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Something Happened Yesterday – Beryl Bainbridge

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The Beryl Bainbridge Fest ain’t over yet, folks, and here’s my final review of the week – Something Happened Yesterday.  It isn’t a novel, it’s a selection of columns which Bainbridge contributed to the Evening Standard in the 1980s and ’90s, with short (often quite bizarre) introductory paragraphs to each column, written when the book was published (1993).

Well, although it takes a different format, Something Happened Yesterday has the same disjointed, playfully subversive tone that I have come to expect from Bainbridge.  Each column involves some event which has recently befallen Bainbridge, or recently come to her mind, suggested by something else.  It’s a whole mix – from visiting the village of her youth to a zoo trip to her time on a BBC children’s radio programme.  The occasion scarcely matters, for it is the eccentric musings on life which Bainbridge incorporates that make this book so distinctive.  The dark humour of her novels is definitely present.  Here’s a representative sample of her style:

It did however remind me of the cautionary tale of my son’s nursery school teacher, a lady named Miss Smith, referred to as Mith Mith by her lisping charges.  It’s a true story, albeit tragic.  A group of infants on a Tuesday morning just before Christmas in a house in Ullet Road, Liverpool, were discovered at home-time marching up and down swigging bottles of milk in an abandoned manner while Mith Mith lay slumped across the piano.  She had been dead for a quarter of an hour and had apparently passed on in the middle of The Grand Old Duke of York.  This shocking incident has remained fresh as a daisy in my memory because I hadn’t got round to paying the fees, whereas the rest of the mothers had stumped up the three guineas a term in advance.
Most amusing, probably, is the way in which Bainbridge can end up at the most curious of statements.  ‘A knowledge of sex and moths is no substitute for Latin, science and maths’, for instance, or, as an aside, ‘(I once knew a countess, an ex-theatre sister from Liverpool, who messed up my kitchen while trying to decapitate her husband, the Earl.)’  These statements are equally startling in context – not completely incongruous, because Bainbridge has more or less built up to them, but then takes a leap to something extraordinary.

Those introductory passages I mentioned – it’s a little odd to read them before reading the column in question, but often they feel no more normal afterwards.  They go off at tangents; they reveal less than they appear to, and add new questions rather than answers.  Sweet William could have written them.  Here’s one which prefixes a column which is mostly about Snow White:

I’m not going to enlarge on the events recounted here: they are too painful.  The moment he set eyes on me my ex said I looked very withered.  The last night he was here the cleaner confronted him.  How could he have walked out on his children all those years ago?  His response was pretty predictable, given the guilt we all feel.  He said, “This is all very boring”, and caught a taxi to the airport.
Which brings me onto another point.  Bainbridge makes pretty free with her relatives and friends.  Often her daughters and grandchildren are mentioned, but also talks about neighbours and acquaintances – surely they then read the Evening Standard, and recognised themselves?  But, but… sometimes Bainbridge’s introductory paragraphs make it clear that the anecdote she’s relating is not, in fact, wholly true… or is true in essentials, but happened with other people, in a different way…

Like some of Bainbridge’s characters, and like her own quirky narrative style, nothing can quite be trusted in her journalism.  I’m very glad that her style and tone didn’t get diluted by the demands of a newspaper column – it really is just an extension of the qualities I enjoy in her fiction, with a personal twist and a drier, acerbic view on life.  Great fun, very unusual, and a lovely way to finish off my first dive into Beryl Bainbridge territory.

Sweet William – Beryl Bainbridge

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Sweet William is my second Bainbridge novel, published in 1975 – so, a couple years before Injury Time, which I reviewed earlier this week.  I’ve read both as part of Gaskella‘s Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week – and I’m very grateful that she prompted me in this direction.  Although I’ve only read two, I feel like I’m getting a greater sense of Bainbridge’s range.

Unlike Injury Time, Sweet William isn’t an out-and-out comedy.  There is a certainly a lot of humour in it, but it’s a darker humour – where the darkness isn’t merely incidental, but brings with it tones of genuine hurt and despair.  But it’s far from bleak – Bainbridge throws in enough of the surreal and unexpected to prevent this being a Hardyesque paean to misery.

