1958

The Visitors by Mary McMinnies

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On 13 May 2018, Barb at the wonderful Leaves and Pages blog wrote about The Visitors (1958) by Mary McMinnies. According to the note I’ve made inside my copy, it arrived at my flat on 18 May 2018. If you go and read her original review, you’ll know why I had to snap it up instantly. ’10-carat diamond quality, people, 24-carat gold. This is very good stuff indeed,’ she wrote.

So, why did it take me six years to actually read the book? Upon opening it, I saw that it was 574 pages of miniscule font. I calculate that it’s about 275,000 words. And I was too nervous to dive into it.

But, after doing a novella a day in May, I was ready for something mammoth. It took me about six weeks to finish it (while reading lots of other things simultaneously, of course) – but what an experience it was. I so seldom enter this fully, exhaustively into a world.

What is that world? The city and country names are made up, but it is a thinly disguised Krakow, Poland. Larry Purdoe works for the British Foreign Office and has been stationed there – bringing with him the main character of the novel, his wife Milly. Also with them are two squabbling young children and their harassed, anxious, spiteful nanny, Miss Raven. They enter a world filled with rules that aren’t quite explained to them, wielding power from representing a powerful nation, but ultimately rather at sea.

There was one other hotel in the town, with many more rooms, although not so luxurious, but if a foreigner chance to go there first instead of to the Grand, he would invairably be told that all the rooms were occupied and be directed to the Grand, because the Grand was the foreigners’ hotel. Thus matters were simplified for everyone concerned.

Milly put on her nicest tweeds, her thinnest stockings and a new hat and penetrated the labyrinth of rooms. Eventually she stumbled upon Miss Raven buttoning Dermot into gaiters.

“How’s everything going, Miss Raven? All right?”

Miss Raven, who eschewed optimism on principle, and in particular the brand indulged in by employers, did not feel bound to make any such fatuous admission. All she said was: “I’m taking them out.”

Milly is the kind of character so richly complex that it is almost impossible to describe her. On the one hand, she is superficial and greedy. She gets over her head in the black market, so she can buy astoundingly expensive porcelain while people around her are starving. She is charmed and dizzied by the circles she’s in, particularly the Americans. But she is also headstrong – ruling the household, including her husband, and much more socially purposeful than he is. She befriends the impoverished Countess Sophie and snubs a taxi driver; she despises people a couple of rungs below her on the class ladder, but is drawn to a fraught friendship with her kind, impulsive maid, Gisela.

One of my fears, in opening such a long book, is that there would be thousands of characters. In fact, I’ve mentioned almost all the principle people already. I loved that McMinnies poured out all the detail and description over a small cast. We got to know them with such depth. Hardly anything of significance happens – there is an ominous mushroom-picking trip, a run-in with some dangerous types which could turn nasty, and a very funny dinner party. But mostly it is just the day-to-day life of a foreign official’s wife, not really fitting in with either the ex-pat community or the people from ‘Slavonia’ aka Poland. It is layered, layer upon layer, filling those hundreds of pages.

I’m not sure I agree with either of the assessments from the two reviews online – Barb says ‘I dove into it every chance I had, five minutes here, ten minutes there, not wanting to miss a sentence. It was positively addictive.’ Brad’s verdict, at Neglected Books, on the other hand: “It manages to be, at the same time, both highly realistic–indeed, drearily, tediously, relentlessly realistic at times, the kind of realism that’s so convincing that it can feel like the writer is holding your head under water and you want to struggle to break free–and utterly artificial.” I don’t think The Visitors is at all a page-turner – it was a novel to langour in, slowly over many days. And I can see why Brad says it is ‘drearily, tediously, relentlessly realistic’, but I found it simply deserved a different kind of reading. It couldn’t be rushed. You couldn’t expect something of note to happen on every page, or even in every chapter. It needs to be leapt into, wallowed in, enjoyed on its own utterly un-abbreviated terms.

