1960s

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.

My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof by Penelope Mortimer (Novella a Day in May #3)

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I’m playing cold-or-Covid roulette at the moment – it would be unlucky to get Covid again so soon, but you never know – and Penelope Mortimer accompanied me while I wasn’t working or napping today. My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is the curious title of this 1967 novel(la), somewhere in the middle of her writing career. A few of her books have come back into print through various houses, but I am still surprised that she has not survived as unstoppably as other contemporaries. Her style is assured, odd, and captivating.

My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof is about Muriel Rowbridge – the only women in a group of journalists who have been flown to Canada. They aren’t there for a particular event so much as to soak in the culture of the area, and report back on it in their various ways. Muriel’s writerly output is a column in a woman’s magazine (though they avoid the term). She has some aspirations of writing novels, though lies about this, and doesn’t seem particularly fulfilled by her job. Though nor is she ashamed of it as some people expect her to be.

Muriel is in something of a turbulent period of her life. Only a few months before the novel starts, she has had a mastectomy. She has a brassiere with a fake breast, and is far from getting used to the change in her body, and in the way she believes that people see her. After the mastectomy, she ended her relationship – a long-term affair with a married man called Ramsey.

Then they told her she was not going to die and her concern changed to a sense of outrage; she became convinced that no one could ever feel anything for her, sexually, but pity and disgust. She sent Ramsey away, his mirror after him. They said she would get over this too, and suggested therapy. But she did not want to get over it, the cheat she was perpetrating on the world by pretending to be a normal woman gave her a kind of terrible liveliness; without that liveliness, that feeling of perpetual shock, she believed that she would drift into an apathy which would be worse than death. she went back to work in new clothes, everything hidden. They called her brave behind her back, but treated her, according to the General’s directions, with affectionate indifference. Very few people telephoned her at home, or asked her out, in case she should feel pitied or find it difficult to refuse. The men who had previously patted or stroked her. out of friendliness, avoided her; the women, in her presence, avoided the men, obscurely ashamed of themselves.

Mortimer writes about this experience with a sort of brutal sensitivity, if that isn’t an oxymoron. Muriel’s feelings are not given anywhere to hide, but there is somehow a kindness in the unflinching way her new life is examined.

She certainly needn’t have worried about men finding her attractive, though. While there is a complexity to each of them, the crux of the novel is Muriel forming a relationship with every man on the trip. More than one are sexual. Some are based on shared disappointment, some on a meeting of minds and questions, and some simply on unstoppable interest in one another. I’ll be honest, I did struggle to separate the men – they did have distinctive traits, but I couldn’t remember which traits went together, or with which name. She shuttles between them all, one by one and back again, often in the form of sparse back-and-forth conversations. There is definitely something Spark-like in the way Mortimer presents conversations – a sort of emotional openness that never quite answers the questions the reader is probably asking.

I thought My Friend Says It’s Bullet-Proof was very good, and the writing is exactly the sort of curious, spare prose I love from this period. Mortimer is expert at conveying the damage that Muriel feels. I think the only thing that stopped me really loving this book is that I was a bit too confused by it. But maybe that was part of the point.

The Initials in the Heart by Laurence Whistler

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I can’t quite remember why I bought The Initials in the Heart (1964) by Laurence Whistler back in 2012. It might be because of his connection with his brother Rex Whistler – though I didn’t know much about him then – or it might be because my friend Carol mentioned it. Either way, it spent almost exactly a decade on my shelves before I finally took it down. I don’t really know what I was expecting, since I didn’t know anything about it, but it certainly wasn’t this.

The Initials in the Heart is Whistler’s ode to his wife, an actress called Jill Furse. They courted and wed, but the marriage only lasted five years – Jill has ill health throughout their time together, and the end is written in from the beginning. We know, from the epigraph onwards, that this is a tribute from a man who only got to be a husband for a brief span.

Grief memoirs are very common now, and I find them fascinating and compelling. Whistler writes in a different mode. It truly is a tribute to a life, without dwelling on anything after the time they had together. It is less introspective, and perhaps less cathartic, but it does mean that joy and hopefulness can be experienced as Whistler experienced it. Here’s the opening:

The best thing my poetry ever did for me was to bring about the story of this book. But that is enough to compensate in advance for the inevitable death-bed recognition of failure.

