ACOB

Authors on Authors (Part 1)

StuckinaBook All , , , , 6 Comments

I’m away this week, off up to Newcastle to give a conference paper, then to one of very my best friends’ wedding in Worcester at the weekend (very exciting!) so I’ve prepared a mini-series of posts to appear in my absence.  It’s not another lot of My Life in Books, I’m afraid, but it isn’t too far away… the next three posts will be on books about books.  Or, more precisely, authors discussing authors: each of the three books/pamphlets are about famous authors, by our sort of middlebrow authors.  Fun!

First up, and taking the spot for 1943 in A Century of Books, is Talking of Jane Austen by Sheila Kaye-Smith and G.B. Stern.  My housemate Mel gave this to me for my birthday in 2010 (thanks, Mel!) knowing how much I’d enjoyed its sequel, More Talk Of Jane Austen.  Yes, I’m doing these things the wrong way around, but it doesn’t much matter which order you read these books in – except that I would argue Talking of Jane Austen is even better.

The book is divided into fifteen essays, alternatively by Kaye-Smith and Stern.  Proceedings kick off with ‘Introducing Sheila Kaye-Smith to Jane Austen’ and ‘Introducing G.B. Stern to Jane Austen’, where our esteemed authoresses recount how they first came to read Austen – sheepishly admitting their early disregard of her, and triumphantly rejoicing in the moments (both with Emma, incidentally) where they discovered their lasting affinity with Jane.  Their love of Jane shines through every paragraph – this is an appreciation, but one from calm hearts and careful minds.  They do not run mad nor faint, rather they love both wisely and well.

To enter that world is to visit a congenial set of friends, and I still find that in their company I lose my own cares, much as I lost them on my first visit, thirty years ago.  Jane Austen is the perfect novelist of escape – of legitimate escape, such as are our holidays.  She does not transport one into fantasy but simply into another, less urgent, set of facts.  She tells no fairy-tale which might send us back dazzled and reeling to our contacts with normal life, but diverts us from our preoccupations with another set of problems no less real than our own, but making no personal demands upon us.  In fact it is her realism which provides the escape, for the fantastic and improbable only irritate certain minds and send them hurrying back unrefreshed to their own business.

Amongst the topics addressed are the education of female characters; a re-evaluation (now a fairly standard argument) or Henry and Maria Crawford; dress and food in the novels; the device of letter-writing… a wide-ranging group of intriguing minutiae.

Perhaps the bravest section is where Stern and Kaye-Smith turn their attention to characters which they consider failed.  Avert your eyes if you consider St. Jane to be infallible.  Even more bravely, this is how Stern prefixes the discussion:

When an author fails with one of her characters, it must, I think, be defined as a lack of perception, a certain bluntness of outlook where this particular character is concerned.  For where the author is aware she has failed, she will be compelled to do something about it: alter it, cut it, add to it, so that it will remain an uneven lop-sided conception with some irrelevant good scenes and some hopeless; showing traces of exasperated tinkering.  Where a character is a plain failure, evenly spread, we can usually detect some slight complacency in its creator.

And whose names are suggested?  Well, Stern and Kaye-Smith cannot agree on some of them, but amongst their nominations are Colonel Brandon, Eleanor Tilney, Lady Russell, Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, and Lady Catherine de Bourgh.  Since those final three characters are amongst my favourite in all the novels, I shall maintain a dignified silence on the topic.  (How could they!)  Ahem.

Perhaps the most fun section is at the end, where is all becomes something of a miscellany.  There are twenty pages of incidental comments and observations, or thoughts which were not quite sufficient to be developed into a whole chapter.  Here’s just one of ’em, courtesy of Sheila Kaye-Smith:

No two authors, you might think, would be less likely to have their work mistaken for each other’s than Jane Austen and Aldous Huxley.  Nevertheless I have recently seen a quotation from the author of Pride and Prejudice attributed to the author of Eyeless in Gaza.  It was in a review of the screen version of Pride and Prejudice, for the script of which Hollywood, with its fine sense of fitness, had made Mr. Huxley responsible.  The critic, having congratulated him on the complete suppression of his literary personality in this task, goes on to say that one piece of dialogue, however, stands out unmistakably as his own.  He then quotes Sir William Lucas’s commendation of dancing as “one of the first refinements of polished society”, with Darcy’s reply: “Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world – every savage can dance.”