Ann is a BBC secretary, recently – impulsively – engaged to Gerald, who is heading off to America as the novel begins.  She has rather a fiery relationship with her mother, who invariably cows or embarrasses her, and is equally sick of putting up with her cousin Pamela.  She is attending a children’s performance on behalf of her landlady (as you do) when she first encounters William…

Her first impression was that she had been mistaken for someone else.  She looked behind her but there was no one in the open doorway.  The stranger was beckoning and indicating the empty chair beside his own.  His eyes held such an expression of certainty and recognition that she began to smile apologetically.  It was as if he had been watching the door for a long time and Ann had kept him waiting.  She did notice, as she excused herself along the row of seated mothers, that he had yellow curls and a flattish nose like a prize fighter.  He was dressed appallingly in some sort of sweater with writing on the chest.  On his feet he wore very soiled tennis pumps without laces.
Not entirely the most beguiling of portraits, is it?  But William definitely has a way with women, and it isn’t long at all before Ann and William have, er, become better acquainted – all thoughts of Gerald apparently banished.

Only William isn’t the world’s most faithful of men.

It gets a bit dizzying, trying to work out how many women – and, Bainbridge hints but never states explicitly, men – are besotted with William – and he certainly isn’t slow to reciprocate.  Sweet William is only 160 pages long, but in that space Bainbridge manages to wind and weave quite a complex tangle of relationships – in fact, the complexity is mostly due to the fact that William is far from honest.  He says he’s going to certain places; he’s actually elsewhere.  He doesn’t even mention some of the people he’s having dalliances with, until much later.  It’s a little confusing for the reader, but that helps get us in Ann’s frame of mind – and Bainbridge’s style is never confusing.  It’s a very organised, precise confusion, if you understand what I mean.

William reminded me quite a bit of Dougal Douglas in Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (which I read for Muriel Spark Reading Week, and reviewed here) – and not just because he’s Scottish.  They’re both deceptively charming men who appear suddenly and create havoc, never telling much of the truth.  We see Sweet William from the woman’s point of view, and so it does have some of the frustration and heartbreak woven in.  Me and my sensitive heart, ahem, I callously preferred the conversations between Ann and her mother – who is strident and occasionally rather hysterical.  (Spoiler ahead, by the way.)

Voice beginning to rise in pitch, her mother said, “His wife should be told.”

“She has been,” Ann said.  “She thinks William’s a beautiful person.”

“Shooting’s too good for him,” said her mother shrilly.  It was as if she’d promised herself, or someone else, that she would not shout recriminations at Ann and was now relieved that there were others on whom she could vent her feelings.
All in all, I didn’t love this as much as Injury Time, because I thought Bainbridge managed farce so beautifully there.  Sweet William is a different kettle of fish, and it’s not fair to fault Bainbridge for not achieving something she didn’t set out to achieve – indeed, I imagine a lot of people would prefer the subtler narrative in Sweet William where actions matter and feelings can get hurt, unlike the surreal hostage-situation in Injury Time.  Whichever one comes out on top, they’re both fantastic novels.  I can definitely see why Bainbridge is mentioned in the same breath as Spark, and I’m intrigued to read more.

And now I’m wondering whether or not Bainbridge wrote any novels without mistresses in them?

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.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes – Anita Loos

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Amongst my towering pile of current (but not very active) reads, I mentioned Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos.  One or two of you encouraged me to return to it, and I am never one to turn down the call to read a short novel from the 1920s.

Lorelei is the blonde in question, going around America and Europe bewitching rich men and thinking deep thoughts.  These thoughts she has been encouraged to note down in her diary… she is admirably determined to educate herself, but rather more determined to secure diamond tiaras etc. from the gentlemen she encounters.  She is not aided by her unrefined friend Dorothy, whom I absolutely love – Lorelei attempts to refine her, but Dorothy’s slang and insults (“Lady, if we hurt your dignity like you hurt our eyesight I hope for your sake, you are a Christian science”) are thankfully unfettered by decorum – they’re hilarious.

The joy of the novel is the voice Loos creates for her blonde.  Almost every sentence begins ‘So’ or ‘I mean’, and her deep thoughts are about as perceptive as her spelling is correct.  Typos today are, for once, not my own work.

I am going to stay in bed this morning as I am quite upset as I saw a gentleman who quite upset me.  I am not really sure it was the gentleman, as I saw him a quite a distants in the bar, but if it really is the gentleman it shows that when a girl has a lot of fate in her life it is sure to keep on happening.
I haven’t seen the film musical, with Marilyn Monroe, but I think I’m going to now.  At the time of publication, it was hugely successful – the second best selling title of 1926 (although published in 1925), and Edith Wharton called it ‘The great American novel.’  I wonder how tongue-in-cheek she was being?

