1960s

R.C. Sherriff’s wonderful autobiography

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R.C. Sherriff has had something of a renaissance in the past few years, thanks to the good people at Persephone Books. They’ve published A Fortnight in September, Greengates, and The Hopkins Manuscript, and other publishers have followed suit. The film adaptation of Journey’s End was very well received recently, and the play remains a text that is often studied in schools, I believe. And yet nobody has reprinted his autobiography, 1968’s No Leading Lady.

It goes for big sums online, but I didn’t know that I stumbled upon it in a Marylebone bookshop in 2019. It was only on the way home that I googled it and found that I secured something of a bargain – and, as so often, it took me a few years to read it. And oh my goodness, I absolutely loved it.

Many authors tend to write their autobiographies with their own lens for nostalgia. They will dwell on childhood memories and anecdotes about family members with no claim to distinction, beyond association with the author. Some rush through their writing career with some sense of embarrassment – others even end their books before they have gained success. I often find this approach infuriating. After all, I am interested in them because they are authors – not because they once left their hat on a train on the way to boarding school.

So, hurrah and hurray to R.C. Sherriff! In the first paragraph, we are thrown into the maelstrom of his writing:

I had left home early that morning on my round of calls, to be back in good time to change and get to the theatre well before the curtain went up. It was the first night of my first play in the West End, and I wanted to find out whether the director had been able to rescue anything from the shambles of the dress rehearsal. I had been at the theatre until near midnight the previous evening, and had caught the last train home worn out with worry and disappointment. The whole thing had crumbled to pieces; the play was in ruins, with the curtain due to go up on the first performance in a matter of hours.

I wondered if this would be an introduction to get our attention, and he’d jump back into the past. Well, he does after a few pages of this – but only back to the beginning of that play’s genesis. And yes, the play is Journey’s End, based on Sherriff’s experiences of World War One – well, based on his knowledge of life in the trenches, rather than specifically based on his life. And it started life as a play to raise money for the rowing club that Sherriff was in.

Marvellously, the first 200 pages of No Leading Lady – more than half the book – is about Journey’s End. Sherriff goes gradually from this humble start to trying (and failing) to get an agent for it. People were put off by it having no leading lady (one of the reasons for the autobiography’s title) and by believing, in the mid-1920s, that no audience had an appetite for being taken back to the trenches.

You’d have to read those 200 pages to experience the hopes and failures, the gradual back and forth of getting to success. Sherriff is turned down many times before he finally gets somebody willing to put on the play at a private club – where the lead part is played by a then-unknown actor called Laurence Olivier. It gets rave reviews, but this doesn’t translate into a proper transfer for the fee-paying public. Eventually, though, someone gives it a chance… and it is a runaway hit.

I have raced through the gradual way Sherriff reveals this, and he goes on to chart its fortunes in the West End, in America, as a film etc. I loved how steadily, slowly he did – he is not coy to tell us about the financial aspect, or the various setbacks that were obstacles before this ‘overnight’ success. We so seldom get this level of detail about a writer’s work, and I absolutely loved it – and I haven’t even read or seen Journey’s End! He does assume you’ll have familiarity with it, but I didn’t find it much mattered. Whenever I review a Sherriff book, I say that is a perfect storyteller – and No Leading Lady is another example of this perfection. He measures the pace so brilliantly, so that the 200 pages feel fully earned.

From another writer, it might have felt braggy. But even when Sherriff is discussing his big pay-outs, enthusiastic reviews, or huge audiences, he does so with a sort of childlike disbelief that you can’t help be happy on his behalf. He never felt something like this could happen to him, a humble insurance salesman (oh, and I loved the sections on his insurance work too). The other part of the book which gets a lot of focus is his time as an undergraduate at Oxford – delayed until his 30s, and with the same sense of being unexpectedly privileged and finding himself in a world he never thought he’d be part of.

But success isn’t guaranteed, of course. He doesn’t spend as much time writing about the next play, but it fails. So does the one after. Sherriff has over-extended himself far too much on his house – and while some of his frets about economising aren’t particularly relatable (he insists he needs two indoor servants, three gardeners and a chauffeur) he is candid about them. It is the most personal he gets. He also writes beautifully about his relationship with his mother, who goes everywhere with him. It’s an impressive balance of genuine openness about what he does write about, and a careful line around the parts of his life he doesn’t want to disclose.

