1983

The Rebecca Notebook by Daphne du Maurier – #DDMReadingWeek (Novella a Day in May #11)

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The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories by Du Maurier, Daphne [1907-1989]: (1981) | Little Stour Books PBFA MemberWhen I was looking at how to double up Novella a Day in May with Ali’s Daphne du Maurier Reading Week, there weren’t a lot of options my shelves. If du Maurier wrote any novellas, then I don’t have them. But The Rebecca Notebook and other memories does come in at novella length, and has been waiting on my shelves since 2009.

I’m sure every one of you has read Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier’s runaway bestseller of 1938, and also (I would argue) her best novel. It’s been adapted for stage and screen many times, and has certainly reached classic status. That was also true in 1983, when du Maurier was in her mid-70s and The Rebecca Notebook was published. “Why, I have never understood!” claims du Maurier in the introduction – not so much that she can’t believe it has been popular, one suspects, than that she thinks it no better and no worse than all the rest of her output.

Anyway, its popularity is sufficient to sell this collection of non-fiction pieces – though the notebook itself accounts for only about 20 pages. It is an outline of the novel, though as she details later chapter it becomes rather more fleshed out with scenes and dialogue that she wanted to note. The survival of the notebook is owed to a plagiarism legal case, brought by Edwina MacDonald for a novel called Blind Windows, which du Maurier had never heard of. Du Maurier’s notes were thus used in her defence.

My only memory of the plagiarism suit was that the notebook was produced in court, and after cross-questioning the judge dismissed the case. I gave the notebook to dear Ellen Doubleday as a memento, and all I can recollect, after that first visit to the States, was being seasick all the way home in the Queen Mary.

When, after many more visits to the Doubledays, dearest Ellen died, she left the notebook to her daughter Puckie. Puckie returned it to me. And I reread it, for the first time in thirty years, when I received it.

It is a curio, and I did find it interesting to see how much du Maurier kept the same and how much she changed from this 20-page outline. The ending changes, and Mrs Danvers becomes creepier. That famous opening section is introduced – or, rather, moulded from the original epilogue (which is also included, after the notebook). All of this is only interesting if you love Rebecca – which I do, so it was.

The rest of the book is essays written at various times across du Maurier’s long career. The first concerns her famous writer grandfather, the next her famous actor/director father. The ones I found most interesting related to Menabilly (the model for Manderley in Rebecca) – I hadn’t realised that du Maurier wrote Rebecca simply on the strength of trespassing in the grounds of the abandoned house, and it wasn’t until years later that she managed to negotiate a lease and live there for a couple of decades.

Other essays are less convincing – I can’t imagine anybody is interested in du Maurier’s idiosyncratic and somewhat naïve takes on religion, and certainly you won’t be by the time you come across them for the third time – but there is enough of interest in parts of this collection to make it very much worth tracking down.

Still Life by Richard Cobb – #NovNov Day 16

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Today’s book is cheating a bit, because I started it in September – and somehow it fell to one side, and I read the second half today. And it is twenty or so pages over the self-imposed 200pp limit. But no matter. I always loved Slightly Foxed Editions – not just beautiful books, but so brilliantly chosen. They’re always memoirs, and often of people I know nothing about. Sometimes, as in the case of Still Life by Richard Cobb, I’m none the wiser about why he’s famous by the end of the book. That’s fine.

Cobb grew up in Tunbridge Wells in a family that was respectable but not very well off, and Still Life is as much a paean to the Tunbridge Wells of his childhood in the ’20s and ’30s and beyond as it is to his family or anything else. Indeed, it starts with the different roads that lead into the town – viewing it from different angles, trying to work out where to start. As Arpita wrote in her review, the beginning of this memoir isn’t it strongest feature. It feels rather impersonal, and we don’t quite know where we are – disoriented, as we don’t quite settle in his house or in any one place.

But, thankfully, Still Life gets better and better as it goes on – and as Cobb fills in the gaps. He gradually adds details of neighbours, shops, customs. I loved his portraits of local notable people – not notable for their rank or even their achievements, but for their longevity, eccentricity, or other addition to the array of people in the community. I found particularly fascinating the contrast when the Second World War came and went – how people returned to their privacy and hierarchies, after a period where more doors were opened and people stood on ceremony less.