Tonally, the novel is varied and rich. There is a slightly ironic detachment to much of the description, recognising that Milly is a little absurd – but not absurd enough to truly mock. Some of the novel is rather amusing – I noted down this exchange between Milly and her young daughter, Clarissa:

“There’s something I want to ask.”

Milly softened. “Go ahead.”

“Well, what I was wondering… you’re past your first youth, aren’t you? So–“

“Just say that again?”

“What? Oh… it’s all here… wait, I’ll read it… ‘She was a woman past her first youth, say twenty-six or -seven years old but still comely…’ So what I was wondering was–“

“What book is that?” said Milly weakly. “You know, you read so much.”

“It’s one Abe lent me… and he says I can’t read too much. I haven’t got into it yet. In fact I’ve only got to the first page.”

“Quite far enough, I should say.”

Occasionally, McMinnies will get more serious and even philosophical. There is a section where the narrator berates Milly for failing to identify happiness when she finds it – constantly searching and yearning for it, but not acknowledging it or expecting it in the right places.

And then there were some sections that felt quite experimental – taking advantage of the lazy slowness of the writing to explore details that would be summarised in a handful of words in other novels. Larry hates to see women cry. Those six simple words are transformed into this curiously beautiful passage, mostly one long sentence. It is redundant, in story terms, but it is somehow glorious for that.

He hated tears; all tears, no matter who shed them, he hated them in every way, shape, or form. He hated them in prospect, the quivering lip, the sighs, the twisted handkerchief, the slow welling up; je hated the aftermath, the blotches and hiccups and shininess; he hated them near at hand, snuffled into one’s own clean handkerchief or damping one’s shoulder, he hated them at a distance on the cinema screen. He hated the threat of them, the secret weapon concealed about each female person to be employed at the least hint of an attack; he hated them for the efficacy with which in seconds they could reduce him or any man to the rank of bastard, and whilst hating himself for the bastard he indubitably was, he hated the tears that washed it home to him far more. He hated them as the outward and visible signs of self-pity, as the preface to chapters of remorse which must be ploughed through, which they would freely punctuate before an evening night might be considered well and truly spent. Most particularly he hated those tears whose purpose was to provide ‘relief’; through a vale of tears one would be frog-marched beside her, the weeper, still humbly wishing to do her a service, acknowledging oneself to blame – whilst ‘something in the oven’ burnt to a cinder or one’s own passion grew cold – and when one was permitted to clamber up the other side, panting, when the river of woe had run dry, she, the Niobe, the source of it all, would park up and say brightly: “Now I could do with a sandwich” – or – “You know I’m always this way about this time…” Tears of rage, of fatigue, frustration, petulance, jealousy, boredom; tears for the act of love (shed, at least, after it), tears to accompany weltschmerz, at the sight of the moon, say, or as an agreeably salty appetiser to a re-hash of old letters; tears with a thousnad uses, as a threat, an excuse, an outlet, useful in prevarication, provocation, useful all around the clock – God, even in dreams! – buckets and buckets of crocodile tears. How he hated them. But he had never in his life seen any quite like these.

I’ve not had many experiences like reading The Visitors. Perhaps the closest reading experience was L.P. Hartley’s The Boat. I think it’ll stay with me a long time, as there can’t be many characters I have spent such time with – time both laborious and leisurely, and ultimately completely satisfying. What an unsual, ambitious and ultimately excellent, book.

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?

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.

Pin A Rose on Me by Josephine Blumenfeld

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I was intrigued when I first read Scott’s review of Pin a Rose on Me (1958) by Josephine Blumenfeld, mostly by this line of his: “a bit like one of E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady diaries as penned by Morticia Addams, or perhaps it’s like one of Shirley Jackson’s wonderful humorous memoirs of domestic life, if Jackson had let loose all the more morbid gothic impulses of her fiction instead of keeping them fairly muted.”

Well, how could I resist?

I think it ended up being a cross between the Provincial Lady and Barbara Comyns, for me – the sardonic domestic memoir combined with a matter-of-fact observation of bizarre things. Very little is given any sense of being unusual, rather we rocket through her experiences without much pause for breath.