Sadly, for me, he decides not to write much about his novels – except for The Fortnight in September, his first novel which restored his renown. The others don’t even get a mention, and I would have loved to read more about some of my favourites. He also worked for a time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood at a time when studios were flinging eye-watering sums at well-known writers to try to lure them. He writes a lot about his first screenplay, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but skates past others – including the one that got him an Oscar nomination, which isn’t mentioned in the book.

I can see that some publishers wouldn’t want to reprint No Leading Lady. It doesn’t follow the usual trajectory of an autobiography, and some might think it would only be of interest to fans of Journey’s End. But I thought it was a spectacular, involving and delightful look at a writer’s life. Sherriff is such a brilliant storyteller that I would happily hear him tell any story – in this book, he captivated me completely.

Finishing #ABookADayInMay with The Finishing Touch by Brigid Brophy

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We have got to the end of May! Thank you for all your encouragement and comments as I’ve finished my book each day – and particular thanks to Madame Bibi for creating the challenge and leading the charge. We did it! And it’s been really fun. Including audiobooks this year made life easier – because I was finishing a book each day, rather than reading a whole book every day, it meant that I could have a breather sometimes and finish off an audiobook that had been on the go for a bit. A few more reflections before I get onto my final read for this challenge…

  • I read seven works of non-fiction and 24 works of fiction – the non-fiction is the main reason I call this challenge A Book A Day rather than A Novella A Day
  • 18 of the books were by authors I hadn’t read before – which pleased me, because I felt like I was in a bit of a rut of not trying new authors in 2023
  • Three were in translation – from Dutch, French, and Italian
  • I toyed with ranking them all, but they basically fall into tiers – and I think my three favourite books from this month were all non-fiction: Gerald: A Portrait by Daphne du Maurier, A Flat Place by Noreen Masud, and Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer by Joan Givner

Onto my final choice – and it wasn’t until I’d decided on it that I realised how appropriate the title was to be a final choice: The Finishing Touch (1963) by Brigid Brophy.

This is my second book by Brophy – I don’t know how The Finishing Touch is regarded in relation to the rest of her oeuvre, but I really liked it. Her style is delicious, reminding me of the biting qualities of Muriel Spark and Ivy Compton-Burnett. There is a convoluted, self-aware artistry to it that is unique, and those words might sound like an insult but I mean them as a compliment. My first Brophy was Hackenfeller’s Ape, which I also really liked, though I don’t remember it reading quite like this.

The setting for the novella is a finishing school in France, run by co-proprietors Miss Hetty Braid and Miss Antonia Mount. The former is diligent, plain, and unloved, though with a far greater knowledge of the running of the school and the individual girls than has Miss Antonia. Miss Antonia, meanwhile, is languidly lovely – adored by most of the girls and, indeed, by Miss Hetty herself. I loved these sorts of authorial commentary-by-intrusion:

“To which girl was the note addressed?”

“Sylvie Plash.”

“Is that the pretty one?” (‘Personal attention and care of the joint head mistresses for each girl‘, said the Prospectus.)

“No, that’s Eugenie.”

What happens? Well, a princess is coming to the school – Royalty, as she is initially referred to – and the headmistresses and pupils get excited about that. Otherwise, the plot is really just about the dynamics between these two women and their charges – particularly a few girls who are entirely besotted with Miss Antonia. The story doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as the telling, and style is much more compelling than substance here. Brophy writes sentences in the most indirect way. Each page is littered with parentheses, and nothing is told simply. It does mean you can’t rush through a page of writing, but I think it is very successful. It is certainly distinctive.

One is, thought Antonia, smoothing the frilled sleeve of her breakfast négligé (pale: it was not the hour for strong colour), misunderstood.

I’m not sure I could cope with a 400-page novel in this style, but it works very well over 120 pages – with a large font and wide margins. I also don’t know if this is representative of all her writing, but I always applaud an author who can make idiosyncratic writing compelling, characterful, and (above all) readable. Brophy delivers on all fronts and this novella is a really fun way to end my May challenge.