To be. a poet! Not relinquishing this hope, from the age of fifteen or so until now when I was twenty-four, I published in November 1936 a third book of verse called The Emperor Heart, and at my elder brother Rex’s suggestion sent a copy to the novelist Edith Olivier at Wilton, that well-read, vivacious, slightly eccentric person who was his closest friend, though perhaps twice his age, and who lived in the Daye House, the converted dairy at one side of the park. Staying with her when it arrived was a young actress, then twenty-one, whose career of great promise on the London stage had been interrupted by illness—paratyphoid, it was said. 

Of course, I know many details about Edith Olivier’s friendship with Laurence’s brother Rex, from Anna Thomasson’s wonderful biography of them called A Curious Friendship. Maybe it was seeing Olivier’s name on the first page that made me buy this book, and my beloved author of The Love-Child does make occasional appearances throughout Whistler’s memoir. But this isn’t her story, and she chiefly serves as the introducer of the central couple.

There is a gentleness at the heart of this memoir. It is, softly and generously, a story of young love – of building a home together, and then several other homes as they move around. It is a story of war interrupting time together; it is a story of a young actress who is feted by many but whose health often denies her the opportunities she is given. Perhaps we see Jill in an idyllic light, from her husband who adored her, but the portrait of a kind, ambitious, thwarted woman comes alive. It is a skilled portrayal of someone who combined contentedness and discontent – somehow both resigned to her limitations while continually fighting against them. The illnesses she experienced are never completely clear, even down to the exact details of the one that cost her life. But those illnesses are the bare facts of Jill’s life: more important is the voice and the person. She kept diaries and wrote letters, and Whistler incorporates many of these – giving us a firm sense of who she was. Here is a passage she wrote while pregnant with their second child:

Last night I lay watching a troubled moon through the plane leaves, very peaceful and happy. There is something about a family house, ugly though it’s been made outside. I like thinking of my ancestors back in the 17th Century lying in bed and waiting for their children to be born. And particularly in the autumn it has a shabby melancholy that’s friendly and kind – great tawny drifts of leaves swirling in the weedy drive, and idiotic geese screaming in the wind from time to time. The leaves are beautiful, mobbing one’s feet in the wind, and lying like footprints on the stones. So I’m glad you arranged this. I have all your serene confidence to lean on. It’s stronger than anything else and makes me perfectly at rest.

Since this is the story of their relationship, and of Jill, other elements of Whistler’s story are skated over. He began to make money as a glass engraver (see, for instance, the cover of the book) but this path to success is only told piecemeal. He includes a little of his war experiences, but chiefly as they mean separation from Jill. I think this approach was wise. It means the story of Laurence and Jill is not diluted.

Whistler writes beautifully, with occasional striking turns of phrase. This moment, in his initial shock of grief, really moved me: ‘I went back to my room, knowing all privation in a moment, and as yet nearly nothing about it. It was like dying, I imagine – at once too strange and familiar to explain – and it was, in a way, dying.” Throughout, his prose is sensitive and perceptive, deeply personal while remaining calm and evenly paced.

The Initials in the Heart is an unusual little book. It’s special.

The Small Room by May Sarton

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When I bought The Small Room (1961), it was because I thought it might be about a house. I’m a simple man: I love books about houses, particularly if this would end up being about a hitherto undiscovered small room in a house. If anybody knows any books like that, lemme know. Well, The Small Room isn’t that, but I found an awful lot to like in it anyway.

I bought the novel on my first trip to the United States in 2013 – more specifically, in a lovely bookshop in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sadly, since then the little town has become renowned for the appalling far-right rally that ended in a woman’s death. At the time, it was simply a day out from DC.

I don’t think I’d read any May Sarton books at the time, but it is now my third – after The Magnificent Spinster and The Education of Harriet Hatfield. While I enjoyed both of them, I found the former less memorable than I’d hoped, and the latter very patchy. The Small Room takes us to a setting that is very distinct and probably a recommendation to many of us: a women’s college in New England.