If you’re not already a Janeite, this probably isn’t a good place to start.   Indeed, you should probably have read all of Austen’s books at least once before you even consider reading Talking of Jane Austen.  The authors are contentedly aware of this themselves, and welcome anyone (is it you?) who fits the description below:

We are not prowling round, my collaborator and myself, searching for converts; only for those insatiable legions who find the same mysterious pleasure as we do in talking Jane, discovering Jane, arguing Jane, quoting Jane, listing Jane, and for ever and ever marvelling at Jane and grateful for her legacy.
And so say all of us!

The Rector’s Daughter – F.M. Mayor

StuckinaBook All , , 27 Comments

There are a few books which I expect to love, end up not loving, and then wonder why.  I lean back in my chair, eye the novel sternly, and ask myself (and it) what went wrong.  Was it timing?  Would a re-read make me fall in love?  Have I recently read something else which does the same sort of thing, but better?  That’s a sure-fire way to leave me unimpressed.  Or is the book simply not as good as everyone tells me?

Well, recently a novel joined the ranks of Hotel du Lac, Gaudy Night, and A Passage to India.  All books which have their passionate fans, and (with me) a somewhat underwhelmed reader.  Well, The Rector’s Daughter, I certainly didn’t hate you.  I liked you rather more than the above trio of disappointments.  But nor did I love you in the way that I anticipated I would, based on reviews by Rachel and Harriet.  So I have stalled writing about this novel… I finished it right at the beginning of 2012, and yet… what to say?  How to write about it properly – justifying my lack of adoration for this much-adored title, but not only that: this was one of those novels which gave me no heads-up on how I would structure a review.  But… well, I’ll try.

The Rector’s Daughter (1924) concerns the life and ill-fated love of Mary Jocelyn, the rector’s daughter in question.  She is motherless, and lives a life of obedient graciousness towards her father – who is deeply intellectual, but not able to show his love for his daughter.  I think Mary was supposed to be in the mold of silently passionate women, having to be content with their lot.  A bit like Jane Eyre, perhaps… but then I have always thought Jane Eyre a little overrated.  Here she is:

His daughter Mary was a decline.  Her uninteresting hair, dragged severely back, displayed a forehead lined too early.  Her complexion was a dullish hue, not much lighter than her hair.  She had her father’s beautiful eyes, and hid them with glasses.  She was dowdily dressed, but she had many companions in the neighbourhood, from labourers’ wives to the ladies of the big houses, to share her dowdiness.  It was not observed; she was as much a part of her village as its homely hawthorns.
Mary has one great chance at love, with Mr. Herbert – and I do not think it gives too much away (for it is no surprise) to relate that her chance comes to nothing, and she must live with the consequences of this unlucky, ineluctable failure.  Love is one of the major themes of the novel.  That’s true of a lot of novels, but in The Rector’s Daughter the theme is love-out-of-reach; the journey from innocence to experience, bypassing happiness.  What horrifies Mary – and what seems to horrify F.M. Mayor too – is any sort of irreverence towards love.

One winter day when Dora Redland had come to stay with Ella, she and Mary met for a walk.  Mary suddenly started the subject.  “I wish you would tell me something about love.  I should think no one ever reached my age and knew so little, except of love in books.  Father has never mentioned love, and Aunt Lottie treated it as if it ought not to exist.  There were you and Will, but I was so young for me age I never took it in.”

“What a funny thing to ask!” said Dora.  “I don’t think I know much about it either.  There was one of the curates at Southsea – I never imagined he cared at all for me; I had hardly ever spoken to him.  I think some one else had refused him.  That makes them susceptible, I believe, and also the time of year and wanting to marry.”  There was a mild severity, perhaps cynicism, in this speech, which astonished Mary.

“But, Dora, don’t you think there is a Love ‘Which alters not with Time’s brief hours and days, / But bears it out even to the edge of Doom’?”

“Take care, Mary dear, you stepped right into that puddle.  Wait a minute.  Let me wipe your coat.  I am not quite sure that I understand what you were saying.”
Dora is also a spinster, but less angsty.  I think I would have rather enjoyed a novel from Dora’s perspective…

It is usually easy to give reasons why a book didn’t work for me.  Indeed, they are few more satisfying activities than laying into a poorly written novel… but The Rector’s Daughter isn’t poorly written.

