1950s

My Face For The World To See by Alfred Hayes #ABookADayInMay No.24

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My Face For the World to See (New York Review Books Classics): Amazon.co.uk: Hayes, Alfred, Thomson, David: 9781590176672: Books

When Madame Bibi read Alfred Hayes’ In Love earlier in the month, it reminded me that I had My Face For The World To See (1958) on my shelves. I’d bought it because I’ll always pick up a NYRB Classic, and this one looked interesting – set in mid-century Hollywood, and only 131 pages.

It’s yet another unnamed narrator – this one being, like Hayes, a screenwriter. He is very successful and wealthy, and also the same age as me (37). He’s also clearly rather discontented. We don’t learn huge amounts about his wife, except that she is currently away and he doesn’t seem to miss her very much. (‘I thought of my wife. She was at a distance. The distance was in itself beneficial. I supposed I was being again uncharitable. She was what she was: I was what I was. That, when you came down to it, was the most intolerable thing of all.’) While at a party, he is looking out at the sea when he sees a young woman wandering into the sea, martini glass in hand. Is she simply drunk and foolish, or is she trying to kill herself?

He suspects the latter, and so does the reader, but she is saved from drowning and more or less laughs it off. Somehow they get to know each other, which spirals into a sexual relationship quite quickly and haphazardly. She is also unnamed, but she is sharply drawn with a pathos that rings true for modern-day Hollywood too – one of the success-hungry, fame-hungry, work-hungry young actors who will probably never get more than a handful of lines in a handful of mediocre films, but cannot get away from the longing.

At this very moment, the town was full of people lying in bed thinking with an intense, an inexhaustible, an almost raging passion of becoming famous, and even more famous if they were; or of becoming wealthy if they weren’t already wealthy , or wealthier if they were; or powerful if they weren’t powerful now, and more powerful if they already were. There were times when the intensity with which they wanted these things impressed me. There was even, at times, a certain legitimacy to their desires. But it seemed to me, or at least it had seemed to me in the few years I had been coming and going from this town, there was something finally ludicrous, finally unimpressive about even the people who had all the things so coveted by all the people who did not have them. It was difficult to say why. It might have been only a private blindness, a private indifference which prevented me from seeing how gratifying the possession of power or the possession of fame could be.

The narrator doesn’t seem to have the same longing. He has found career success, but he doesn’t appear to want much more of that – but he certainly has longing. It’s unclear for what. Perhaps, as his namelessness and the title of the novella suggest, some sort of more solid identity? Some way of presenting himself to the world and to others that feels more secure, and which he can be prouder of?

The morning after the two sleep together, he wakes to find she has already left. I quote this as an example of Hayes’ writing, which I found rather exquisite without being unnecessarily embellished. He really draws you into the minutiae of a moment:

When I awoke again, she was gone. I did not at first remember she had been there; she had slipped out from beneath the blankets and left them carefully arranged as though she had wanted to create the impression, for herself too perhaps, that she had not occupied at all the other half of the bed. I remembered her with a small effect of shock. When had she gone? There was the pillow, indented; in the bathroom, a scrap of tissue with lipstick; on the floor in front of the fireplace, two glasses with what remained of the Scotch. But that was all; only the smallest sort of disarrangement, only the merest trace: she had been careful, as well as quiet.

Typing that out, it really is a riot of colons, semi-colons and commas. If I were writing it, I’d probably be tempted to tidy it up. But it didn’t seem at all obtrusive while I was reading it. Rather, it flowed beautifully to me – the pacing of his realisation, the psychological insights coming naturally alongside the visual observations.

I really appreciated Hayes’ writing, but my only drawback to the novella was that I wish he’d treated the story a little differently. On the one hand, it is just the snapshot of a brief, spontaneous, unexpectedly complicated encounter. But there are moments of melodrama and shock that feel a little jarring. Similarly, I was jarred by a graphic scene at a bullfight in Tijuana. David Thomson’s introduction calls it ‘a magnificent, remorseless scene’, but I found it an inelegant distraction to the flow of the narrative.

Perhaps it is appropriate for a novella set in Hollywood to have a few very dramatic moments, but I think Hayes’ writing would be better served by the mundane. He is so good at exploring the everyday in beautiful prose, I don’t think he needed the gimmicks of shock moments. I still think My Face For The World To See was very good, but perhaps not as good as it almost was?

How To Be a Deb’s Mum by ‘Petronella Portobello’ #ABookADayInMay No.8

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Hayley/Desperate Reader gave me her copy of How To Be A Deb’s Mum (1957) by Petronella Portobello a couple of years ago – she wrote about it on her blog – and rightly thought that it would be up my street. The author name sounds very unlikely and is indeed a pseudonym – albeit for the also unlikely name Lady Flavia Anderson. It’s told in letters from Petronella to an old friend, Pris, and does exactly what the title suggests: it’s all about being a Deb’s mum.