Lucy Winter – surely a coy nod to Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette? – has just started there, and it is her first teaching job. She is young, idealistic, and keen to make a good impression. More than that, she is keen to be a good teacher – in every sense of the word ‘good’.

The girls arrived, and settled like flocks of garrulous starlings, perpetual chatter and perpetual motion. Lucy, looking down from her office on the fourth floor of one of the oldest buildings, compared the campus to a stage where a complicated ballet was being rehearsed. Small groups flowed together and parted; a girl in a blue blazer ran from one building to another; five or six others arranged themselves under an elm, in unconsciously romantic attitudes, a chorus of nymphs. The effect was enhanced by the freshmen’s required red Eton caps, and by the unrequired but almost universal uniform of short pleated skirts and blazers. Looking down on all this casual, yet intimate life from above, Lucy felt lonely and a little scared.

At the centre of the novel are the actions of one student. She is exemplary and feted, and widely regarded as having a promising future that would reflect well on the college. But when Lucy is marking one of her essays, she discovers that it is plagiarised. She feels she has to inform other members of the faculty – and sets in motion a series of actions that affect everybody in the college.

Lucy is a well-drawn and interesting character, partly because Sarton uses her to show that there are not simple choices between wrong and right, and that people might do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and vice versa. The girl who plagiarises is also written really interestingly, and reacts in a way that is both believable and unexpected. What stopped me wholeheartedly loving The Small Room is that these two, and perhaps one or two others, are the only nuanced characters in the novel. It’s not that the others are stereotypes, it’s just that Sarton doesn’t spend enough time delineating them and they all (particularly the other teachers and board members) blur into one amorphous mass.

Sarton does make up for this with beautiful, unpredictable writing. Here is one bit I noted down:

Lucy opened the window and knelt beside it, tasting the cool freshness, the stately, suspended, hypnotic fall, drank in the silence, and finally fell onto her bed as if she had been drugged, to sleep a dreamless sleep.

At the heart of The Small Room is a fascinating dilemma, done well and interestingly – with only a few flaws in the way the cast is put together. I don’t think I’ve yet found my perfect Sarton novel, but I think this is my favourite of the three I’ve read so far.

A couple of recent audiobooks

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I go back and forth with my Audible subscription. I’m currently back in – and have discovered the Audible Plus catalogue, where you can download free audiobooks that have been added to that collection. There are thousands of the things, with no clear criteria why they’re in – some classics, some look to be self-published with audiobook covers designed in Paint. It takes some scrolling through, but I have managed to find some books of interest. (Any recommendations?)

And here are a couple of books I’d already added to my Audible wishlist – and I was pleased to see, when I re-joined, that they were labelled as freely available to me.

The Elephants in My Backyard eBook by Rajiv Surendra | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster UKThe Elephants in My Backyard by Rajiv Surendra

If you know Rajiv Surendra’s work at all, it’s probably as the rapping mathlete Kevin G from teen classic Mean Girls. I think I read about this 2016 memoir in a Buzzfeed article – but I’m really glad I did. Perhaps against the odds of that opening description, it’s really very good.

Surendra was on the set of Mean Girls when a member of the crew recommended that he read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – because it’s “a book about you”. Naturally intrigued, Surendra reads – and is instantly captivated. While he doesn’t live the same life as Pi, a Tamil boy in India who is shipwrecked with a tiger, there are other things the same. Surendra’s parents are Tamil and from Sri Lanka; Surendra matches the physical description of Pi. He becomes determined to play the role of Pi in a film.

At this point, there isn’t even a film in the offing. But Surendra starts planning – and even gets in touch with Martel, who proves a remarkably kind and patient correspondent over the coming years (his emails are included in the book). The determination to play the role really becomes an obsession. Over the next few years, Surendra moves for a period to India, he learns some Tamil, he learns to swim, he turns down other acting work on the off-chance that casting for Life of Pi will happen.

In the background to all of this, he naturally shares his own life. And much of that is quite desperate. An alcoholic father, prone to violent outbursts, haunts his home life. His work is mostly playing a character at an interactive historic farm. We get to know him, and he is mostly likeable and interesting – able to laugh at himself, and to convey what it’s like to be so single-minded in pursuit of a goal. (There are some regrettable body shaming moments, and some of the humour doesn’t quite land, but those are only small annoyances in the grand scheme of the book.)

