1960

Twice Lost by Phyllis Paul

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When I read R.B. Russell’s very good Fifty Forgotten Books, there were a handful of books that particularly appealed – and one of them was Phyllis Paul’s much-admired but out-of-print Twice Lost (1960), even though Russell actually prefers her A Little Treachery. I set up an abebooks alert and patiently waited – and, hurrah, finally a copy come up! It was quite pricey and not very good condition, but I didn’t think I’d ever stumble across another chance to read it.

…days after this tatty Lancer Gothic edition arrived, I saw the news that a beautiful new edition was being printed by McNally Editions! I do wonder if the bookseller had caught wind of the news and wanted to sell off this copy quick-sticks. NEVER MIND. I may not have the lovely edition, but I do have the fun of a copy that clearly mystified its editors/marketers. Because the way they’ve tried to sell it is really quite bafflingly unlike the book you’ll find inside. ‘An innocent schoolgirl is the victim of evil, and in terror the people of Hilberry ask why!’ sets up a very different sort of novel, and I suspect quite a few purchasers of this edition ended up confused and disappointed. For one thing, it gets the name of the village – Hilbery – wrong.

It’s clear from the outset that Phyllis Paul is not writing disposable mass-market fiction. Her writing is lush and beautiful, more like the opening of an Edwardian novel of manners than a gothic thriller. Here’s the opening paragraph:

They had separated and were creeping about the grass, bowed over, with their eyes on the ground. But it was too near nightfall. Through the gateway with the flanking piers topped by urns, whose pale, classic shapes were enveloped in savage tufts of ivy, the rest of the tennis-party had already drifted, and out in the lane voices rose boldly above the din of bicycle bells and hooters, and the stuttering of a motor-cycle on the point of moving off. Christine Gray and a friend of her own age, Penelope, had good-naturedly stayed behind to help the little girl in her search for a lost treasure.

The little girl is a curious, adventurous child called Vivian. Don’t worry about Penelope because we don’t see much of her, but Christine becomes a key figure – she is young herself, with the carelessness and trust of youth. It seems inconceivable that anything could truly go wrong. Not here, in a large, beautiful house in the English countryside at a party for well-off, cheerful people.

And yet – of course it does. Little Vivian goes missing. A search is made for her, or for the treasure she was hunting. No trace of her is left behind.

Twice Lost isn’t a procedural mystery by any stretch of the imagination, and the reader never feels like they are the trail of a detection. While we wait to see if a resolution will be given, it feels for much of the novel that Phyllis Paul isn’t especially interested in the disappearance herself. It’s the catalyst for a few things, and the story continues through to the end of the novel, but Paul is far more invested in writing about this small community in lovely, languorous prose. She is very good at it. There are many scenes where we can simply relax into the comedy and drama of human relationships – particularly between newcomers to the village, a writer Thomas Antequin and his son named, of all things, Keith. They have come to Carlotta House with the idea of Thomas Antequin becoming a renowned playwright, if he can do so away from all the distractions of town. Descriptions of Carlotta House are as near as Twice Lost gets to truly being Gothic, in my opinion. The section I noted down to quote is actually about a different house, a minor cottage, but it’s an example of the vivid, gorgeous writing that I so enjoy – and which must have come as such a surprise to readers hoping for the sort of novel suggested by this cover. It’s also a great insight into village life and the ways that small issues can become major. (You get the feeling these elms preoccupy villagers more than Vivian’s disappearance.)

But crouched at the foot of these majestic trees, on an uncultivated piece of ground as spacious as a meadow, was one small, ancient cottage; a little garden patch before it, and all the rest wild. Here, in fact, was an outstanding example of that obstructive cottage property which many a good, full, tidy mind in Hilbery lusted to sweep away. It was felt to be the nearest approach to a slum that the district possessed.

This lonely relic of wild beauty caused much unease in Hilbery Village. For the elms were ‘wild’! Efforts were therefore continually being made to prove that they were dangerous. Everyone knew that this cry of danger was a bare-faced pretext; the elms, if dangerous at all, were not remotely as dangerous as the near-by road since that had been straightened and turned into a speed-track, and there was no proposal to scrap that. And in fact, as always in such cases, all sorts of humane and public-spirited reasons had been put forward to mask a simple lust for destruction.

There was, of course, the opposite camp. The elms had their partisans. Even in Hilbery there were those whom wanton destruction enrages – and those who are perhaps even more enraged by the tidy mind. And among the first of these was the owner of the ground, a Mr. Parmore, who lived opposite in one of the rejuvenated farmhouses, and he was a man as determined as wealthy, and doted on his view. In the second class was the tenant of the cottage.