It continues with different ways of looking at the town, as a conceit, and here is the opening to a chapter called ‘Doors and Windows’:

In the course of my walks, at whatever time of day, I would pass many front doors behind which I had penetrated; and thus I came to see Tunbridge Wells as consisting of a series of interlocking privacies; a mingling of addresses at fixed times, and according to unstated, but recognised, conventions. There could be a proper time for the drawbridge to be brought down and for a carefully restricted breach of privacy. One would not expect to gain entry through a front door – unless it was that of a doctor or a dentist – in the morning, or any time much before 3. People did not ask one another to lunch, though they might arrange to meet at lunch -as they might meet for morning coffee at the Cadena or the Tudor Café – in one of those established that seem to have marked the Thirties and that served modest, three-course southern English meals by well-spoken ladies, generally in couples, and wearing artistic smocks over their tweeds, to show that they were not servants.

I loved what Arpita wrote about Still Life: ‘For as the dextrous miniaturist painter adds infinitesimal detail to his work of art, so too has the author added layer upon layer of minute detail of his retelling of childhood.’ That’s the feeling I got from this memoir too. Perhaps I enjoyed it more and more as it went not just for the things he included later in the book, but because I had more of a background to see each person and trait against. It was cumulatively enjoyable.

Another success from Slightly Foxed – but, at this point, that’s more or less tautology. The SF Editions remain one of the finest curated lists out there.

25 Books in 25 Days: #12 Another Time, Another Place

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I knew that my friend Phoebe had given me Another Time, Another Place (1983) by Jessie Kesson as a birthday present, but I hadn’t remembered that it was as far back as 2015. In my head it was last year. Well, this project and its 120 pages are good bedfellows, and I’ve now read it.

Times like these, the young women felt imprisoned within the circumference of a field. Trapped by the monotony of work that wearied the body and dulled the mind. Rome had been taken. The Allies had landed in Normandy, she’d heard that on the wireless. ‘News’ that had caused great excitement in the bothy, crowded with friends, gesticulating in wild debate. Loud voices in dispute. Names falling casually from their tongues, out of books from her school-room days. The Alban Hills. The Tibrus…. ‘O Tibrus. Father Tibrus. To whom the Romans pray…’ Even in her schooldays, those names had sounded unreal. Outdistanced by centuries, from another time. Another place. The workers in the fields made no mention of such happenings. All their urgency was concentrated on reaching the end riggs at the top of the field. The long line of army jeeps roaring down along the main road provided nothing more than a moment for straightening their backs, never impinging on the consciousness of the turnip field.

The story is set in 1944, as three Italian prisoners of war start working as farmhands in a remote part of Scotland – and the effect this has on the various inhabitants of the village.

I’m just going to leave this one with the quote, I think. Because the writing was often rather lovely – but I found it quite hard to work out exactly what was going on. One character seemed to die, and then appeared again… Anyway, I enjoyed it for the atmosphere and the beautiful turns of phrase, and perhaps someone can explain what happens to me.

Blue Remembered Hills – Rosemary Sutcliff

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There must have been a time – a dark, bleak time – before I was introduced to the Slightly Foxed Editions.  I love the Slightly Foxed journal when I get my hands on a copy, but that doesn’t compare to the bottomless affection I have for all the memoirs I’ve read in their Slightly Foxed Editions series.  Which is, I realise, only five or six – I still have a long way to go.  But the one I finished recently is battling it out with Dodie Smith’s Look Back With Love not only for my favourite SF, but for my second favourite book read this year (Guard Your Daughters has secured first place.)

I need to start condensing my preambles, don’t I?  The book is Blue Remembered Hills (1983) by Rosemary Sutcliff, and it is heartwarmingly wonderful.  The original run of 2000 hardback copies has sold out and, due to its popularity, Slightly Foxed have produced this paperback edition.  Unlike most of the people I’ve spoken to about this book, I’ve never read anything by Rosemary Sutcliff.  My allergy to historical fiction has been lifelong, and her Eagle of the Ninth series has never got nearer than the peripheries of my awareness.  That doesn’t matter in the slightest, in terms of enjoying this book, believe me.