‘Deb’ here is, of course, debutante. And the book feels a little anachronistic since debutante balls were far less a feature of the 1950s than of the generation earlier. Indeed, Petronella harkens back often to her own debutante season in the ’30s – because, though often describing herself as practically decrepit, Petronella is only 38 herself. Though she is also a widow, and we hear very little about the departed husband.

There are some questions about why Petronella is bothering with this old-fashioned tradition – especially since she lives in the highlands of Scotland, and has to travel to London and rent a house to host all the requisite dinner parties of the season. The question comes chiefly from Alice Hardcastle, a friend who really seems to be a nemesis.

“After all,” I go on, “you may ask what it did for us, Alice, but we shouldn’t be sitting in this train talking, if we hadn’t got acquinated twenty years ago in the same racket.”

“Ah! Then you do admit it’s a racket?”

“No I don’t,” I protest. “I have friends in every corner of Britain, and I want Jane to have the same. Go to a cocktail party in Cornwall or take a job in Manchester, and there’s always someone you know to rescue you from being left high and dry.”

I realise too late that I am using just the wrong argument with Alice, because if we were both honest we should admit that neither has gained anything by association with the other, and that each would probably prefer the loneliest corner of the Midlands to making small talk together. But I cannot carry honesty far enough and say, as I am tempted to do, that only by making a large number of acquaintances can one weed out the incompatibles and cultivate the congenial among one’s fellow human beings.

If you’re sensing some Provincial Lady-esque tone from that, then I’m with you. There is a lot in How to be a Deb’s Mum that certainly feels in that world, with the same self-effacement and mild mockery of others, and ultimately good-humoured beneficence.

And, to be honest, a lot of the novel does feel very much older than the 1950s. There are a few stray things that date it to the period – the young women wear lipstick and nail polish without any fear of censure; somebody brings along a man who is a ‘bearded Existentialist from her Chelsea art class’ – but for the most part it does feel unaffected by anything else happening in the world in 1957. The focus is entirely on how to make this Deb season the perfect one for young Jane. I have to say that Jane doesn’t come off the page as fully as her mother, and I’d be hard-pressed to say anything about her character except that she is excited, a little overwhelmed, obliging and occasionally able to be swayed into something unwise by other people her age.

I thought the book was really fun. The only thing that stops it being a classic is that it is rather one-note – a steady walk through everything involved in the Deb season, and the politics of whom to invite to what, which invitations to accept, and how to be appropriately quid pro quo among the hundreds of young women (and their mothers) who are also fighting to give their daughters the best chance in life. ‘Chance’ does seem to mean social success and other opportunities, not solely a husband (and men are given rather a scant look-in in the novel). Though, of course, a good deal of consideration is also given to ensuring Jane dances with the right young men, and dodges the wrong ones. There is some japery about men who are Not Safe In Taxis, which feels rather dated and unpleasant.

The only other plotline is Petronella’s own relationship with family friend Freddy – who steadily goes from being a reliable friend to perhaps something more, and I was certainly more invested in this than in anything that might be going on in Jane’s life.

So, thanks Hayley for sending to me! It is rather a curiosity – a period piece that probably would have felt oddly out of sync with 1957 even in 1957. It is a window on a very small part of society at a time when their traditions were fading away from dominance – and a really fun time to be had reading it.

 

A Perfect Woman by L.P. Hartley

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A Perfect Woman by L. P. Hartley | Hachette UK

About ten years ago, John Murray did some rather lovely reprints of L.P. Hartley’s novels – and it was around that time that I read their edition of his brilliant novel The Boat. And then Harriet wrote a wonderful review of A Perfect Woman (1955), and I was all set to read it asap. I suspect most of you will understand that somehow more than eight years went past before I finally read it. And it’s another excellent book.

L.P. Hartley is known best, of course, for The Go-Between – which holds the distinction of being one of the relatively few novels that me, my brother and both my parents have read. He’s not entirely considered a one-hit wonder, as quite a few people know The Shrimp and Anemone and the rest of that trilogy, and quite a few of his books turn up in secondhand bookshops – but there is still a wide range of his books that don’t get mentioned. And I haven’t seen many people talk about A Perfect Woman.

For quite a long novel, the plot is simple and the cast list is short. There are four main characters: Harold and Isabel, a middle-class couple who have married fairly contentedly for a fair number of years. Alec Goodrich, a novelist. And Irma, the Austrian barmaid.