How many Lancer Gothic writers were putting in things like that? (It did slightly amuse me, in a sad kinda way, that this would be a moot conversation within a decade or two – when Dutch elm disease would have laid these trees to waste.)

We continue seeing the affectionate squabbling between Antequin senior and Anetquin junior – affectionate, but with an element of malice – as well as Christine’s development towards adulthood. Vivian is given up for lost, and people are sadder about the idea in the abstract than because anybody particularly valued poor Vivian as a person. Her stepmother certainly doesn’t mourn her. Her disappearance is chalked up as a freak accident.

Suddenly, turning from one chapter to the next and hardly heralded, we are a significant amount of time in the future. I don’t want to give away anything from this point (though the blurb to my edition does – and, to a certain extent, the title does too). But relationships have been formed, suspicions have developed, and Vivian’s disappearance continues to haunt Hilbery and its residents in ways that aren’t entirely obvious to the undiscerning.

I really enjoyed Twice Lost. It is a fascinating novel. For the most part, it is beautifully written and a piercing but undisturbing psychological portrait. Phyllis Paul sees her characters keenly, with the insight of a writer who doesn’t waste too much time on sympathy. But what also makes Twice Lost fascinating is how Paul seems to disregard many of the conventions of novelistic structure. It’s not even that she defies the rules of particular genres, or merges different genres together. There are parts that seem intentionally clumsy. There are significant characters and plot points hurriedly introduced in the final pages. The title only makes sense with enormous spoilers. There’s a lull in the momentum for the major part of the novel’s middle – that is fine, as a reader, because it’s so enjoyable to read – but it’s hard to imagine anybody advising on novelistic structure would let Vivian’s disappearance fade away for such a long stretch.

Only one of these strangenesses weakens the novel, in my opinion. The belatedly added characters feel like a cop out, and dent the sort of eerie elegance that the rest of Twice Lost has. For the rest – they just mark Paul out as an unusual novelist forging her own path. I can see why McNally republished this uncategorisable novel. One of the blurb quotes on my edition says, ‘A brilliant novel of suspense… haunting, fascinating, wonderful’. I don’t think it’s a novel of suspense – but I can’t disagree with the final three words.

A bunch of books I’ve read recently

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It’s that time again when I look at a big pile of books I’ve been intending to review, and don’t really have a full-post’s worth of things to say… so here they all are, in a round up. Hope you’re all reading something fun at the moment.

Because of Jane (1913) by J.E. Buckrose

I have a few books by the near-forgotten Buckrose and really like her writing. My hope is that one of them will elevate itself above the others and be good enough for the British Library Women Writers series – but it won’t be Because of Jane. As I’ve written previously, Buckrose is very good on puncturing egos and awkwardness and social manners. She is much more formulaic and less interesting when it comes to romance – and there is a lot of romance in Because of Jane. The central one is ‘spinster’ Beatrice who reluctantly lives with her brother and his wife and daughter, and who begins to fall for a local widower, Stephen Croft.

“They were married at a registrar’s office. That always seems to me a little like buying machine-made underclothing. Doesn’t it to you?”

“Yes – no – I don’t know,” said Beatrice.

“And so,” said Miss Thornleigh, pursuing her train of thought, “it didn’t last. It was never likely to last.”

“I cannot think that Mrs Stephen Croft died because she was married at the registrar’s,” objected Beatrice in common justice.

“Well, perhaps not,” conceded Miss Thornleigh. “But it was a bad start.”

That was one excerpt I enjoyed, but sadly Because of Jane doesn’t have that much in this tone – and a lot more in Jane’s voice. Jane is Beatrice’s seven-year-old niece and the sort of irritating novelistic child who says things with wide-eyed innocence that sum up what other are truly feeling. The book was fine, but rather worse than the other two Buckroses I’ve read.

The ABC of Cats (1960) by Beverley Nichols

Reading the Meow week was the reason I started The ABC of Cats, but I didn’t finish it. He goes through the alphabet, writing about a different aspect of cats for each letter (e.g. Y is Yawn). It’s all delightful, and Nichols does cats extremely well – he is expert on their behaviours, habits, wishes without every getting saccharine or fey. It’s one for cat lovers certainly, and enjoyable if only for his apparent belief that he has invented the cat flap.

