1986

Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett

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I bought Family Skeletons (1986) in 2011, shortly after seeing Henrietta Garnett give a talk about her life at a bookshop in Oxford. It was a fun evening, not just because her life is interesting but because she was quite clearly several drinks past sober throughout. My main memory is that she continually took glasses off and put them back on, holding the notes from which she was reading at great distances each time. It was a continue whirl of outstretched arm and the other spiralling her glasses on and off.

Anyway, it interested me enough that I wanted to read her novel. And I was interested before any of this happens, because she is from a literary an artistic dynasty – being the daughter of David Garnett and the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell. With such heritage, one could hardly avoid writing a book. Despite the title of this one, it is not a roman à clef.

Catherine is the heroine in this one – a young and naive woman, just turned adult, who has lived a sheltered life in a beautiful Irish estate called Malabay. Only her eccentric uncle Pake lives with her, excepting some staff. He has given her a love of literature and nature, but doesn’t like her to travel far from Malabay and admits few visitors.

Tara – a man; have men ever been called this? – is allowed in as a cousin, but these family ties don’t stop Tara and Catherine falling in love, against Pake’s better judgement. He is older and less innocent than Catherine, and he is amused by her total lack of understanding of the world. It is a passionate and unwise relationship, and one that Garnett describes with sort of language and images you can easily imagine a Bloomsbury Group member using.

Once, she woke during the night, frightened by the half-forgotten image of a dream already scudding out of her head. She had been transformed into a hare and was being pursued by dogs. The dogs were not far behind her and she could smell their dreadful hot breath. Her soul was still her own, but the dogs were hunting her. When she woke, she found that Tara was kissing her and stroking the nape of her neck.

“What is it, Catherine? You twitch in your sleep like a frightened animal.”

“I was an animal in my sleep and I was frightened.”

She kissed him.

They made love again and fell asleep in one another’s arms.

Their relationship does reveal some family skeletons – but there is also the unsettling tension between Malabay and the locals, and in Ireland of the 1980s you can probably imagine what the undercurrent of those tensions is.

Overall, I was impressed by Garnett’s writing. This wasn’t published just because of her family connections. A lot of the novel is in dialogue, and she is good at the emotions that hover below the surface and come through awkwardly – even if her characters are perhaps more willing to discuss their feelings than most Brits would be.

It’s often quite bitingly witty too, particularly when Pake is being scathing, or when his ex-wife Poppy turns up. You do feel for Catherine, a little boat on the sea of all this wit, intelligence, and experience – having to learn how to craft her own personality against a backdrop of so many powerful personalities.

It’s certainly a very evocative novel, and the plotting includes some big events and revelations without losing the sense that we are in a deeply real world. Somehow it doesn’t feel of the 1980s, though some of the plot is inextricable from it – take that away, and it could easily be the 1930s. Perhaps that is the ethereal timelessness Garnett brings to the narrative.

What a talented family. She died just over a year ago, and this was her only novel. A shame – I would certainly have been intrigued to see what came next.

The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace

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I was reading The Cross of Christ by John Stott for my 1986 entry in A Century of Books, but it’s a big book and felt too important a read to rush through for the sake of a reading challenge. And so I turned to the other 1986 books waiting on my shelves – it turns out I have a lot, and I was toying with Margaret Forster, Henrietta Garnett, Penelope Fitzgerald, Diana Athill, Quentin Bell, Barbara Pym… but settled, in the end, of The Silent Twins by Marjorie Wallace.

I don’t remember exactly the conversation that led to this, but Kim (of Reading Matters) kindly sent me her copy back in 2012 – I think perhaps the twins were mentioned in an Oliver Sacks book? – and it’s been waiting patiently until then. The edition is a 1998 reprint, including a new chapter, and is clearly marketed to fit into the post-David-Pelzer proliferation of misery memoirs. The tagline – ‘the harrowing true story of sisters locked in a shocking childhood pact’ – is nonsense that does the sensitive book a disservice.

June and Jennifer Gibbons are the twins of the title, born in Yemen and growing up in Haverfordwest in Wales (a pretty miserable town, I have to say, having gone there a few years ago). The Gibbons were a loving family, excited to add to their number – and, having moved to Wales, were dealing well with the tensions that came from being one the few black families in their 1960s community. But as the girls grew older, they were clearly different from their family and from local families. They were more or less elective mutes – speaking to each other in words so fast and curiously stressed that it sounded like another language, but never speaking to their parents or older siblings. Their younger sister was the exception to the rule.

Baffling teachers, June and Jennifer didn’t seem to match any evident diagnosis – and, indeed, Wallace doesn’t attempt to give them a diagnosis. Trapped in a world of their own, spending hours in their bedroom with their dolls and stories as they grew older, they were an enigma to the world at large. Limp and uncommunicative in public, they clearly had a ferociously active sororal relationship. They also wrote prolifically – fiction (which they furtively sent off to publishers, and eventually self-published) but also diaries. Wallace uses these diaries – which they wrote for years, covering enormous quantities of pages in tiny handwriting, to recreate their experiences. Often we see things from their perspective in the narrative, with the diaries silently referenced – most movingly when they deal with how much June and Jennifer love their family, even while never expressing it or communicating with them at all.