It Ends With Revelations by Dodie Smith #ABookADayInMay No.23

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Back in 2012, lots of us were excited when Corsair reprinted some hard-to-find Dodie Smith novels – and with lovely cover illustrations by Sara Mulvanny. I’d already read The Town in Bloom (borrowed in an older edition from the library), but I snapped it up along with The New Moon with the Old and It Ends With Revelations, and promptly never opened them again. But the intention was definitely always there, and I’m pleased to have finally read It Ends With Revelations (1967). The title comes from that famous line in Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance – one character says “The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.” Another replies, “It ends with Revelations.” Which has always irritated me, because the final book of the Bible is called Revelation, not Revelations.

ANYWAY, to turn to this book, the main character is 34-year-old Jill Quentin. Her husband Miles is a well-respected theatre actor, and she has accompanied him to an English spa town to the opening of a play that looks unlikely to do very well. It has recently been a TV series, but the transferral to the stage is pretty weak for any number of reasons, and Miles won’t mind extricating himself from the whole thing in the likely event that it ends after a few weeks.

Before I go further with the plot – my favourite parts of this novel are all the theatre things. Dodie Smith was both a jobbing actress and a playwright at different times, and writes about the theatrical world from the inside in one of her autobiographies and in The Town in Bloom. Her knowledge of the theatre suffuses the first half of It Ends With Revelations, but is seen more from an outsider – Jill has no wish to be an actor, though would have enjoyed being a stage assistant or something. Smith is very good on the various feuds and triumphs of the rehearsal process, how lines are cut and rewritten, or scenes re-directed to put focus on a different actor. You can tell it’s a world she knows well. I loved slightly knowing, caustic things like this:

They tiptoed into the back of the stalls. On the stage, a working light of dazzling brilliance dangled into a roofless composite set, made up of a sitting room and a kitchen separated by a staircase leading up to a room which suggested a look-out for forest fires. The whole gave the impression of a giant toy badly put together, rather than a place where human beings could conceivably live.

While buying chocolates for the leading boy, Jill bumps into Geoffrey Thornton. He is the local MP, as well as being a lawyer, and they quickly form an affinity. He introduces her to his daughters, Robin and Kit, on the cusp of adulthood. They are extremely self-possessed and take an instant liking to Jill – before long, they are all seeing each other, drinking hot chocolate in cafes, discussing their ‘dipsomaniac nymphomaniac’ mother with unusual candour, and sharing their tastes and interests. Perhaps my favourite two pages in the novel are where the sisters discuss Ivy Compton-Burnett.

“I almost like her because she writes about families,” said Robin. “But she doesn’t tell one enough about their backgrounds, what the houses are like, what the women wear. And though everyone’s always eating, we’re never allowed to know what they eat.”

“Well, who wants to know what anyone eats?” said Kit impatiently. “And she does say quite a bit about backgrounds. Sometimes there are cracks in a wall, or an overgrown creeper, or the rich people have cushions. One can do the rest from imagination.”

It’s totally irrelevant to the plot, and I imagine most modern editors would cut it, but I loved it so much.

The plot of the second half gets more complex, and it’s hard to write about it without giving spoilers – suffice to say that the lives of the Quentins and the Thorntons becomes increasingly entangled. There are, indeed, revelations. And among these are themes that are surprisingly modern for the 1960s, and discussed with a range of viewpoints. And, of course, anything surprisingly modern in 1967 will necessarily feel quite dated now. There are certainly passages that wouldn’t be printed today. And the debate rages on about what that means for reprints.

I really enjoyed It Ends With Revelations chiefly for the theatrical setting, but the second half worked for me too – because the revelations and twists say more about character than shocking plot, and they explain various things that were a bit mysterious in the first half. It’s a well-structured novel and pretty satisfying, give or take a few improbable relationships and decisions. I particularly enjoyed Kit and Robin, and would have liked even more from them – Smith is so good at girls of this age, as I Capture the Castle proves.

Better late than never, and I remain glad that Corsair made these lesser-known novels available to a wider audience.

The Fire-Dwellers by Margaret Laurence

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If you read my favourite books of 2022 list, you’ll know that Margaret Laurence came out on top – with A Jest of God, a brilliant short book about a woman called Rachel living a claustrophobic, hopeless life in a small Canadian town. I also read The Diviners last year, and read The Stone Angel many years ago – which meant that I only had two novels from Laurence’s Manawaka sequence left. One is a collection of short stories that I don’t own, and one is the book I recently finished: The Fire-Dwellers (1969).

