1970s

Injury Time – Beryl Bainbridge

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It’s Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week with Annabel/Gaskella… hope you’re joining in!

Can you imagine what would happen if the casts of Abigail’s Party and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? were held hostage in a siege?  Well, if you can’t, then read Injury Time and it’ll give you a pretty good idea.  The sexual bewilderment of George and Martha is combined with the 1970s would-you-like-an-olive stylings of Beverley et al in Bainbridge’s 1977 novel, somewhere in the middle of her writing career.

Edward is a somewhat hapless chap, working in dull job and in a marriage with Helen which, if not loveless, is hardly passionate.  And he has a mistress – albeit one with three unruly children at home, and no intention of staying submissively in the shadows.  His mistress rejoices in the absurd name Binny.

Binny was a wonderful mother, but she didn’t seem to realise he was a very busy man and his time was limited. They could never do anything until her ten-year-old had settled down for the night.  They could usually start doing something at about five to eleven, and then they had to do it very quickly because Edward had to leave at quarter past eleven.  He was always whispering frantically into Binny’s ear what he might do if only they had a whole evening together, and she grew quite pale and breathless and hugged him fearfully tightly in the hall, mostly when seeing him out.
Binny is tired of fitting in around Helen’s schedule (although Helen supposedly does not know of Binny) and demands that Edward ceases to treat her as a dirty little secret.  In order to pacify Binny, Edward agrees to invite his colleague Simpson, and Simpson’s wife Muriel, to a dinner party at Binny’s house.  What could possibly go wrong?

Bainbridge is great at showing the awkwardness of this dinner party and all its shades of morality: Simpson has overstated his wife’s approval of the night, for example, and Binny’s attempts to maintain a presentable dinner party in bizarre circumstances are drawn wonderfully.  My favourite character, though, is Binny’s neighbour Alma, who turns up mid-way through the party, rather the worse for wear.  I don’t know what I find so amusing about characters who incongruously pepper their conversation with ‘darling’ and ‘dear’, but it always makes me chuckle.  Indeed, the whole novel is very funny – mostly a humour which comes from dialogue, clashes of characters, and surreal turns of events.

“Drunken driving is a crime,” said Simpson stiffly.  “It should carry the harshest penalties.”

“What are you worried about, darling?  I lost my licence, didn’t I?”  All at once Alma’s face crumpled.  Tears spilled out of her ludicrous eyes.

“You can talk, George,” Muriel said coldly.  “You’re only wearing one shoe.”
The most bizarre twist, as I mentioned at the beginning and as the cover suggests, is that these characters find their evening’s festivities interrupted when two men and a woman come running through the front door (complete with a pram holding a doll) and hold them all hostage.  The house is chosen more or less at random, and they are simply a bargaining tool against the police.

What makes Injury Time so hilarious is that Beryl Bainbridge chooses not to change the tone when the hostage situation takes place.  The characters – especially irrepressible Alma – don’t alter the way they talk, and the dynamics between man, mistress, colleague, and wife all remain fraught, uncomfortable and very funny.  It helps that Ginger and Harry, the main two hostage-takers, are not your normal criminals.  Some fairly disturbing events occur in Injury Time, but they are described with such lightness, and focus upon social awkwardness rather than anything more traumatic, that this remains decidedly a comic novel.  As my first foray into the world of Bainbridge, I’m off to a fantastic start, and I look forward to seeing what else the week brings.

Two More Sparks: The Abbess of Crewe and The Takeover

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A couple more Spark novels this morning; later in the day I’ll put up a more general post with some questions looking back over Muriel Spark Reading Week for y’all.

I decided to try and cover some of the Spark titles which others haven’t read this week, and so in the past couple of days I read The Abbess of Crewe (1974) and The Takeover (1976) – consecutive novels from around the middle of Spark’s writing career.  Turns out others have now posted about The Abbess of Crewe (including my own mother), but I’m still alone on The Takeover.  Or The Take-over, sometimes.  But Chris won a copy in my very brief competition on Facebook, so perhaps I won’t be alone for so long.  Victoria/Litlove wrote in her excellent post that she’s seen a lot of people this week say “this isn’t one of Spark’s best.”  I’m delighted to say I’ve seen equal amounts of “this is my first Spark novel and I love her!” but, for these two novels, I’m going to have to say… they’re not Spark’s best.  But Spark’s sub-par is still rather wonderful.  Onto the books.

The Abbess of Crewe is, the cover of my rather ugly edition informs me, a satire on the Watergate scandal.  (And, rather wonderfully, apparently a film starring Glenda Jackson called Nasty Habits.)  Now, I don’t know a lot about the Watergate scandal, which happened over a decade before I was born, so Our Vicar gave me a quick rundown.  All I knew was that bugging was involved, and that seems to be the most salient detail for understanding the links with The Abbess of Crewe.  Who but Muriel Spark would transfer bugging and intrigue from politics to an abbey?  One which, indeed, uses both the Bible and Machiavelli’s The Art of War.

Alexandra is the Abbess of Crewe at the start of the novella – after a chapter, Spark does her frequent trick of taking us back in time, to the period where Alexandra and Felicity both wish to win the ‘election’ for Abbess – supposedly without canvassing for votes, which is forbidden by abbey rules.  Alexandra is one of Spark’s casually ruthless characters, without any strenuous sense of morality (which one might expect from a politician, but is amusingly strange from a nun).  She says wonderfully snarky/Sparky things like this:

“I don’t deny,” says the Abbess, “that by some chance your idea has been successful.  The throw of the dice is bound to turn sometimes in your favour.  But you are wrong to imagine that any idea of yours is good in itself.”