Mrs Appleby is the first-person narrator, who has a handful of adult children and doesn’t much care for them or their progeny. As the novel (let’s call it that, though I’m not sure it quite qualifies) opens, she is more focused on her dog Fanny and her coquettishness for dogs of the opposite sex. The line ‘Tarts don’t have Fannys’ on the first page might rather make this one impossible to reprint in England…

There isn’t a plot, really, it’s just Mrs Appleby’s life – which seems crammed with movement. At one point she rather suddenly goes off to America by sea (if I understood it properly), while elsewhere she embarks on a volunteering career in a hospital. Very little is forewarned, and the eccentricity of the structure matches the eccentricity of the character.

Essentially, it is an exercise in tone. Here are a couple of examples of it…

After dinner the others play bridge and say, ‘The rest are mine’, while I do my occupational therapy, a rather revolting piece of tapestry I am doing for my nephew and his wife who don’t want it but who daren’t say ‘no’. It has gone wrong somewhere, it rises to a tight peak in the middle and is lopsided.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” people say sadly. “But isn’t there something a wee bit wrong? Haven’t you pulled the wool too tight? You’ll have to have it stretched, won’t you?”

I shan’t have it stretched, I shall throw it into the sea the day we leave. But now while the others are writing their log books and we are drifting about between the islands, it is infinitely soothing to push coloured wools in and out of any old holes I feel inclined, and it keeps my mind off the rough seas.

And another…

Sad friend sends white hand-knitted shawl for my birthday.

“It will go well with your dark hair, my dear,” she writes. “It was originally meant for Derek’s wife, but things didn’t turn out to plan as you know, so I feel that you should have it for your birthday.” She goes on to say she has arthritis in all her fingers and is finding it more and more difficult to get through her tea cosy orders. “The doctor says I should winter abroad. What wild ideas they have.”

The shawl is beautiful, wide, long, soft and miraculously woven in the shapes of giant cobwebs and open roses. In a shop it would cost a lot. Sad friend wouldn’t get a lot from a shop, but she will get nothing from me as it is my birthday present and I can’t pay for my birthday present.”

Sometimes the tone worked really well – sometimes the deliberate inconsequential nature of Mrs Appleby’s descriptions of life were, well, too inconsequential. Overall, it is exuberant and odd, and it doesn’t quite cohere into a full novel, but perhaps Blumenfeld is trying something completely different. It certainly felt pretty dizzying to read, and there were plenty of moments that made me laugh – as well as times I had no clue what was going on or where we were. Mrs Appleby’s determined forthrightness, and total absence of anything resembling etiquette or regard for others, made her an enjoyably eccentric protagonist to spend time with. She would be a nightmare in real life, but some of the best protagonists would be.

I think I’ll re-read one day and see if I can work out what’s going on a bit better. But it’s great fun and very unusual – not quite consistent enough to warrant becoming a classic, but a tour de force that may have influences of Delafield, or even Comyns, but ends up being its own strange little thing.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (25 Books in 25 Days #10)

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Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) is one of the books that has been on my shelves the longest, I think. I bought it in a library sale in 2004, and it has hidden on my shelves ever since – and I haven’t even seen the film. Basically all my knowledge about it comes from the famous image of Audrey Hepburn with the cigarette holder and the song ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something. Which is a great song.

About ten years ago, I read In Cold Blood by Capote, and I wasn’t super keen to read more by him. Yes, it was very good – but it was so deeply unpleasant that it left rather a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, it’s stupid to dismiss an author based on one book, particularly when Breakfast at Tiffany’s is so very different – and, indeed, I was totally beguiled by it.

Our narrator opens by saying that he hasn’t seen Holly Golightly (full name Holiday Golightly! I did not know that before) for years, but used to live in the same building as her – and first encountered her properly when she kept ringing his doorbell whenever she got home at 2am or 3am. I’d somehow picked up somewhere that Holly was a prostitute, but she is not. She is a ‘cafe society girl’, whatever that means. And it chiefly seems to mean living a bohemian life with a stream of men, but guarding her independence and only giving as much as she chooses.