As the beauty of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is in the style, I’ll give you another excerpt – one which gets across quite how beguiling the young woman is:

So Mr. Jennings helped me quite a lot and I stayed in his office about a year when I stayed in his office about a year when I found out he was not the kind of gentleman that a young girl is safe with.  I mean one evening when I went to pay a call on him at his apartment, I found a girl there who really was famous all over Little Rock for not being nice.  So when I found out that girls like that paid calls on Mr. Jennings I had quite a bad case of hysterics and my mind was really a blank and when I came out of it, it seems that I had a revolver in my hand and it seems that the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings.

[…]

Because everyone at the trial except the District Attorney was really lovely to me and all the gentlemen in the jury all cried when my lawyer pointed at me and told them that they practically all had had either a mother or a sister.  So the jury was only out three minutes and then they came back and acquitted me and they were all so lovely that I really had to kiss all of them and when I kissed the judge he had tears in his eyes and he took me right home to his sister.
So, I mean, I liked the novel a lot – I didn’t find it quite as uproariously funny as some people evidently do, and I think the joke would wear a little thin if it were stretched beyond the 150pp of this novel – but it was great fun while it lasted.  And I do have the even shorter sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, in the other half of this edition, starting from the other side and meeting in the middle… I’ll report back in due course.

M for Mother – Marjorie Riddell

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Why is it that I love books about motherhood from 50+ years ago?  I’m not likely ever to be either a mother or a time traveller.  I blame the Provincial Lady books, which set me off on a literary path from which I have never looked back.  I can’t remember who mentioned Marjorie Riddell’s M for Mother (1954) – was it you? Own up! – but I enjoyed adding it to the fold.  This one is actually from the other perspective – the daughter narrates.  She has recently left home, and each short chapter begins ‘My mother writes to me and says’ – it’s all good fun.  There are lots of gossipy aunts who cause trouble, and Mother doesn’t believe the daughter can possibly live a successful life without a mother’s tender care.  


It’s not in the same league as Diary of a Provincial Lady or Shirley Jackson’s Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, but it’s definitely a book you’ll enjoy flicking through, if you’re a fan of those books by Delafield and Jackson.  I thought it would make sense to give you a taste – here’s a chapter picked more or less at random: Chapter 17 – Holiday at Home.

My mother said she was glad she had got me at home for a fortnight because she was going to feed me up.  She knew that when I was away in London I lived on baked beans.  She wasn’t surprised my eyes were dull.  She had warned me every time I came home but it was like talking to the Sphinx.  She had always thought that if I insisted on starving myself to death I would just have to get on with it, but now she had changed her mind.  Mrs. Plant’s daughter was the picture of health and my mother wasn’t going to have people making comparisons.

I said I don’t live on baked beans.

My mother said yes, you do.

Now, eat your supper, my mother said.  You’ve got to eat it all.  I’m not going to let you die of starvation.  I’m just not going to let you whether you like it or not.

There, she said when I had finished, you look better already.  You don’t look haunted.

On the following day we went to buy a tonic.

A tonic for putting on weight, my mother told the assistant.  Yes, you are rather thin, madam, said the assistant.  For my daughter, said my mother coldly.

Then we had me weighed.  I was nine stone.  See, my mother said.

And you’ve got to go to bed early, my mother said.  I can’t do anything about it if you will never go to bed before two in the morning when you are away.  But I can while you are home.  I am helpless when you are in London and am forced to stand by and watch while you wear your nerves to trembling shreds.  I’m only glad I can’t see you.  If you will tire yourself out like this the next thing will be you will lose your job, and you know you won’t like that.

I said I don’t stay up until two every morning.

My mother said yes, you do.

And another thing, my mother said.  You are going to take things calmly and slowly while you are home.  When you are in London you spend your time rushing like a mad thing from place to place without pausing for breath.  Tearing about like that without breathing isn’t good for you.  You will have a gastric ulcer and then where will you be?

Aunt Ethel had one in her old house at Tunbridge Wells, my mother said.  She was in hospital for weeks and when she came home her roses were thick with greenfly.

I said I don’t rush about like a mad thing.

My mother said yes, you do.

You whole attitude towards things is wrong, my mother said.  Your money, for instance.  Your father is going to talk to you about that.  I told him only last night he is going to.  I shall leave it to him and not say a word myself.  But what I want to say is that you simply must not carry it all about with you at once.  And don’t say you don’t because you do.

I know I do, I said.  Do you want me to leave half a crown under my mattress and carry a shilling round wih me?

There’s no need to be sarcastic, my mother said.

I’m not being sarcastic, I said.

You carry pounds in your handbag, my mother said.

No, I don’t, I said.