Alexandra is not only determined to become Abbess, she is certain that it will happen.  Of course, the reader knows that it will – but it is curious that Alexandra is herself unswerving in this knowledge.  This sort of prelepsis is common in Spark, and always unsettling.  Another unsettling aspect is – and I can’t think of other Muriel Spark novels where she does this – that The Abbess of Crewe is all in the present tense.  Usually that’s a big no-no for me, but it works quite well here – because it gives the sense of constant surveillance.  And that’s what’s going on in the abbey: everyone’s movements are recorded and observed, in the buildings and grounds.  And then there is the scandal caused by Felicity, and started by the theft of a thimble, alluded to in the first chapter, but rather a mystery to the reader…

My favourite character was one who was rather irrelevant to the plot – even in the slimmest of novellas (and this one comes in under 100 pages in my edition) Spark finds room for tangents, doesn’t she?  Sister Gertrude is off in a far-flung corner of the globe, trying to convert cannibals, somewhere “unpronounceable, and they’re changing the name of the town tomorrow to something equally unpronounceable.”  She is called by telephone every now and then (somehow), is utterly unflappable, issuing the detached and bizarre aphorisms for which Spark is famous (“Justice may be done but on no account should it be seen to be done.”)

The Abbess of Crewe is one of Spark’s weirder books, and also one of the more amusing – on Thomas’s wonderful Quirktensity Graph he puts it somewhere near the middle, but I’d put it in a very-quirky-not-very-intense position.  For people who know lived through the Watergate shenanigans, I imagine the whole thing would be even more entertaining – for me, it tipped the scales at a little too strange, but it was certainly the sort of novella nobody but Spark could have written.

* * * * *

The Takeover is probably my least favourite of the ten Spark novels I’ve now read – but it’s still rather interesting, and good; everything is relative.  I intended this post to be brief, so I’ll whip through The Takeover pretty speedily.  It’s set in Italy and apparently (the cover again) it’s a ‘parable of the Pagan seventies’, whatever that means.  Hubert and wealthy Maggie Radcliffe have parted ways; Maggie returns to the area with her new husband but Hubert refuses to leave her house, which is still filled with her furniture.  He busies himself secretly selling off her antique furniture and valuable paintings, replacing them with impressive fakes.  Oh, and Hubert ‘considers he is a direct descendant of the goddess Diana of Nemi.  He considers he’s mystically and spiritually, if not actually, entitled to the place.’  Here he is, in full Pagan action:

Again, standing one winter day alone among the bare soughing branches of those thick woodlands, looking down at the furrowed rectangle where the goddess was worshipped long ago, he shouted aloud with great enthusiasm, “It’s mine!  I am the King of Nemi!  It is my divine right!  I am Hubert Mallindaine the descendant of the Emperor of Rome and the Benevolent-Malign Diana of the Woods…”  And whether he was sincere or not; or whether, indeed, he was or was not connected so far back as the divinity-crazed Caligula – and if he was descended from any gods of mythology, purely on statistical grounds who is not? – at any rate, these words were what Hubert cried.
That’s a great example of how Spark writes her narratives: she does not interpret or judge, she simply presents the characters, their words and actions, and sits back to watch them.  In The Takeover, though, the stuff about Diana doesn’t really seem too important until the final section.  Before that, it’s all about money and lies.

There are plenty of characters – other neighbours, including Maggie’s son Michael and his wife Mary; various effeminate ex-secretaries to Hubert; Pauline Thin, his current besotted secretary, etc. etc.  More or less all of them are concerned with embezzling from one another, without any sense of conscience-twinging going on anywhere.  That’s one of the reasons I couldn’t entirely get on board with this novella.  I’m used to Spark’s characters being rather unapologetically ruthless – but here they are in the Evelyn Waugh school of selfishness.

The dynamics between Maggie and Hubert are interesting, as she tries unsuccessfully to takeover her own house, and there are certainly many moments of Spark’s inimitable style (“How do you know when you’re in love?” she said. / “The traffic in the city improves and the cost of living seems to be very low.”) but I’m afraid on the whole I found it rather lacking in momentum.  Perhaps if I hadn’t recently read several other Muriel Spark novels, and dozens of reviews, I’d have found the joy of reading her style sufficient – but the comparison has made me feel The Takeover a bit lacklustre.

So, a very brief review, I’m afraid.  I daresay one could write a lot about The Takeover, and if any of you are well-acquainted with 1970s Paganism, it would mean more.  For today’s post I seem to have picked the two Muriel Spark novels which require the reader to have lived through the 1970s, don’t I?  And interestingly, although both are ostensibly about religious activity, neither really have much to do with religion.  That’s one of the few links I can see between these consecutive novels – except for both giving away huge plot twists long before they happen, in typical Spark style.

Of the five Spark books I’ve reviewed this week, I think her autobiography is my favourite – and, from the novels, I would choose The Only Problem, which keeps growing in my estimation since I finished it.  Later today, as I mentioned, there’ll be a general discussion post – especially for non-blogging folk, but of course everyone else is welcome to comment too.  Keep posting your reviews, and letting me or Harriet know!  What fun!

Ivy & Stevie – Kay Dick

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The first book I read from my recent Hay-on-Wye haul was Kay Dick’s Ivy & Stevie (1971) about Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith.  Dick was friendly with both, and recorded conversations with them as part of a wider project she was researching.  ‘When’ (she writes) ‘Stevie Smith died earlier this year, not long after Ivy Compton-Burnett, it occurred to me that public interest in them both was sufficient to warrant publications of these two conversations on their own.’  So the book is divided into two – transcripts of each interview, paired with Dick’s reflections on each author.  Ivy C-B gets the first half of the book (and is the reason I bought it), while Stevie Smith gets the second half.