Things I Didn’t Throw Out (2017) by Marcin Wicha

Translated from Polish by Marta Dziurosz, this is a non-fiction reflection on Marcin’s mother’s life through the books that she left behind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they are mostly Polish books – Emma by Jane Austen is the only one I’ve read. The book is also a lens to look at post-war Poland and how the Communist regime affected those who lived there.

I think Wicha writes really well, in sparse, curious way. But I struggle to know what to write about this book except that it’s unusual and beguiling – and probably better if you have a good knowledge of this period in Polish history and literature already, which I do not.

The First To Die at the End (2022) by Adam Silvera

I thought Silvera’s young adult novel They Both Die at the End was a brilliant premise worked out really well – it’s a world where people get a phone call from DeathCast on the day they will die, but aren’t told precisely when or how. And now he’s written The First To Die at the End, a prequel set on the first night that DeathCast is launched.

As before, there are two teenage boys who meet for the first time that day and spend it together – waiting for death (though I won’t spoil whose). It does feel a little like a repeat of the same sort of thing, done a little less compelling and with some extraneous side characters taking up some of the 550 pages. But it’s still a brilliant idea, and Silvera writes very engagingly. I didn’t remember the original book well enough to get all the references or Easter eggs, though did appreciate the two boys from that book appearing here briefly as their younger selves.

The Colour of Evening by Robert Nathan (Novella a Day in May #27)

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I love Robert Nathan novel(la)s for when I need something simple and lovely. He is best remembered now for the film adaptations of his works – The Bishop’s Wife, The Preacher’s Wife, and Portrait of Jennie – and far easier to find in the US than the UK, but I snap up any I come across. They are never at all demanding, and have no claims to being great literature. But there is something refreshing about spending time in one.

The Colour of Evening (1960) came towards the end of his long and prolific career. (Incidentally, it was also filmed in 1990.) It concerns an old painter called Max Loeb who lives south of Santa Monica, painting portraits and getting enough interest from the public to get by, just barely. He is filled with disdain about modern art – which seems to encompass artists who were well past being ‘modern’ by the time this book came out – and Nathan seems to assume his readership will have the same outlook. This disdain stretches out to include the idea of realism in art and literature, as opposed to anything idealised or beautiful.

“Realism,” grumbled Max, sketching away. “You call it realism what we get? Is a bone with gristle on it realism? Maybe – for a cemetery. Do you know what true realism is? It is the bone inside the flesh, under the living tissue: paint that, or write about it! Even in the newspapers you can find out what is going on with our artists, or sometimes in a magazine at the barber shop. Do you know what I think about these books you read? They are not like life, because in life everybody is not such a good-for-nothing.”

Alongside Max is his landlady, Mrs Hermione Bloemendal, and Jon Kuzik. Or sometimes ‘John’, which I think was a failing in the copyeditor, rather than a deliberate trick. Mrs Bloemendal sometimes poses for portraits; Jon is Max’s pupil, and pays him in money or, more often, in kind. They have a quiet, contented dynamic between the three of them. They care for each other, but in a calm way.

Into this world comes Halys – a young woman in a dirty dress, desperate for any work or way to keep going. Well, desperate in the sort of picturesque way of a Robert Nathan novel, which will never get too unpleasant. She moves into this delicate ecosystem, earning her keep by cleaning and posing for portraits. Only things start to go awry when Max wonders if he is in love with her, and the careful balance of the existing friendships get challenged…

This sort of plot could make for a very dramatic novel, but The Colour of Evening remains quiet and contemplative even when Nathan is infusing it with event. I think that’s largely because characters are often given to philosophising, or exchanging moral conclusions that are a little bit saccharine. The sort of tropes that might belong in a chatty magazine.

It’s all perfectly enjoyable, though I think Nathan is better when these maxims and pronouncements about life and love are offset by his quirky plots. In other books of his I’ve read, there is often a fantastic streak – a girl whose ageing is off-kilter, a character who comes to life, a boat that sails through roads to the sea. Without that whimsy or fantasia, it feels a bit fey. He needs to add in the strange and unworldly to balance out his sentimental tone.

But I still always enjoy my time with Nathan. I wouldn’t recommend this one to start, but it was what I needed today.

Pomp and Circumstance by Noel Coward

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It seems odd to me that Noel Coward wrote something in 1960. To me, he seems hermetically sealed within the 1930s. As it happens, he lived until 1973. but it’s still quite bizarre to read a novel by Coward – I think perhaps his only novel, though the internet is proving cagey on that – in which Elizabeth II is on the throne.