Don’t argue, my mother said.  I remember, she went on, when Aunt Gertrude went to London in 1938 to see Aunt Dora and somebody stole her handbag.  Aunt Gertrude has never forgotten it.  Since then she has kept her money in a woolly bag tied round her waist under her clothes.  It has never been stolen again.  If you won’t leave some of your money locked up in your room, my mother said, I will give you a woolly bag like Aunt Gertrude.

Now, eat your suet pudding and stop arguing, my mother said.  I’m going to keep you alive if it kills me.

For Sylvia by Valentine Ackland

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When I started reading For Sylvia: An Honest Account by Valentine Ackland (published posthumously, in 1985) I was rather prepared to loathe the author.  I’ve recently read Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Diaries, and I haven’t come across more heartbreaking diary entries than those concerning the period when Ackland (STW’s partner for decades) decided to move her lover Elizabeth Wade White into their home, while Sylvia Townsend Warner moved out to a hotel, as some sort of experiment.  Although Warner is devoted to Ackland until Ackland’s death, and indeed until her own, she comes across as a selfish, cruel person.  It is perhaps unsurprising that when writing about herself, a more sympathetic portrait is drawn – and the fact that Ackland writes so well swept me along for a lot of it.  Although I have to say, a more miserable portrait than the cover photo I do not think I have ever seen.  I’m not sure a more miserable portrait is possible.  It didn’t make me immediately warm to her.

For Sylvia isn’t wholly an autobiography – it is, as the title suggests, an account of Ackland’s life, written for Sylvia. Having said that, the ‘for Sylvia’ bit doesn’t particularly influence the style or structure – she isn’t addressed as ‘you’ at any point, but remains ‘Sylvia’ – so perhaps it is safest to call For Sylvia a memoir.  In essentials it deals with two broad aspects of Ackland’s life – one being her romantic life, and the other being her battle with alcoholism.

Ackland starts by addressing that which every memoir needs: the pivotal moment of its subject’s life:

The ‘crisis’: it has been laid down that this should grip the reader’s interest, grapple him to the author, and amke it impossible for him to put the book down until he has finished it, or at least impossible for him to return it to the lending library by the next post.  But the ‘crisis’ in this particular life is very difficult to describe; for one thing, it is hard to know whether it happened in a flash or whether, in point of fact, it matured rather slowly and broke, as it were, creamily and in silence.  This ‘crisis’, too, is not directly concerned with a sexual upheaval, which makes it perhaps less enthralling to the reader than it was to the author.  However; it happened, and it was undoubtedly the sharpest possible crisis any life can know, for all it was so quiet and did not so much as cause a ripple on the surface of domestic life.

She is writing of her alcoholism, which had dominated much of her life for 19 years.  More particularly, the crisis is actually the end of this domination.  I know they say you cannot cure alcoholism, but the night in question – 8th October 1947 – was the last time Ackland felt the need for alchol.  Although with very, very little Christian faith at this point (she wavered quite a lot) she prayed to God.  ‘There was no reply.’  And yet, the following evening, after being ill all day, ‘I suddenly realised that I was walking in tranquility and with perfect confidence; and that tranquillity and assurance has never left me.’  I don’t wish to undermine the battles faced by those with alcoholism when trying to stop drinking; I am merely recounting the ‘crisis’ with which Ackland opens her memoir.

It is quite a structurally peculiar way to start.  Although Ackland does mention alcoholism at many points throughout For Sylvia (which, by the way, is short – 135 pages, including a 24-page introduction by Bea Howe) the rest of the memoir is structured chronologically, and focuses upon her various relationships, especially those with the anonymous R and X. 

I shan’t summarise Ackland’s accounts of her various love affairs – they take up most of the book.  I will simply write that (a) it is astonishing the number of women who throw themselves upon Valentine without the slightest provocation, and without knowing that she was a lesbian – Valentine herself didn’t know for the first few, and (b) that it can’t have made for very charming reading for Sylvia.  Although Ackland writes very well about her life, and has a simple, calm, flowing style which I had not expected of her, she isn’t being very kind to her intended audience.  I get the feeling that, just as I forgot that Sylvia had been apostrophised at the beginning, so Ackland forgot, and became too involved with the tangled webs of her love affairs.  And they are often very tangled.  Ackland got married to a poor, bewildered man after a lengthy engagement – saying, shortly beforehand, that she will either marry him tomorrow or not at all.  She refuses to consummate the marriage, but immediately commits adultery with her long-term female lover.  Indeed, there is barely a time when Ackland isn’t being, or considering being, unfaithful.  ‘I wonder,’ she writes at one point, ‘if anyone in the world was ever so idiotically vile as I was, for the best part of my youth.’  Ah!  A moment of self-awareness! (one thinks).  But one would be wrong.  Despite devoting paragraphs at various junctures to praise of Warner’s character and their love for one another, the reader then comes upon this:

I write this on a day when I have heard that I at any time now another one I love will come to live with me here, in this house where Sylvia and I have lived for twelve years together, through bitterness of private woe, through war, through my degradation and shame and throuhg the almost two years accomplished of my heavenly rescue and our increasing happiness and peace.  I do not know how this new thing has come about, nor whether it is the work of heaven of hell.  I cannot, for more than a moment at a time, realize what it will be like to be here without Sylvia – or anywhere without Sylvia.  But I have a conviction that this must be tried; although it is so dangerous that I can scarcely dare measure it even in my fancy.