In their later teens, things changed. They start stalking some brothers. They lose their virginities with frantic determination. And they go on a spree of ill-concealed burglary and arson that will lead to them going to court – and, ultimately, Broadmoor. On a life sentence (of which they served eleven years), for crimes that usually warranted a few months’ sentence.

It is a fascinating tale, and Wallace does her best to show us the deeply complex relationship between June and Jennifer – drawing from the diaries, because of how little she or anybody else can see of it from the outside. And the power dynamics and repressions behind those silent exteriors were truly extraordinary.

Time and again the twins returned to this theme. They saw themselves as the ultimate unhappy couple, Jennifer as the quirky, irascible husband, June the victim wife, and although they switched roles in most of their other games, in this they remained consistent.

The ‘silent’ of the title isn’t quite true. As they got older, they spoke more – and seemed to have held relatively normal conversations with the teenagers they became involved with, as well as answering Wallace’s questions at least at times. But their twin relationship certainly plays into some of the stereotypes associated with twins in the popular consciousness – that we inhabit a world apart, unknowable to outsiders, and that the relationship might be unhealthy or dangerous. I can’t count the number of times people have asked me if Colin and I have a secret language, or if we can feel each other’s pain, or communicate psychically. Or, more generally, what it’s like to be a twin. Well, as I’ve said before, I can’t imagine what it’s like not to be a twin – but I also can’t imagine what it’s like to be in the closed and claustrophobic world June and Jennifer inhabited. My relationship with Colin is the most special in my life, and I don’t doubt that there are dynamics there that no other relationship could have, but it’s definitely not the curious mix of passionate hatred, obsessive love, and controlling fear that the Gibbons had. Theirs is truly a unique existence.

As for the writing – I think Wallace used the diaries well, and told their story without being unduly melodramatic. Indeed, I found the whole thing curiously sedated. It’s not bad writing by any means, but having discovered Janet Malcolm and Julie Salamon this year, I have new high standards for this variety of non-fiction. Wallace felt a bit unambitious in the way she wrote – though you could also argue that she was letting the extraordinary circumstances tell their own story. And they did do that, but I think I’d have valued the book even more if there was a little more to the writing.

I’m glad to have finally read it – thank you, Kim!

Letters to Max Beerbohm by Siegfried Sassoon

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Max B Siegfriend SOne of the nicest bookish finds is when you discover that two authors you like kept a correspondence. Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Garnett; William Maxwell and Eudora Welty; Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell. When people you like independently turn out to have connections, it’s like discovering two of your friends actually went to uni together. So imagine my happiness when I found a book of letters between Siegfried Sassoon and Max Beerbohm!

Granted, I haven’t actually read anything by Sassoon, but I grew very fond of him when I read another book of unexpected connections – Anna Thomasson’s A Curious Friendship, about Rex Whistler and Edith Olivier, but featuring a fair dose of Sassoon.

The full title of this collection, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, is Letters to Max Beerbohm & A Few Answers (1986). There are few answers not because they’ve been lost, but because Beerbohm was famously bad at writing them. His friends seem to have been pretty tolerant about this, and his letters (when he does write them) are friendly, fluid, and charming – but Sassoon bears the lion’s share of this exchange. Even this doesn’t quite make up enough for a book, and Hart-Davis has rifled through Sassoon’s diaries for more information to set the scene. (Hart-Davis’ footnotes are also occasionally rather amusing – for instance, he describes Sibyl Colefax as ‘relentless society hostess’.)

Who comes off the page? I got the impression that Sassoon was much younger than Beerbohm – each letter is soaked with a sort of affectionate awe. It turns out that, for the bulk of their correspondence (in the 1930s), Beerbohm was in his 60s and Sassoon was in his late 40s and early 50s. A difference, yes, but not as much a one as comes across.

They both write letters that speak of deep friendship (and a curious resentment of Yeats). They are witty, thoughtful, and show a closeness and respect that you wouldn’t be able to get except through reading a book of this sort. They also have sketches and jottings by Siegfried, which are great fun, as well as verse that he throws into the letters – presumably fairly off the cuff.

The diary entries are well chosen, giving context to their friendship, and the mix of diary and letters works well. I enjoyed this description of their friendship, from Sassoon:

Conversing with Max, everything turns to entertainment and delectable humour and evocation of the past. […] Not a thousandth part can be recorded. But I feel that these talks with Max permanently enrich my mind, and no doubt much of it will recur spontaneously in future memories; he is like travelling abroad – one feels the benefit afterwards.