Holly is a wonderful creation. Any number of authors want to make a spirited, lively female character, but she is no manic pixie dream girl. She is vibrant on her own terms – initiating conversations (by, say, knocking at the narrator’s fire escape in the early hours), chopping and changing what is on her mind in a dizzying way. She is always finding new ways to express her thoughts, and refusing to bow to expectations. And there is an underlying dignity, despite any undignified place she might find herself. I think Capote achieves all of this through the dialogue he gives her. It’s a tour de force, and I’m wondering how the film lives up to it.

The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff

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Lost-EuropeansJudging by the number of comments, reviews where I get you to click somewhere else aren’t necessarily as popular as reviews here – but THIS one is hopefully different because, guys… THIS IS THE LAST BOOK ON MY 50 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BUT MAY NOT HAVE HEARD ABOUT. (That list is over in the right-hand column, fyi.)

The list has been going since I started the blog in April 2007, although it has slowed over the years as I ran out of the backlog of titles I wanted to add, and worried about the end drawing near.

Do I start another list? Don’t know. But watch this space for a little celebration of 50 Books next week.

ANYWAY The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff is the book in question. It was published in 1958 and is about Germany after the war, and what it was like to visit as a Jewish German who was evacuated to England. But what makes it so good is Litvinoff’s extraordinary writing.

It doesn’t hurt that the book is beautifully produced too.

Head over to Shiny New Books to read all my thoughts, but here is the beginning of my review. And look out for 50 Books celebration and PRIZE next week!

Have you ever had the experience of starting a novel and, before you’ve got to the end of the second page, you are so bowled away by the writing that you already know that you’ve found one of the best books you’ll read that year? It happens to me very seldom – Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude did the sane thing – but it certainly happened with Emanuel Litvinoff’s 1958 novel The Lost Europeans, reprinted as part of a beautiful new series by Apollo.

The Outlaws on Parnassus by Margaret Kennedy

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I’m in one of those moods where – though there are book group books and Shiny New Books I should be reading – I am impulsively picking up other, non-essential books, and reading them instead. Once I get them in my head, nothing else will quite do. Which is why I’ve recently read The Outlaws on Parnassus (1958) by Margaret Kennedy – which I bought when Jane ran Margaret Kennedy Reading Week.

The Outlaws on Parnassus

It’s non-fiction – more specifically, a look at the art of the novel. In case the opaque title isn’t immediately clear, this is the opening paragraph, which might help:

The status of the novel, as a form of art, has never been clearly determined. No particular Muse was assigned to story-tellers. There are no Chairs of Fiction at our Universities. Criticism has never paid to the novel the degree of attention which it has accorded to other kinds of literature.

So, Kennedy’s title suggests that the novel is something of an outlaw among the other forms of literature, waiting for the gods on Mount Parnassus. While her opening statements are no longer true (there are plenty of Chairs of Fiction) and probably weren’t quite true in 1958, the doesn’t take away from the interesting discussion Kennedy launches into – interesting both on its own merits, and as a snapshot of literary opinion in the mid-century.

The Outlaws on Parnassus starts by looking through a brief history of the novel, dwelling on those names that were only a century or so old in the 1950s. (Indeed, throughout the reference points are intriguing – we expect to find Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf – and do – but how many books about the novel written today would return so often to Joyce Carey?) Kennedy writes some very interesting things about the difference between plot, story, and comment – not all of which I agree with, but it’s interesting nonetheless – and includes some very adroit comparisons of the skeletons of novels, convincingly identifying the same plot structures in Vanity Fair and To The Lighthouse, for instance.

But most of the book, Kennedy looks at different approaches to narrative forms and narrator personae. The latter she divides into autobiographical, author-observer, impersonal narrative, realist, and egocentric. I can’t imagine her categories becoming lasting pillars of literary criticism, but she argues her points well, giving specific examples for each of these styles of a woman entering a room and being found beautiful by those in it.