As I say, ICB – sorry, Dame ICB – is the reason I bought this book.  Maybe only one fifth of people who try Ivy end up liking her, but that one fifth will be passionately pro.  And she came across pretty much as I imagined she would from her writing and from photographs – formidable, amusing, confident, rather intimidating.  I think all of that comes across in this response:

What question do you most dislike people asking you about your work?
[…] ‘Do you find other people’s conversation useful?’  I went to a cocktail party the other day, and some woman I was talking to said, “Mustn’t this be useful to you?”  Of course it wasn’t useful.  Whatever good would it be to put down, “Do you feel that draught?”, and “Are you sure you won’t have another sandwich?”?  Conceit, because the don’t say a thing that would be any good at all.  One would be only too glad to take it down if one heard something deep or revealing or interesting.  Certainly not at a cocktail party, which is a dreadful function in itself.  I can’t bear them.  I went to this one because it was given by the landlord.  We’re frightfully friendly.  That is to say he’s frightfully friendly to me.  I believe it’s because of the enormous rent I pay him.  He rather likes my fame, but he thinks of the rent much more.
If I was hoping to learn a lot about her writing process, I was rather out of luck.  The interview is mostly about her thoughts on religion, families, even her characters – but not really about how she creates them.  And the big question that everyone must ask when they encounter ICB – why so much dialogue? – is sadly one which she cannot answer herself:

I don’t know why I write so much in dialogue.  I think it must just have been my nature.  It just came like that.  I don’t think one can explain these things – they probably go deep, these reasons, don’t you think?
So, there you go.  Was she being disingenuous?  Hard to say.  There is an air throughout that ICB is slightly above these sorts of discussions, or that she feels distanced from them somehow.  Perhaps that’s just her no-nonsense personality, and that isn’t to say she doesn’t give her views firmly.  I liked what she had to say about accusations that her novels were old-fashioned (I’m going to keep quoting quite a lot from these ladies, because the whole point of Ivy & Stevie is that it focuses on the authors’ voices.  That, and typing out quotations takes less energy than forming my own sentences!)

I know you get very annoyed, don’t you, when people say that you write about a world that is no longer there, because, as you say, human beings are always there.
Oh, I think the world will always be there.  It is true I put my books back, because the kind of world one knows one doesn’t know completely until it’s finished.  In a sense one has to wait until it’s finished.  Things are so much in a state of flux now.  I think that some of these modern books that depict human life with people just roaming about London and living in rooms and sleeping with everybody – it’s not interesting, because, of course, I can’t read them.  Everybody doesn’t live like that, do they? […] They live in civilized houses as they always did.  They have servants as they always did, although fewer.  Supposing I were living fifty years ago, situated as I am, I should have had a house and a cook and a housemaid, and, I suppose, a pony trap and a stable boy, instead of just a flat and one factotum.  But that’s a superficial difference.  I don’t think people do alter – if they do, they react back again, don’t they?  There must be family life.
Stevie Smith says something quite similar in her interview:

What do you think of the world today?
Well, much the same as I always thought of it yesterday.  It doesn’t change very much does it?
Well said, Stevie!  I think the difference between question and answer here can be attributed to the difference between journalist and novelist.  Not that Dick was a journalist (she was an erstwhile novelist herself) but she takes that stance for these interviews.  The journalist focuses on change, and everything being new in the present moment; the novelist (especially one as perceptive as ICB) looks at that which stays the same; the consistencies of human nature throughout the generations.

When I say that I bought Ivy & Stevie because of Ivy, I don’t imply any distaste for Stevie.  I just haven’t read anything by her – except for ‘Not Waving But Drowning’ – although I do have a novel or two of hers on my shelf.  Having now read the interview with her, she comes across as a charming, modest, slightly scatty woman – qualities which make me rather love her.  She lived with her aunt for a long time, who obviously took scant interest in Smith’s writing, and she describes it wonderfully (I think there is something in the expression ‘my dear’ which will always win my support):

What did you aunt think of your work?
Oh, her attitude was simply splendid, everything one asks for really.  I should hate to live with a literary aunt.  My aunt used to say, “I’m very glad to hear you’ve got another book coming out, but as you know I don’t know much about it.  It’s all nonsense to me, my dear.”  I felt this was the right attitude.  My aunt had a faintly sardonic attitude, I think, to the whole world.  Her highest praise was when, after I got the Cholmondeley Award, she said, “I wish your mother was alive and could have known about this dear.”
Being unfamiliar with her work, I couldn’t really relate it to what she said.  My main knowledge of Stevie Smith comes from Kathryn Williams’ song ‘Stevie’, from the album Leave to Remain.  I can’t find a version online to imbed, but it includes the line ‘They say she’s obsessed with death and that / but what else do you laugh at?’  Which prepared me for Stevie Smith saying something like this:

There’s a terrible lot of fear of life in my poems.  I love life.  I adore it, but only because I keep myself well on the edge.  I wouldn’t commit myself to anything.  I can always get out if I want to.  I think this is a terribly cowardly attitude to life.  I’m very ashamed of it, but there it is, dear.  I love death, I think it’s the most exciting thing.  As one gets older one gets into this – well, it’s like a race, before you get to the waterfall, when you feel the water slowly getting quicker and quicker, and you can’t get out, and all you want to do it get to the waterfall and over the edge.  How exciting it is!
So I came away with a new fondness for Smith, and determination to read her writing, and a renewed admiration for (and slight fear of) Dame Ivy.  As for Kay Dick herself, I rather enjoyed her brief reflections upon knowing both writers.  Neither sticks in my mind particularly, but the personal touch was valuable.  I thought I knew Kay Dick’s name from somewhere, but can’t track down where… I Googled her and read an obituary which I wish I hadn’t, as it was incredibly vicious (and provoked letters giving opposing views.)  Well, whatever else Dick was or wasn’t, did or didn’t do, I am grateful that she preserved these conversations, which could only take place with an interviewer with whom the authors felt comfortable.  An invaluable resource for anyone interested in either of these writers – or, indeed, in the lives of writers in general.

