1961

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

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I don’t usually stand behind the idea that the books we read in school are ruined for us – but I have to admit that I have no long-lasting love for Of Mice and Men. It was rewarding to analyse for my GCSE English, but I filed it away in ‘worthy’ rather than ‘enjoyable’. It’s only recently that I’ve come to enjoy Steinbeck for his portrayal of small-town America. Last year I read Cannery Row, and now I’ve read The Winter of Our Discontent (1961).

I suggested the book for my book group because I thought it would make sense to read it during winter… well, it turns out the title (while obviously a quotation from Richard III) is only working on one level. The novel starts on a ‘fair gold morning of April’, and Ethan and Mary Hawley are waking up together.

Ethan work in a grocer’s – though he used to own the shop. His family used to own a number of shops, in fact, and were well-respected people of note in their small community. Steinbeck doesn’t go into too much detail about the financial gambles that Ethan made, but they went horribly wrong. His business prospects were destroyed, and he has ended up at the bottom of the ladder again. He still has his loyal wife and his young, eager children – he is the sort of man who cannot be openly affectionate with any of them, but shows his love through parries and quips. Steinbeck is very good at the sort of light-hearted banter that men like Ethan exchange with their friends and dole out to their family (and very good also, later in the novel, at the confusion that children feel when this sort of father suddenly becomes serious).

The Hawleys seem to have a broadly happy marriage, and the badinage between them is elegantly done too. But Ethan clearly hasn’t come to terms with his fall from grace – and even patient Mary isn’t beyond outbursts of frustration:

“You said it! You started it. I’m not going to let you hide in your words. Do I love money? No, I don’t love money. But I don’t love worry either. I’d like to be able to hold up my head in this town. I don’t like the children to be hang-dog because they can’t dress as good – as well – as some others. I’d love to hold up my head.”

“And money would prop up your head?”

“It would wipe the sneers off the face of your hold la-de-las.”

“No one sneers at Hawley.”

“That’s what you think! You just don’t see it.”

“Maybe because I don’t look for it.”

“Are you throwing your holy Hawleys up at me?”

“No, my darling. It’s not much of a weapon any more.”

“Well, I’m glad you found it out. In this town or any other town a Hawley grocery clerk is still a grocery clerk.”

“Do you blame me for my failure?”

“No. Of course I don’t. But I do blame you for sitting wallowing in it. You could climb out of it if you didn’t have your old-fashioned fancy-pants ideas. Everybody’s laughing at you. A grand gentleman without money is a bum.” The word exploded in her head, and she was silent and ashamed.

I think the Hawleys’ state is an interesting contrast between mid-century America and mid-century Britain. I’m not a social historian, so have just picked this up from literature – but, in the UK, a ‘grand gentleman without money’ is still a grand gentleman. America doesn’t seem to have impoverished gentry in the same way – class in this community, at least, is determined by money and success. Now Ethan has lost it, he has lost his status.

Mary is a complex, sympathetic character – but Steinbeck is less generous to other women, particularly Margie. She seems a jack of many trades – telling fortunes being among the least disreputable. Ethan dislikes but largely tolerates her, and other men sleep with her when they’re out of other options. All of that is fine – Margie is a ‘type’ in a lot of mid-century novels of small-town America – but it is awkward and unpleasant to read narrative lines like ‘It was a durable face that had taken it and could it, even violence, even punching’. Steinbeck seems incapable of describing her without lingering on her breasts, and she is probably the least successful of his characters. Someone should have taken him aside and told him to grow up a bit.

I can’t believe it’s a coincidence that Margie and Mary have similar names. Together, one with supposed prophecy and one with hope, they think that Ethan has business success around the corner. Can he become content with his station in life, or will he try to change things? In the first half of the novel he is an exemplary portrait of a moral man. It wouldn’t be Steinbeck if things stayed that simple. And it wouldn’t be Steinbeck if he didn’t make some cynical comments about the state of the nation:

Now a slow, deliberate encirclement was moving on New Baytown, and it was set in motion by honourable men. If it succeeded, they would be thought not crooked but clever. And if a factor they had overlooked moved in, would that be immoral or dishonourable? I think that would depend on whether or not it was successful. To most of the world success is never bad.

What I most liked about Cannery Row was its depiction of small-town life that relied on many portraits of different men, women and children. The Winter of Our Discontent is much more about a single central character – the secondary characters are almost all very well-drawn and compelling to spend time with, but this is Ethan Hawley’s novel. Indeed, the narrative has some chapters in first-person and some in third-person, moving back and forth. I think I prefer Steinbeck when he turns his attention to a wider cast, but The Winter of Our Discontent is excellent. I haven’t detailed much of the plot, partly because its simplicity means that even a handful of hints will give too much of the game away – it is very predictable, I suspect deliberately so, but also very affecting because Ethan is known so intimately to us and we want to retain our respect for him.

This was Steinbeck’s final novel, and his talent was clearly undiminished. I haven’t attempted the novels on which his reputation is often considered to rest most firmly – East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath – but perhaps now I should.

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.

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.