How do these four come to know each? It starts when Harold – respectable accountant, unimaginative and (for that reason) broadly happy – is on a train journey. He finds himself oddly interested by a man sitting in his carriage/

Yet there was nothing so remarkable about the man. He was above the average size, loosely built and inclined to corpulence; he was wearing a good brown tweed suit, a brown and white check shirt, a knitted brown tie and pair of heavy brown suede brogues. So far so good: all was in rural symphony. But there was a discordant note, the socks. Dark blue and of cheapish material they were obviously meant for town. In his vacant mood the discrepancy worried Harold. Cautiously he lifted his eyes to the stranger’s face. There, at a first glance, everything seemed to match., The general impression was sandy.

The gentleman is reading After the Storm by Alexander Goodrich. And is, it transpires, Alexander (Alec) Goodrich himself.

“Well, yes I am.” He leaned forward, put his hand on his knee, and said with great intimacy, as to an old friend, “It’s always been my ambition to find somebody in the train reading a book of mine. I never have, but sometimes I read one myself in the hope that someone will connect me with it.”

Alec is boyishly open, and yet with an undercurrent of something else. He is clearly used to getting his own way, and expects no obstacles in his path. Luckily his own way is usually pretty harmless – in this instance, for example, he wants Harold to take over his tax affairs. The offer is made with spontaneous enthusiasm. Harold, who is seldom spontaneous, agrees with some misgivings.

Back home, he relates the tale to his wife Isabel – who is, it turns out, a big fan of Goodrich’s writing. It is characteristic of their marriage that he would not know that. She, in turn, has dampened down the evidence of her intelligence and literary leanings – as, the narrator drily notes, ‘was likely to happen when a woman of slightly superior social standing, decidedly superior brains and greatly superior imaginative capacity married a dullish man and lived in the provinces’. She is also expected to devote most of her energies to motherhood – Hartley is brilliant at observing children, and giving proper weight to the depth and strength of their emotions and fears. Jeremy and Janice are both drawn so distinctly and believably. Jeremy – eight, I think – is serious and worried. Janice (6) is obsessed with marriage and much less anxious, but still with a fragility that is very moving.

When Alec comes to stay, he befriends Harold and Isabel happily – but the woman who really bowls him over is Irma, the barmaid of the local pub. She knows she is a figure of fun to many of the locals and regulars, and takes it in good part – but Alec sees something different, and asks Harold to connect the two. Reluctantly, Harold agrees to try and woo Irma on Alec’s behalf.

From here, the tangle of the four characters gets tricky. Secrets and lies abound, and the worlds of literature and tax affairs provide an unlikely but wonderful background. Hartley’s theme is eternal, but I loved the way he bedded it firmly in the clash of 1950s middle-class stability and a kind of relentless bohemia. These four are not likely friends, and the whirlwind of their experiences together will loom long in all of their lives. But there is nothing sensational in the way Hartley presents this novel. He resists anything that would make this melodramatic, and it is instead moving and rather beautiful.

What a storyteller. I haven’t mentioned that A Perfect Woman is also a page-turner. The way Hartley combines reflective insight and tense pace is very impressive.

Hartley seems to bubble under as one of those authors who doesn’t need rediscovery – he certainly isn’t forgotten – but he is one of those mid-century novelists who hasn’t received their proper due. I’m already looking forward to reading my next book by him.

Immortality, Inc. by Robert Sheckley

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MMRTLNC1959.jpgI almost never read science fiction, but one of the good things about the Audible Plus catalogue is that I can explore all manner of books that I probably wouldn’t race to pay money for or have taking up shelf space. And at some point I stumbled across Robert Sheckley’s 1959 novel Immortality, Inc. and added it to my downloads – and listened to it last week.

From the Wikipedia page (and, indeed, the fact that the novel has a Wikipedia page at all), I get the impression that Immortality, Inc. is well-known in certain circles. I was drawn to it because time travel is one of the bits of sci-fi that I find fascinating, and the title made me think of Paul Gallico’s intriguing novel The Foolish Immortals, about a scam to fool people into thinking they have immortality.

At first, Thomas Blaine doesn’t have immortality – he simply has his lifespan moved dramatically forward. The novel opens with a car crash in 1958 – his car careers out of control, the steering wheel comes off, and he is killed instantly – impaled on the steering column, which is quite the detail. But then he wakes up. It hasn’t been a dream – he’s just been in a coma.

At first, he is simply confused – and the medical staff, reporters, and business people around him are not providing any answers. It is more important that he answers their questions: about what he is experiencing, how he feels about it etc. It turns out that he is at the centre of a publicity campaign for the organisation that has made this time travel possible. Their priority is getting good footage of his awakening, rather than explaining what’s going on.

What’s going is that it’s 2110. Sheckley gradually introduces us to the changes that have taken place over 150 years – some of which are quite dispiriting. One of the first things Blaine sees is a long queue, and he thinks he ought to join it, but soon realises it is a line for a suicide booth.

In 2110, thoughts about what being alive means have changed significantly, as have the corresponding scientific abilities. Blaine is living in a body that belonged to somebody else, a strong and muscular young man, and he quickly finds that there is a trade for bodies. Minds are transferred between bodies, either from people who willingly choose to die or from people who are trafficked. Then there are zombies, who occupy bodies that are about to die.