Born in 1920, Sutcliff was quite isolated in her childhood – she was an only child, and (after suffering Still’s Disease when very young) had varying levels of disability, and spent a great deal of time in and out of hospitals and nursing homes.  Yet this couldn’t be further from a misery memoir.  Everything is coated with a fascination for life, and a joy for the possibilities of observing and experiencing.

Like Smith’s childhood memoir, Sutcliff has great fun describing all her relatives – how blessed these memoirists seem to have been with comic uncles and aunts! – and especially her parents.  Her mother seems to have had undiagnosed bipolar disorder – Sutcliff describes times when her mood would change for days without warning – and this understandably made her unpredictable to live with.  This was coupled with a difficult personality, and Sutcliff (though generous to her) clearly didn’t have an entirely easy mother/daughter relationship.  Her father (a sailor) spent long periods away from home – all in all, not a simple childhood for young Rosemary.

But, as I say, she finds the beauty and joy in this all – not by ignoring her difficulties, but by maintaining an optimistic attitude.  Indeed, it wasn’t until I sat back and put together the information Sutcliff gives about her parents that I realised the difficulties she faced.  In Blue Remembered Hills this sort of excerpt represents the tone with which Sutcliff recalls them:

He was a lieutenant when he and my mother were married.  The had first met when they were both fourteen, at a mixed hockey match, and he always claimed that the first word he ever heard her say was ‘Damn’, which I suppose, to judge from her vehemence in protesting that it was the first time she had ever said it, was quite a word in those days.  My father’s invariable retort – oh, the lovely ritual changlessness of family hokes and traditions! – was that for a first time, she said it with remarkable fluency.
I think my favourite thing about childhood memoirs is the revelation of family jokes.  It makes the reader feel, at least for a page or two, that they’ve been inducted into the family.  We all have these, don’t we?  And they’re usually senseless and silly, and oh so precious!

Among Sutcliff’s many memories, the ones which most warmed my heart were about Miss Beck’s school.  Education reform has doubtless done much for children’s welfare, but as a side-effect it was removed the possibility of anything as joyful as this:

In a small back room with peeling wallpaper, under the eye of a gaunt elderly maid, I was stripped of my coat, leggings and tam-o’-shanter, in company with twelve or fourteen others of my kind.  And with them, all on my own, so grown up, I filed through into the schoolroom, to be receive, as Royalty receives, by Miss Beck herself, who sat, upright as Royalty sits, in a heavily carved Victorian armchair.

My schooldays proper had begun.

Looking back with warm affection at that first school of mine, I can hardly believe that it was real, and not something dreamed up out of the pages of Cranford or Quality Street.  I suppose nowadays it would not be allowed to exist at all.  Miss Amelia Beck had no teaching qualifications whatsoever, save the qualifications of long experience and love.  She was the daughter of a colonel of Marines, in her eighty-sixth year when I became one of her pupils; and for more than sixty years, in her narrow house overlooking the Lines at Chatham, she had taught the children of the dockyard and the barracks.  She accepted only the children of service families.  Oh, the gentle snobbery of a bygone age; bygone even then, and having less to do with class than totem.  It was her frequent boast that she had smacked, in their early days, most of the senior officers of both services.  Both, not all three, for the RAF was too young as yet to count for much in Miss Beck’s scheme of things.  But I do not think that it can have been true, unless she had gentled greatly with the passing of her years.  For I never knew her to smack anybody during the year that I sat at her feet.
Isn’t that blissful?  There is quite a bit about this school and Miss Beck, who stayed in touch with every pupil she taught (or so Sutcliff claims!) – it is all fairly ordinary, but made extraordinary through Sutcliff’s lovely writing and engaging personality.