Well, we have certainly benefit afterwards. This is a slight book, and I certainly wish they had written to each other more prolifically. If they had, this might have been up there with the William Maxwell/Sylvia Townsend Warner collection of letters (The Element of Lavishness) as one of the great literary correspondences. As it is, it is a brief and brilliant gem that will enhance an appreciation of either Sassoon or Beerbohm.

Reader for Hire by Raymond Jean

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Reader For HireI will be writing Great British Bake Off recaps again this year, you may or may not be pleased to know – but I’m thinking that weekends are probably going to be the earliest I’m able to write them.

So, for today, I’ll point you towards another of my Shiny New Books reviews. This time it’s Reader for Hire (1986) by Raymond Jean, translated from French by Adriana Hunter.

It’s basically about how fab reading is. Find out more…

On Acting – Laurence Olivier

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As if to act as an antidote to Emma’s disdain for the theatre, in Margaret Drabble’s The Garrick Year, I have just finished reading Laurence Olivier’s On Acting (1986), lent to me by my friend Andrea.  Nobody could accuse Olivier of disdaining the theatre – indeed, his adulation for it far exceeds mine, and he has (of course) a much more experienced and wise eye to cast over it.

I was a little unsure about reading On Acting, because I’m not a huge fan of Olivier (he falls into the Kenneth Branagh category of just-too-actory for me) and thought it was his autobiography – but it turns out that he’d already published his autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, and this volume instead focused on the craft of the actor, particularly on playing Shakespeare on stage and screen.  Perfect!

Olivier starts off with a brief history of great actors of the past – Burbage, Kean et al – which isn’t a very auspicious start to the book.  As I discovered throughout the book, Olivier delivers anecdotes appallingly.  In this section, he often suffixes them with the acknowledgement that they’re probably false – and somehow he mismanages each anecdote so that it falls oddly flat.  I began to worry.  But once Olivier started writing about the craftsmanship of acting, he got much, much better.  The largest section of On Acting concerns various significant roles in Shakespeare, devoting a chapter to each.  Olivier writes of Hamlet, Othello, Richard III and more, with firsthand insight into playing the roles, and explaining how he developed and discovered the characters.  This stuff is like catnip to me.  Olivier’s exploration of these characters is attached to specific performances and is very personal, it cannot and does not claim to be objective literary criticism, but it’s fascinating.

How I love to read actors’ theories about the theatre!  Olivier does not skimp on this.  Here’s an excerpt I loved:

To achieve true theatre, you can’t have one man up front and the acolytes with their backs to the audience feeding the great star with lines as dull as dishwater.  What you must have is every character believing in himself and, therefore, contributing to the piece as a whole, placing and pushing the play in the right direction.  The third spear carrier on the left should believe that the play is all about the third spear carrier on the left.  I’ve always believed that.  If the character is nameless, the actor should give himself a name.  He should give himself a family, a background, a past.  Where was he born, what did he have for breakfast?  Perhaps he had troubles at home, perhaps his wife has left him, perhaps his wife has just presented him with a new baby, perhaps he is saving for something – and so on.  If the actor brings on with him a true belief in himself, we should be able to look at him at any moment during the action and see a complete three-dimensional figure and not a cardboard cut-out.  To transport an audience, they must see life and not paste.
It is, though, one of the few times that he acknowledges the need for a united company.  One of the things that did irk me in On Acting is the isolation in which Olivier prepares his roles – there seemed no sense that other actors’ decision might affect his performances, or even that he was aware of them.  He is also monumentally egotistical (he claims all actors must be) and often congratulates himself on brilliant work – which is perhaps the prerogative of the aging actor, looking back over a long and successful career.  When writing about film, he is a little less self-confident, and I gained a lot of respect for Olivier when he acknowledged the failings of his version of Pride and Prejudice:

I was very unhappy with the picture.  It was difficult to make Darcy into anything more than an unattractive-looking prig, and darling Greer seemed to me all wrong as Elizabeth.  To me, Jane Austen had made Elizabeth different from her affected, idiotic sister; she was the only down-to-earth one, but Greer played her as the most affected and silly of the lot.  I also thought that the best points in the book were missed, although apparently no one else did.
You’re not alone, Olivier!  I didn’t think it worked at all…

This isn’t the place to come if you want gossip about Olivier’s life.  Perhaps Confessions of an Actor has that, but I rather imagine it doesn’t.  On Acting isn’t just for the aspiring actor, either – goodness knows I have no ambitions in that direction – but it is a fascinating look behind the red curtain, and an authoritative examination of the acting profession.  Coming at it from another direction, it has unusual and interesting readings of Shakespeare’s plays.  Olivier is not a very gifted writer, although a mostly competent one, but his acting talent and vast experience excuse his mediocrity in that regard – and make On Acting a very engaging read.  It would seem an inexcusable boast from most actors, to cover so broad a topic as acting, but somehow Laurence Olivier seems (and certainly believes himself to be) the man allowed to do it.