I couldn’t remember, whilst reading For Sylvia, whether it has been written before or after this crisis in their relationship (for it was not permanent; Ackland chose Warner, and Warner came back to her own home, her own possessions) and was quite shocked that Ackland could write the above excerpt in the midst of eulogising their love.  I daresay I shouldn’t judge her, but it is difficult to read her wanton cruelty, having read Warner’s diaries.  In a book which centres on a person’s actions and motivations, it is impossible not to assess and respond to them.

Whilst I was reading For Sylvia, the genuine quality of Ackland’s writing, and (for some reason) its merit as good prose, made me feel a little more sympathetic to her.  I remain, of course, sympathetic to her plight with alcohol.  But in remembering her unkindness, her cruelty to Sylvia, and her absurd belief that it ‘must be’ done, I lose patience altogether.  It should be possible to separate writer and person, and I do admire Ackland more as a writer than I thought I would, but For Sylvia is an exercise in self-delusion – interesting, involving, but also infuriating.

The Spinster Book – Myrtle Reed

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Image source, and online text

There has been a bit of a theme on SiaB this year, hasn’t there?  Lots of books for, and about, unmarried women – because of the research I’ve been doing.  You’ll be hearing more about metamorphosis and talking animals later in the year, so get ready for that… Anyway, The Spinster Book by Myrtle Reed is the earliest of the books I’ve read this year – published, as it was, in 1901.  Myrtle Reed was only my age (26) which is perhaps too young to be penning anything with ‘spinster’ in the title – and, indeed, she never became an old spinster, or an old anything, as she committed suicide when she was 36.  I learnt all this after reading the book; it would, perhaps, have coloured my view of what is a witty and exuberant examination of men, women, and marriage.

Quite why it is called The Spinster Book I’m not sure, unless it is intended to act as a guide for the uninitiated.  It certainly doesn’t linger on the single state for long – instead, leaping headfirst into a discussion about men.  This was perhaps the most openly satirical chapter – if I had read some of the others first, I might have thought Reed serious (if misguided) for 1901 is a long time ago, and her ‘advice’ might well have been current.  I couldn’t tell whether the beautiful lay-out of the book, with bordered margins and notes at the side to tell you the main topic of the page (none of which, I note, is available in the free ebook edition – just sayin’) was itself part of the satire, or simply a throwback to design which was not, in 1901, particularly distant.  But nobody could read this and imagine Reed’s tongue to be anywhere but in her cheek:

How shall a girl acquire her knowledge of the phenomena of affection, if men are not willing to be questioned on the subject?  What is more natural than to seek wisdom from the man a girl has just refused to marry?  Why should she not ask if he has ever loved before, how long he has loved her, if he were not surprised when he found it out, and how he feels in her presence? 

Yet a sensitive spinster is repeatedly astonished at finding her lover transformed into a friend, without other provocation than this.  He accuses her of being “a heartless coquette,” of having “led him on,” – whatever that may mean, – and he does not care to have her for his sister, or even for his friend.
The Spinster Book is something akin to a satirical exploration of men, women, and love – not really in the style of an advisory guide, but closer to natural history.  Reed writes of men and women as though she were neither, and merely watching them at an amused, or concerned, distance.  She is full of sage, simple advice:

In order to be happy, a woman needs only a good digestion, a satisfatory complexion, and a lover.  The first requirement being met, the second is not hard to obtain, and the third follows as a matter of course.

And who can blame her if the contemplation of mankind in the throes of romance makes her somewhat cynical?

The average love letter is sufficient to make a sensitive spinster weep, unless she herself is in love and the letter be addressed to her.  The first stage of the tender passion renders a man careless as to his punctuation, the second seriously affects his spelling, and in the last period of the malady, his grammar develops locomotor ataxia.  The single blessedness of school-teachers is largely to be attributed to this cause.