Perhaps my ennui can be attributed to spinster novel fatigue?  I have read quite a few recently, and have to say that May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean attempts a similar type of novel rather more (for me) successfully.  The public debate about unmarried women between the world wars (covered fascinatingly in a chapter of Nicola Beauman’s A Very Great Profession, and less fascinatingly in Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out) was loud and often angry; the 1920s novels dealing with this issue were written at a time when the issue was contentious, as well as potentially tragic.  Maybe I’ve just read too many, now?

Perhaps I found The Rector’s Daughter too earnest?  I have often noted that novels others love sometimes fail with me if they are very earnest.  It kills a narrative.  And certainly there appeared to be very little humour in Mayor’s novel… at least in the first half.  I was surprised, in the second half, to come across moments which would be at home in Jane Austen or E.M. Delafield’s lighter work.  This passage was brilliant – it’s from Miss Davey, a character (looking back) whom I remember nothing else about:

“Who can that be coming down the road?  Why, it’s the pretty little girl with the dark curls we saw yesterday when the Canon took me out a little walk – your dear father.  Oh no, it’s not; now she comes nearer I see it’s not the little girl with the dark curls.  My sight isn’t quite as good as it was.  No, she has red hair and spectacles.  Dear me, what a plain little thing.  Did you say she would be calling for the milk, dear? Or is this the little one you say helps Cook?  Oh no, not that one, only ten; no, she would be rather young.  Yes, what the girls are coming to.  You say you don’t find a difficulty.  Mrs. Barkham – my new lodgings; I told you about her, poor thing, she suffers so from neuralgia – she says the girls now – fancy her last girl wearing a pendant when she was waiting.  Just a very plain brooch, no one would say a word against, costing half-a-crown or two shillings.  I’ve given one myself to a servant many a time.  Oh, that dear little robin – Mary, you must look – or is it a thrush?  There, it’s gone.  You’ve missed it.  Perhaps we could see it out of the other window.  Thank you, dear; if I could have your arm.  Oh, I didn’t see the footstool.  No, thank you, I didn’t hurt myself in the least; only that was my rheumatic elbow.”
Had I simply missed this sort of thing at the beginning, or did Mayor alter the tone?  I’m not suggesting that all novels ought to be comic novels, but without a slightly ironic eye, or dark humour, or even a slight reflective smile, I am rather lost.  This came too late in The Rector’s Daughter – or at least I missed it.  Hilary wrote in her review at Vulpes Libris that “There is no distancing irony or humour – its serious tone is relentless.”  I didn’t find it quite relentless, but otherwise I agree with this sentence (although Hilary, as you’ll see at the bottom, was overall more positive about the novel.)  I admire good comic writers so much more than I admire good poignant writers – it is so much more difficult to be comic – but maybe that is simply horses for courses.

However, as I finish a lukewarm review of The Rector’s Daughter, I am chastened by the memory of my initial response to Mollie Panter-Downes’s One Fine Day.  Who knows, perhaps a re-read of The Rector’s Daughter would give me an equally enthusiastic second impression?

Others who got Stuck into this Book:

“This is such a brilliant book, worthy of being a classic, really, in that it so perfectly encapsulates how limited unmarried women’s lives could be before the advent of feminism” – Rachel, Book Snob

“The novel is minutely observed; there is beautiful detail about each day and the East Anglian countryside, so that although time passes in the book very slowly, it is wonderfully described.” – Verity, Verity’s Virago Venture

“This is a novel about how hard it is to understand other people, and how many misunderstandings and even tragedies arise from it.” – Harriet, Harriet Devine’s Blog

“I wouldn’t have missed it, and I do recommend it. I can understand why this novel is regarded as a hidden gem.”  – Hilary, Vulpes Libres

Opus 7 – Sylvia Townsend Warner

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

I’m reading around my next DPhil chapter, on Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, and thus there might well be a little spate of Warner related posts coming up here over the next few weeks.  I have an inkling that this might be one of those reviews which is very specialist, and might not attract much interest (1930s narrative poem, anyone?) but I shall plough ahead and see what happens!

