1955

The Oracles by Margaret Kennedy

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It’s not often that I buy a book and read it straightaway, but I was so intrigued by The Oracles (1955) by Margaret Kennedy when I picked it up in Chipping Camden last weekend that I immediately started it.

Everybody has been reading The Feast in the past couple of years, and I enjoyed it a lot – but had to add it to the list of Kennedy novels that haven’t quite bowled me over. I’ve read four or five of her novels – I’ve liked some, admired some, disliked some, even given up on one. But I’ve finally loved one: The Oracles is my favourite of hers by some distance.

Also published as Act of God in the US, the cover of my edition tells you how the novel starts. We are instantly flung into a vicious thunderstorm:

The thunderstorm frightened a great many people in East Head. It came after a phenomenal heatwave, and it reached the Bristol Channel upon a Saturday night.

During the afternoon it had rumbled a long way off, to the north-east, over the Welsh coast. At ten o’clock the thunder-claps were coming fast upon the heels of the flashes. An hour later it was described by everybody as right overhead, although this hardly did justice to its menace. Had it remained vertical it would at least have kept to its own place; it became horizontal, a continuous glare, punctuated by short sharp cracks. It no longer descended from the sky, but sprang out of the earth – sizzling along the roads and blazing through drawn window curtains.

Little does East Head know the far-reaching effects this storm will have… more on that in a moment. East Head is a small village that is ordinary in almost every respect. The one thing that sets it apart is the presence of Conrad Swann, the noted sculptor. His name looms large in avant-garde circles and he is widely revered by a sizeable group of acolytes, all of whom long to be close to him but who receive minimal encouragement in return.

Swann is better as a sculptor than a husband or father. He is living in East Head with a woman who is not his wife (who is, in fact, the wife of his best friend) – though this scandal is no longer new, and the villagers don’t much care anymore. This is 1955, after all, not 1925. He has a sizeable brood of children and his mistress has brought a couple with her too – all the children are left alone to live more or less wild, looking after one another and playing out elaborate fantasies in their back garden. There is little money to spare, and neither the villagers nor the acolytes want anything much to do with them – but they are self-sufficient. Which is just as well, because Swann has absconded.

Conrad Swann has been working on a new sculpture – all anybody knows is that it is called Apollo. There is a group of local intellectuals who want to put their village (and themselves) on the map, and they want to secure the sculpture with local public funds. Other intellectuals think it should be taken to a more prestigious place. And most of the villagers are contentedly mystified by it, and anticipate being mystified by anything Swann produces.

What only the reader – and one of the young Swann siblings – realises is that ‘Apollo’, discovered in the shed, is not the sculpture Swann was working on. What is taken for ‘Apollo’ is actually… a garden chair that was struck by lightning in the storm. It has been melted and bent out of shape. And – deliciously – the intellectuals think it’s a wonderful piece.

“Mr. Pattison!” said Martha solemnly. “Here is a work of complete integrity. It makes no compromise, no concession, to what the public may demand, or think that it likes. To state his secret, private vision is all that concerns Conrad. Can’t you understand?”

“That,” put in Carter, “is something which you can’t expect anybody to understand but us, Martha. The artists are the only honest people.”

Margaret Kennedy has great fun throughout the novel in poking fun at this sort of person – but The Oracles is much more than a satire of artistic elitism. I’ve not mentioned them yet, but the real central characters are Dickie and Christina. They have only been married for a couple of years, but is evident that both of them think it was probably a mistake. He is a solicitor regarded as ‘bumpkin’ by the oracles and considered too clever by half by some of the villagers. He has an honest, unpretentious interest in Swann’s work and is keen to learn more – and, brilliantly, he doesn’t fall for the hype: he even reads several books on Apollo to try and see a connection between the chair/sculpture and the god, without success.

This pursuit of art makes Christina feel alienated and judged, though. He makes the mistake of suggesting she could be ‘provincial’, and this unintentional barb echoes throughout the rest of the novel – Kennedy expertly shows us how someone can return time and again to a word that cuts them to the quick, and Christina retaliates with increasing unkindness. Ironically, Dickie is quite provincial himself much of the time, and doesn’t seem to mind. It is a marriage of unequals in many ways, and it comes to a head over a seemingly unrelated question of art.