There are a few connections between the books in the Manawaka sequence (though they can be read in any order). Perhaps the clearest link is between A Jest of God and The Fire-Dwellers – as The Fire-Dwellers is the story of Rachel’s sister, Stacey.

Stacey appears in the peripheries of A Jest of God as the sister who managed to get out of the town. Her life is only sketched in fragments, but she is held up as a contrast to Rachel’s stultifying inability to develop. In The Fire-Dwellers, we discover that her life has been far from ideal.

I’ve imagined myself getting away more times than I can tell you
Then do it.
Stacey looks at him, appalled and shaken by the suggestion of choice. Then she turns away again.
If I had two lives, I would. You think I don’t want to?

Yes, she has the husband, Mac, and the children – but she feels trapped and lost. Her marriage is hollow and sad, her children don’t bring her the fulfilment that she hoped they would, and the drudgery of daily life is overwhelming. As a theme, it is hardly unique – but Laurence brings her trademark insight to the telling. She is so good at getting beneath the skin of the everywoman. Her searing insights are remorseless. No character can hide behind pretences, even as we see their attempts at dissemblement – which might, indeed, fool the people around them, if not the reader. Her husband, for instance, is so fixated on an affair that he wrongly believes she’s had that he doesn’t notice the affair that she might have. The children are at an age where it is inconceivable that their parents might have independent personalities outside of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ – though the oldest daughter is beginning to recognise this, and clearly finds it troubling.

Several of the side characters are drawn really well. There is Thor, the head of the vitamin company for which Mac is salesman – a company that is only millimetres away from being a cult, and Thor is every bit the darkly boistrous cult leader. There is Mac’s boorish best friend – a trucker whose chief pleasure comes from playing ‘chicken’ with other truckers, both facing each other down in the middle of the road, daring the other truck to last as long as possible before pulling to the side. And then there is the enigmatic man that gives Stacey a new lease of life – a kind, clever, funny man who is not unlike the man who intervenes in Rachel’s life in A Jest of God. Across the span of Manitoba, the sisters were experiencing similar epiphanies that they never communicated about. And neither is a panacea, because Laurence is too realistic for that.

So, did I love The Fire-Dwellers as much as A Jest of God? Well, I’ve made it sound wonderful – and I know that others have found it brilliant, including Barbara’s Book Obsession recently, but I’m afraid I didn’t love it. And that’s for one reason which may or may not matter to you, and which might have been clear from the quote at the top. For some reason, Laurence decided not to use speech marks in this novel.

Normally I give up on a novel immediately if I see it doesn’t have speech marks. I only persevered because I love Laurence. Some people don’t mind this increasingly common authorial choice, but I find it maddening – an affectation that doesn’t add anything to a book, and simply makes it harder to read. They might as well leave out spaces between words. (I did, actually, find Laurence’s technique of sometimes leaving several spaces between words rather more effective.)

Here’s a section that illustrates it as well as any other bit. When she uses a dash, it is internal thought.

Duncan, for goodness sake shut up and quit making such a fuss about nothing.
Leave him, Mac. He was scared. Ian told him a rusty nail would
Scared, hell. He doesn’t need to roar like that. Shut up, Duncan, you hear me?
Duncan nods, gulps down salt from his eyes and the mucus from his nose. His chest heaves and he continues to cry, but quietly. Mac clamps a hand on his shoulder and spins him around.
Now     listen here, Duncan. I’ll give you one minute to stop.
Duncan stares with wet slit-eyes into his father’s face. Stacey clenches her hands together.
-I could kill you, Mac. I could stab you to the very heart right this minute. But how can I even argue, after last night? My bargaining power is at an all-time low. Damn you. Damn you. Take your hands off my kid.

Perhaps you think this is a silly reason not to enjoy a book as much as I’d hoped. (Someone on Twitter certainly did!) Or perhaps you’re on the same page as me. I just found it frustrating that The Fire-Dwellers could have been a brilliant novel, in my opinion, if she hadn’t tried this affected stylistic avenue. I understand that people like to play with the limits of literary form, but the absence of speech marks would have looked a little ‘done’ by the 1930s, and brought nothing to the table in 1969.

So this is comfortably my least favourite of the Manawaka sequence, though there is enough of Laurence’s brilliance to keep me going. Ultimately I found it a frustrating read, but it still hasn’t dinted my belief that Laurence is one of the best writers of the second half of the 20th century.