I read Opus 7 (1931) by Warner mostly as a counterpoint to Lolly Willowes, but it is also interesting on its own account.  It’s a narrative poem, about fifty pages long, about Rebecca Random – an unsociable woman who lives in an idyllic cottage, ‘lives on bread and lives for gin’, and has an almost uncanny ability to grow flowers:

Some skill she had, and, more than skill, a touch
that prospered all she set, as though there were
a chemical affinity ‘twixt her
stuff and the stuff of plants.

Indeed, the most obvious connections between Opus 7 and Lolly Willowes are the countryside, and this almost witchlike ability that Rebecca has.  Flowers spring up almost overnight, and make Rebecca and her garden something of a spectacle for the villagers.
But the topic is really just a way of exploring the dynamics of village life, especially the darker side.  Rebecca starts to sell her flowers – but only because she needs money for drink.  The villagers buy her flowers for their mantelpieces, parties, and funerals – but do not accept her; she engages in these exchanges, but does not talk to the people next to her in the pub, nor buy them the drinks they anticipate.  In a really interesting aside, Warner leaves the stance of anecdote-reteller and dips into the author’s voice – comparing her addiction to writing and rewriting with Rebecca’s reliance on alcohol:

And down what leagues of darkness must I yet
trudge, stumble, reel, in the wrought mind’s retreat ;
then wake, remember, doubt, and with the day
that work which in the darkness shone survey,
and find it neither better nor much worse
than any other twentieth-century verse.
Oh, must I needs be disillusioned, there’s
no need to wait for spring!  Each day declares
yesterday’s currency a few dead leaves ;
and through all the sly nets poor technique weaves
the wind blows on, whilst I – new nets design,
a sister-soul to my slut heroine,
she to her dram enslaved, and I to mine.
I rarely read poetry, as you know, so perhaps I am not the best judge of quality.  I recently wrote a little bit about Warner’s collection Time Importuned, which I didn’t really like or dislike.  I felt I got a lot more out of Opus 7 – perhaps because it had a sustained narrative, and everything which comes along with that, particularly the foregrounding of character.  Once I had that all set in my mind, I could sit back and enjoy Warner’s writing.  It was occasionally a little forced, and I didn’t approve of all her attempts to create end-rhymes.  This was rather inexcusable:

But now Rebecca, wont to chatter ding-
dong with the merriest, and when drunk to sing

But in general I found it rather beautiful – her use of metaphor is quite striking, for instance.  This excerpt isn’t to do with Rebecca, but concerns the aftermath of village life after the first world war – looking back to the war with quite a chilling, effective image.  Even with all the writing about the trenches which I have read (which we have all read, I imagine) this made an impact on me:

I knew a time when Europe feasted well :
bodies were munched in thousands, vintage blood
so blithely flowed that even the dull mud
grew greedy, and ate men ; and lest the gust
should flag, quick flesh no daintier taste than dust,
spirit was ransacked for whatever might
sharpen a sauce to drive on appetite.
I can’t imagine any publisher willing to publish Opus 7 now, simply because of its form and length.  It’s not long enough to be considered a novel in verse, but it is obviously too long to be merely a poem.  However I am glad that Chatto and Windus decided it was worth issuing back in 1931, in their lovely Dolphin Books series (which I collect when I stumble across them) – it’s not my favourite book by Warner, but it is rather powerful and striking.  And, for a poetry ignoramus, rather an accessible way to enjoy the form, without forfeiting the qualities which make me primarily a lover of prose.

Raising Demons – Shirley Jackson

StuckinaBook All , , 18 Comments

Raising Demons is the 1957 sequel to Shirley Jackson’s hilariously wonderful memoir/novel about being a wife and mother, Life Among the Savages (1953).  I paid a steepish amount for a hideous paperback (pictured), and thus managed to secure Raising Demons, saving it for a treat – and I read it whilst recently beleaguered with a cold.  It is an absurd indictment of the publishing industry that these books are so difficult to find, especially on this side of the ocean.  They are brilliant, and deserve to be classics (please, some publisher or other, please!)  I don’t often laugh out loud while reading, but with Raising Demons (as with Life Among the Savages before it) I sat in the corner giggling away to myself, getting curious and worried glances from my housemates.