Kennedy’s talent is to make both Christina and Dickie quite sympathetic – certainly moreso than any of the other adults in the novel. Dickie is driven by a genuine wish to learn, and Christina has an intense compassion for others, particularly children. They are seeing the worst in each other, but the reader can see the best in them. Here’s Kennedy on the aftermath of one of their feuds, caused by Dickie getting embarrassingly drunk at an event:

He could not, in any case, have told her much, because he remembered very little. He was desperately ashamed of himself. He had been drunk before, once or twice in his life, but only upon excusable occasions and never since his marriage. It shocked him deeply to think that his wife should have been obliged to put him to bed – that he had left her all alone and frightened for hours while he made a beast of himself. She had, he felt, every right to be furious and he was most anxious to apologise, if allowed an opportunity. He got none. She would not even permit him to say that his conduct had been bestial. Not at all. If he must know what she thought when she found him lying on the mat, he had better understand that a man in such a condition is generally rather pathetic. No, she was not angry. She was sorry for him. He need say no more about it.

Free and full forgiveness is the good woman’s most formidable weapon. Nothing makes a man feel smaller; yet few husbands have the brutality, or the strength of mind, to reject it. Christina was aware of its essential unfairness, but she was really very angry.

The Oracles is a very funny book but it’s a book with a lot of heart to it. Towards the end, as we see more of Swann himself, it feels little less heart-filled – but I still really fell for it. The ingredients I’d enjoyed in different Kennedy novels come together here in the perfect recipe – for me, at least. I’m aware that I probably think it’s Kennedy’s best work (that I’ve read) because it is the one that is closest to my taste. If it sounds like it could be closest to yours too, then I recommend seeking it out.

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.

Ludmilla by Paul Gallico – #NovNov Day 18

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Earlier in the month I read The Lonely by Paul Gallico, and today I read the other half of the book I have it in – Ludmilla, originally published in 1955. It was printed as a separate book initially, but it is only about 50 pages – including drawings by Reisie Lonette.

For those who’ve read Gallico’s Small Miracle, it is quite similar. Set in Liechtenstein, it’s about a festival where cows are paraded with ribbons etc, and the cow at the front is the most celebrated one of the year. The Weakling cow covets the prized position, though barely produces any milk and is lean and unimpressive. But a prayer to St Ludmilla might just sort things out…

You who believe that animals are dumb and incapable of reason or emotions similar to those experience by humans will of course continue to do so. I ask you only to think of the yearning and heartache that is the lot of the poor and not-so-favoured woman, as she stares through the glass of the shop window at a gay Easter hat, a particularly fetching frock, the sheerest of stockings, or a pair of shoes with little bows that seem to dance all by themselves; lovable articles, desirable articles, magic articles out of her reach since she can neither buy them, nor earn them as a gift, yet things that she knows would transform her in a moment from someone drab and unnoticed, into a sparkling queen, a ravishing beauty that would draw all eyes to her. Or, if not all eyes, then at least a few, and if not a few, then just one pair of eyes, and in the end, the only pair that mattered. Are you a book editor? Find your job on Jooble.

Ludmilla is very slight, but has its charm. The cow is rather a lovely character. It is a curious choice to pair it with The Lonely, because they have nothing in common (except for Gallico’s not-entirely-enlightened perspective on the role and motivations of women). Gallico can be fey or dark or both, and this one couldn’t be feyer if it tried. Fun, if minor.

For All We Know by G.B. Stern

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What a curious novel, which has left rather an impression on me, even though I find it a little complex to untangle. I bought For All We Know [1955] in 2011, based on having enjoyed her books on Jane Austen that she co-wrote with Sheila Kaye-Smith. She’s also one of those names you see a lot if you’re interested in women writers in the early/mid twentieth century – and years ago I did read her novel Ten Days of Christmas. But somehow it still felt like I was a Stern fiction newbie. Do Christmas novels feel substantially different? Like you haven’t really heard a singer if you’ve only listened to their Christmas album?

Anyway, I decided to see what was going on with For All We Know – the sort of title that isn’t really giving anything away. What I think of as an Alan Ayckbourn-esque title – trips off the tongue and doesn’t really mean anything.