Five memoirs I’ve read recently

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Quite a large percentage of the non-fiction I read or listen to is accounted for by memoirs and biographies. While glancing at my pile of books to be written about on here, I realised that five of them fell into the category of memoir and autobiography – while covering an extraordinary range between them. And all by authors where I haven’t read anything else by them. Here they are…

My Father and Myself (1968) by J.R. Ackerley

I have four of Ackerley’s books, because I’ve always assumed I will enjoy his writing (and because they are delicious New York Review of Books Classics) – I took to Twitter to ask people which I should start with. While My Father and Myself didn’t win the poll, the replies were sufficient to convince me.

As the title suggests, this book is more or less equal parts about Ackerley and his father, Roger – a relationship that grows steadily more fascinating as the book continues. At times, they have a shocking openness, particularly around sexual matters – while there are other, major parts of Roger Ackerley’s life that his son had no idea about until after his death. I shan’t spoil what they are, because they are revealed rather late in this book – though I was already aware of them because I’ve read The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley by Diana Petre.

From the attention-grabbing opening line onwards (‘I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919’), Ackerley is an excellent storyteller – particularly about the things that interest him. What most seems to interest him, for better or worse, is his own sexual exploits. There is an awful lot about the young men he encountered through life and what he did to them (and they to him). There is a startling candour in these passages. In a biographer, it would have felt unprofessionally prurient; in Ackerley’s own words, it seems like a lengthy attempt to understand his own fascination with this aspect of his life.

More interesting to me was his perspective on his parents’ marriage – people say that nobody knows a marriage except those in it, but constant onlookers can perhaps have a more even-handed view. His mother put up with a lot; his father was not a monster, but lived by a set of principles that combine curiously and don’t benefit many people, including himself.

Honesty and accuracy are not the same thing, of course, and Ackerley’s striking openness sits intriguingly alongside the limits of his self knowledge. It’s a fascinating read, often uncomfortable, but mesmerising too.

Diary of a Lone Twin (2019) by David Loftus

To talk of the death of one’s twin to surviving identical twins is almost impossible; the break of that bond is too painful and shocking to describe, too unbelievable to imagine.

Loftus was in his 20s when his identical twin brother died, not long after they had celebrated their birthday together. Three decades later, he takes us through the diary of a year – a year where nothing significant happens in relation to that death, but which is as good an opportunity as any to continue processing the grief, seeing what has happened to him over the years.

As you probably know, I have a twin brother (Colin, who is also reading Loftus’s memoir), and the idea of losing him is as unbelievable as that quote at the beginning suggests. My life doesn’t make sense without him. And that’s the world David Loftus was thrust into, from a brother who was also his best friend. We don’t learn at first how he died, and Loftus measures out the parts of that story throughout the first half of the book. It feels oddly like a thriller, as we piece together how it happened – eventually discovering that it was shocking medical malpractice.

Of course, Diary of a Lone Twin is not an objective account, nor should it be. Rather than simply a description of what happened, it is Loftus’s thoughts on life without John – and how it might have been different. It’s also about his recent second marriage, about his son, about his career as a food photographer. At times, it felt like other things were crowding out the story of John and its aftermath (I could particularly have done without the pages about how much he hates cats). But, even with the padding, this is a very engaging attempt to describe the unthinkable.

Delicacy (2021) by Katy Wix

I listened to Wix reading this extraordinary memoir – about cake and death, as the subtitle says (and isn’t it a brilliant title for that?). It looks through the significant moments of Wix’s life through the prism of cakes that she associates with each of them. And it’s about the deaths of her father, her mother, and her best friend.

I first encountered Wix as a contestant on Taskmaster, and she appears in almost every good British TV show of recent years. While she is extremely funny in character roles, her personality and comic sensibility is rather different on her own terms – it is still funny, but it is equally melancholy. In her narration, there were plenty of lines that would have made me laugh if I’d read them on the page, but she delivers them with calmness, almost a sadness, which makes them effective in a very different way. A possible exception is the chapter on a personal trainer, which does have moments of poignancy but is more unabashedly hilarious than other sections of Delicacy.