Look Back With Love – Dodie Smith

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I am growing very fond of those lovely folk at Slightly Foxed.  Last December I had spotted that they were publishing Dodie Smith’s first autobiography, Look Back With Love (1974), and was umming and ahhhing about asking for a review copy… when they offered me one!  Although I’m always flattered to be offered books by any publisher, my heart does a little jump for joy (medically sound, no?) when it’s a reprint publisher doing the offering.  And even more so when it’s one of these beautiful little Slightly Foxed Editions (I covet the *lot*) – and even more so when it’s a title I’ve wanted to read ever since I first read and loved I Capture the Castle back in 2003.

I was not disappointed.  Look Back With Love is simply a lovely, warming, absorbing book.  It is only the possibility that I may prefer one of her other three autobiographical instalments (think of it; three!) which prevents me adding it to my 50 Books You Must Read list just yet…

You may have gathered from all those volumes of autobiography that Smith doesn’t cover her whole life in Look Back With Love.  Indeed, she only gets as far as fourteen by the end of this book, placing it firmly in childhood memoir territory.  I do have a definite fondness for memoirs which focus on, or at least include, childhood – as evinced by my championing of Emma Smith’s The Great Western Beach, Angelica Garnett’s Deceived With Kindness, Harriet Devine’s Being George Devine’s Daughter, Terence Frisby’s Kisses on a Postcard, Christopher Milne’s The Enchanted Places, and one of Slightly Foxed’s other recent titles, P.Y. Betts’ People Who Say Goodbye.  I especially like them if they cover the Edwardian period – perhaps because that means the subjects will have been adults in the interwar period which I love so dearly.  What links all these autobiographies, besides their recountings of childhood, is that they recount happy childhoods.  That is to say, they all find and express happy moments from within their childhoods, rather than prioritising the miserable or cruel.  Misery memoirs, I’m afraid, will never have a place on my bookcases.  I can understand why people write them – it must be a form of catharsis – but I cannot begin to fathom why people want to read them.

Dodie Smith’s family sounds like it was wonderfully fun.  True, her father died in her early childhood, and she was an only child, but these sad circumstances do not seem to have held her back.  She certainly didn’t grow up isolated: her widowed mother moved back to her parents’ house, and so Dodie grew up surrounded by grandparents, aunts, and uncles.  The aunts gradually married and moved, but three uncles remained bachelors and meant (Smith says) that she never felt the absence of a father.  The dynamics of the family certainly don’t seem to be lacking much.  As the only child amidst so many adults, Smith was showered with affection and approval – and no small amount of teasing…

Somehow I knew I must never resent teasing and though I sometimes kicked my uncles’ shins in impotent rage, never, never did it make me cry.  Teasing must be accepted as fun.  And I now see it as one of the great blessings bestowed on me by those three uncles whom, even when they became elderly men, I still referred to as ‘the boys’.
Smith’s autobiography is not a string of momentous occasions, really, but a continuous, welcoming stream of memory.  Of course there are individual anecdotes, but the overall impression I got was of a childhood gradually being unveiled before us, with stories and impressions threaded subtly into what feels like a complete picture.  I was mostly struck by how accurate Smith’s memory seems to be:

All the memories I have so far described are crystal clear in my mind; I see them almost like scenes on the stage, each one lit by its own particular light: sunlight, twilight, flickering firelight, charmless gaslight or the, to me, dramatic light of a carried taper.
This particular comment is actually an apology for the fact that, for recollections before she turned seven, Smith cannot recall exact chronology.  Well!  I have come to realise that my own memory is rather shoddy.  I remember strikingly little about my childhood – or, indeed, about any of my past.  If family and friends talk about an event, there’s a good 50/50 chance that it’ll come back to me – but if I were to sit down and try to write an autobiography, I think I’d come unstuck on about p.5.  I just can’t remember very much, at least not without prompts.  Curious.  But it makes me all the more impressed when writers like Smith seem effortlessly to delve into their past and convey it so wonderfully – especially since Smith was in her late 70s when she wrote this memoir.

With memoirs, I seem especially drawn to people (like Harriet Devine) who grew up amongst theatrical folk, people (like Irene Vanbrugh) who became actors, or (like Felicity Kendal) both.  There’s always been a part of me that wishes I’d grown up alongside actors and theatre managers.  Although I have no genuine aspirations to be an actor, I’m endlessly fascinated by the world of the stage, especially before 1950.  Well, although Smith’s relatives were not connected with the theatre professionally, several were keen amateurs, and some of my many delights in Look Back With Love were Smith’s first adventures upon the stage – especially the ad-libbing.