I was daunted by a family tree in the opening pages. For me, a family tree in a book is a tacit way of admitting that they haven’t done a good job delineating characters. But onwards – the first section, of five, is a family group discussing Gillian’s recent biography of the whole dynasty. She has been working on it for years, and it has been a total critical and commercial flop. Gillian is a biographer of some note, and the family is well known in theatrical circles, so why has it not been a success? Well, because Gillian has ignored the noted Bettina, and devoted significant sections to Bettina’s son Rendal, who is of no public note.

This family gathering and sotto voce discussions over, we jump back a few decades – to an infant Gillian, encountering Bettina’s side of the family for the first time. Bettina is Gillian’s grandfather’s sister’s daughter, whatever that translates into in terms of cousins and removes. That side of the family has a whole range of siblings and cousins and whatnot, and you quickly work out why the family tree is needed. All you need to know is that Gillian’s grandfather is the head of the side of the family that isn’t famous, and Bettina’s mother is the head of the side that is.

It was Timothy, her cousin, who had casually referred to Gillian’s grandfather and her Uncle Conrad as the ‘failure branch’ of the family tree. Dear, dear Timothy! Happily able to say even worse than that, not to tease nor to be cruel but because he could not for the life of him see why she need mind, as it was true. Timothy had a thick blank spot, and though only twelve years old when he came forth with this chubby definition of Gillian’s immediate family as compared with his own, indisputably the ‘celebrity branch’, he would be just as capable of saying it to-day when he was sixteen, because the thick blank spot had not grown more delicately assailable and nor had he; just one of those get-away-with-murder-boys, every year handsomer, and brilliant at everything he undertook.

Gillian is a few years younger, and in awe of this daunting family – though also enamoured by them, and desperate for them to show her attention and affection. The strength of For All We Know is the Stern’s understanding of the power of embarrassing or upsetting moments. She is so good at children and the way they feel so strongly in the moment. There are a couple of incidents where young Gillian feels she is being laughed at by the family – and, even more powerfully, one moment of triumph that is later forgotten by the people she thought she’d impressed. In a biography, these moments wouldn’t even warrant a footnote – but in Gillian’s young mind, they are seismic. She decides that she will one day write the biography of the family, and begins to fill notebooks with observations and eavesdroppings.

The novel has a further three parts, jumping forward in time, seeing how Gillian’s life becomes more embroiled with the family. Timothy fulfils his early promise and becomes a big-name actor in Hollywood; Rendal has fulfilled the prediction that he will have a much less illustrious career. Gillian has grown in confidence, though still clearly in awe of what Bettina thinks, and capable of strong emotional reactions.

One of the interesting things about For All We Know is that, jumping in stages through this family’s history, Stern doesn’t land in the most significant places. We hear about marriages that have happened between sections, and of moments of success and fame. The chapters of narrative seem almost random, in terms of a timeline, but perhaps they are the places of biggest emotional impact – not the places that Gillian’s biography would highlight. Stern is more interested in the ways that relationships within the family change. And particularly between Gillian and Bettina. There is no big surprise twist or gotcha moment – I did wonder if Bettina would turn out to be Gillian’s mother or something, but there’s nothing like that. But there are times when their relationship shifts dramatically – largely because what they want and expect from it is so different.

Getting to the end of For All We Know, I was left with a really strong impression of the emotional weight of the narrative – and, yes, slightly disconcerted by the curious structure and the events that aren’t covered. I can see why Stern chose to pick the moments she did – and yet I feel a bit like Gillian in the early chapters. That I’ve been watching a family from the outside, not quite privy to their most significant memories. I like a novel to leave me thinking, and I’m not quite sure yet whether I’ll remember this novel as a brilliant success or as something a little off-kilter. Or perhaps both?

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore

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I don’t remember who originally told me about The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) by Brian Moore, but that recommendation was enough for me to buy it in 2012. A few people read it for the 1955 Club a little while ago, and I’d read so many positive reviews that I finally read it. Yes, it’s rather brilliant! (By the way, I’ve included a copy of the NYRB Classics edition because it’s beautiful; mine was a film tie-in, with Maggie Smith on the cover, and it was made me want to seek out the film…)

Here are the first couple of paragraphs, to whet your appetite:

The first thing Miss Judith Hearne unpacked in her new lodgings was the silver-framed photograph of her aunt. The place for her aunt, ever since the sad day of the funeral, was on the mantelpiece of whatever bed-sitting-room Miss Hearne happened to be living in. And as she put her up now, the photograph eyes were stern and questioning, sharing Miss Hearne’s own misgivings about the condition of the bed-springs, the shabbiness of the furniture and the run-down part of Belfast in which the room was situated.