Usually this sort of book is written by someone explaining how they got to where they are. But if you’ve seen Life of Pi, then you’ll know… Rajiv Surendra doesn’t get the part. In the end, despite having a good chat with the casting director, he doesn’t even get an audition. Six years of his life have been dedicated to something that didn’t work out. His lasting acting credit on iMDB is 2005. It’s fascinating to listen to a book like this from the perspective of someone who didn’t make it. There are, of course, any number of actors who commit utterly to their dream and end up not making it. Those stories are probably more valuable to hear. The ones who didn’t luck out.

And it’s a really good, interesting memoir. I’ve never read or seen Life of Pi, but I think all you need to enjoy it is an interest in people and what motivates them.

 

The Wall cover artThe Wall by Marlen Haushofer

I’ve not managed to track down who recommended this Austrian novel from 1963 (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside). I must have seen it somewhere and found the premise interesting enough to pop on my list. And that premise is: an unnamed narrator is visiting a couple friends in a remote farmhouse. They go off to a nearby town for an evening meal, leaving her behind. In the morning, they still haven’t returned.

On her wandering to see what’s happened to them, she finds something impossible. An invisible wall is stopping her going any further. Beyond it, she can see that people and animals are all frozen – clearly having died instantly.

Within the wall are acres and acres of empty land. It’s never clear quite how big it is, but she can travel for hours and find nobody and nothing – except animals. There are enough trout and deer for her to eat, and there is a dog (Lynx), a cat (Cat), and a cow (Bella). From the vantage of a couple of years on, she documents her experiences in surviving, and in developing a deep kinship with those animals.

Haushofer’s story is told quite slowly and gently, never flashing past an experience that she can detail. She is particularly good at the behaviour of animals – well, she’s very good at cats, and I assume she is good at dogs and cows. But over it all is a sense of looming dread – because the narrator has told us that the animals die, and that something bad has caused it.

I did find the end weirdly rushed and odd, after the gentle pacing of the rest of the story. I’m assuming it is a parable for something, or done with deliberate effect, but I am not at all convinced that it worked. Similarly unsuccessful (to my mind) were the occasional attempts to rationalise why she thought the wall was there, and who might be to blame – it worked better as something inexplicable.

These quibbles apart, it is a very impressive work. I do find that fine writing doesn’t work as well for me in audio as on the page. Maybe I’m more into story than prose when I’m listening? And the reader of the audiobook was a bit breathy and soft, which didn’t feel quite right. ANYWAY in summary perhaps I should have read this one as a book, but I still found it really interesting and would recommend. Not least because I want to talk to anyone and everyone about that ending, to try and understand why she did it.

Particularly Cats by Doris Lessing – #NovNov Day 17

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Particularly Cats (1967) is the third book by Doris Lessing that I’ve read – but nothing in the dystopian Memoirs of a Survivor or the grim The Fifth Child would have led me to expect something like Particularly Cats. It is 108 pages of absolute joy for a cat lover.

In a way, it’s like Elizabeth von Arnim’s All the Dogs of My Life, in that it is a memoir that concentrates on cats that Lessing has owned, or who have owned Lessing. But though it mentions various cats from different stages of Lessing’s life, it’s really about two – known as grey cat and black cat.

Before we get to their lives, we do get a whistle-stop tour of Lessing’s experience of cats in her Zimbabwean childhood – there are many, living unbridled lives that interweave with those of wild cats. Sometimes domestic cats mate with wild cats; sometimes they become wild. They are at the mercy of hawks, and they are many miles from the nearest vet. It is a tumultuous environment to have pets.

Then Lessing fast forwards to cats in London, and particularly to the black cat and grey cat. At the time she is writing the book they are only two and four years old respectively, and so very much present concerns – and they cannot abide each other. Lessing’s descriptions of their ongoing feud, and the forms it takes, is more fascinating than any battle I have read about.

Writing about cats can be tricky. Lessing is beautifully successful – because she is loving without being sentimental, and observant without being fanciful. She clearly understands cats deeply, and never tries to credit them with any anthropomorphism that doesn’t fit. And, at the same time, she recognises the nuanced and varied behaviours that different cats have. Lessing describes them with an anthropologist’s fervour, and with an affection that knows they can never be fully understood by a non-cat.