As well as discussing the loved ones she lost, in difficult and painful ways, Wix also writes about her career – the highs and the lows, and particularly about the way that she has been expected to look and behave as a woman in the industry. She doesn’t name many of the productions she’s been in, so it’s not a tell-all in that sense, but she is still very candid about the treatment she experienced. And there is a moving, tense chapter on a possible reunion on a project with a bully from her early life.

As you can perhaps tell from this overview, I don’t remember any of the specific cakes that Wix associates with different moments of her life. As a framing technique, it isn’t especially relevant – but if it helped her produce a book this good, then hurrah.

Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds at Once (2021) by Phil Wang

Another comic I first encountered on Taskmaster, and a memoir published in the same year – which I also listened to as an audiobook read by the author. Wang spent the first 16 years of his life in Malaysia, and the second 16 in the UK – so this book is about a life split down the middle in years, but also in terms of identity. He writes of feeling not Malaysian enough for Malaysia and not British enough for Britain.

The book is divided into different categories – food, nature, language etc – which gives Wang opportunities for covering a vast amount of material. There is definitely some serious stuff about racism in here, and about the differences between cultures and the difficulties of trying to ‘be from two worlds’ without either of them suffering – but it’s also a very, very funny book. Wang’s writing is much more punchline-driven than Wix’s, and a lot of the book would feel equally at home as stand-up. I definitely recommend you try the audiobook, if you read Sidesplitter, because it really requires Wang’s insouciantly optimistic voice.

Raining Cats and Donkeys (1967) by Doreen Tovey

Definitely the most uncomplicatedly fun book on this list, it’s one of a series that Tovey wrote about having Siamese cats and a donkey. It opens with:

Charles said the people who wrote this bilge in the newspapers about donkeys being status symbols were nuts.

At that moment we were in our donkey’s paddock dealing with the fact that she’d eaten too many apples, and I couldn’t have agreed with him more.

It’s representative of the entirety of this short memoir. The book is a collection of self-deprecating stories that show how complicated life can get when you fall in love with spirited pets. The stakes are not often particularly high, and that’s what makes them so entertaining to read – because things might go awry, but at the end of the day Doreen and Charles will be happy together, contentedly accompanied with a menagerie of animals.

Tovey is very good at conveying the characters of the two cats, Solomon and Sheba, and Annabel the donkey – without ever making the mistake of making them too twee or fanciful. She is a keen observer of genuine animal behaviour, in its ruthlessness and obstinacy as well as its more gentle moments, and describes them with humour and affection. My edition was given to me by my friend Kirsty and Paul, and has an earlier handwritten dedication from 1968: ‘For Alan, as a Bedside Book (to encourage earlier bedtimes). I can see that it would have done.

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.

A Jest of God by Margaret Laurence (Novella a Day in May #15)

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Wow. A Jest of God (1966) by Margaret Laurence is absolutely brilliant. I bought it in 2007, and 15 years later it has come off my shelf and been devoured in a couple of sittings. It might not quite be a novella, at 202 pages, but its scope is compact in time and space – and a spectacular success.

This is the second in Laurence’s Manawaka series of novels – I’ve now read the first, fifth, and second (in that order) – set in a fictional town in Manitoba, Canada, though with a different set of characters each time. Having read the lengthy, spacious The Diviners for ‘Tea or Books?’ and finding it astonishingly good, I wanted to see which other Laurence treasures I’d been neglecting.

They are not actually chanting my name, of course. I only hear it that way from where I am watching at the classroom window, because I remember skipping rope to that song when I was about the age of the little girls out there now. Twenty-seven years ago, which seems impossible, and myself seven, but the same brown brick building, only a new wing added and the place smartened up. It would certainly have surprised me then to know I’d end up here, in this room, no longer the one who was scared of not pleasing, but the thin giant She behind the desk at the front, the one with the power of picking any coloured chalk out of the box and writing anything at all on the blackboard. It seemed a power worth possessing then.

Rachel Cameron isn’t just living in the same small town where she grew up – she is living in the same house, and working as a second grade teacher at the same school she attended as a child. Her life has not progressed in any of the ways she’d imagined. Her days are spent at work with children who know her deeply for a year and then move on – still in the same school, the same town, but no longer part of her life. Her evenings are spent with her widowed mother, living above the funeral parlour that Rachel’s father used to run. Like some of the other books I’ve read this month, the mother/daughter relationship is too dependent, too stultifying, too thoroughly tangled with guilt and resentment, as well as love. Rachel seems to have few friends and no intimates – and she tries to avoid the closeness sought by her colleagues, such as the teacher who wants her to come along to her charismatic church.