After she had arranged the photograph so that her dear aunt could look at her from the exact centre of the mantelpiece, Miss Hearne unwrapped the white tissue paper which covered the coloured oleograph of the Sacred Heart. His place was at the head of the bed, His fingers raised in benediction. His eyes kindly yet accusing. He was old and the painted halo around His head was beginning to show little cracks. He had looked down on Miss Hearne for a long time, almost half her lifetime.

Judith Hearne is settling into a boarding house, uncertain about how she will be perceived and how she will fit in. These two pictures sum up her life – a devoted Catholic faith, and a longing for any sort of family. But she has her pride, and – on a quest for a hammer, to put in a nail for her oleograph – she is reluctant to jump straight into a friendship with her talkative landlady and the landlady’s overgrown, ugly adult son. But she is rather taken by the landlady’s brother, James Madden – an Irishman who has recently returned from many decades in the US, possibly returning wealthy.

The other friendships she has outside the house are with Moira and her various children – all of whom mock her behind her back, and see the weekly cup of tea as a chore that they can take in turns. These scenes encapsulate what Moore does so very well – showing us the pain that comes not only from Judith Hearne’s loneliness but from her self-awareness. She knows that the family are tired of her, and she notices when they exchange glances at her comments. With James Madden, she has immediate, desperate visions of them falling in love and marrying – but she is no fantasist. She knows her visions are fake, and can’t happen. There is no escape for her in fantasy.

I’ll read more or less anything set in a boarding house, and Moore is brilliant at the enclosure of it – the proximity of strangers and the factions that develop between them. This proximity is even the reason for a rape scene that is very troubling, and I don’t think would be written in quite the same way today – it is written as a terrible crime, but there is little aftermath.

What Moore is best at is developing the portrait of Judith Hearne – her desperation, her melancholy, her stupidity, her hopes and the ways in which she protects them from the eyes of others. Her crisis of faith is dealt with sensitively and without the sneer of the cynic. She is a complete and miserable character, whose life could have been far more complete – but who, one suspects, would always have managed to spoil things, or to let the fly in the ointment overwhelm and destroy her. It is impossible not to feel for her; it is impossible not to realise that she is her own worst enemy.

All this Moore achieves through superlative writing. It reminded me a lot of Patrick Hamilton in its vitality, though perhaps without the dry wit – here is more the humour of hysteria, albeit subdued hysteria. I’m so glad I finally read it – and I hope his other novels are as good.

Onions in the Stew by Betty MacDonald

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The final of the Betty MacDonald audiobooks from Post-Hypnotic Press is 1955’s Onions in the Stew – the fourth of her four autobiographical books. And it’s just as enjoyable as the others, even if Anybody Can Do Anything remains my favourite of the series.

No chicken farms or TB wards in this one – rather, it documents MacDonald moving to Vashon Island with her new husband, Donald MacDonald. As always (always!) MacDonald meanders around vagaries connected with the topic before getting into the topic proper – but ultimately they decide that they can’t live in Seattle or the surrounding suburbs, but could make a home for themselves on one of the islands,

MacDonald does seem to make a rod for her own back. She describes her difficulties and obstacles extremely amusingly, but moving to an island that is often inaccessible, and to a house that doesn’t have a road leading to it, is hardly conducive to ease.

As in all the other books, MacDonald encounters any number of odd characters. There is a feeling of unity on the island, but the odd fly in the ointment – such as the woman who palms off her (many) children on anybody who’ll house and feed them, then makes out later that she has been horribly offended and abused by said person. In MacDonald’s writing, though, the incident is funny rather than traumatic – with just that dark edge to it to set it off. The most appalling character seems to be her angry and bellicose dog Tudor.

MacDonald does self-deprecation so well. It’s so fun, for instance, to read about her family’s attempts to manoeuvre a washing machine by boat. Her daughters make a proper appearance here, having been mysteriously absent from her previous memoir, and join in the family’s amiability and ineptitude.