Pomp and Circumstance is set in the fictional British island colony of Samolo, somewhere in the South Pacific, and the ex-part dignitaries are preparing for the arrival of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Perhaps it isn’t too big a spoiler to say that the novel ends before they turn up – this is all about the preparation, which must take place in the midst of the island’s other events, secrets, and gossip.

The narrator is the bizarrely named Grizel Craigie, an official’s wife who is used to the ex-pat community of upper-class Brits who’ve grown used to living a fairly luxurious life in a fairly insignificant place. The dinner parties, social niceties, and hierarchies of England have all been exported to this island – which does, indeed, feel rather like it is living in an era two or more decades earlier. Whether this is because Coward is holding the pen or because it is an accurate portrait of this sort of community in 1960, I have no idea.

Their lives revolve around Government House, which is described in the opening lines of the novel:

There’s no use pretending that, architecturally, Government House has anything to recommend it at all because it hasn’t; it is quite agreeable inside with nice airy rooms and deep-set verandas, but outside it is unequivocally hideous. Viewed from any aspect it looks like a gargantuan mauve blanc-mange. It was built in the early nineteen hundreds after the old one had burned down and nobody knows why it should have been painted mauve in the first place or why it should always have been repainted mauve since.

Again, it might be 1960, but any Edwardian comic writer could have written that paragraph.

The novel starts with a neighbourly dispute about children, and there is something of the Provincial Lady in the way that Grizel attempts to manage her husband, her neighbours, their respective children, and somewhere in the middle of it all lies the truth of what happened. But this is just scene setting before she hears the news that Her Majesty is on her way – and news spreads like wildfire across the island. Well, again, the ex-pat community. We here surprisingly little from or about native Somoloans, and it’s about as racially insensitive as you might imagine whenever they are mentioned. Well, perhaps not quite as bad as the worst you can imagine, but certainly any 21st-century editor would put a red pen through a lot of it.

But Grizel can’t dwell on this for too long – because a different visitor is coming before the royals arrive: Eloise, the Duchess of Fowey. She has a longstanding affair with a man called Bunny, and Grizel is called upon to try and keep their affair secret by officially housing Eloise. Reluctantly, Grizel agrees.

When Eloise does come, there is all manner of fun with clandestine meetings and ‘sleepovers’, the spread of scarlet fever that puts paid to these plans, and a diabetic nurse who cheerfully tells people to force sugar into mouth, however much she protests, if she has an episode.

There are a lot of typically Cowardian elements in Pomp and Circumstance, from elaborate set pieces to immoral people being wittily frank about their immorality. Grizel is an entertaining narrator, caught between callousness and social decency, and endlessly frustrated with the admittedly frustrating people around her. But mostly Pomp and Circumstance shows how good Coward was at plays…

While there are some funny lines and situations, and the prospect of a royal arrival is a fun idea to throw the island into a frenzy, there is an awful lot of padding in the novel. It moves with glacial slowness, and often dozens of pages would pass without anything of note happening, or the same conversations happening again and again in slightly different ways. There must be some reason that this became a novel rather than a play, but it feels as though there is only a play’s worth of words at the centre of this much-longer book. The rest is rather surplus to requirements.

So, I enjoyed reading certain sections, and the opening paragraph gave me hope that it would be a silly delight. In the end, it was more of a slog to get between amusing moments. I will say that the end is a delight, with the sort of momentum I’d hoped for throughout, but it’s a long way to go for that pay-off. On the whole, I don’t think it much matters if you stick to seeing Coward on stage.

Conversation With Max by S.N. Behrman

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Yes, I’m still working my way through #ProjectNames reviews, and am likely to do so for a while longer! Conversation With Max is a 1960 book by S.N. Behrman, and if that name sounds familiar then you might have come across Duveen, which was reprinted a few years ago and which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. That was a biography of a bizarre art dealer, and this is a memoir of a friendship with Max Beerbohm – so Behrman is nothing if not eclectic.

Beerbohm is chiefly remembered today for his satirical novel Zuleika Dobson, about a woman so beautiful that all the undergraduates in Oxford drown themselves. I’ve read a couple volumes of his essays and have many more, but I don’t think I really understood what a cultural figure Beerbohm was in the early twentieth century – or at least according to Behrman.

The structure of Conversation With Max belies the singular ‘conversation’, in that Behrman returns several times to Beerbohm’s house – to hear stories of his long writing career and his life. The former apparently started when he wrote an impassioned piece about make-up in an Oxford undergraduate magazine, which seems as unlikely a start to a writing career as any.