Into this unchanging world comes Nick Kazlik. Or, rather, into it he returns.

“Hello, Rachel.”

Has someone spoken to me? A man’s voice, familiar. Who is it?

“It is Rachel, isn’t it?” he says, stopping, smiling enquiringly.

He is about the same height as myself. Not thickly built, really, but with the solidity of heavy bones. Straight hair, black. Eyes rather Slavic, slightly slanted, seemingly only friendly now, but I remember the mockery in them from years ago.

Nick was the milkman’s son, returned to stay with his elderly parents – he left; he went to teach high school in the city. He and Rachel weren’t particularly close, but now they are drawn to each other. Soon, they are spending most evenings together – clandestinely, for both know their parents wouldn’t approve of anything so sudden.

In another genre, this would be a romantic release from drudgery. But in A Jest of God, Rachel cannot get release from herself. Though there is happiness in this new fling, Rachel has the self-consciousness of an adolescent. She second guesses everything she does or says, constantly imagining how it might be interpreted, what sort of impression she is making, whether she will be accepted or rejected.

Laurence writes with astonishing psychological acuity. The Diviners was sprawling in time and space – A Jest of God takes place over just a few weeks in a town so insular that it’s hard to conceive the rest of the world exists in any meaningful way. Rachel is so detailed and complete a character that the reader loves her, wants the best for her, and knows how unlikely it is that she will get it – because of flaws in herself and her upbringing, as much as the environment in which she lives. The tension between the possibility of Rachel’s future and her own hubris is what keeps this novel pacy and compelling, even when very little is happening on the surface.

It is a fantastic success of a novel, showing how adept Laurence is at whichever scope she sets herself.

Novella a Day in May: Days 13 and 14

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I’m watching Eurovision; I’m typing up thoughts about novellas. What a day.

Day 13: Elizabeth Finch (2022) by Julian Barnes

Ooof. I’ve read a couple of Barnes novels before this one, and never really seen what the fuss was about. But I wasn’t prepared for quite how bad Elizabeth Finch would be.

The narrator is remembering a teacher – Elizabeth Finch, referred to often as EF – who has had a lasting effect on his life. Think someone with the unusual pith and dignity of Jean Brodie, dispensing philosophical insights that have her pupils thinking for decades. Except that everything she says is only a couple of notches above a ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ sign in terms of profundity.

One of the things she introduces the class to is Julian the Apostate, who hated Christians sometime many centuries ago. Don’t know much about him? Don’t worry, Barnes then includes an ‘essay’ by the narrator where he dumps all the knowledge he has about Julian. It reads like a Wikipedia article, only it’s 50 pages long. We get the facts and theories about Julian the Apostate, It’s astonishingly inelegant, in terms of novel writing.

Elsewhere, in the first and final sections, his writing is serviceable and only occasionally embarrassing (some of the dialogue he gives Elizabeth Finch is really awkward, and clearly she is a mouthpiece for a middle-aged man). But the best this novella gets to is mediocre, and at worst it is bafflingly poorly done.

 

Day 14: Sing Me Who You Are (1967) by Elizabeth Berridge

I bought this back in 2009 because I knew her name from the Persephone collection of her short stories, but I might equally have bought it for this glorious cover. The illustrator – Reg Cartwright – did three or four Berridge reprints in the 1980s and they are so characterful and wonderful.

What’s more, it is accurate to the premise of the novel. Harriet Cooper and her two Siamese cats arrive at the farm which belonged to her recently dead aunt, and where her cousin Magda and her husband Gregg live. Her aunt hasn’t left her the farm, or the land, or anything – except, pictured there on the cover, the bus.

Wading through the still-dewy grass – for the bus lived in shadow half the year, and this was autumn – Harriet went through the wooden gate set in a gap in the hedge and up on to the step. She unlocked the padlock and pushed open the door, which folded inwards down the middle. Stepping inside she became aware of the musty smell of disuse. How long, a month, six weeks? Enough for damp to invade this thin shell. She would open windows, light a fire, banish it.

She has stayed there on and off over the years, and now she has brought her few possessions to live there indefinitely.