As for Vashon Island – I was rather surprised to learn, from Wikipedia, that the population is over 10,000. I don’t know what it was in the mid-century, but I rather got the impression from the book that it was a few hundred. I suppose 10,000 is still a smallish place, but I live in a village of about 150 people, so everything’s relative.

I’m sad to have got to the end of MacDonald’s oeuvre, and enjoyed hearing Heather Henderson narrate them so well. But I do have all the books on my shelves, so next time around I can read them the old-fashioned way.

H.G. Wells and His Family by M. M. Meyer

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As I’ve probably said before, I love books about authors from a unique perspective. All the famous ones have biographies written about them, of course, and I daresay there are several authoritative and scholarly biographies of H.G. Wells that I could have bought – but I’m rather more intrigued by the personal angle. Show me a book that only one person could have written, and I’ll run towards it. My favourite is probably the book about Ivy Compton-Burnett written by her secretary (Cecily Grieg or Cicely Greig or some variant on that – one day I’ll learn which), but I would also recommend H.G. Wells and His Family (1955) to any Wells enthusiasts.

 

Who was M.M. Meyer? Well, she was the governess to Wells’ children. Her experiences looking after the two boys form the mainstay of this book – even if we first hear of them as ‘Professor G.P. Wells and Mr F.R. Wells’ in her introduction, with a touching pride in their achievements and maturity. As the first paragraph states, though:

Some of the most cherished memories of my long career as a Swiss governess in England take me back to the four and three-quarter years that I spent in the literary household of Mr. and Mrs. H.G. Wells – first t Spade House, Sandgate, then at No. 17 Church Row, Hampstead, and finally at Easton Glebe, near Dunmow, Essex.

As this paragraph might suggest, Meyer isn’t the most sparkling prose stylist in the world. The memoir is quite prosaic in form, relating incidents one after the other, but it is the tone of happy nostalgia – as well as Meyer’s unique placement to observe these moments – that make the book so enjoyable. Whether it’s the family playing a variant of consequences (‘consequences’ is called ‘exquisite corpses’ in American English, I believe? Or was? I read the entirety of Exquisite Corpse by Alfred Chester without knowing that, and it was baffling), or the only time Wells shouted at her, these are stories that nobody else could relate first-hand – and a biographer would flatten, losing the moving enthusiasm that Meyer clearly has about every aspect of the family. She even includes pictures of their consequences and other doodles, having preserved them for years.

What did I know about Wells before I opened up this book? Well, besides a relatively small percentage of his books (sidenote: I bought The Bulpington of Blup by him recently; who knew THAT existed?) and the fact that he was A.A. Milne’s maths teacher, it was mostly his adultery. His serial womanising seems to be the keynote of his personal life in biographers’ eyes. It’s refreshing that Meyer doesn’t mention it – possibly it was not widely known in 1955, but you get the impression that she wouldn’t have talked about it either way. But it does make the reader smile a little guiltily over notes like this, which appears in a section she writes as a diary:

September 27th. Miss Rebecca West arrived to-day. She looks about twenty-two years of age, and is very vivacious. She writes in the Freewoman, and has just reviewed Mr. Wells’s new novel Marriage.

This book is doubtless only a footnote in a literary or biographical analysis of H. G. Wells – but how enjoyable it was. If anybody has any other recommendations for this sort of book – notable authors as known by their friends, employees, or acquaintances – then please do let me know!

3 little links…

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Here are three things I’ve written in other places this week… fill your boots!

1.) I reviewed Aldous Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess at Vulpes Libris.

2.) 5 things you didn’t know about Mrs Dalloway over at OUP Academic Tumblr (although, spoilers, I think some of you definitely will know these)

3.) My favourite: 12 nouns that are always plural. The most geeky English language thing I’ve ever written AND the most cat-themed thing I’ve ever written. *drops mic*

Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis

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Who first told me about Auntie Mame (1955)? A quick search through blog comments suggests that Vicki from Bibliolathas recommended her when I wrote about Abbie by Dane Chandos, but I already owned the book before that, so… who knows? Anyway, many thanks to whoever it was. Some years later, I took it off to America with me, and finished it on the ‘plane on the way back.