I went back and read what I wrote about Life Among the Savages (you can do the same thing if you click here) and basically everything I said for that book is true of this one.  Funny, warm, happy, funny, clever, and did I mention funny?  But I shan’t be lazy; I shall write a new review for this book, and not just send you back to that review…

Despite my enthusiasm for Life Among the Savages, I’m well aware that Shirley Jackson is much more likely to make you think of Gothic, creepy, psychological novels – like the excellent We Have Always Lived in the Castle.  She does that sort of thing incredibly well.  But she also excels at this sort of gentle, family-orientated, self-deprecating writing – a genre which many would dismiss, I’m sure, but which I (and many of you) adore.

By the time Raising Demons starts there are six in the family, plus attendant animals, and they have outgrown the house which was so amusingly bought at the beginning of Life Among the Savages – and so they start hunting for a new house.  Or, rather, everyone tells them which house they should choose – the one with the wonky gatepost, converted into four self-contained flats.  Despite insisting that they don’t want to move, nor rent their house, they find themselves sending all their belongings into storage, and converting the flats into one house.  It is here that they live out their ordinary, hilarious lives.

Jackson has a talent for two types of humour at once: the knowing grin we grant to the recognisable, and laughter at the bizarre and unexpected.  These initially seem like opposite sides of the coin; that authors would have to pick one or the other – but Jackson manages both at once, by taking the everyday, identifiable dynamics of the family home… and exaggerating them.  And then putting them in a pattern, so that events pile on events, creating a surreal outcome.  Yet one which seems entirely possible – had, perhaps, happened to Jackson herself.

Having written about illustrative quotations yesterday, I should provide excellently evocative ones today, shouldn’t I?  I liked this one, about the mother preparing her son for his first Little League game – obviously rather more nervous than he is:

As a matter of fact, the night before the double-header which was to open the Little League, I distinctly recall that I told Laurie it was only a game.  “It’s only a game, fella,” I said.  “Don’t try to go to sleep; read or something if you’re nervous.  Would you like some aspirin?”

“I forgot to tell you,” Laurie said, yawning.  “He’s pitching Georgie tomorrow.  Not me.”

“What?”  I thought, and then said heartily, “I mean, he’s the manager, after all.  I know you’ll play your best in any position.”

“I could go to sleep now if you’d just turn out the light,” Laurie said patiently.  “I’m really quite tired.”

I called Dot later, about twelve o’clock, because I was pretty sure she’d still be awake, and of course she was, although Billy had gone right off about nine o’clock.  She said she wasn’t the least bit nervous, because of course it didn’t really matter except for the kids’ sake, and she hoped the best team would win.  I said that that was just what I had been telling my husband, and she said her husband had suggested that perhaps she had better not go to the game at all because if the Braves lost she ought to be home with a hot bath ready for Billy and perhaps a steak dinner or something.  I said that even if Laurie wasn’t pitching I was sure the Braves would win, and of course I wasn’t one of those people who always wanted their own children right out in the centre of things all the time but if the Braves lost it would be my opinion that their lineup ought to be revised and Georgie put back into right field where he belonged.  She said she thought Laurie was a better pitcher, and I suggested that she and her husband and Billy come over for lunch and we could all go to the game together.

That also gives an example of my favourite technique in the book.  It’s simple, but I find it endlessly amusing: it is what Jackson doesn’t write.  So much of Raising Demons is left to the reader’s imagination.  Not much is needed, to be honest – any reader is likely to deduce that the mother is distrait, and the son calm.  Jackson isn’t trying to be super-subtle with that point.  But I love that it is never quite spelt out – and that other characters thus often miss what is so obvious to the amused reader.  Here’s an example in that vein:

By the Saturday before Labor Day a decided atmosphere of cool restraint had taken over our house, because on Thursday my husband had received a letter from an old school friend of his named Sylvia, saying that she and another girl were driving through New England on a vacation and would just adore stopping by for the weekend to renew old friendships.  My husband gave me the letter to read, and I held it very carefully by the edges and said that it was positively touching, the way he kept up with his old friends, and did Sylvia always use pale lavender paper with this kind of rosy ink and what was that I smelled – perfume?  My husband said Sylvia was a grand girl.  I said I was sure of it.  My husband said Sylvia had always been one of the nicest people he knew.  I said I hadn’t a doubt.  My husband said that he was positive that I was going to love Sylvia on sight.  I opened my mouth to speak but stopped myself in time.