Although Reed is being tongue-in-cheek throughout, The Spinster Book is still interesting as a window on society in the early 1900s.  True, affections and engagements were probably not bestowed and withdrawn quite in the manner Reed suggests, but it is taken as read that a man will barely know a woman before he proposes, and that a woman ought to turn down a few men before she settles upon one (in contrast to the post-WW1 supposed mentality of grabbing any man one can.)  Cynicism about marriage is a trope of comic writing which has been around since Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, and doubtless before, but through this cynicism one can always discern a portrait of contemporaneous marriage and relationships – through a glass darkly, but it’s there.  Failing that, The Spinster Book – though not satire at its most sophisticated or thorough – is still good for a giggle.

(As usual, clicking on the sketch will give you a larger, more readable, image… enjoy!)

The Spinster Book
Lesson No.1: Get lots of cats.
Lesson No.2: errr…

Spinster of this Parish – W.B. Maxwell

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I’m back!  Did you miss me?  I suspect a lot of people barely noticed, since I wasn’t away for all that long – but I usually try to post at least five times a week, so it felt like a lengthy holiday for me.  Sometimes a break is needed to keep blogging fresh for me – and my week-and-a-bit was enough to get me raring for more.  Let’s kick things off with a review to fill the 1922 slot on A Century of Books, eh?

It was in this article by Sarah Waters (an introduction to Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes) that I first heard about Spinster of this Parish by W.B. Maxwell.  (A William, it turns out, but not that William Maxwell.)  It was only mentioned in passing, alongside F.M. Mayor’s The Rector’s Daughter (which sadly underwhelmed me) but it was enough to pique my interest.  Luckily Oxford library has a copy in its store, and eventually I got around to reading it.  It’s rather extraordinary.

The action kicks off in 1920, with Mildred Parker (age 25) visiting ‘old maid’ Miss Emmeline Verinder (age 50) in the hopes of receiving some advice.  Mildred is ‘that mixture of shrewdness and innocence which makes the typical modern girl seem at once so shallow and so baffling.’  She has fallen in love with a man of whom her parents do not approve – and is bewailing this state to Miss Verinder when she stops suddenly, and suggests that Mildred might not be able to help her, as she has never experienced ‘the passions’…

Rewind to 1895, and Emmeline’s youth.  We’re still in the third person, so it’s not entirely Emmeline Verinder’s perspective, but she is certainly taking centre stage.  She is engaging in the late-Victorian social whirl, when she happens to meet celebrated explorer Anthony Dyke… and yes, dear reader, Emmeline is smitten.

How had he captivated her?  She did not know.  Was it only because he was the incarnate antithesis of Kensington; because he was individual, unlike the things on either side of him, not arranged on any pattern, not dull, monotonous, or flat; a thing alive in a place where all else was sleeping or dead?  Neither then nor at any future time did she attempt mentally to differentiate between the impression he had made upon her as himself all complete, with the dark hair, the penetrating but impenetrable eyes, the record, the fame, and the impression she might have received if any of these attributes had been taken away from him.  Say, if he had been an unknown Mr. Tomkins instead of a known Mr. Dyke.  Absurd.  The man and the name were one. […] He was Anthony Dyke.  He was her lord, her prince, her lover.

In other words, he is about equal measures Tarzan and Mr. Rochester.  Indeed, he borrows more than a penetrating stare from the world’s most beloved bigamist – for Dyke [er, SPOILERS!], like Rochester, has a madwoman in the attic.  Like poor Rochester (for we can’t our brooding heroes being too cruel, can we?) Dyke was tricked into marrying a madwoman (variety of mental illness not mentioned) who is now not, actually, in an attic but in an asylum.

This is where things start to get a bit daring.  Dyke is rather more honest than Rochester, and tells Emmeline about his wife.  She, in turn, decides that their love is more important than society’s morals and her parents’ approval – and becomes, as it were, his mistress.  This was pretty daring for the time, wasn’t it?  Shunned by her parents (although, to do Maxwell justice, Mr. Verinder ‘was not in any respects the conventional old-fashioned father that lingered in the comic literature of the period’) Emmeline takes her maid Louisa and lives elsewhere.

Being an explorer, Dyke must explore – and he’s high-tailing it off to South America.  They have rather a rushed emotional goodbye and he sets sail… only… wait… Emmeline has sneakily crept onboard!

This, blog-readers, is where everything goes mad.

The next section of the novel takes place in South America – and I highly doubt that Maxwell had ever gone nearer to it than Land’s End.  They go emerald-hunting, get lost in caves, involved in duels… it’s insane, and entirely different from the novel I was expecting.  Had I seen the cover (below) then I might have been better prepared for the excesses of Spinster of this Parish, which were in no way betrayed by the novel’s title.

