame is no different, but she is perhaps closer than anyone else I’ve read. These stories, like Mansfield’s, are often very short, very perceptive and affecting. One of my favourites was one of the shortest – ‘A Short Note on the Russian War’. If people are interested to sample Frame’s work, I’ll type it out and post it in a day or too? Anyway, I wholeheartedly second Lynne’s recommendation. Once you’ve exhausted all of KM’s output, there is another New Zealander worth putting in the Frame…

Persephone Week: The End

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Apparently Persephone Week finished on Friday… but here at Stuck-in-a-Book we’re going to keep it going right until the end of the week. No Weekend Miscellany this weekend, then, but instead the final two Persephones will be proffered. (And maybe even a redux tomorrow). No, I didn’t manage to read six (though I’m quite pleased with four), but today you’re going to hear about Lettice Delmer by Susan Miles and, more excitingly, see the product of Our Vicar’s Wife’s interaction with Good Things in England by Florence White (which is also coming out in November as a Persephone Classic, with a really beautiful cover, below)


Right – Lettice Delmer, my first novel in verse, and the only one which Persephone have published. [Edit: Sorry, I forgot, Amours du Voyage by Arthur Hugh Clough is another one.] Not in rhyming verse, at least most of the time, but in blank verse. (If you need a brush up on what blank verse is, have a look here.) I bought this in a secondhand bookshop a while ago and, to be honest, I might not have bought it otherwise – like a lot of people, I suspect, the concept of a novel in verse was a little off-putting. Me more than most, since I’ve always struggled with reading poetry – probably because I read quite quickly, and poetry really needs to be read slowly, or even aloud.

But, nothing daunted, I gave Lettice Delmer (1958) a go for Persephone Reading Week. If I’m ever going to read it, thought I, now is the time. The Publisher’s Note writes that it is ‘a novel, i.e. narrative with plot, characterisation and psychological insight, where the verse form is readable, not too intrusive – but essential.’ Lettice Delmer is the privileged daughter of extremely charitable parents, who are always seeking to help others for the sake of Christ. She herself is uncertain at the welcome her parents give to Flora Tort and her young son Derrick. Flora was a patient at a Special Hospital (a euphemistic title) and her son is rather an unpredictable, savage creature – at first. The rest of this novel looks at the Delmer household; Lettice’s leaving of it, and her subsequent life of difficulties, weaknesses, loves, losses and spiritual journey. The secondary depiction of a Christian girl struggling to communicate with God, and seeking further depth in her relationship with Christ, was very honest, moving, and genuine.


The Persephone edition has a Plot Summary section at the end, giving summaries of each 10-20 pages – I occasionally flicked to it to clarify a point or two, but largely didn’t find I needed it. Its inclusion does speak volumes about an anticipated readerly response – you can’t imagine a plot summary at the end of a novel, can you? It is true that, now and then, I’d miss a pivotal event – perhaps because I read verse a little too fast, and the nature of its lay-out, with dialogue incorporated into stanzas alongside everything else, means that it’s trickier to make significant points stand out. But this didn’t happen very often, and in general, I didn’t find the verse format a problem.

I suppose that’s the central part of this review, in terms of whether or not I’ll convince others to give Lettice Delmer a try – was I able to read it? For the first thirty pages, I thought I wouldn’t be able to. It was tricky, I get stumbling, and realising I hadn’t taken in anything on the page – but then it clicked. Something suddenly worked – and, though every time I picked the novel up it would take a few lines before it clicked again, I was immersed more quickly each time.

But, of course, unobtrusive wouldn’t be good enough. If a verse format did nothing but disappear into the background, it would be pointless. Of course, Susan Miles uses it to much better effect. Difficult to pin down what the verse *does* achieve: it is more of an atmosphere than anything specific. A subtle beauty and poignancy is lent to the pages, an almost ethereal quality. The verse enables Miles to discuss hard-hitting topics such as death, suicide, abortion, and depression without this feeling at all like a gratuitously gritty novel – they are serious topics, dealt with seriously, but almost through a glass darkly.


The lines I really want to quote give away a big spoiler. So I’m going to post them in white, and you can decide whether or not to read them. Below that are two other quotations, little moments in Lettice Delmer which were illuminating examples of how the verse can be used to accurately reveal a character. The last shows just how well this book fits into the Persephone canon.

He lets the subtle Tempter’s guiding hand
direct his footsteps to the sea-dashed brink.
Not till the waters close above his head
does any plea for mercy stir in him.

* * *

“It’s want of confidence, I truly think,
that keeps him so resentful.
I’ve watched poor Flora hold a stick – quite low –
and try to make him jump.
It seemed as if he were afraid to raise
both feet at once in case when they came down
the earth would not be there!”

* * *

For Lettice insists scratchily
that aching to be in the war is a whim that merits contempt.
“You are doing far better serving at home humbly
than seeking false glory, it seems to me, Hulbert,
out on the battlefield,
for unmarked, unpraised, wholly unheroic home service
is, to my mind, self-satisfying or not self-satisfying,
much more admirable than a soldier’s blatant offering.”

To conclude, I thought I’d find Lettice Delmer impossible to read – but I was pleasantly surprised. Though it won’t become one of my favourite Persephones, the novel has a lyrical beauty for which it is worth acclimatising yourself to the unusual form. Do have a step outside your comfort zone, and give this novel a try.

Onto the second Persephone title of the post:


Our Vicar’s Wife had a flick through Good Things in England, (in its Persephone Originals edition) trying to decide what to make – the first thing she found was something involving a pig’s head, and thought not. Which is nice for me, because I’m vegetarian. Instead, she opted for gingerbread. ‘Eliza Acton’s Gingerbread’, no less, appropriately enough a recipe submitted from a Rectory. Here Mum is, holding her offering (doesn’t she look nice?)


And this is what it looked like when sliced up…. it’s even nicer than it looks. The yummiest gingerbread I’ve ever eaten, and a fitting end to Persephone Reading/Eating Week. Mmmm.