My husband laughed self-consciously.  “I remember,” he said, and then his voice trailed off and he laughed again.

“Yes?” I asked politely.

“Nothing,” he said.
Lovely!  I really can’t recommend this book, and Life Among the Savages, enough.  It’s such a shame they’re so difficult to find – but I promise they are worth the hunt to anybody who likes Provincial Lady-esque books.  (Hopefully you’ll find a nicer copy than mine – I quite like the other image featured, yours for $500.)  Like the PL et al, I know I’ll be returning to this family time and again.  I’m rather bereft that only two were written… and on the hunt for other, potentially similar, books.  And more on that before too long…

Dear Octopus – Dodie Smith

StuckinaBook All , , , 2 Comments

When I was reading Dodie Smith’s first volume of autobiography, Look Back With Love, the title which cropped up most (and most intrigued me) was her play Dear Octopus (1938).  She didn’t write much about its creation or production, since obviously she didn’t write the play during her first eleven years, but she makes allusions now and then.  My attention was grabbed by the mention of family reunions, John Gielguid, and that curious title.  Actually, I’ll instantly put you out of your misery, lest you think this is a play set in an aquarium.  The title derives from the speech Nicholas gives at his parents’ Golden Wedding Anniversary:

“To the family – that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor, in our inmost hearts, ever quite wish to.”

Despite being an only child, Dodie Smith seems very able at portraying sibling relationships within large families.  (Indeed, one character claims to be ‘crazy about large families’, and their husband caustically remarks ‘That’s because you’re an only child.’)  Rose and Cassandra always seemed very believable in I Capture the Castle (albeit Thomas rather less so) and Dear Octopus is no different.  The size of the cast, and the various familial and marital relationships, was rather dizzying – but, of course, it would have been rather easier to identify everyone when seeing it on the stage, rather than reading the play.  We discussed reading plays a couple of years ago, and it seems that I am in a minority – although it has to be said that I do prefer reading plays with small casts, rather than the mammoth ensemble of Dear Octopus.

The situation is a tried and tested catalyst for all manner of action: a family reunion.  I don’t think there’s much point in me going into specifics, but it involves all the expected angles.  A daughter returns after a seven year absence, holding a secret; a sister-in-law holds resentment about a long-ago rejection; siblings compete and misunderstand each other; children try to understand the adult world; the gathering draws further attention to one family member who has recently died.  And, naturally, there is a romance plot threaded through – which culminates rather too neatly, perhaps, but everyone likes a bit of feel-good theatre.

There is plenty in Dear Octopus which does remind one of the insouciance of much of I Capture the Castle – and, indeed, Cassandra’s faux-sophistication.  Like this, for example:

MARGERY: Ken’ll carry on with anyone who crooks their little finger at him.
HILDA: Don’t you mind?
MARGERY: Not in the least.  It’s a safety valve.

Young love and young marriages are treated quite flippantly at times, although elsewhere the oncoming war (they must have known it was oncoming?) does crash through this flippancy:

LAUREL: Your father’s picture.  He was exactly your age when he was killed. (Suddenly.)  Oh, darling, darling–
HUGH: What?
LAUREL: Sometimes I wish we were quite middle-aged.
HUGH: Good lord, why?
LAUREL: So that you wouldn’t have to go if there’s another war.
HUGH: It’ll take a damn good cause to get me to war.
LAUREL: Oh, you all say that.

But the focal point is not budding romance – it is the security and trust of a fifty-year long marriage.  There is a lovely sense through that the anniversary couple in question (Charles and Dora) can cope with the antics of their family because of the depth of their bond.  For a young(ish) unmarried woman, Smith conveys this very well, and very calmly.