These sections were all the more enjoyable because Smith made frequent reference to her later career as a playwright.  (I’ve only read one of her plays – her first, published under a pseudonym – but am now keen to read more.)  When I wrote about P.Y. Betts’ People Who Say Goodbye I commented that it was as though her childhood had been hermetically sealed.  Not once did she introduce her later life, or make links across the decades.  This worked fine for me, since I’d never heard of Betts before, and was happy to take her memoir on her terms.  Since I came to Look Back With Love with an extant interest in Dodie Smith, I’ve have been disgruntled if she hadn’t made these connections between stages in her life (although, tchuh, she didn’t mention I Capture the Castle.)

I keep saying that different things from this book were my favourite part… well, that’s because I loved so much of it.  But I think, honestly and truly, my favourite element was Smith’s ability to write about houses.  I love houses.  Not just to live in (they’re handy for that) but as subjects for novels, autobiographies, TV redecoration programmes…  Chuck me a novel where the house is central, and I’m in.  Write something like Ashcombe and I’m delirious.  So I loved the way Smith conveyed the various houses she lived in.  Not that she wrote in huge detail about decor or style, although these were mentioned – more that, somehow, she manages to make the reader feel as though they were also residents in the houses, looking around each room with the familiarity of those who share Smith’s memories.  I can’t pinpoint an excerpt which made me feel like this; it permeates the book.

Most of Look Back With Love is (as the title suggests) lit by the glow of nostalgia.  The humour tends to be gentle, intertwined with the fond remembrance of innocent times past, rather than knockabout comedy, but there was one excerpt which made me laugh out loud.  It’s part of Smith’s tales of schooldays:

My mother felt the elocution lessons were well worth the extra she paid for them, but she was not pleased when Art became an extra, too.  Drawing, plain and simple, was in the curriculum but, after we had been drawing for a year or so, the visiting mistress would bend over one’s shoulder and say quietly, “I think, dear, you may now tell your mother you are ready for Shading.”  This, said my mother, merely meant she had to pay half a guinea extra for me to smother my clothes with charcoal; but it would have been a bad social error to refuse Shading once one was ready for it, so she gave in.  I then spent a full term on a bunch of grapes – the drawing mistress brought them with her twice and then we had to remember them; they were tiring fast.  After a few terms of Shading pupils were permitted to tell their mothers they were “ready for Oils”, but mothers must have been unresponsive for I can recall only one painting pupil.  She had a very small canvas on a very large easel and was generally to be seen staring helplessly at three apples and a Japanese fan.  After many weeks I heard the drawing mistress say to her brightly, “One sometimes finds the best plan is to start all over again.”
Lovely, no?

This has gone on for quite long enough, so I’m going to finish off with a characteristic piece of Dodie’s writing.  The setting, ladies and gents, is the senior (mark it, senior) dancing class.

There were so many superb boys that I did not see how I could be without a partner, but I was soon to realise that there were two girls too many and I was always one of them.  Few of the boys were younger than fifteen.  I was only nine and small for my age, but I could never understand why they were not interested in me – I felt so very interesting.

This is the rhythm which is maintained throughout Look Back With Love: young Dodie always thought she was very interesting, and old Dodie looks back across the years with the same level of interest, albeit now more detached.  There is every possibility that this level of self-importance in a child would have been irritating for those around her – Smith freely confesses that she used to recite and perform at the merest suggestion of the drop of a hat – but, from the adult Smith, it pulls the reader along with the same happy enthusiasm.  Smith’s childhood was not wildly unusual, but the way she is able to describe it elevates Look Back With Love above other childhood memoirs.  Everything, everyone, is capable of interesting Dodie Smith (adult and infant), and this makes her the most fascinating subject of all.  It is rare that I am bereft to finish a book.  A mere handful of titles have had this effect on me in the past five years.  But Look Back With Love is one – as I turned the final page, I longed for more; I longed to know why she made such dark hints about her stepfather; how her playwriting took off; how she experienced the theatre of the 1930s… thank goodness there are three more volumes to read!

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

Well, I was going to do a round-up of other bloggers who’ve written about Look Back With Love, but I can only find one who has!  But they say it’s quality not quantity, and you couldn’t do better than Elaine’s review over on Random Jottings:  “Look back with Love is a lovely, lovely, lovely book.  It is charming, it is delightful, it is beguiling, it made me laugh and it made me cry and I adored every single word of it and was very sad to finish it. […]”

The Driver’s Seat

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I’ll kick off with the first novella I read at the weekend… although, first, a detour via the word ‘novella’. Peter questioned the criteria for a novella – and he has a point. In the research I did once about short stories, the general consensus seemed to be that there was no strict definition for the novella. It’s basically just a short novel, without necessarily any structural differences from a novel proper – and who can determine what qualifies as ‘short’? Rather arbitrarily, I said 200 pages – but font and margin sizes can mean that 150 pages of one book would be 300 pages of another, and I didn’t have time or energy to make word count estimates… so 200 pages was the number I chose to signify novella! As it turned out, of the seven I read The Driver’s Seat (1970) by Muriel Spark was the thickest, at 160 or so pages – although I suspect it had fewer words than some of the others.

The Driver’s Seat came with recommendation from Simon S, as did one of the other titles this week – so thanks Simon! It was also, apparently, recently in contention for the ‘lost Booker’ of 1970. I have read some Muriel Spark before (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Girls of Slender Means) and, while I certainly enjoyed them, they didn’t quite click. The Driver’s Seat definitely did.

