1967

A Meeting By The River by Christopher Isherwood

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Christopher Isherwood is one of those authors everyone knows about, and you sometimes see mentioned, but whose wide-ranging catalogue of books doesn’t seem to get as much attention as you’d expect. Beyond the sexy German-set novels, what else did Isherwood write? A few years ago I loved Prater Violet, and recently I read one of his much later works – A Meeting By The River (1967). It’s one of his only novels not to be given a Wikipedia page, which might or might not speak to its general reception – but I thought it was really excellent.

The novel (or perhaps novella) is told entirely in letters and diary entries written by two brothers – Oliver and Patrick. They are somewhat estranged. There is clearly a history of power struggles between them, and neither trusts what they read or hear from the other. But, as the first letter shows, Oliver re-opens correspondance because he has something significant to say.

I’m only writing because of a stupid misunderstanding which has now got to be cleared up without further delay. I admit I was responsible for it in the first place, though I must say I don’t see why I or anyone else whould be expected to account for his actions to people they don’t really concern. The point is, Mother is still under the impression, and I suppose you and Penelope are too, that I’m here working for the Red Cross in Calcultta, just as I actually was working for them in Germany, up to a year ago. Well as a matter of fact I’m not. I’m in a Hindu monastery a few miles outside the city, on the bank of the Ganges. I mean, I am a monk here.

Oliver is about to be fully received into the Hindu monastery, renouncing the world (though, as he points out to Paddy, this wouldn’t prevent him receiving letters – he is not totally disappearing). Patrick/Paddy writes back an enthusiastic letter full of bonhomie – and the reader thinks it’s going to warm up to being a cheerful tale of brothers reuniting. It is received more or less as such, and Oliver writes back explaining the monastic process a little more. And then Patrick writes back, suggesting that he come and visit Oliver in Calcutta.

And this is the first of many times that Isherwood pulls the rug from under our feet a bit. Because, after this exchange of letters, we get our first taste of Oliver’s diary.

Patrick’s first letter fooled me completely to begin with, because it worked on my guilty conscience. I was ashamed of my silly childish secretiveness. I wanted him to tell me he understood perfectly what made me behave like that, then assume the responsibility for putting everything right again, like a true Elder Brother. So I accepted what he wrote at its face value and believed what I wanted to believe.

But this second letter shows the first one up. It’s obvious to me now that he was just playing with me, as he always used to. He hasn’t changed a bit. And why should I have expected it? You don’t change unless you want to, and it’s clear that nothing has happened to make him the least dissatisfied with himself as he is.

The reader has also probably ‘accepted what he wrote at its face value’, and I felt quite wrong-footed here. Who was correct? Was it charming, bombastic Patrick – or Oliver, whom I now knew was mistrusting and wary?

This all accelerates when, despite Oliver trying to put him off, Patrick does arrive on the scene. He alleges he’s there to support his brother and find out more about Oliver’s new life and future – but we know from Patrick’s letters to his wife and his mother that he’s trying to dissuade Oliver from taking this step. Oliver is suspicious himself, but goes back and forth on whether he can trust what he’s hearing.

In some ways, A Meeting By The River is quite a simple story of feuding brothers miscommunicating, worn down by years of mistrust and rivalry – yet also bonded in a way that cannot be dismissed. What makes it unusual is the setting in an Indian Hindu monastery. What makes it so brilliant is the way Isherwood constantly wrong-foots the reader. After each letter or diary entry, I felt on firmer ground – then you’d gradually discover how Patrick was lying in a letter, or how Oliver jumped to the wrong conclusions in his diary. Later, Oliver reads some of Patrick’s letters, and the plot thickens further when he suspects Patrick left them out on purpose, so his brother would read his lies.