I have a soft spot for memoirs of writers that come from a specific and subjective angle – whether that be H.G. Wells from the perspective of his children’s governness, Walter de la Mare from someone who went to tea, or Ivy Compton-Burnett through the lens of her secretary. (Yes, those are all real examples of books I have actually read.) Behrman perhaps forges his own connection, as a fan and journalist, but there is a definite sense of sitting in Beerbohm’s home, hearing his stories, and being in the presence of a biographer who is happily overstating the importance of a single cultural figure. He is not pretending to be objective. Here’s the opening:

The hero of J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye judges authors by the simple test of whether he has an impulse, after reading something, to call the author up. It seems to me that all my life I have felt like calling up Max Beerbohm. I first made Max’s acquaintance, one might say, in the Public Library on Elm Street, in Worcester, Massachusetts, when I was a boy, and I later deepened it in the Widener Library, at Harvard, so that long before the Maximilian Society was organized by his devotees on his seventieth birthday, in London, I was already a Maximilian. When, as a young man making my first visit to Italy, I looked out the window of my compartment on the Paris-Rome Express and caught a flashing sight of the station sign “RAPALLO” (the Paris-Rome Express does not stop in Rapallo unless you arrange it beforehand), I felt a quick affinity for the place because I knew that Max Beerbohm lived there. I felt like getting off, but the train was going much too fast. On subsequent trips to Rome, I always looked for the flicker of that evocative station sign. That I would one day actually get off at Rapallo for a prearranged meeting with its renowned inhabitant never remotely occurred to me. But life is seething with improbabilities, and so, in the summer of 1952, it came about.

(The book also seems to have appeared as a series of articles – the first is available online, if this opening has caught your attention.)

At the time, Beerbohm was known as much for his drawn caricatures as his writing. It’s hard to recognise the impact that individual caricatures could have, in this era where every public figure is open to ridicule or affectionate mockery at any moment of any day. I suppose, also, that the sphere of intellectual life was smaller and more insular. Whether or not you are interested in Beerbohm’s output in art and literature, there is a lot to enjoy in the way Conversation With Max presents one artist/writer’s life through nostalgia and anecdote.

And that’s what made this book special to me. Not so much the individual examples chosen, but that a book of this sort exists – affectionate, leisurely, and somehow revealing the life of a writer more intimately than the most tell-all biography. Because, by the end, we also feel like we have been invited into Beerbohm’s home, and have become his friend.

Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm by Gil North (25 Books in 25 Days: #18)

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I tend to buy British Library Crime Classics whenever I come across them, and have been lucky enough to have quite a few as review copies – but it seems like I don’t get around to actually reading them as much as I’d like. So I went for the shortest one I own with a name in the title, for a meeting of projects – step forward Sergeant Cluff Stands Firm (1960) by Gil North. It was the first in a long series of crime novels with Sergeant Cluff at the helm.

I will say ‘crime’ rather than ‘detective fiction’, because North seems to be more interested in the psychology of the investigating sergeant, the victim, and the probable murder than with a twisty, turny novel. I prefer the twists, but I was willing to get on board – and I liked that Sergeant Cluff is a mainstay of his little village. When he begins to explore the death of Amy Snowden, we’re quickly aware that Cluff knew her, her recent (much younger) husband, her neighbour. He knows everyone, and they all know him – and his father before him – because this is rural England in the 1960s. It’s something that other members of the force can’t quite appreciate properly.

I did like Cluff and his humanness – his pity for the ill-treated, and his quiet thirst for justice. What I liked rather less is how misogynistic this novel is. At first I thought maybe it was just some characters who were misogynistic (why, for instance, is everyone transfixed with the idea of a woman marrying a younger man?) – but it saturated the novel. I am not exaggerating when I say that no woman is ever introduced without her breasts being described. This includes the dead woman. Seriously, there was one character whose breasts were mentioned every time she was mentioned. It felt like satire.

So, this wasn’t a massive success for me. If it had had a brilliant detective plot, I might have been able to latch onto that and set aside other elements of the novel – but since North was going for the higher ground, as it were, that option isn’t left to me. So… I guess I enjoyed some elements of it, but it left a nasty taste in my mouth? I’d definitely read another Sergeant Cluff novel, because I liked him – but I hope that the author has grown up a bit in the interim.