Where does the immortality come in? That is the afterlife – something that has been scientifically proved, but which is only entered naturally with a one-in-a-million chance. Otherwise you have to buy your way in. Inequality hasn’t disappeared. Quite the opposite.

It’s curious, given the whole scope of human imagination that Sheckley could have developed, that he is most fixated on mortality. There are scenes where Sheckley has to fight for his life, where his mind or body are at risk of being stolen, where he needs to kill others. It does all give a (literal) vitality to the novel that would have been lost if it were crammed instead with fanciful scientific inventions that have no real urgency. Perhaps that’s why this novel appeals to this sci-fi sceptic – because it is about the essentials of life, and the trappings of a fictional future don’t get in the way of that too much.

Oh, and there’s a romance plot. Because of course there is.

It’s interesting to read a novel written in the 1950s about the 2110s. We are still closer to the 1950s, but of course a lot of time has passed since Sheckley wrote his futuristic vision. Some details about 2110 thus seem amusingly old-fashioned – and not just references to Abyssinia and Ceylon. Of course, he couldn’t have been expected to come up with the idea of the internet, but the modes of communication and broadcast feel more 1950s than any decade since.

Overall, I really enjoyed Immortality, Inc. At the heart of it is a confused man trying to work out what’s going on, and that’s usually a good vehicle for a reader who is also confused and trying to work it out. We can share his fascination, both amused and horrified in turn, and there is a pleasing simplicity to the survival dramas he undergoes. Naturally I won’t spoil the conclusion, but it ties up the narrative neatly and makes sense of various parts of the plot that seemed a little odd along the way.

I don’t think it has tempted me to dive headfirst into science fiction, but I enjoyed my sojourn there.

House Happy by Muriel Resnik

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House Happy (1958) by Muriel Resnik is one of the books I’ve bought for my Project 24 – I’d seen it every time I’ve been to Astley Book Farm, and I finally couldn’t resist and had to splurge a little to bring it home with me. The cover has a lot to do with it – as does the intriguing subtitle ‘A Tale of Mortgages and Mirth’. And it ended up being a lot of fun.

The cover is very accurate about the starting point of the novel – which begins with the bedframe you can see in the bottom left. Lucy Butler is a divorced mother of two who is drawn to elegance and beauty even when it is impractical. And one of the things that catches her eye is a beautiful French bedframe – which is only five dollars. By the time she’s got it delivered it costs several times that, and the chain of events it kicks off is extremely expensive. Because she decides she needs a new home to fit the bedframe – and sets her heart on one that she certainly can’t afford.

Lucy Butler reminds me a lot of Cornelia Otis Skinner’s essays – the same sort of amusement at being expected to take part in everyday life, and the same ability to get through it absurdly but in tact. While Skinner is very self-deprecating, Lucy seems to coast along on naivety and charm. She is certainly attractive to most men – particularly when she walks, which is a detail Resnik labours and which feels very of its time. (Allegedly her husband left her because she walked too seductively, which… ok.)

I kept thinking of other novels as I read House Happy, the trouble being that they’re not really household names and thus the comparisons might not be helpful. The tone is like Thorne Smith, albeit several notches less farcical; the sequence of events is rather like Eric Rabkin’s Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, though without the underlying sense of tragedy. It all feels a bit like a screwball comedy, tethered to the domestic.

My favourite scenes were when Lucy looked on as a helpless bystander, dizzied by proceedings, particularly when trying to exchange contracts as the housing solicitors (curious spellings Resnik’s own!):

They brought in a chair for me and had a terrible time finding room for it, and then the secretary started reading the most boring contract all about the party of the first part and the party of the second part and one of them was me but I don’t know which. And it was full of whereases and therefors and wherefors and so forth and Arthur kept interrupting with his silly ideas about changing a whereas to a wherefor or the other way round. Really he’s so petty and it was just terrible.

Similar confusion and frustration happens when she is trying to arrange garbage collection – a saga that I very much enjoyed. Many details of finding, buying, and moving into a new house haven’t really changed in the decades since Resnik this, though I doubt many of us find tens of thousands of dollars becoming suddenly available when we take a closer look at our property portfolios.

I haven’t mentioned any of the other characters, and it’s true that Lucy is the undisputed star, but I also enjoyed her cynical sister and her two teenage sons – one of whom is very excited about the move, and the other keeps trying to put obstacles in the way. And yes, there is a romance element, of course. It’s not the most convincing element, but I was happy to go along for the ride.

Overall, House Happy is a good mix of domestic detail and silliness, and I really enjoyed my time in House Happy. It’s too intentionally absurd in tone to have the sort of mimesis that appears in lots of novels about mid-century housewives and mothers – but it’s something different, and joyful.