It tells the story of Lise, a woman who leaves work to fly south on holiday… but Lise is an oddball of the oddest variety. She is looking for her ‘type’ and isn’t afraid to accost strangers to tell them so – but, when pressed, isn’t sure what her ‘type’ is – just that she’ll know when she finds him. We first meet Lise whilst she is buying clothes for her holiday – settling on a dress: ‘a lemon-yellow top with a skirt patterned in bright Vs of orange, mauve and blue’ along with a red/white striped coat. “Of course, the two don’t go well together” says the salesgirl – but Lise thinks otherwise, and welcomes the attention such a brash outfit gives her.

About thirty pages in, the reader gets a bit of a shock. Although it comes quite early on, I won’t mention it here – suffice to say, it throws the rest of the novel into some sort of waiting game, the reader never being quite sure where they stand. Spark’s prose is deliberately – and deliciously – disorientating. We move in and out of Lise’s thoughts, never quite grasping hold of her perspective, nor yet letting it slip entirely out of reach. Eventually Lise takes a ball-point pen from her bag and marks a spot in a large patch of green, the main parkland of the city. She puts a little cross beside one of the small pictures which is described on the map as ‘The Pavilion’. She then folds up the map and replaces it in the pamphlet which she then edges in her hand-bag. The pen lies, apparently forgotten, on the bed. She looks at herself in the glass, touches her hair, then locks her suitcase. She finds the car-keys that she had failed to leave behind this morning and attaches them once more to her key-ring. She puts the bunch of keys in her hand-bag, picks up her paperback book and goes out, locking the door behind her. Who knows her thoughts? Who can tell? The ending didn’t come as a huge surprise to me – Spark leaves an enormous clue – but, as with Lise’s travel throughout the mysterious city, the journey is easily as important as the destination. I finally see what is so special about Muriel Spark, and will definitely be on the hunt for more of her work now. Suggestions welcome…

And my favourite title is…

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What a wonderful selection of favourite titles you all came up with! I’m almost reluctant to put my review up, as I loved hearing them all – do keep letting me know your favourite title, on the previous post, and perhaps I’ll do a post on my favourites from them, sometime next week.

A few of my favourites, before I tell you my *absolute* favourite, and then tell you that the novel was pretty good too…

I love:

Tea Is So Intoxicating – Mary Essex
We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
The Elegance of the Hedgehog – Muriel Barbery
But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes – Anita Loos
The Brontes Went To Woolworths – Rachel Ferguson
Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead – Barbara Comyns
No One Now Will Know – EM Delafield

But the one that comes out on top, because it works on at least two levels, and is intrinsically funny, is… Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen by PG Wodehouse.

Ok, wonderful title aside, this is also a great little novel. To be honest with you, I haven’t met a PG Wodehouse novel I haven’t devoured happily. According to my little drop-down author menu, the only Wodehouse I’ve written about on here was Indiscretions of Archie, another fab title, and enjoyable, but probably the worst of the Wodehouses I’ve read. Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen is back on form – and the first Jeeves and Wooster novel I’ve read.

Wooster is sent off to the countryside by a doctor because of his ‘young man about town’ lifestyle has had a disastrous effect on his general health. He plumps for an Aunt in Worcestershire (land of my upbringing!)

“Is the air pure there?”

“Excursion trains are run for people to breathe it.”

“Your life would be quiet?”

“Practically unconscious.”
Sadly, said Aunt Dahlia is herself off to Maiden Eggesford, Somerset (she’s following me around the country!) and so Wooster decides to follow her there, Jeeves in tow, naturally.

It is one of those villages where there isn’t much to do except walk down the main street and look at the Jubilee watering-trough and then walk up the main street and look at the Jubilee watering-trough from the other side. This bit amused me, because whenever Mel and I visit a little village, we look out for their Millennium Project. Every village has one, usually fairly humble, and generally unveiled in mid 2003. I’ve seen Millennium benches, signposts, woods, stones… all sorts.

This being Wodehouse, all sorts of coincidences have come together to make more or less everyone Wooster knows turn up in Maiden Eggesford. There’s a woman he once asked to marry him, as well as her more recent beau; there’s a man he once cheated and gave a fake identity to; there is even Jeeves’ own aunt. It all gets a little complicated as two rival households are going in for a horse race, only one of the horses is closely attached to a cat, and is inconsolable without it… and Aunt Dahlia (betting on the other horse) decides to have the cat kidnapped. Or catnapped, if you will. Hence the title – it’s not cricket, she is not acting like a gentleman. And so it all begins.

I love Wodehouse’s writing, with its mixture of hyperbole and litotes – I love the unbreakable calm of Jeeves, against Wooster’s exaggerations and whimsical turn of phrase (I love that he always cheerfully calls Aunt Dahlia either ‘aged relative’ or ‘old ancestor’ – but don’t think I’ll be trying this out on my own aunts. Who are not, for that matter, particularly old):

“Have you ever seen a garrison besieged by howling savages, with their ammunition down to the last box of cartridges, the water supply giving out and the United States Marines nowhere in sight?”

“Not to my recollection, sir.”
I just find Wodehouse endlessly funny. But I must confess – I thought Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen would be my favourite ever Wodehouse, centring (as it does) around a cat – but, for some reason, the cat is given very little personality. I love reading about cats, and I’d have thought Wodehouse would be on top form writing about one… but perhaps he is not a cat person. Shame.

But, even though this doesn’t reach the dizzying heights of its feline potential, it is great fun and very good – sometimes a Wodehouse just hits the spot in a way that no other book can. If you’ve never read one before – well, firstly, I’m a little horrified – secondly, why not start with this one?