On re-reading The L-Shaped Room

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One of my ongoing, unsuccessful (and, to be fair, fairly inactive) battles is to convince Rachel that we should read The L-Shaped Room (1960) on the Tea or Books? podcast. It’s one of my favourite books, and I’ve read it a fair few times – and it’s not often I’ll re-read a book at all, let alone more than once. In the end, I decided just to re-read it (again) myself. And, rather than write another review of it, I’ll take you through the experience I had…

Taking the book off the shelf

As someone pointed out in an Instagram comment, my copy is definitely falling apart. The spine went a long time ago, there are tears in some pages, and the whole thing might just crumble into dust at this point. It was in pretty bad condition when I paid 10p for it in a charity shop in Pershore, Worcestershire, buying it on the strength of having loved The Farthest-Away Mountain and The Indian in the Cupboard as a child.

But I can’t get rid of this copy. Maybe one day I’ll have to buy another, if this one gets too fragile to hold, but I love it too much to throw or give it away. Not because of the design or feel, but because it has been with me for so long, and was one of the first adult novels I loved.

Starting the book

There wasn’t much to be said for the place, really, but it had a roof over it and a door which locked from the inside, which was all I cared about just then. I didn’t even bother to take in the details – they were pretty sordid, but I didn’t notice them so they didn’t depress me; perhaps because I was already at rock-bottom. I just threw my one suitcase on to the bed, took my few belongings out of it and shut them all into one drawer of the three-legged chest of drawers. Then there didn’t seem to be anything else I ought to do so I sat in the arm-chair and stared out of the window.

This is the first paragraph and I’m instantly so happy. This description of a room isn’t exactly paradisiacal – it’s meant to be the opposite – but I feel like I’m coming home. No, my home isn’t remotely like this – but the world of the novel is one I love so much that it feels like coming to home to be back in that block of flats, and back in the L-shaped room.

The l-shaped room

Speaking of – once we’ve seen a bit of Jane’s background (in the theatre, then in a café, then being forced to leave home because she’s got pregnant – rattling through the premise, sorry) we’re in the room. And I realise that I have never paid any lasting attention to the description of the layout that Lynne Reid Banks gives. I’ve blogged before about how I can’t visualise descriptions in books – and it’s definitely true of layout. Try as I might, I can’t put those pieces together in my mind. So, for me, her room is laid out exactly as it is on the book cover.

The discriminatory language… 

When I first read the novel, in 2002 or thereabouts, I wasn’t happy about the racism and discriminatory language used about gay people. I’m still not happy about it, of course – even if it’s largely put in the mouths of characters we’re not supposed to agree with. Jane herself is rather racist as the novel starts, though perhaps because I know she’ll change her mind later in the book, I can get through these pages. But there are some sentences that are really tough to read.

Toby and Jane

It is very, very rare that I care about a will-they-won’t-they couple in a book. Reading about romance tends to bore me rather, and I’m much more interested in reading about a couple who’ve been married for thirty years than by young suitors. But Toby and Jane might be that couple. Even though I can’t actually remember whether or not they end up together – either at the end of the book or at the end of the trilogy. Despite all those re-readings, and my love of them, that detail has disappeared. But Toby is great. He comes along, rattling away about his writing and his life, and Jane wants nothing to do with anyone. But you know from the first moment that he’ll wear her down, and they’ll become friends and comrades if nothing else. As her friend Dottie says, “First of all I thought he was just some
little fledgling that had fallen out of its nest, but I very soon realised there was more to him than that.”

What did I remember?

My terrible memory is bad for many things, but good for re-reading. While the atmosphere of a book stays with me, the details usually flit from my mind pretty quickly – and, even after four reads, I’d forgotten pretty much everything that takes place at Jane’s workplace. It’s not as prominent as the block of flats, but there is quite a fun dynamic with her brash but friendly boss. She does the PR for a hotel, and there is an extended scene of her trying to manage a staged meeting between a comedian and a diva, and it’s very amusing. As I read it, it all came back to me – but if you’d asked me before I started this re-read what Jane did for a living, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you.

Was it as good as I remembered?

Of course. This many times in, I know it’s a reliable joy. Seeing Jane grow to love the people she is surrounded with, and deal with the enormous life changes facing her, was as wonderful as always. Perhaps this novel wouldn’t have captivated me in the same way if I’d read it a few years later, but I know it’s now down as one of my all-time favourites and will never be dislodged from there.

Will I read the sequels next?

As always, I ended the novel bereft that I was leaving their company – leaving the l-shaped room and the house and the experience of reading the book. And it’s very tempting to go onto The Backward Shadow and Two Is Lonely, that continue Jane’s story. This time, I probably won’t. They’re both good, but they leave the flat behind – and I miss the flat terribly when I’m reading those books. So I’d certainly recommend them, and I’ve read them three times each, but I only give in to the urge to read them (and feel slightly disappointed) every other time I read The L-Shaped Room.