In fact, it is the ordinariness of Sutcliff’s life that makes Blue Remembered Hills so difficult to write about.  It is oddly similar to The Outward Room, reviewed yesterday, in being significant not for its incidents, but for the beautiful way in which they are related.  After relaying the activities, thoughts, people and pets of her childhood, Sutcliff relays her early career as a miniaturist (not, she notes sadly, a form likely to win any major notice in the art world) and her first infatuation.  Those are the two important strands in the second half of the book, I suppose, and it continues up to her first literary commissions.  But the events are so much less vital than the tone.

So, yes, it’s another book you have to read to appreciate… but, oh, what a warm, engaging, beautiful book it is.  One of the very few where I cannot bear the lessening pages as I read on – and which I am certain I shall return to time and again.  Slightly Foxed – I don’t know how you do it.  You are my new addiction.  Long may you continue to find memoirs as spectacularly lovely as this!

Others who got Stuck into this:

 “Perfect. My only complaint is that it is too short.” – Leaves and Pages

 “The tone of the book is one of gratitude for life’s blessings & joy at the natural world, her friends, her dogs & her love for her parents.” – Lyn, I Prefer Reading

Baker, Baker…

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Since we’ve had three posts about short stories this week, let’s have another! I didn’t plan to do any sort of themed week, and I rather suspect the theme will screech to a halt after this review, but for today… step forward Frank Baker and Stories of the Strange and Sinister.

I’ve mentioned a few times before that, although Frank Baker wrote one of my very favourite novels (Miss Hargreaves) I have only read one other of his books. It was Before I Go Hence, which I quite enjoyed – but it was nowhere near the standard of Miss H., and I worried that I’d like his work steadily less and less… so stopped. But it’s been three years since I read that, and short stories is moving the goalposts a little, so I tried again, with more reasonable expectations.

Stories of the Strange and Sinister was published over forty years after Miss Hargreaves, in 1983, the year Baker died. It was also his first work of fiction for twenty-two years, although including stories written between 1947 and 1983. The stories – as the title suggests – all touch upon the strange and sinister, but I don’t think any of them were intensely frightening. Which is good for me; I’d rather read strange stories than horror stories – which is why M.R. James has remained on the shelf for now.

Intense repugnance. That is one definition of horror to be found in the dictionary. Or, power of exciting such feeling. I think it is more. It is also what is totally unexpected: the long sunlit lane that has only a brick wall at the end, the worm in the rose, the sudden ravaged image of one’s own tormented face in a window pane. That which has sudden power to corrupt and defile. A stench where sweetness should be; darkness where light should be; a grin where a smile should be; a scream searing into a night where silence should be. An old withered hand where a young hand should be… And no escape from whatever it may be that has suddenly come upon the visitant. No escape.

This is the beginning to perhaps the creepiest story in the collection, ‘The Chocolate Box’, about a man who finds a severed hand in – you guessed it – a chocolate box. But, thankfully, it is a definition Baker doesn’t keep to. Even in his darkest moments, he can’t help introducing a touch of that whimsy which makes Miss Hargreaves so irresistible. For instance, in the middle of my favourite story in the book – ‘The Green Steps’ – the narrator refers to the disturbingly insane character as ‘about as talkative as a Trappist monk in Holy Week.’

In ‘The Chocolate Box’ the narrator writes:
But this is not a story about music. I must keep it out, otherwise it will flood the pages and consume me.
Baker suffers from the same predicament. He is obviously too great a music lover to allow it far from his mind. There is a story about warring partners in a music shop; one about a singer who morphs into a bird; a haunted piano…

But there are moments of terror too – the sack which follows its victim around the house; the presentiment of a steam-room murder… In Baker’s hand, we never wander too far into Gothic territory – but the sinister undertones to Miss Hargreaves have become much more alarming, and much less balanced out by humour. The whimsy still – as I said – hides in the corners, but there remains much to chill, even if not give nightmares.