Dear Octopus doesn’t reinvent the wheel.  There are a lot of plays in a similar mould, and even with a similar tone, but Smith’s construction and balance throughout is so well done that this seems like an exemplar within its crowded genre.  Perhaps it won’t overly excite the reader, or transform any lives, but it does its job rather well.  I don’t know how often the play is revived now, but you do get a chance to see it, grab the opportunity.  Otherwise, I recommend you track down a copy, and have an entertaining afternoon…

Short non-review today…

StuckinaBook All , , 60 Comments

For the sake of A Century of Books, I must record that I have read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) – but I have no desire to write about it.  I hated reading it.  The writing was good.  But it is a horrible book, about a horrible murder committed by horrible people.  People will, I daresay, suggest that I am shying away from ‘real life’, but unpleasant actions are no more real than pleasant ones.  The usual, indeed, is rather more real than unusual.  There is a greater amount of reality in the Provincial Lady books than within the pages of In Cold Blood.  I cannot understand why anybody wants to read crime books, let alone true crime books: one half of the world does not understand the pleasures of the other.  Reading In Cold Blood could never be a pleasure for me, and the amount of displeasure it caused me wholly obscured any admiration I should feel towards Capote for his writing ability or his experimentation with genre.  I wish I had never read it.

Any books for which you feel like this?

One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes

StuckinaBook All , , , 28 Comments

Back to normal now, folks!  You’d think I’d have taken the opportunity to write lots of reviews, ready to post… but… I didn’t.  Although I hope you were suitably intrigued by the little clues I gave yesterday… the first one up is the brilliant re-read.  So brilliant, in fact, that it’s leaping onto my 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About…

39. One Fine Day – Mollie Panter-Downes

I do more re-reading now than I used to, but I tend towards books I already know I’ll love.  So there are some novels I’ll read every two years or so, and some that I don’t remember much about, but knew I loved ten years ago, say.  What I seldom do (understandably, perhaps) is re-read books that I didn’t love – those that I disliked, or thought only quite good.

Thank goodness I decided to re-read Mollie Panter-Downes’ One Fine Day.

I first read it back in 2004, and thanks to never emptying my inbox (currently at 76,992 emails – all read, don’t worry) I can tell you that I reported thus to my online book group: “I did enjoy this, but not as much as I was expecting given Nicola’s love love love of it.  I was expecting E.M. Delafield and it landed more Virginia Woolf than I thought it would??  Memorable, though.”  The Nicola in question is Nicola Beauman, doyenne of Persephone Books, who has often held up One Fine Day as an almost perfect novel.  Indeed, it was she who rediscovered the book for Virago’s Modern Classics series.

Well, turns out Nicola was right, of course.  I had initially thought One Fine Day only fairly good, whereas now I believe it is an absolutely excellent – and, indeed, important – novel.

My early comparison with Virginia Woolf is one that I stick by, although why I would have thought that was a bad thing, I can’t imagine.  But I am aware that a lot of you will be turned off by the mention of Woolf – let me encourage you not to be!  One of the reasons that I think One Fine Day is an important novel is that it is something of a bridge between the middlebrow and the modernist.  It is Panter-Downes’ style which makes the novel so exquisite, and yet it has none of the inaccessibility of which Woolf can be accused.  She has all the fluidity and ingenuity of the great prose/poetry stylist, combined with the keen and sensible observation of the domestic novelist.  Time for me to hand over to Mollie Panter-Downes for a fairly long excerpt:

The bus was full of women, sighing, sweating gently under the arms of their cotton dresses as they held on to their baskets and their slippery, fretful children.  A tiny boy screamed like an angry jay, drumming his fists on the glass.  He wa-anted it, he wa-anted it!  Bless the child, wanted what?  It, it, ow-w-w! he wept with fury at adult stupidity already frustrating his simple world.  A spaniel on the floor at somebody’s feet shifted cautiously, lifting a red-cornered eye towards his owner, hoping and trusting that no one would tread on his paw.  Human uneasiness and irritability seemed to fill the bus with hot cottonwool, choking, getting up the nostrils.  If it did not start in a moment, it might burst with pressure from its prickling cargo.  Only a young man, a hiker, seemed to sit aloof and happy in the heat.  He wore a blue shirt and drill shorts; on his knees was a knapsack.  His neck was a dull red, so was the brow of his cheerful, ordinary face.  Perhaps he had only just come out of the Army or the Air Force, thought Laura, watching him study his map with such happy concentration.  Ow, ow, ow-w-w, wept the tiny boy, unable to escape and go striding off amongst the bracken, still handcuffed to childhood.  I’ll smack you proper if you don’t stop, threatened his mother.  The young man studied his map, reading England with rapture.  The driver, who had descended to cool his legs and have a word with a crony outside the Bull, swung himself up into his seat.  An angry throbbing seized the bus, the hot bodies of the passengers quivered like jelly, the jaws of an old woman by the door seemed to click and chatter.  With a lurch, they started.  The tiny boy’s tears stopped as though within his tow-coloured head someone had turned a tap.  His brimming eyes stared out at the streets as he sat quietly on his mother’s lap, clutching a little wooden horse.