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford

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I've borrowed this image from Karyn, who reviewed it here: http://apenguinaweek.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/penguin-no-1738-hons-and-rebels-by.html (Hope that's ok, Karyn!)
I’ve borrowed this image from Karyn, who reviewed it here: http://tinyurl.com/qhpbmxc (Hope that’s ok, Karyn!)

It’s no secret that I’m a longstanding fan of the Mitfords – or, at least, of reading about them. Debo has an eternal place in my heart, but, even though none of the others quite made it there, I still adored reading the letters between all six sisters. The one whom I didn’t much like (besides Unity, obvs, though her regression after shooting herself is fascinating to see in letter-form) was Jessica. I was chastised. I was told I should read her letters and her books, and that thus I would come to like her more. Finally – FINALLY – I have read Hons and Rebels (1960). Do I like her more? Maybe.

I’ll get in there early: if I were writing a scholarly book review, whether or not I like the woman would be completely immaterial. And here, as with a novel, it isn’t the be all and end all. But if it is acceptable to cheer on a biography because you like the writer so much (heart you, Debo), then it’s equally acceptable to do the reverse. On the same page? Fabs.

In actual fact, Jessica (or Decca, as she was known) comes across very sympathetically. Partly this is because of my political leanings, I daresay. I don’t fall as far left as Decca, but I’m pretty much a lefty – and we can all agree to band against the Fascist and Nazi beliefs of Diana and Unity Mitford. There are some pretty extraordinary descriptions of Decca and Unity setting up their shared bedroom into a Fascist and Communist split, with posters advocating their own politics on either side. It would be amusing if Unity’s views were not so extreme.

I was expecting a biography of the eccentric Mitford childhood we (mostly) all know well. The sort of thing we found in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love – with the hons in the cupboard, the father hunting the children, and the various codes. Spoilers: it is not. We do see some of Decca’s childhood – but by the time she was around in the nursery, her older siblings were more or less adults. Just Unity, Debo, and Decca were left around – and it is the three of them who formed various bonds and antipathies.

This section of the book I loved, even without the full line-up of Mitfords. We see, for instance, them being dragged around by the Conservative Party – ‘Our car was decorated with Tory blue ribbons, and if we should pass a car flaunting the red badge of Socialism, we were allowed to lean out of the window and shout at the occupants: “Down with the horrible Counter-Honnish Labour Party!”.’ We get a child’s-eye-view of the various scandals Nancy causes. Mostly, we get a taste of Decca’s thirst for independence, particularly in her longing to go to school and her storing-up of a Running Away Fund.

That fund turns out not to be as whimsical as it sounds. Very young, she rushes off to the Spanish Civil War. For those who think the Mitfords were rich gentry who never stepped down from their thrones to put their money where their mouths were (to mix metaphors) – Hons and Rebels is an education. We are many miles from the Cotswolds as we see the intrepid Decca follow her cousin Esmond Romilly to Spain, facing hardship, opposition, and – yes – romance. It shows the extraordinary person Decca was, for better or worse.

But the Cotswolds get even further around as the book progresses – as Decca moves to America. Here’s an example both of her early sheltered life, and the wit with which she writes. It is often a very amusing book.

My own impressions of Americans had been culled from various sources, ranging from books read in childhood, such as Little Women and What Katy Did, to Hemingway and movies. I knew that they lived on strange and rather unappetizing-sounding foods called squash, grits, hot dogs, and corn pudding. On the other hand, cookies sounded rather delicious. I visualized them as little cakes made in the shape of cooks with sugar-icing aprons and hats. From seeing The Petrified Forest, I gathered that Americans often made love under tables while gangster bullets whizzed through the air.

I’ve given enough plot for this book, so shan’t tell you all that happens in America – but, suffice to say, Esmond and Decca go through some difficult conditions and she writes about them winningly and wittily. A stray and dispassionate footnote on the penultimate page alerts us to why this memoir is particularly moving – but I’ll allow you to find that out for yourself.