The Sheik by Ethel M. Hull was published in 1919, and was wildly popular into the 1920s – although Spinster of this Parish involves none of the disturbing rape fantasies of The Sheik, it’s clear that Maxwell (and many others) were influenced by the popularity for exoticism.  I, however, found this section rather tedious, and flicked through it…

Finally we are back in English society – Emmeline grows gradually less shunned, and Dyke’s adventures continue abroad without her.  He is determined to succeed in his quest to get to the South Pole… will he survive or not?  Maxwell has rather calmed down by now, and Dyke’s activities take place off stage, thankfully – instead, we see the changing views of upper-class society, and Emmeline’s unwavering loyalty to her absent lover.

Picture source

Ah, yes, their love.  I got a bit tired of that.  He is physically perfect and unimaginably manly; she is womanfully patient and devotedly passionate.  Hmm.  Not the most original of pairings.  A lot made sense to me when I found out that W.B. Maxwell is the son of none other than Mary Elizabeth Braddon – of Lady Audley’s Secret fame.  He certainly inherited her love of sensation romance literature (did I mention the blackmail plot that’s thrown in?)

And yet – I enjoyed an awful lot of it.  Maxwell’s writing is, if not exceptional, consistently good.  He is quite witty throughout, and certainly writes better than most of the authors who would warrant a similar dustjacket image.  When we were in England, looking at the workings of society, it was very much my cup of tea – even if the characters were a little too good to be true.  At one point I even thought of suggesting it to Persephone Books.  But… I couldn’t get past the insane section in the middle.  The bizarre trip through South America, duels-n-all, is what will make Spinster of this Parish so memorable – but also that which lets down the overall writing, and makes it feel rather silly.

So, a strange book with which to make me blog return!  If nothing else, it has taught be that one must not only forswear to judge a book by its cover – similar caution must be taken as regards a book’s title.

Moominpappa at Sea – Tove Jansson

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You probably know that I love and adore Tove Jansson.  She is, indeed, one of my all-time favourite writers, and the only author whose books I eagerly await.  (Yes, she’s dead, but they’re being steadily translated – a newly translated collection of short stories coming soon from Sort Of Books!)  Until now, though, I hadn’t read any of the Moomin books for which she is best known.  Aware of this, Margaret Szedenits very kindly gave me a copy of Moominpappa at Sea (1965) which is actually the final book to feature the Moomin family, except some picture books.

Only the beginning of Moominpappa at Sea takes place in Moominvalley, and only the Moomin family appear.  Apparently there are lots of other characters, but I got to know thoughtful, adventurous Moominpappa, wise, diligent Moominmamma, anxious, imaginative Moomintroll, and fearless, feisty Little My.  They have a map on their wall, a dot on which marks an island (or perhaps, Little My suggests, some fly-dirt) with a lighthouse – Moominpappa decides that the family will move there.

“Of course we run the risk of it being calm tonight,” said Moominpappa.  “We could have left immediately after lunch.  But on an occasion like this we must wait for sunset.  Setting out in the right way is just as important as the opening lines in a book: they determine everything.”
After a wet and windy journey across the sea, they arrive on the island – deserted, except for a taciturn fisherman – and head towards the lighthouse.  Everything is not quite as they hoped.  The beam of the lighthouse doesn’t work, there is no soil for Moominmamma’s garden, and worst of all – the lighthouse is locked and they can’t find the key.  Without being too much like an educational TV programme, Tove Jansson incorporates many different responses to change – whether it intimidates, infuriates, or energises people.  Moominmamma is definitely the family member who most wishes they had never left.

In front of them lay age-old rocks with steep and sharp sides and they stumbled past precipice after precipice, grey and full of crevices and fissures.

“Everything’s much too big here,” thought Moominmamma.  “Or perhaps I’m too small.”

Only the path was as small and insecure as she was.
And then it all gets a bit surreal.  Not only is are they followed by the Groke – a curious creature which fills them with fear and turns the ground to ice – the island itself seems to be alive.  The trees move, the sea itself has a definite, often petulant, character.  The Moomins take this in their stride – they almost seem to expect it.

Moominpappa leaned forward and stared sternly at the fuming sea.  “There’s something you don’t seem to understand,” he said.  “It’s your job to look after this island.  You should protect and comfort it instead of behaving as you do.  Do your understand?

Moominpappa listened, but the sea made no answer.
So, what did I make of it all?  I definitely enjoyed it, and I especially liked Tove Jansson’s deceptively simple illustrations throughout – they enhanced the story, and also softened its edges, as it were.  The emotions and actions of the Moomins are often quite human, and the illustrations remind us that we are in a different world – they give the prose a warm haze.