Told in Winter by Jon Godden

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Each Christmas, the Thomas family take it in turn to open the parcels under the tree – most of which have come from each other, or family and friends that we all know. And every year there’s a little pile of parcels to me from somebody none of the others know. And that person changes each year. It’s the LibraryThing Virago Modern Classics Secret Santa! [The group is devoted to VMCs – the Secret Santa books don’t have to be VMCs.]

This year, I was lucky enough to get Dee as my Santa, and chose a lovely selection of books. Among them was Told In Winter (1961) by Jon Godden – Rumer Godden’s sister. Since I wanted to read it in winter, and because that gorgeous cover was calling to me, I polished it off in January. I didn’t quite have the snow depicted on the cover and in the book, but it definitely felt suitably wintery.

Snow had fallen all night and the house in the woods was already cut off from the road and the village by a four-foot drift at the bottom of the lane. Snow lay along the branches of the firs that made a dark ring round the house, and the lawn was a smooth white lake.

As the sun came up behind the hills, the back door opened and closed again. One of the house’s three inhabitants was now abroad in the morning; the cold air filled her lungs and cleared the last mists of sleep from her eyes. She shook her head, as if in amazement at the white world which confronted her, and moved cautiously round the side of the house keeping close to the walls. Every few steps she paused to look suspiciously across the untouched expanse of snow into the recesses between the trees. Nothing moved. Nothing threatened.

This is the opening to the novel – and I don’t know about you, but I already felt a really strong sense of place. Not just the snow, but the stillness, the isolation, the vastness. I love a novel that can make me feel like I dived into it – and because descriptions of landscapes etc usually don’t work for me, I want the bare bones of the physical environment to be filled with how it makes the observer feel. Not many authors can do it in a way that works for me, but I felt cold and isolated as I read the opening of Told In Winter – isolated in a positive sense. With a secure centre.

And have you worked out what’s unusual about the first character we meet? We learn, after a few more paragraphs, that this is Sylvie – and she is a dog.

In this isolated house are only three characters: Jerome, a writer who has had success with plays and less success with the novels he considers his true art. Peter, who was Jerome’s batman in the war and is now a sort of housekeeper. And Sylvie, the Alsatian who lives with Peter when Jerome isn’t there, but worships Jerome.

Godden builds this house so perfectly. Focalising through a dog might sound twee or annoying, but it is not that. She never treats Sylvie like a pet or a piece of whimsy – she gives us Sylvie’s viewpoint, with honesty and accuracy, and without ever slipping into the first person. That would have made it too fey.

If their little world seems almost idyllic, then the moods in it aren’t. Peter is recalcitrant and so loyal that he can’t help pointing out his master’s errors. Jerome is frustrated and cross, and grudgingly fond of Peter. Only Sylvie is content, and she is content only when Jerome is around.

Into this world, though, stumbles Una. She has lost her car in the snow and turns up, bedraggled and desperate. Peter is sickened by the thought of her. Jerome is shocked and tries to send her away – but lets her in. They have had a relationship of sorts, and she believes herself to be in love with him. She has come to this distant place to convince him to reciprocate that love.

Into a settled household comes a great disturbance. I don’t love a big age gap in a novel, particularly of the kind where the man is always saying things like ”You silly little thing”, and the girl is weeping and flinging herself on him. It would read like a middle-aged man’s fantasy if it weren’t written by a woman. Well, it might anyway.

But if we put that aside, there is something very interesting at the heart of Told in Winter. It’s the most intriguing take on a love triangle that I’ve read. A love triangle between a man, a woman… and a dog. Sylvie is deeply, openly jealous. And Peter is constantly trying to get her to behave with dignity and restraint, as he feels too pained at watching her undisguised jealousy.

In terms of plot, this is it. Godden’s writing is so beautiful that it doesn’t need more. We see Jerome use his control over the girl and the dog, ebbing too and fro between them. We share Peter’s growing rage and unhappiness. And we know there can’t be a happy ending for this disturbed trio.

I don’t know much about dogs, so I’m guessing about how accurate Godden is – but it certainly chimed with everything I do know. It reminded me of May Sarton’s excellent The Fur Person, about a cat, in the depth of its attempt to explore the psyche of the animal – putting aside any of the romanticised versions that humans might put on top of that. Are dogs really this possessive of humans? I’m going to assume so.

Told in Winter will stay with me a long time, and makes me wonder how a writer of Godden’s calibre ever faded away.

Margaret Kennedy Reading Week

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Are you joining in Margaret Kennedy Reading Week? All the info you need is here on Fleur Fisher Reads, and it’s all very exciting. I’d thought I would read Red Sky at Morning, because I started it months ago, but instead I read Kennedy’s final novel – The Forgotten Smile, published in 1961.

It has just been reissued by Vintage Books, along with a whole bunch of other Kennedy titles (some of them POD) and I read it for Shiny New Books – so I’m going to point you over there. (And I actually did finish it this week – on Sunday afternoon.) I’ll just say that she does such interesting things with chronology, and it works – and her characters are brilliantly realised. Read on…

So… are you joining in Margaret Kennedy Reading Week?