I’ve read quite a lot about realist fiction in my studies, as you might expect, having written about fantastic literature – and I wish I’d come across this earlier. It pretty much sums up what happened with realist fiction (and the backlash against it) in the early 20th century. I can’t work out if the echoes of Woolf’s ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ are intentional or not, but it plays out less condescendingly that Woolf’s (excellent and witty, but, yes, condescending) essay: (oh, by the way, the hypothetical Flora and her activities form Kennedy’s exemplar throughout the book)

In the early realistic novel Flora’s validity was established by surrounding her with intensely valid detail, of a kind which the reader could readily endorse from his own experience. If she cooked cabbage the house smelt of it. If the weather was warm she sweated. If she went to Penzance she started from Paddington and took a train which could be verified in Bradshaw. If she died she did so of an authentic disease described in clinical detail. Any doctor, reading an account of her symptoms, would agree that she had to die. No author could save her after ‘a coffee grounds vomit’.

This detail need not necessarily be sordid or disgusting; it was a matter of plain accuracy. The whole technique however came to be identified with this unseemly statement, because it was this aspect of it which most struck the average reader. He had never met such things in a novel before; a ‘realistic novel’ not only mentioned a privy but described minutely what went on there. Many realistic novels used such material sparingly, but liberty to employ cloacal, physical, or sexual detail was interpreted, by so many inferior novelists, as licence that the whole nature of the technique came to be misunderstood.

And then there are sections wherein Kennedy looks back at specific moments in critical history, as the novel began to be understood (or misunderstood) by a wider public. She is particularly reproving of those, in the 1930s, who chose to turn their focus away from the qualities of art:

A distinction between art and non-art may be useful, but it is not the most vital distinction to be made. The major service of criticism is to distinguish between bad art and good art, and, above all, to help us to understand why good art is good. It was a great misfortune for the cause of the novel that criticism should have gone off on a witch-hunting excursion, just when novelists had a chance of securing serious attention. They were not the only sufferers. Some attempt was also made, in the 1930s, to screen the poets for suspicious intentions and cynical attitudes, but the poets are better established. Enough sense has been talked about them, in the course of 2,500 years, to enable them to stand up against an occasional bombardment of nonsense. The case of the novelists was not so robust. Their public, long accustomed to think of them with a certain degree of disparagement, would have been reluctant enough, in any case, to changes its ideas. An opportunity was missed of establishing an art, claimed as great, by defining those qualities which make it so. It was neglected in favour of denunciations against naughty boys.

The only curious misstep in The Outlaws on Parnassus, to my mind, is the late chapter where Kennedy writes at length about the plot of The Odyssey without, so far as I can tell, much of a wider point to make. She makes a half-hearted attempt to call it the world’s first novel, but the chapter still feels a bit like she wrote it for something else, and thought she might as well include it to bulk out the number of pages.

But, that aside, it’s a really fun, interesting, and engaging little book. It’s no surprise that it didn’t revolutionise the world of literary theory, but those of us who love novelists like Margaret Kennedy and reading about novels (as well as reading novels themselves), then this is a bit of a find.

Alfred and Guinevere by James Schuyler

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There is something rather wonderful about choosing and reading a book while knowing very little about it. I knew nothing at all about James Schuyler or his 1958 novel Alfred and Guinevere when I picked it up in Hay on Wye last year – all I knew was that I loved NYRB Classics (and this one, from 2001, shows just how timeless their designs are – looking beautifully fresh 14 years later. Even though I can’t find out what the painting is). Not being a poetry buff, I didn’t realise that that was the arena in which Schuyler made his name – but I do now know that he had a knack with words that was rather extraordinary.

The eponymous Alfred and Guinevere are children who are sent to stay with their grandparents. Most of this slim novel is given in their dialogue, excerpts from Guinevere’s diary, and letters that she writes. The novella probably says their ages, but I must have flown past that section. Guinevere is the elder; Alfred is pretty unschooled in reading and writing.