And yet I never felt I quite knew what Jansson was doing.  I was expecting that it might all be a sort of allegory, in a way, for how humans respond to change.  But the Moomins aren’t simply there to represent types of response – they form a family unit as valid as those in any novel, even if there isn’t quite the same depth of development in these relationships (in this book, at least.)  The characters certainly often speak wisely, or demonstrate their feelings through actions (as Moominmamma does with her painting), but I couldn’t ever forget that this was a children’s book – and that, in this case, the children’s book really did feel like a watered-down version of the adults’ novels.

I wasn’t sure how Tove Jansson’s books for children would relate to the wonderful novels and stories I’ve already read.  It seemed to me, after reading Moominpappa at Sea, that it was like the skeletal equivalent of something like Fair Play.  Janssons’ great talent is her deeply perceptive descriptions of everyday interactions between people – incredibly nuanced and yet subtle.  She only gives the bare bones of this in Moominpappa at Sea.  Well, more than the bare bones – more, I daresay, than a lot of adult novelists – but not with the finesse of which I know her capable.  I still loved reading it, and I’m very grateful to Margaret for giving me the book and the opportunity, but I now feel comfortable that I have not been thus far missing Jansson’s greatest work.  She may be best known for the Moomin books but, based on what I have read of her oeuvre so far, she saved her finest writing for elsewhere.

The Outsider – Albert Camus

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Somehow, through some sort of mental osmosis, I find that most avid readers know the broad outline of classics long before they’ve read them.  I certainly found this with Rebecca, To Kill A Mockingbird, Jane Eyre etc.  The simple explanation, of course, is that conversations, articles, blog posts and films have, over the years, given us this foreknowledge.  So it is something of a rare joy to read a classic without any prior understanding of the contents.  That was the experience I had with Albert Camus’s The Outsider (1942), translated by Joseph Laredo.  (Laredo, apparently, opted to translate L’Etranger as The Outsider rather than The Stranger, under which title the first English translation appeared.)  My striking copy was kindly given to me by the Folio Society.

My experience with French literature – always in translation – has been mixed.  I have found some of it rather too philosophical for my liking, and there is always the spectre of ghastly French theorists I have tried, and failed, to understand.  The title didn’t encourage me – I thought it might be very existentialist or, worse, in the whiney and disaffected Holden Caulfield school of writing.  It was thus rather a delight to find The Outsider more in the mould of the detached, straightforward English novelists I love – Spark, Comyns – but perhaps most of all like my beloved Scandinavian writer Tove Jansson.  A lot of that style is due to the protagonist – Meursault – and the first-person presentation of his life.  Meursault sees the world through a haze of emotionless indifference.  He is not cruel or unkind, he is simply emotionless.  Actually, that’s not quite true.  He feels things to a moderate amount – the novel opens with his mother’s death, and the most he can muster up is that  he would rather it hadn’t happened.  His honesty is unintentionally brutal…

That evening, Marie came round for me and asked me if I wanted to marry her.  I said I didn’t mind and we could do it if she wanted to.  She then wanted to know if I loved her.  I replied as I had done once already, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t.  “Why marry me then?” she said.  I explained to her that it really didn’t matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married.  Anyway, she was the one who was asking me and I was simply saying yes.  She then remarked that marriage was a serious matter.  I said, “No.”  She didn’t say anything for a moment and looked at me in silence.  Then she spoke.  She just wanted to know if I’d have accepted the same proposal if it had come from another woman, with whom I had a similar friendship.  I said, “Naturally.”
When I thought that The Outsider would be simply a very well-written character portrait – an unusual and unsettling pair of eyes through which to view the world – things become more complicated.  In case others of you have the same lack of foreknowledge I had, I won’t give away the details – but the second half of the novel (novella? It’s only 100pp.) concerns a court case…

Albert Camus writes in his Afterword that the defining characteristic of Meursault (which is obvious early in the story) is that ‘he refuses to lie.  Lying is not only saying what isn’t true.  It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels.’  Meursault cannot lie; he cannot exaggerate the emotions he feels – and he feels them to a lesser degree than most.  The fallout from this honesty is slightly surreal, but at the same time entirely possible within the narrative.  It’s a brilliant piece of writing, and a brilliant outworking of an idea.  So, perhaps, like many of the French novels I couldn’t quite enjoy, Camus’s is concerned with ideas and philosophies – but he prioritises the execution of a believable, complex, and consistent character, and that is the triumph of this exceptional book.