In The Springtime of the Year – Susan Hill

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In the run up to Christmas, we briefly discussed Festive Reading, and I was relieved to see that I wasn’t the only one who didn’t prepare that much, and had never really thought about it. It doesn’t get much more unseasonal than the book I was reading in late December – Susan Hill’s In the Springtime of the Year. Look, another season is right there in the title… and, do you know what, I rather wish I had read it in Spring now. (I also rather wish I knew whether or not seasons should be capitalised, so answers on a postcard please. Or, alternatively, in the comments box.)

I’ve made no secret about my love of Susan Hill’s Howards End is on the Landing, and shortly after reading that I made my first acquaintance with one of her novels, the captivating and unsettling The Beacon (more here) – I can’t remember who recommended I try In The Springtime of the Year next, but thank you whoever it was – it’s another short, sad, and often rather brilliant book. Published in 1974, it’s theme is eternal – the loss of a loved one. In this instance, it is the sudden and accidental death of a young man called Ben, killed by a falling tree in the opening pages of the novel. The novel follows his wife Ruth, in her early twenties, coping with his death, and coming to terms with it.

I daresay that sounds quite slight as a synopsis, but some of my favourite writers are those who can weave an involving narrative without huge set pieces or plot turns. The biggest event having happened in the first few pages, this novel is more a study of grief than a rollercoaster of events. From the immediate aftermath; the funeral; Ruth’s difficult relations with Ben’s family; closer kinship with Ben’s younger brother; dealing with Ben’s possessions; moving onwards to the future without him – each stage is subtly and intimately shown – never too much introspection, and always writing of so high a standard that it doesn’t feel like cliche. This sort of writing (especially in the days of soap operas) must be incredibly difficult to do, for the path is so strewn with cliches, but Hill makes it look easy.

She thought suddenly, I am alone, I am entirely alone on this earth; there are no other people, no animals or birds or insects, no breaths or heartbeats, there is no growing, the leaves do not move and grass is dry. There is nothing.

And this was a new feeling. No, not a feeling. Loneliness was a feeling, and a fear of the empty house and of the long days and nights, and the helpless separation from Ben – feelings. This was different. A condition. A fact. Simply, being absolutely alone.
My one problem with the novel was that everybody in the village seemed to feel Ben’s death incredibly deeply – the novel states that even those familiar with death were especially affected by his. I suppose that isn’t a problem, but it might have been more realistic to contrast Ruth’s deep grief with those around who, though sad, cannot feel it to the same extent. For that is how such deaths affect neighbourhoods, is it not?

Nobody very close to me has ever died, not yet, and I still found this novel incredibly affecting. I also felt – though, again, I cannot support this from my own experience – that In the Springtime of the Year could be a huge comfort to anyone going through that. Or perhaps to those around them, to help them understand. I’m in danger of getting emotional here, aren’t I? And I shouldn’t forget that Susan Hill hasn’t set out to write a grievance counselling book – though there may be overlap, this is primarily a very well written, subtle, and touching novel, and that is certainly achievement enough.

Mrs. Palfrey

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I read Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont a few weeks ago, but was waiting until I’d seen the film as well before writing about it here. Consequently I’ve forgotten all sorts of details, but I’ll do my best…

The novel concerns Mrs. Palfrey at, you guessed it, the Claremont – ‘One rainy Sunday in January Mrs. Palfrey, recently widowed, arrives at the Claremont Hotel in the Cromwell Road. Here she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are a magnificently eccentric group who live off crumbs of affection, obsessive interest in the relentless round of hotel meals, and undying curiosity.’ So says the blurb on my beautiful Virago edition (I used a postcard of David Hockney’s My Parents for a bookmark, see below, and his mother is startlingly similar to the Virago cover Mrs. Mabel Whitehead by Margaret Foreman. Same pose, same hair, everything.)

The characters sharing the Claremont with Mrs. Palfrey are all in various stages of boredom and hopelessness, but Elizabeth Taylor is subtle enough with her pen to show these states as brittleness or insatiable nosiness or indulging in risque jokes. Mrs. Arbuthnot is bossy; Mrs. Burton drinks; Mrs. Post gossips; Mr. Osmond complains of the lack of male company. Into this web Mrs. Palfrey stumbles, her daughter too busy and grandson too selfish to care much about her. Again, Taylor doesn’t lay it on too thick – there are no villains in this piece, only humans. The life in a hotel, which acts as a retirement home in all but name, is beautifully observed, and perfectly nuanced. As an example (but how can one exemplify subtlety?) here is a couple of paragraphs from early in the novel:

The chief gathering-place for the residents was the vestibule where, about an hour before both luncheon and dinner, the menu was put up in a frame by the lift. People, at those times, seemed to be hovering – reading old church notices on the board, tapping the barometer, inquiring at the desk about letters, or looking out at the street. None wished to appear greedy, or obsessed by food: but food made the breaks in the day, and menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and dissatisfactions, as once life had.

When the card was fixed into the frame, although awaited, it was for a time ignored. Then, perhaps Mrs. Arbuthnot, on her slow progress to the lift, would pause nonchalantly, though scarcely staying a second. There was not much to memorise – the choice of two or three dishes, and the fact (which Mrs. Arbuthnot knew, but Mrs. Palfrey had not yet learned) that the menus came round fortnightly, or more often. There were permutations, but no innovations.