So, in brief – it is fascinating, and certainly well told. The only reason I didn’t love Hons and Rebels as much as I could have done is because I was expecting something else – I missed hearing about the rest of the family (who are more or less absent for the second half of the book), and wondered quite what they were thinking about her. The feeling I got from the letters, that she rather abandoned them, is quietly reflected here – not by what she says about them, but by the fact that they are seldom mentioned. And that is a terrible reason to put something in the ‘cons’ column of a book review. But, Mitford-fanatic that I am, I can’t help it, and thought I should warn fellow enthusiasts. But this issue aside (as it should be), Hons and Rebels is an extraordinary book. When I read the sequel (A Fine Old Conflict), I shall better prepare myself for the book Decca wrote, rather than the one I wish she’d written.

Stuck-in-a-Book’s Weekend Miscellany

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Hope you’re all having a good weekend! Mine is disappearing all too quickly… and I’ve read only 20 pages of the book I was intending to finish. Oops.

Slightly different from usual this week, as I’m going to be entirely egotistical in this miscellany… these things are all me elsewhere.

1. I wrote about Jeeves in the Offing by P.G. Wodehouse over at Vulpes Libris.

2. I made a cake to celebrate the 400th Very Short Introduction book.

3. And I appeared in this Oxford Dictionaries video (see the post for answers):

Mrs. Harris Goes to New York – Paul Gallico

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(image source)

I’ve finished so few books lately, and have been so dissatisfied with the number of reviews I’ve been able to post, that I have turned to the small pile of books I finished months and months ago, but never quite got around to reviewing.  So I’m looking back over the hazy mists of time, trying to remember not only what I thought about a book, but what on earth happened in it.

Lucky for me, Paul Gallico’s 1960 novel Mrs. Harris Goes to New York has a little synopsis right there in the title.  The sequel to his charming novel Flowers For Mrs. Harris (published in America as Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris, and republished together recently by Bloomsbury, with its aspirate in place), Mrs. Harris Goes to New York does, indeed, see Mrs. Harris travel off to see the Empire State.  This time, though, it’s not with a dress in mind, though – she and her friend Violet Butterfield (familiarly Vi) are off to reunite a mistreated adopted boy with his long-lost American father.

In case you haven’t encountered Mrs. Harris before, she is a no-nonsense, salt-of-the-earth charlady, who (in the first book) unexpectedly develops an all-abiding passion to own a Christian Dior dress like the one she has seen in the wardrobe of one of the women for whom she works.  Mrs. Harris is a wonderful creation – speaking her mind, with its curious mixture of straight-talking and dewy-eyed romance.  Romance for adventure, that is, not for menfolk – Mr. Harris is good and buried before the series begins. 

I mentioned in the ‘strange things that happened in books I read this year’ section of my review of 2012 that I’d read one book where somebody went door-to-door searching for people called Mr. Black (that was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and one where somebody went door-to-door searching for people called Mr. Brown.  That was Mrs. Harris Goes to New York – since she did not know exactly who might Henry Brown’s father, she needed to go and visit every Mr. Brown in New York…

Few native New Yorkers ever penetrated so deeply into their city as did Mrs. Harris, who ranged from the homes of the wealthy on the broad avenues neighbouring Central Park, where there was light and air and indefinable smell of the rich, to the crooked down-town streets and the slums of the Bowery and Lower East Side.
It’s a fun conceit for a novel – I wonder if Jonathan Saffron Foer was deliberately mimicking it? – and Mrs. Harris is an excellent character to use repeatedly in first-encounters – it shows how Cockney and brazen she can be, as well as the endlessly charming effect she has on everybody she meets.

Paul Gallico’s novels often hover on the edge of fairy-tale.  The first one I read, which remains easily my favourite (and is on my 50 Books list over in the right-hand column) was Love of Seven Dolls, which is very much the darkest of his books that I’ve read – but was still very certainly mixed with fairy-tale.  That was what saved it from being terrifyingly sinister.  The two Mrs. Harris novels I’ve read are much more lighthearted, and Mrs. Harris herself is very much a fairy-tale creation.  She enchants everyone she meets – and I mean that almost literally, in that she seems to be a fairy godmother, changing their lives for the better through Cockney wisdom and irrepressible optimism.  And perhaps a little bit of magic.

There are quite a few other Paul Gallico novels on my shelves, waiting to be read – including the next two in this series, Mrs. Harris, MP and Mrs. Harris Goes To Moscow, which Bloomsbury also publish and kindly sent me.  I’m also excited about reading The Foolish Immortals and The House That Wouldn’t Go Away.  I’ll report back on all of these as and when I manage to read them – but, for now, for when you want to be a little charmed yourself, you could do a heck of a lot worse than spending an hour or two in the delightful company of London’s finest, Mrs. Harris.