To love Particularly Cats as much as I did, you probably have to love cats as much as I do – or at least find them as fascinating as I do. I would happily read about cats’ doings and habits for many more pages, but I’ll leave you with just one moment. If cats don’t interest you, this wouldn’t be for you – the book would be far less enjoyable for me if it were about dogs, for instance. But if you’re a felinophile, and can cope with the reality of nature red in tooth and claw, then I urge you to get hold of a copy.

As a kitten, this cat never slept on the outside of the bed. She waited until I was in it, then she walked all over me, considering possibilities. She would get right down into the bed, by my feet, or on to my shoulder, or crept under the pillow. If I moved too much, she huffily changed quarters, making her annoyance felt.

When I was the making the bed, she was happy to be made into it; and stayed, visible as a tiny lump, quite happily, sometimes for hours, between the blankets. If you stroked the lump, it purred and mewed. But she would not come out she had to.

A Spirit Rises by Sylvia Townsend Warner #SylviaTownsendWarnerReadingWeek

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Helen at A Gallimaufry is hosting another Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, and I think I’ve managed to join in every year – my bookshelves are nothing if not replete with unread STWs. I have rather failed with many of her novels, and gave up on The Flint Anchor a few weeks ago – but I tend to have much greater success with her short stories. I bought most of the available collections in a spree in 2011, and am gradually reading through them – and 1962’s A Spirit Rises is brilliant.

In her novels, Sylvia Townsend Warner travels widely through time and space. In her short stories, she tends to stick to contemporary England – and this is doubtless one of the reasons I love them so much. She doesn’t need to take us to another world; she can turn her observant eye to the world directly in front of her. And nobody is as good as Warner at the slightly unexpected twists of wording that show deep below the surface of people and their relationships with one another.

It’s always hard to write about a short story collection, so I’ll just pick out some of my favourite stories. Right up there was ‘A Dressmaker’, about an older woman who decides to stop being a dependable relative (shades of Laura Willowes!) and set up as an independent dressmaker. She is mostly doing dull, everyday outfits, but finds most fulfilment on the rare occasions when she has been asked to make evening gowns. And then quiet Mrs Benson comes – seeming quite drab, but bringing extravagant fabrics and asking them to be made into fanciful, beautiful pieces. Here is a section of it – best read slowly, enjoying every word choice Warner makes:

Five months later, she reappeared, and once more it was an evening gown she wanted. Winter had done its worst to Mrs Benson, but had not tamed her ambition. She brought billows of glistening white gauze, splashed with vermilion and rose and lemon, together with a wide ribbon of mignonette green for a sash – ‘like an azalea bed’, she remarked. Mary was about to ask if Mrs Benson was fond of gardening – many ladies were, and looked the worse for it – when Mrs Benson went on, ‘And after this, there is something else I’ve been thinking about, something quite different.’

‘A spring tailor-made, Madam?’ Mrs Benson’s daytime appearance made this a natural assumption.

‘For sad evenings.’

The word ‘sad’ had secondary meanings. It can be used for cakes that have failed to rise, for overcast weather. Mary supposed that the next dress she would make for Mrs Benson would for those dusky, clammy evenings when one almost lights a fire but instead puts on a shawl, and she was glad to think that for once Mrs Benson was facing realities. Mrs Benson was doing no such thing. The silk she brought, patterned in arabesques of brown and mulberry and a curious dead slate-blue, was fine as a moth’s underwing. Held against the light, it was almost transparent, like a film of dirty water.

‘You’ll have a slip underneath, of course, Madam. What shade were you thinking of?

But for once, Mrs Benson had not got it all planned and settled. She stared at the stuff as people stare at slowly running water, and said nothing.

Nobody but Warner could have written this. There are so many things I love in it, but ‘those dusky, clammy evenings where one almost lights a fire but instead puts on a shawl’ stands out. Just wonderful.