The story then looks at how her life alongside Magda and Gregg brings up past and present tensions, as well as affinities. Central to them is the memory of a man known as Scrubbs – who deeply affected each of the three. He has been dead for a long time, but he is still impacting all of their lives, and the way they interact with each other. Along the way, secrets come out…

I’ve read three other Berridge books, and have yet to find one that I really love. This is a good novel, and Harriet is an interesting, layered character – but I think I’m really hoping for a book that will live up to those wonderful covers. If Berridge were a little weirder, or a little more stylised in her prose – a dash of Beryl Bainbridge, say – then I think I’d love her. As it is, her realism lacks a little something. And yet I’ll keep reading them, because I feel like there might be something even better in her oeuvre – and something that lives up to those covers.

Novella a Day in May: Days 9 and 10

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

Day 9: Every Eye (1956) by Isobel English

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Pious Memory by Margery Sharp (Novella a Day in May #6)

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When Madame Bibi and I realised we both had In Pious Memory (1967) by Margery Sharp on our shelves, we decided to put it down for the same day of Novella a Day in May – the only forward-planning I’ve done. I haven’t read Madame Bibi’s review yet, but you can do so (and I will do so as soon as I’ve finished writing this).

I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Sharp, and find her such an interestingly diverse writer. Going into this novella, I didn’t know whether she’d be in serious or comic mode. It’s a book about death, but definitely leans more towards the latter. With some surreality thrown in, for good measure.

In Pious Memory comes later in Sharp’s long writing career, and I wasn’t sure whether she’d still have the lightness of touch which makes her dry, sparkling sense of humour work so well. I needn’t have worried. There was something so piercingly wonderful about the opening lines that I knew I was back in safe company with Sharp:

After some thirty years of marriage, Mrs Prelude’s sole manifestation of independence was always, when travelling by plane, to sit in the tail. She and her husband flew a good deal; he was an authority on international banking, much in demand wherever his European colleagues gathered in conference, and though austerely avoiding all attendant junketings – receptions, or visits to historic monuments – invariably took Mrs Prelude along to look after him at the hotel. He suffered from asthma. His giant intellect was housed in but an average body – indeed rather below average; average only in the sense of being unremarkable: all the more startling therefore was the effect when on rostrum or at banquet board he suddenly rose to his feet and let his intellect loose like a line from a mouse-trap. Mrs Prelude naturally never witnessed this transformation herself, she was always at home in the hotel bedroom sterilising his inhaling-apparatus with water boiled over a portable methylated-spirit stove; but other wives told her about it.

Mrs Prelude feels safer sat in the tail of a plane, and chooses it even when her husband can’t get a seat next to her. We are just preparing to smile at her silly foibles when, on the second page, we learn that her precautions are justified. Mr and Mrs Prelude are in a plane crash: ‘Mrs Prelude, in the tail, was but shocked and bruised, whereas of her husband there remained but the remains.’

The Preludes had two adult children (Elizabeth and William) and a daughter on the cusp of adulthood (Lydia). None of them were particularly close to their father, who had more time for economic academics than for his flesh and blood – but they speedily begin recreating him in false memories, giving him attributes that they wish he’d had, and recalling things that it would have been convenient for him to say.

But then… Mrs Prelude announces that she thinks her husband might still be alive.

Quite a lot of the rest of In Pious Memory focuses on the impetuous Lydia and her cousin Toby going to France, to see if they can find their missing father/uncle. We dart back to England often, to see how unaffected William and Elizabeth are – and how Mrs Prelude is choosing the next stage of her life. This isn’t a novel about grief, but about how a big change in a family will set off other changes – and how much will remain the same.

Unlike other Sharp novels I’ve read, this one doesn’t feel meticulously planned. Particularly in the French sections, the plot spirals off into such unexpected and disconnected directions that it felt a bit like Sharp was making it up as she went along. But that made it feel irrepressible rather than incoherent. It was odd but great fun – or perhaps I should say odd and great fun.

I really enjoyed In Pious Memory, and I think Sharp was wise to make this one a short book (my edition coming in at 160 pages). A longer novel with this plot might have required the reader to feel stronger emotions than amusement, and occasionally exasperation. As it is, Sharp guides the reader through the strange experience and we come out the other side having had a delightful, unusual time.