Appointment With Venus by Jerrard Tickell

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When I saw that Manderley Press had reprinted Appointment With Venus (1951) by Jerrard Tickell in the beautiful new edition pictured, I decided I had to get my own copy off the shelf. Mine isn’t quite so beautiful (what could be?) but it’s got its own charm – one of those books from the Reprint Society where they covered the dustjacket with quasi-astrological pictures that aren’t very relevant to the plot. You might think it’s to do with the title, but my copy of Guard Your Daughters is the same.

It’s worth noting from the outset that the Venus of the title isn’t the planet, or even the goddess – it’s a cow. Let me explain. The action takes place on Armorel, a fictional addition to the Channel Islands (at one point the others are listed, so it’s not a stand-in). The population is about 300, in a close-knit community with a strong hierarchy. There is a Provost standing in for the Suzerain, the leader of the island who is away at war. Other inhabitants of the island include Lionel Fallaize, an artist who is a conscientious objector, various herdsmen, and others who are excluded from war work for being too young or too old.

(I will get to the cow eventually, promise.)

The island has been occupied by Nazi soldiers – as indeed happened in the Channel Islands. One of the interesting things about Tickell’s novel is how sympathetic it is to the soldiers – not at all to Nazism or to the idea of German victory, but these soldiers are men doing their job and doing what they believe to be right. Things like the Holocaust never come up; this is a question of nationalism alone. (Which is no good thing in my book, but it’s still notable that Tickell could create sympathetic and non-aggressive characters like Captain Weiss as early as 1951.) Even the unnamed German soldiers are not demonised.

The occupation of Armorel was carried out with unusual discretion. The German soldiers arrived without fuss and marched in silence up the hill to the commandeered hotel which was to be their barracks. One detachment went to the lighthouse, another to the telephone exchange. A sentry was posted at the gate of the hotel drive. He was a young man of about twenty, unarmed and smiling. The children gazed at him wide-eyed from behind the hedges, as he leisurely paced up and down in the sunshine. Soon the boldest of them ventured on to the road to stand and stare. The sentry stopped and felt in his pocket, found an apple. He said, still smiling: “You wish an apple?”

The islanders are still resistant to occupation, of course, ‘knowing, with a sense of bewildered resentment, that their beloved island was clasped in a loop of alien steel’. They are polite but clear – they are waiting for Britain to win the war, and will never collaborate with their invaders.

Back on mainland UK, interest turns to a curious quarter – to Venus, the eponymous cow. She is pregnant by Mars, a prize bull who is now deceased, having stepped on a landmine. Both Venus and Mars come from pedigree lineage, and their progeny is widely believed to be the perfect imaginable cow. Captain Weiss was a farmer before he was a soldier and recognises the calf’s worth – and wants to take him back to Germany. And so a plot is launched to sequester Venus and her unborn calf away from Armorel…

I can’t think of a more quintessentially British plot. The pluckiness, the underdog, the eccentricity. It feels like something that might have been an Ealing comedy – and it was indeed made into a film in the same year it was published. I haven’t watched it, but it’s all on YouTube (embedded below).

I absolutely loved Appointment With Venus. Tickell’s clever trick is never making the plot to rescue a cow seem silly. A few characters raise eyebrows, but broadly we are onboard with the priorities of the people doing the rescuing. All the characters are well-drawn and nuanced, and I particularly liked Lionel Fallaize. I’m not sure I needed the romance subplot, but such things are inevitable.

The book is a joyful experience, with enough realism about the experiences of living under Nazi occupation to prevent it feeling saccharine or sentimental. I wholeheartedly recommend that you make acquaintance with Venus and all those who love her.

Maigret’s Revolver by Georges Simenon (Novella a Day in May #25)

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Whenever Karen and I run a club year, there is a Georges Simenon – and every time I comment that I must read something by him. And as I was glancing around my shelves, I spotted that Maigret’s Revolver (1952, translated by Nigel Ryan) is really short – and why not? So I have now read my first Simenon, and finally met Inspector Maigret.

He is straight-forward man, more compassionate than he needs to be but also unlikely to fly into any sort of passion. He drinks an extraordinary amount, and finds the fact that he can’t get whisky in an English hotel before 11.30am absurd. He is determined to solve a mystery, but seem content to achieve that aim with measured and thoughtful steps.

The mystery, in this case, starts with the revolver of the title – a young man is waiting in Maigret’s study, but has gone before Maigret gets home. He discovers that his revolver is missing. The revolver itself was a gift that he has never used, but it is still fully functioning. He quickly learns that a young man matching the description of this mysterious figure (for Maigret’s wife met him, and could describe him a little) has been buying gun cartridges.