As another example, here’s the opening paragraph of ‘Randolph’, about a man returning to his sisters after some time away:

The date of the glossy new tear-off calendar was January 1 but from the window behind the writing-table one saw the vaguely smiling sky of a London spring. It was a room on the first floor, square, and rather too high for its floor-space. The folding-doors in the back wall were open, and gave a view of the room behind – once the back drawing-room of a Victorian mansion but now furnished as a bedroom. Both rooms were inhumanly tidy and smelled of moth-powder. Two women came in and began unwrapping the parcels they carried. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m reeled in immediately. She sets up the small world of the short story so quickly. I said earlier that Warner was describing the world in front of her – but often it is a hazy, timeless world. There are few 1960s references – and I suppose many of the stories would have appeared in the New Yorker in the previous decade. Perhaps it was writing for an audience across the ocean that meant Warner didn’t put English culture too front and centre.

When I read a later collection of stories, The Innocent and the Guilty, for Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week a couple of years ago, I found it all a bit vague and abstract. Some of the stories in A Spirit Rises go a different way – it’s the only time I’ve seen Warner use the precision of the unexpected denouement. I’m not sure those perfectly suit her writing style. Better are those like ‘A Dressmaker’ or ‘The Snow Guest’, about an escaped prisoner in a snowy countryside, which end on a stray observation. Something with far-reaching implications, but which is only a moment in a series of moments – not a turning point or a conclusion.

My favourite collection of Warner’s remains Swans on an Autumn River, though this was at least partly because I read them in a castle in Dorset. A Spirit Rises isn’t quite as meteorically wonderful as that book, but it’s not all that far off – it certainly includes the finest writing I’ve read this year, and I know will reward careful, slow, luxurious re-reading. If you’ve only encountered Warner the novelist, please don’t hesitate in exploring her extraordinary talent as a writer of short stories.

The Faces of Justice by Sybille Bedford

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You probably know about Sybille Bedford, and maybe have even read some of her novels. She had a welcome resurgence of interest in the blogosphere when Daunt republished a few of her books a while ago, and I think she is a really interesting novelist. Lots of good stuff on small moments in child/parent relationships, as well as the drama of a larger scale journey. I enjoyed A Favourite of the Gods and A Compass Error enough to buy up more books by her – and four years ago I came across The Faces of Justice (1961) in one of my favourite bookshops, The Malvern Bookshop.

She starts off with a description of a trial of someone accused of stealing 32 cheeses. We are thrown, in media res, into the court case – a mixture of legal speak and very human reactions; a clash of the amusingly mundane and, for the defendant at least, the extraordinary.

This case, or one like it – it was a very ordinary case – came on some four or five years ago. Mutatis mutandis, it could come on this year and it could come on, God willing and if this particular judge has not retired, next year and the year thereafter. I walked in on it by chance when I was first trying to learn the ways of our law courts. I have sat since through many cases of all kinds, but that one was the first criminal trial and the paragraphs above, with a few enlargements, are what I wrote of what I saw at the time. Now, I propose to go through the case – in memory as well as words in black on white – with a fine toothcomb [sic!]. For I have decided to start on a journey to the law courts of some other countries, and I was a kind of yard-stick. Before going off to see how they are doing it elsewhere, I want to put down, if I can, commit to mind and paper, the look, the sound, the ways of some daily English trials.

And that is exactly what she does. Bedford is limited by the languages she understands – which are quite a few – and she goes to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France to see how their courts compare with England’s. But first, she will spend about eighty pages looking at England’s courts.

Of course, these comparisons are no longer particularly useful as a comparison of legal systems. England’s justice system of sixty years ago might as well be a foreign country. All manner of laws have changed – we still had the death penalty, for instance – and I expect an awful lot of other elements have also altered. But it is absolutely fascinating nonetheless.

Bedford doesn’t take any particularly structured approach to examining the justice system. There are occasional incidental descriptions of why certain things are happening, but it is mostly a series of snapshots of court cases. Some are trivial, some are rather more devastating. All the driving offences are rattled through in moments. Similarly, the prostitution cases are rocketed through as a matter of course. The wonder of this section is Bedford’s eye for humanity and her ability to condense those observations into a few words. I learned a little about the legal system, but a lot about how people felt appearing in court. And that just by Bedford’s transcriptions – if transcriptions they are – of the usually brief appearances each defendant makes.