Undoubtedly the greatest achievement in this novel is Schuyler’s ability to capture the cadences of children’s conversation, particularly the back-and-forth of sibling arguments, which leap from battle to truce to battle, weaving in long-standing disagreements, I-know-something-you-don’t-know novelties, and (most beautifully captured of all) snatches stolen from the conversation of adults around them, and novels the children probably shouldn’t be reading. This is a trick Schuyler uses throughout: they borrow idioms and metaphors that sound extremely out of kilter with their childish bickering, because – of course – that is exactly what children do do. Perhaps particularly those who feel adrift from the adults around them, and uncertain of the events that have occurred (more on that soon). Here’s an example from a letter Betty writes to Guinevere, her erstwhile friend:

Dear Guinevere,Thanks for the note. It is a shame boys make so much trouble and go around tattle-taling and spoiling intimate friendships. Of course your knocking me down like that made a permanent wound in my feelings which is slow to heal but it is not you at bottom I blame it is them. It was not me or Lois who told her mother or my mother what my mother told your mother she said you said. It was Stanley who told his mother and she told the other mothers. So you see how it goes.It is a shame what happens but I guess you have to take it as it comes and not spoil your life with vain regrets.More in sadness than in hate,Elizabeth Carolanne House
And there is this…

“You’re scared to walk across the bridge and look. I can tell you’re scared when you try to look like Mother.””I’ll run away and leave you in the gathering gloom at the mercy of reckless drivers and we’ll see who’s scared.””I’ll throw myself in the gutter and get sick and die, then you’ll be sorry.””No I won’t. I’ll go to your funeral and say, ‘Doesn’t he look sweet in his coffin,’ and cry, then everybody will feel sorry for me and give me things. I’ll wear a black dress with black accessories and a hat with a black veil. Black is very becoming and makes you look older. Then I’ll take your insurance money and go on a trip and meet a dark, interesting stranger.”
Lest you think that this is a cutesy book, I should say that – behind the well-observed dialogue – there is an indistinct darkness. I suppose Guinevere’s macabre callousness might already dismiss ideas of Brady Bunch levels of cuteness, but there is a much darker subtext. The children briefly discuss having found a dead body. At one very poignant moment, Guinevere blurts out “I’m sorry Daddy hit you”, but it is not explored further than that. Schuyler gives just enough shade to make clear that all is not sunny.

But, at the same time, this is a very funny book. It is the sort of humour that stems almost entirely from acute observation – and that, if coupled with a slight (slight) heightened tone, is probably the thing I find most amusing. In only 126 pages, Schuyler combines humour and darkness in a really exceptional way.

Alfred and Guinevere is deceptively quick and simple. But, oh, there is an awful lot going on – not least an authorial restraint and style that I heartily applaud. If I had to pick any other novel that it reminded me of, I would pick another NYRB beauty – Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi.

Have you read this? Do you know anything about James Schuyler? I now want to find out much more!

Shirley Jackson – The Sundial, Hangsaman, and The Bird’s Nest

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Oh, this has been a difficult bunch of books to keep quiet about.  And I haven’t really managed it, looking back, but I could have been much less restrained.  Now that Shiny New Books is unveiled, I can finally start linking to my Century of Books reviews – and I have to kick off with the Penguin Classics reprints of Shirley Jackson’s novels. (Incidentally, they tick two dates on my Century of Books list.)

Best among them is The Sundial.  If I didn’t already have a Shirley Jackson title in my 50 Books You Must Read list, then this would be on it.  Annoyingly (and these are the sorts of things I keep quiet from Shiny New Books, but can’t hide from you, dear friends) I’d spent a mini fortune on a copy of The Sundial three years ago, back when it was very scarce… and yet hadn’t got around to reading it until the reprints came out.  Oops.

So this is what I’ll do with my links to SNB reviews.  A little bit of intro, and then the first line or two of the review, to hook you in… click on the link to read my review of Hangsaman, The Bird’s Nest, and The Sundial.

“You can more or less divide readers’ familiarity with Shirley Jackson’s works into separate levels”…

We Were Amused – Rachel Ferguson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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