It’s done so well. Isherwood is so, so good at the ways that people deceive each other (and themselves) – not in big, gradiose, elaborately crafted falsehoods, but in the small, thoughless moments the suit the occasion, without thinking about the wider implications. And that’s before I get to the affair that Patrick is trying to keep hidden…

A Meeting By The River is a slim novel, deceptively simple – but I think it is a masterpiece in miniature. Isherwood may be more remembered for the showy subversion of books like Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, but for my money his real brilliance can be seen on show in quieter, cleverer works like this one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Romance of Dr Dinah by Mary Essex (25 Books in 25 Days: #23)

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I stumbled across Mary Essex’s books in a charity shop a long time ago, and started with the delightful and funny Tea Is So Intoxicating. I’ve read a few since then, and the final one waiting on my shelves was 1967’s The Romance of Dr Dinah. With the cover you see, the title, and being published by the Romance Book Club, I was a bit wary that it might not be quite as up my street…

Mary Essex was one of the pen-names used by Ursula Bloom, who wrote a staggeringly high number of books. Over 500, I believe, which is some sort of record. And this one turned out to be rather enjoyable – though definitely her with a different persona than some of her other novels.

Apparently one of the genres she wrote in was medical romance. One of her many pen-names specialised in this, while this authoritative site tells me that the later Essex novels also fell into this sphere. Taking a look at some of the titles she wrote as Essex, we can see a theme: The Love Story of Dr Duke, Doctor on Call, Date With a Doctor, Nurse from Killarney, The Hard-Hearted Doctor, A Strange Patient for Sister Smith, Doctor and Lover etc. etc.

Before you get visions of fluffy Mills and Boon, The Romance of Dr Dinah isn’t quite like that. Indeed, the book is much more about her career than her love life. Dinah is the daughter of a doctor who doesn’t think much of her prospects. Keen to prove him wrong, she becomes a medical student – which is where she meets and falls in love with another medical student, Mark. But when he lets her take the blame for a potentially fatal mistake (and also gets grumpy even when she does), she starts to see him in a new light. At which point she heads off to cover for a rural doctor who is having an operation.

There is a romantic element to the novel – or, more accurately, a relationship one. But it is never gushing, and she is pretty clear-eyed about the flawed Mark. I found it much more interesting as a novel looking at the way female doctors were perceived in the 1950s (when this is set), and there are also an interesting section on plastic surgery – it’s not all stuck in a Lark Rise to Candleford world, by any means.

But the main difference between The Romance of Dr Dinah and the Mary Essex novels I’ve enjoyed most is that this one isn’t funny. It’s not trying to be funny, but the dry wit of the other books was sadly missing. At the same time, the writing is good, and would fit perfectly well alongside other middlebrow novels of the period.

Right, four Ursula Bloom names to go – only 496 to go!

Stonecliff by Robert Nathan

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Robert Nathan is one of those names now known only, it seems, to people who’ve enjoyed the films based on his work. Portrait of Jennie and The Bishop’s Wife are both, apparently, regarded as classics in the movie world – but less known is their author, who was extremely prolific. I love his novels, which take only a couple of hours to read but transport the reader away for a while. When I read about Stonecliff (1967), I knew I had to get hold of a copy.

Stonecliff is the house of Edward Granville, noted writer. He is a recluse, and Stonecliff is isolated on a cliff in California, but he accepts a visit from Michael Robb – the narrator. He has been commissioned to write the great man’s biography, and is allowed to stay.

I have been sitting here at my desk with the last page of my book in front of me – my book, still untitled, the biography of the novelist Edward Granville. It is all done, complete, with names and dates and places, facts gathered from many sources, including Stonecliff itself. And yet in a real sense it is not done at all, for I know that the life of the book itself has escaped me; the mystery that baffled me then eludes me still.

That’s the opening of the novel, and consider me hooked. The greatest mystery is Granville’s wife – absent from the house – and the young woman who is there and whom Robb finally meets; she is beautiful, captivating, and elusive. He gradually begins to suspect that she is the creation of Granville – has he called her to life with his pen? And what exactly is their relationship? How should the biographer interpret what he sees, and can he get to the bottom of the mystery?

I rushed through the book gleefully. Nathan is not a great prose stylist, but there is also nothing obstructive in his writing – and he is an expert at conveying atmosphere. So I wouldn’t want to quote many of the lines out loud, but he builds wonder and romance (in the traditional sense of the word) so adeptly that I loved my short stay in Stonecliff. It’s the fourth novel I’ve read by him, and I’ll certainly seek out more. They so perfectly suit certain moods. And if you happen to be in America, you can snap them up very easily.