As always with short story collections, I find it impossible to outline many of the stories, or give a proper feel for the collection as a whole – but I think Stories of the Strange and Sinister has convinced me not to abandon Baker just yet. It’s pretty expensive to track down, and probably isn’t really worth the £20 or £30 that various online sellers are requesting, but there are some interesting and original ideas and thoughtful writing – especially in that first story, ‘The Green Steps’. I’ll leave you with an excerpt from early in that story, which is both evocative of Baker’s atmospheric tone, and so many coastal villages in Cornwall (a county Baker loved) with their mysterious, historic and ambling paths:
I had observed him often and I had good reason to know where he lived, for it was very close to our cottage, up the cliff path, that bends sharply uphill over the harbour and the boatmasts that swing and sway in the gales; a path too narrow for any traffic, with rows of cottages, different sizes, shapes and colours, on one side. From the windows of our living-room which overlooks an area – a waste bit of land where kids keep rabbits in hutches and women dry clothes and men saw wood in winter – I would often, and still often see, the Scavenger. Above the area there are steps, the Green Steps they are called, worn away dangerously, all uneven, ground by the feet of many generations, the stone crumbling, little weeds growing from the cracks. I’d always had a curious familiar feeling about the Green Steps; they brought back a hint of the past to me, a paragraph of my boyhood, as though I’d been there years ago; and I knew I hadn’t.

Andrina

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Ages ago I won Andrina and other stories by George Mackay Brown on Hayley’s blog Desperate Reader. So enthused was she, and so keen that I read it, that I got it to the top of my pile in surprisingly quick time for me (putting this in perspective, I’m currently reading a book someone gave me over three years ago) – but then didn’t blog about it, and now am looking back in my memory to see what I thought. As such, I’m probably more likely to give impressions about the book as a whole, rather than individual stories.

Every time I write about short stories, I say how difficult it is. The themes will be so sprawling, the characters so diverse, that trying to find a unifying voice is tricky. Hayley suggests, in her review, that GMB is drawn to ‘time, tide, season, poetry, and faith’ – which is pretty wide, but probably fairly accurate. From the beautiful island photograph on the cover of my copy, I was expecting something from the same stable as Tove Jansson – with chilly descriptions, unsentimental characters, lots about the minutiae of human interaction, etc. etc. So I was a little surprised when the first story was all about a whaler, with some quite wordy letters being sent to a woman with the improbable name Williamina. I can’t say I was smitten.

But I persevered – and what I will say is that the collection is mixed, but mostly on the good side of that! George Mackay Brown is very interested in fables and legends, and the whole book feels a little as though it had been translated from Old Norse or Icelandic or a language with a similar oral tradition. What do I mean by that? I suppose it’s his odd choice of language – the sort of things we encounter in Anglo-Saxon literature, with turns of phrase relating to the most primitive forms of existence. This can be incredibly effective – I especially loved this line:

Days, months, years passed. A whole generation gathered and broke like a wave on the shore.
On the other hand, for those of us who never read historical fiction – which I recognise is a failing in myself, not the genre – it sometimes grates a little. Or, if not ‘grate’, does wear a little thin occasionally… but only occasionally.

The title story ‘Andrina’ is one of the best, and one of the few which felt more in the traditional mould of beginning-middle-twist-end. If I had to pick a favourite story from the collection, it would be ‘Poets’, which is actually a group of four stories, set in different times and places, carefully displaying four poets (some creating written poetry; some more metaphorical). In ‘The Lord of Silence’ within this group, Duncan is a poet who never utters a word:
He grew up. He was a young man. He learned to hunt, to herd, to plough. He learned to drink from the silver cup, pledging his companions in silence. His father went once on a cattle raid into the next glen, and did not return. They managed to get his body from the scree before the eagle and the wolf made their narrowing circles. The women of the glen, who mourned in a ritualistic way, had never seen such stark grief on a human face: the mouth of Duncan opened in a black silent wail.
Maybe it is when GMB’s own interest in poetry overrides, that I lose my way sometimes. As someone who has an admiration for poetry, but rarely an enjoyment, I think I was occasionally left on the sidelines with some of the stories. I could see that they were beautiful, and with many of them I could relish that beauty and engage with the characters, writing, themes – but with others I could only sense beauty, not feel it. There is no doubt that GMD is a talented and evocative writer, when he finds the right reader – and whilst I certainly wasn’t completely the wrong reader for Andrina and other stories, which I’m very glad I’ve read, and mostly enjoyed – I think there could be ideal readers out there for whom this would be an incredibly special book.