The stumbling minutiae of their lives, delicately and acutely portrayed. The central interest in their lives is the visitation of relatives. Each has a store of potential visitors, and an even more valuable reserve of reasons why they haven’t been able to visit. Mrs. Palfrey naively makes known that her grandson Desmond lives near the Claremont, and is sure to come and see her… which he does not do. When she falls outside a flat, and a young man comes to her aid, she finds in many ways a substitute grandson. Ludovic Myers (for it is he) gives her a cup of tea, and is kind. A writer, and a bohemian of sorts, he is enough unlike Mrs. Palfrey to make their friendship diverting, and enough like her to prevent it being ridiculous. Both alone, in their own ways, it is somehow not long before he is masquerading as her grandson.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont does not go in for high drama, and this fraudulence never provides it. What the unusual pairing does offer is a touching, but not saccharine, breath of life into Mrs. Palfrey’s old age – but this is no Disney transformation. Elizabeth Taylor brilliantly continues to tread the line between fairy tale and misery literature – the line, I suppose, of reality. And never has reality been more beautiful written nor more honestly and unmanipulatively told.

So, I loved the book. Come back tomorrow to see what I thought about the film…

Enchanting

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Following on from my recent post on the new Winnie the Pooh, I had a couple of other things to mention. Firstly, thanks very much to the two people who pointed me in the direction of this Radio 4 programme (accessible UK readers only, I’m afraid) about Winnie the Pooh in Russian (Vinni Pukh, apparently) – its popularity and the changes they made. I haven’t listened to it yet, but what a fascinating idea. I’m going to be big and ignore the fact that the blurb says EE Shepherd instead of EH Shepard…

The other item related to the world of Winnie is no.25 on my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About. That’s right, we’re half way. Let’s go into big font for that, actually.

25. The Enchanted Places
by Christopher Milne

Well, I say The Enchanted Places but I’d actually like to put forward three titles, Christopher Milne’s autobiographical trilogy. The Enchanted Places is the first one, and the most widely available; the second is The Path Through The Trees and the third is The Hollow on the Hill. They all have rather different characters, but should all be read…

Christopher Milne, to start at the beginning, is Christopher Robin, AA Milne’s son and the only human allowed into the Hundred Acre Wood. The Enchanted Places is mostly centred around the Pooh books and characters, and what it was like to grow up as the child millions of children wished and pretended to be. At the same time it is a memoir of his father, honest but affectionate – and, a brief snapshot of what Christopher Robin grew up to be. To quote the introduction, ‘I am making a double appearance, first as the boy I am describing and secondly as the adult through whose eyes I am seeing him’.

There’s a danger that, to the cynical heart, this all sounds mawkish and sentimental, but those are two words I should never apply to Christopher Milne. He writes about meeting journalists, being the star at a pageant, preferring Euclid to a sponge cake – but all with a dry and sensible hat on. Nor, contrary to some widespread belief, does he loathe everything connected with his father – I believe there were some years when he wanted to distance himself, but by the time he wrote The Enchanted Places, he’d changed his mind. For anyone even remotely interested in Winnie the Pooh, I do encourage you to find this memoir – it’s currently out of print, I think, but lots around secondhand. Parts of sad, much will feel nostalgic, all reveals writing talent to run in the Milne family.

I suspect some will have already heard of The Enchanted Places, but it’s less likely that you’ll have read the sequels. I’ll only mention them, but they’re definitely worth finding and buying and loving.

The Path Through The Trees – actually my favourite of the three, this volume looks at Christopher Milne’s time in the army, his marriage, and running a bookshop. I loved the chapters on the different ventures the bookshop made, the decision over whether or not to stock the Pooh books, the customers he got – it would be fascinating if written by any bookshop owner, but Milne’s account is even more interesting.

The Hollow on the Hill – Milne’s first love, Nature, takes centre stage in this volume, writing about the Devon countryside and his garden. I don’t remember this one so well, to be honest, which makes me think I might try and re-read the whole trilogy this year…

With the Woolfs

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Glad you all took a trip down memory lane with me – I’m sorely tempted to buy the DVD of The Herbs… but probably shouldn’t.

That book I was going to talk about… A Boy at the Hogarth Press by Richard Kennedy, which my friend Barbara gave to me, and which (I hear) is being republished by Slightly Foxed. I’ve had my eye on this for a while, but somehow hadn’t got around to buying it when Barbara sent me a copy, and so I was rather delighted. The list of Woolf-related books I’ve read isn’t small, and it is growing – I like to dip back into Bloomsbury waters every now and then, especially the books which are first-hand, but from the peripherals. The most recent addition to 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About was one of these – and while Kennedy’s isn’t *as* good, it’s still rather wonderful.

Richard Kennedy was just what the title suggests – a boy at the Hogarth Press, the small publishing venture started by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Kennedy did the day-to-day tasks, but was also occasionally asked his opinion about the books people sent in – winning something of a victory when he (with the help of his uncle) called Ivy Compton-Burnett a genius, while Leonard Woolf dismissed her as being unable to write. His book was written about forty years after his time there, but is still in the form of a diary, which leads to a rather odd mix of naivety and disingenuosness – but an uncomplicated eye amongst the complicated which is difficult to resist. All new angles of Virginia are welcome to me, but perhaps especially one who wasn’t all that afraid of her, and judged her by such standards as it being ‘bad form to laugh at your employees’. Love Virginia Woolf though I do, sometimes contemporary accounts of her can be a little nauseating. How much more precise is: ‘I think she is rather cruel in spite of the kind, rather dreamy way she looks at you.’

Richard Kennedy would never rival his employers in terms of writing – the boyish charm is needed to carry a patchwork of recollections, tied together by similarly boyish sketches – but A Boy at the Hogarth Press is a refreshing and amusing addition to the canon of Bloomsbury onlookers.