Off she goes to Germany. And this is probably where her stated exercise of comparison rather breaks down. If she intended to compare, presumably she’d have sat in on similar cases, and pointed out similarities and differences. What she actually does, in Germany, is document one case at length, involving the shooting of a man believed to have repeatedly flashed girls and young women in a public park. It was a warning shot gone awry, apparently.

I should be clear – I absolutely didn’t care that the purported point of The Faces of Justice changed. Bedford is just as good at taking us through a more complicated and more serious case as she was with the trivial. She never intrudes her opinion, yet the framing she gives to everything is still pretty editorial. We never lose the sense that Bedford is our guide to these worlds, and I’m grateful for it.

The sections on Austria, Switzerland, and France aren’t quite as memorable as that on Germany, but Bedford could give me a tour of my own home and I’d find it surprising and original. I shan’t go through what happens in each place, but her ability to find humanity in any arena doesn’t falter.

The Faces of Justice will tell you nothing useful about today’s justice systems, and only fairly circumstantially will you learn anything about the ’60s, but it’s no less engaging, curious and oddly delightful a book for that. In anybody else’s hands, it might have fallen apart. But, with Bedford’s pen, she pulls together all the disparate and disorganised strands into one successful whole.

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.

T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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This week is Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week, organised by Helen at A Gallimaufry – I was mulling over which collection of short stories to take off the shelf when I decided to do a bit more of a curveball. I bought Warner’s biography of T.H. White (published 1967) nine years ago, and I can’t remember whether that was before or after I read her letters with David Garnett, in which they discuss it a lot. And, indeed, White’s letters – which Garnett edited.

Much like when I read Roger Fry by Virginia Woolf, this is one of those times when I’m more interested in biographer than subject – but a very intriguing portrait emerged nonetheless.

I’ve only read one book by White – Mistress Masham’s Repose, which is sort of a long-distance sequel to Gulliver’s Travels – but I probably saw the Disney Sword in the Stone at some point and he’s one of those names that is around a lot. For most people, he is best known for his Arthurian links – but I believe he has more recently taken on fame by association with Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, in which he features.

Hawking is one of the passions that comes out in Warner’s depiction of White. She is not a biographer who gives equal weight to all the different stages of a man’s life. She zooms straight through childhood in a handful of pages (which didn’t bother me at all; I always want to find out about an author being an author, not a child). What she draws out is White’s love of animals and particularly hawks, his writing, and his isolation.

Some years are dwelt on for so long that I began to feel trapped – 1939, for instance – whereas others flash by. We learn that White’s one real love in life was a dog called Brownie, and she is perhaps the most vivid secondary character of them all. His grief when she dies is long and painful. We also learn quite a lot about his writing processes, mostly from his own perspective. Rather wisely, Warner relies extensively on quotation. Why paraphrase what already exists? The biography becomes almost a patchwork of other people – White’s letters and diary, the letters of others, the memoirs of others. It’s hard to say, at times, whether Warner is a biographer or a collagist.

Chief among these is White’s friend and encourager David Garnett, author of Lady Into Fox and much else. It’s hard to know whether he would be considered quite so significant a figure in White’s life if he had not also been such a good friend of Warner’s, and thus able to provide her with a great deal of written material. But if the share of perspectives is a little skewed, it is none the less interesting for that.

We chart White’s shifting interests and anxieties. There is a curious attachment towards the end with a boy called Zed, about which Warner is coy and oblique. It certainly raises disconcerting questions about the suitability of their relationship, and any more recent biographer would investigate the issue more thoroughly. Warner introduces it mysteriously and leaves it mysterious.

What we see, collectively, is that White was sporadically successful and seldom content. The sentence that sums up the whole comes near the end: ‘He had been unlucky with his happinesses’.

Warner writes biography in some ways like her fiction and in some ways not. It shares the tone of her fiction in the belief that everything is marvellous, in the true sense of that word, but that nothing is especially so. But it has fewer of those sentences that crystallise everything in a suspended moment. Fewer of those sentences that jolt you slightly by their unexpected rightness. But I did write down one such, about Brownie:

There are photographs of her in his Shooting Diary for 1934 -slender, leggy, newly full-grown, with the grieving Vandyke portrait expression of her kind.

I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.

There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.