Auntie Mame

The narrator, like the author, is called Patrick Dennis – but it’s not entirely clear how autobiographical this novel is (indeed, it is the matter of much debate in the afterword by Matteo Codignola in the Penguin edition I have). It’s not even clear if it’s a novel or a series of short stories (more on that in the afterword too) – but what is clear is that Auntie Mame features the larger-than-life lady in question and her nephew going through various escapades over the course of many years.

We meet Mame when she takes in the young, recently orphaned, Patrick, against the better judgement of the staid Mr Babcock, who looks after Patrick’s finances. She is dressed in Japanese garb (she is always in garb of some variety; later she wishes to be thought Spaniard), hosting a party, and ushers impressionable Patrick into her socialite lifestyle. She is keen to educate him…

“My dear, a rich vocabulary is the true hallmark of every intellectual person. How now” – she burrowed into the mess on her bedside table and brought forth another pad and pencil – “every time I say a word, or you hear a word, that you don’t understand, you write it down and I’ll tell you what it means. Then you memorize it and soon you’ll have a decent vocabulary. Oh, the adventure,” she cried ecstatically, “of moulding a little new life!” She made another sweeping gesture that somehow went wrong because she knocked over the coffee pot and I immediately wrote down six new words which Auntie Mame said to scratch out and forget about.

You get a feel for the sort of thing. Mame is an irrepressible delight, and – as the novel progresses – we see Patrick both fond of and embarrassed by her. She gatecrashes his college ball; she looks after swathes of unpleasant evacuees; she becomes the unlikely nemesis of the horse-riding set. In one memorable episode, she launches into an anti-anti-Semitic tirade (an entirely admirable one – albeit one which changes the tone of the book quite suddenly). Each event is neatly tied up and self-contained, without any characters really changing – except in age and marital situation.

Each chapter also begins with the narrator-Patrick comparing Auntie Mame to the ‘Unforgettable Character’ of some hagoigraphic newspaper article. Every trait exemplified by this worthy woman is mirrored also, it seems, by Auntie Mame – mostly in an exaggerated and individual manner. This device for linking together unrelated stories isn’t, to my mind, entirely successful; although the afterword praises it for surmounting the difficulties of disparate tales, I think it just felt a bit forced and fake. It didn’t stop me enjoying Auntie Mame, but I’ve had enjoyed the book more without this touch.

But I still really liked Auntie Mame. Any novel about an eccentric spinster is likely to get a thumbs up from me. Perhaps she hasn’t joined Abbie and Miss Hargreaves and Patricia Brent (if one can really use the term ‘spinster’ about her) on the top tier, but it was a jolly fun read nonetheless.

Oh, and while I remember – I’ve figured out how to add those ‘like’ buttons to the bottom of posts! Of course, a comment is always best, but I thought it couldn’t hurt.

 

A review round-up

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As with 2012’s Century of Books, there are some books which – for one reason or another – don’t get their own blog post, but I still need somewhere to link to in my run-through of 100 books.  So… here is that place!  Or at least the first part of it.  Let’s call them mini-reviews; that sounds better.

The Perfect Stranger (1966) by P.J. Kavanagh
A friend lent me this; it is a memoir of a young man’s life – at Oxford, at war, and in love.  I certainly liked it, and it was rather moving, but that’s about all I remember now.

The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie
I think my Reader’s Block is FINALLY over, and that means my Agatha Christie binge has probably come to an end too.  Whenever I read too many in a row, the plots have to be really good to impress me, and – well – I just read too many, I guess.  So I liked The Sittaford Mystery and I think it was probably quite artful, but I didn’t appreciate it as much as I could have done.  I did very much like the feisty, no-nonsense, secretly-sensitive heroine who took on the role of quasi-detective.  I think her name was Emily?

Inclinations (1916) by Ronald Firbank
Mike Walmer kindly sent me a copy of this, but I’m afraid I didn’t have a clue what was going on while I read it.  I love some books which are mostly in dialogue (I call Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett to the stand) but this one just baffled me.  Luckily Karen/Kaggsy enjoyed it more – read her review for more elucidation.

Riding Lights (1955) by Norman MacCaig
Green Song and other poems (1944) by Edith Sitwell
Every now and then I think I should try poetry. I don’t remember anything at all about these.