Along the way, after some fortunate policework, Maigret is led to the discovery of a body…

I really enjoyed reading this. It has a dry humour that I didn’t know would be there, and Maigret is a more interesting and likeable character than I’d realised. He is not hard-boiled or maverick – he is human and sensible, and engages with fellow professionals. Something I particularly liked in the writing was the treatment of women, who are frequently intelligent and not thrown by the strange circumstances they find themselves in. A lovely contrast to the common figure of detective novels from this era, where women fall apart in hysterics when questioned or when faced with difficult circumstances.

Here, for instance, is part of a questioning with one female character. I think it shows what I liked of Maigret’s dogged patience, and the quick-witted assuredness that Simenon gives women. In this novella, at least. I don’t know how much of an anomaly that is.

“You know your father’s ill?”

“He always has been.”

There was no pity, no emotion in her voice.

“He’s in bed.”

“Very likely.”

“Your brother’s disappeared.”

He saw that she was startled, that this piece of news took her aback more than she was willing to admit.

“That doesn’t surprise you?”

“Nothing surprises me.”

“Because I’ve seen too much. What exactly do you want from me?”

It was difficult to reply point blank to such a straight question, and she calmly took a cigarette from a case and asked:

“Have you a light?”

He lit a match for her.

“I’m waiting.”

“How old are you?”

“I presume it wasn’t just to find out my age that you took all this trouble. According to your badge, you aren’t a plain sergeant, but a Chief-Inspector. In other words, someone important.”

As for the plot itself – it’s a little flimsy as a mystery, but works well as a story. If Maigret’s Revolver is anything to go by, Simenon is more interesting as a novelist of characters than of puzzles. I’m glad I’ve finally read some Simenon, and it certainly won’t be my last. And do let me know if my conclusions based on this single book are wide of the mark or not!

Novella a Day in May: Days 9 and 10

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I will try to keep doing these daily, and I am reading novellas daily, but I had so little to say about Day 9 that I thought I’d better roll these into one…

Day 9: Every Eye (1956) by Isobel English

One of the shortest Persephone books, I’d somehow started and quit this one before. And I thought I’d go back and… well, I can see why I didn’t much bother about it before. It’s about Hatty going away away on honeymoon with a much younger husband, Stephen. That’s the present day plot, but much of it looks back at previous journeys, previous relationships, and particularly her aunt Cynthia and Hatty’s ill-fated relationship with a man called Jasper.

Some people really love this book, but I found the whole thing both confusing and negligible. I often didn’t know which timeline we were in, as it flitted back and half between paragraphs, and there was nothing in it to capture my attention. The writing, in isolation, is precise and rather lovely – but in such a way that I never felt particularly keen to look at sentences out of isolation. As a whole, it felt like a stagnant 119 pages to me.

A Change for the Better - WikipediaDay 10: A Change for the Better (1969) by Susan Hill

I had much more success with today’s novella, which I loved. Hill was still only her mid-20s when she wrote this story of people in a seaside community – and if you are immediately reminded of Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour, then keep that comparison in mind. If Hill’s writing is not quite like Taylor’s, being here a little less piercing and a little more comforting, these characters and stories could easily have been lifted from a Taylor novel.

The canvas is a little less wide, and I think that is to the novel’s advantage – many books that take a small society as their scene end up cramming in too many characters. Here, it is really two households that are focal. One is Deirdre Fount and her mother Mrs Oddicott, who run the draper’s, and Deirdre Fount’s 11-year-old son from her brief marriage. The marriage had been impetuous and ended in a wise divorce, with the absent Fount mentioned as seldom as possible.

Deirdre Fount had never questioned her mother’s view of the whole affair, had been entirely influenced in her behaviour and beliefs by Mrs Oddicott. She found it hard now to separate what actually had happened from what her mother had always predicted would happen, and she could remember no conversations with Aubrey, no relationship, no intimacy, that was not intruded upon by her mother. It was as though, having used men to provide them with a status and offspring, to ward off the shames of spinsterhood, they were ready to discard them and sink back into their closed, female society.

As you can see, they don’t have the healthiest relationship – but Hill gives subtlety to the usual portrait of a domineering mother, because the power shifts back and forth between them. It even passes to the 11 year old. Each needs the others, but also needs freedom, and the uneasy dynamic never stays still.

The other household is an older couple living in a hotel – Major Carpenter and his wife Flora. He is one of the most realistically infuriating characters I’ve ever come across. His life is spent in selfish complaining, but each complaint is phrased in a way that makes Flora seem selfish, thoughtless or hectoring. Throughout the book, but particularly in scenes with these characters, Hill is brilliant at dialogue. It’s impossible to refute what Major Carpenter says, because he uses logic like a weapon. But, oh, he is appalling. But even he is treated with some sympathy – part of his unkind and self-centred nature comes from a terrible fear of illness and death.

Alongside nuanced character portraits, there is plenty that happens in A Change for the Better. Nothing is static, even in lives that don’t feel like they are developing. It all reminded me a little of the ‘well-made play’ – characters neatly doing enough to make a good, solid plot. And I found it absolutely enthralling and wonderful, a perfect balance between event and observation.

The only thing I would add, which could be either criticism or praise depending on your point of view, is that A Change for the Better feels very like a novel by someone who has learned more from reading than from life. I suppose most of us end up learning more from reading, since it encompasses much wider experience – but this feels especially like a novel built from reading many other novels. A few details suggest that it’s set contemporaneously, in the 1960s, but without those I could easily have believed it 1930s or even earlier. All this means that it doesn’t quite have the vividness of lived experience, but that is a quality that I am willing to sacrifice for something as satisfying as A Change for the Better.

Four more #1954Club books I read

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Let’s rattle through some other books I read for the 1954 Club which possibly don’t warrant full reviews… they range from ok to bad, so come on a journey with me.

Doctor’s Children by Josephine Elder

Let’s start with the good-in-parts. This novel was reprinted by Greyladies, who bring back forgotten women writers in very limited print runs, so they sadly become forgotten again almost instantly. It’s both by and about a female doctor – not a new concept in the 1950s, but still not a commonplace, and Barbara (the heroine) faces quite a lot of disparagement and underestimation.

At the outset of the novel, Barbara’s artist husband has deserted her and their four children (aged between 19 and five). She needs income, she needs occupation, and she is trying not to think too much about her disastrous marriage. She manages to get a job as a GP in a job interview that is probably shamefully accurate about recruitment in the 1950s – i.e. she mentions that her uncle is renowned doctor Alderman Fisher, and that is all the panel need to hear to give her a job.

It is very interesting to see life as female doctor at the dawn of the NHS, and the subplot about her husband painting a picture that starts London gossiping is quite fun. Some of Elder’s observations on being a working single mother, and learning to deal with her children growing up and opposing her worldview, are engaging and show how little may have changed in 70 years.

The downsides… it is quite often an unsubtle polemic about aspects of the NHS, particularly about private GP practices being nationalised. A lot of the talk, inexpertly put into dialogue between various figures who exist only to discuss the topic, is focused on what this will be like for the doctors. There isn’t much about the patients’ point of view, or the inhumanity of refusing healthcare to those who can’t pay.

And – well, sadly Elder isn’t a very good writer. It’s not appalling, but it’s quite clunky and unconvincing at times. I never felt like I was reading the words of a gifted novelist, or even an averagely talented one – more that I was reading a doctor playing at being a writer.

 

Dishonoured Bones by John Trench

1954 is an interesting year for Golden Age crime, because the era was on its wane. Three decades had passed since the peak of detective fiction, and yet authors like John Trench seem to have stayed firmly in the mould that had been around for a long time.

This is the middle of three novels featuring archaeologist Martin Cotterill, though I’m not sure I’d have known he was the lead if it weren’t for that. When an old man is found dead at an excavation site, he is quickly identified as Lord Garnish – who, of course, is widely disliked. Murder victims in the early pages of these novels always are.

It’s not long before there’s another victim, and there are all manner of entanglements between local families that give us clues and red herrings along the way. I’ve said that this is in the mould of Golden Age crime, but in truth it oscillates between that and an adventure novel. There is an improbable scene of falling from a cliff and almost drowning, some rather silly chasing around subterranean darkness, and that sort of thing.

The eventual solution is ok, and could equally well have been almost anything else. Trench is good at drawing the more ridiculous characters, and there is one gossipy and flamboyant side character that I enjoyed and who got most of the best lines – but ultimately it was all rather flimsy. But good fun, as long as you know what you’re going in for.

 

The Cretan Counterfeit by Katharine Farrer

Somehow another one about archaeology! And, like Dishonoured Bones, it’s apparently the middle of three novels featuring the same detective – actually a legitimate policeman – Richard Ringwood, whose wife Claire pops up a bit and presumably plays a bigger role in other Farrer novels? Anyway, one morning they are reading the paper and see a very snarky obituary about an archaeologist, Alban Worrall, who has died. It is anonymous, but seems to be from a disgruntled colleague. The next day, a defence is written in the letter column by Janet, an unmarried woman who clearly admired him unrequitedly. And then she is attacked with a knife and left for dead.

There are some things to enjoy in this novel. The writing is fair, and I enjoyed the dynamic of Richard and Claire (albeit briefly). But overall it was difficult to care what happened, not to mention heavy doses of racism, antisemitism, and sexism. And Farrer either knows a lot about Cretan archaeological finds or went and did some research, and isn’t afraid to dump it on the page. I think any detective novel should rely on knowledge that any reader could be expected to have – it’s so much more irritating when all sorts of other knowledge is needed, or introduced in an expositionary way. There were a few Poirot-esque red herrings in the final gather-round-so-I-can-tell-you-who-did-it, though the answer is pretty offensive. One to miss. But not as bad as the last of these four…

 

Beside the Pearly Water by Stella Gibbons

We all know that, at her best, Stella Gibbons is wonderful. There’s a reason that nobody has reprinted Beside the Pearly Water, which is Gibbons at her absolute worst. It’s actually only the first 83 pages of this book, the rest filled with short stories of varying merit.

Throughout her writing, Gibbons is brilliant at oddballs and unlikely housing situations. She is very bad at romances, and also indefatigable at including them. In Beside the Pearly Water, the famous and beautiful Julia Lanier pays a visit to a remote part of the Scottish Highlands. She went there many years earlier, and there is a young woman (a girl, on Julia’s previous visit) who has held a grudge ever since. She devises a romance between Julia and a local man with a secret…

Somehow the two fall in love instantly, and we are meant to believe that they plan to spend the rest of their lives together on the basis of a half hour conversation. The final denouement is absurd and bad – and though tied to a 1950s concern, that I won’t spoil, is so histrionic that it a schoolgirl would be embarrassed to plot it. Gibbons really dropped the ball on this one.

The stories are a mixture of strong and weak. I think the best was ‘Listen to the magnolias’, about a nervous older lady waiting the arrival of various American soldiers who are being stationed in her house. (I am a bit confused if the fact they all turn out to be African-American is meant to be a twist or not… hopefully this story isn’t racist.) It’s thoughtfully and movingly described, and I felt like I was in her house as she waited.

The oddest opening to a story is ‘Madonna of the Crossings’, with “In the early summer of that year, the figures for road accidents soared, as usual, and as usual very many of those hurt or killed were young children.” There’s an attempt at a story in historical dialect that I skipped. And others are fine… but the aftertaste of Beside the Pearly Water lingered.

 

The Native Heath by Elizabeth Fair – #1954Club

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My friend Barbara bought me a whole pile of Furrowed Middlebrow books a while ago, and one of them was The Native Heath by Elizabeth Fair – my third novel by Fair, and one with the most beautiful cover. I am assuming it is from the original edition, because otherwise it is unbelievably apt for one of the opening scenes: two busybody ladies in the village of Goatstock are peering through the railings at a house that has just been inherited by Julia. One of them gets caught in the railings, presumably moments after this illustration.

Julia Dunstan is a widow in middle age, or a little later, who is relatively merry and pretty well off. She reminded me a bit of Julia in Margery Sharp’s The Nutmeg Tree, though several notches less exuberant. She has the same witty outlook on life, unbowed by the various difficulties she has faced. As the novel opens – before the railings incident – she is talking with her old nanny about some childhood memory of the house she has inherited.

But this explanation conflicted with Nanny’s memories, which were sometimes tactlessly different from Julia’s. She laid the stocking down and gave her employer what she called ‘a straight look’. This preliminary, and the little grunt that accompanied it, warned Julia that they were about to begin an argument; and although she did not doubt that she would triumph (Nanny was so old and her memory was not what it had been) she did not wish to be in the middle of an argument when Dora arrived. Arguments took time, and also a lot of tact and sympathy and loving remarks so that she and Nanny should finish up good friends. It wasn’t – it simply could not be – the right moment for starting one.

You get the measure of Julia! Dora is her cousin, less merry, who moves in as her companion. They were both nieces of the man who left the house to Julia, and there is no obvious reason why she has been left as the sole beneficiary. It is partly guilt, partly kindness and, one assumes, partly curiosity that leads Julia to invite Dora into her new adventure in Goatstock.

I would happily have read a whole novel about the dynamics between Julia and Dora. But that isn’t really what The Native Heath is – Elizabeth Fair likes giving a wide cast of villagers, and she doesn’t stint here. I got a bit confused between a few of the older ladies, but there is also some young people and some in between. A down-on-her-luck Lady with an interest in organic food. A love triangle of sorts, including a young woman engaged to a missionary in a far-flung country. A vicar and his sister, who fears that he will marry and she will have to leave their home. A village produce and flower show. Etc. etc. Over it all hangs the threat – very 1950s – that the village will become a New Town, absorbed into a mass building project.

Because there is so much going on, each element taking centre stage for a period, your enjoyment of any particular section of the novel will depend on how invested you are in that story or person. The structure ended up feeling quite episodic. I really enjoyed an unsuccessful picnic, which was where Fair went to town with humour and character assassination. There were other sections that I found less interesting, and I think The Native Heath would have benefited from a ruthless cutting down to a smaller group of people and storylines.

I still really enjoyed spending my time there, but I think there was an even better, more incisive and interesting novel hidden within the crowds of people and plots. Still, for something perhaps more Miss Read than Margery Sharp, this is a delightful 1954 book to spend some relaxing time with.