I think that’s brilliant, just beautiful.  Mollie Panter-Downes also has a great way with metaphors and similes, offering unexpected images which somehow don’t jar, and convey much more than a simple statement could.  I’m not going to be able to resist quoting MPD (if you will) quite a bit, by the way, so here’s an example: ‘Now that he was home, he could not abide the thought of other people’s bath water running out, meeting on the stairs with forced joviality, someone else’s life pressed up against one in a too small space like a stranger’s overcoat against one’s mouth in a crowd.’

It’s unusual for me to talk about the style of a novel before I address the rudiments of the plot, but I do think it’s MPD’s style which sets her apart from her contemporaries.  In terms of plot, nothing really happens.  One Fine Day, as the title suggests, is all set during one day.  The war is over, and people are beginning to get back to their old lives – only, of course, nothing can ever really be the same.  Laura (the central character, through whose eyes we see most of the novel) goes shopping, visits a family in the village, tries to retrieve her dog from a gipsy encampment, and walks up a beautiful hill.  The events of the day are, in fact, uneventful.  It is this ordinariness, in contrast to the uncertain and unkind days of war, which resonates throughout One Fine Day.  Laura’s observations and reflections are not dramatic or life-changing – but that is their beauty.  What a relief it must have been to read about the pursuit of a gardener, or the view from a hill, rather than menacing newspaper headlines and the constant worry about loved ones.  The novel relaxes into this peacefulness and freedom – but with a continuous backward glance.  The war has changed Laura.  She is

a bit thinner over the cheekbones, perhaps, the hair completely grey in front, though the back was still fair and crisply curling, like rear-line soldiers who do not know that defeat has bleakly overtaken their forward comrades.

There is an undercurrent throughout One Fine Day of changed times – not just the working-class villagers who no longer want jobs in domestic service, or need to pay strict adherence to codes of class civility.  Laura has been separated from her husband Stephen for years; he has not watched their daughter Victoria grow up.  The family is not destroyed by this, nor is it even unhappy – but it is strained, and it is tired, but resilient.  Mollie P-D conveys so perfectly the triumph and relief of this weary, determined little family unit, who do not fully understand one another, but who stand together, grateful for all they have managed to keep.

Alongside Panter-Downes’ beautiful writing, it is the character of Laura which is the novel’s triumph.  Perhaps the two cannot quite be separated, because she is built of this wonderful style – it is not quite stream of consciousness, it never leaves the third person, but it flits through thoughts and noticings and reflections as Laura does.  And she is such a wonderful character.  She reminds me a bit of Mrs. Miniver, but without her slight tweeness.  Laura loves beauty, especially beauty in nature; she is a little absent-minded and uncertain, but she is strong and caring and optimistic.  Laura is observant but not judgemental; intelligent but not an intellectual.  A line of poetry runs through her head, in relation to her everyday activity:

Who wrote that? Laura wondered absently.  She could not remember.  Her mind was a ragbag, in which scraps of forgotten brightness, odd bits of purple and gold, were hopelessly mixed up with laundry lists and recipes for doing something quick and unconvincingly delicious with dried egg.

Laura is a perfect heroine for the wave of feminism which re-evaluated the worth of domestic life.  Perhaps especially because she does not entirely idealise it herself; she describes her class and people as ‘all slaves of the turned-back fresh linen, the polished wood reflecting the civilised candlelight, the hot water running into the shining bath.’  But she is a willing slave – all grumbles and laments are covered in the sheer gratitude Laura feels for life and freedom.  I can’t convey quite what a wonderful character Laura is, nor quite how perfectly Panter-Downes understands and shapes her.  To create a character who is both realistic and lovable must be one of the most difficult authorial tasks.  She is as psychologically well-developed as Mrs. Dalloway or Laura Ramsay, but as delightful as Mrs. Miniver or the Provincial Lady.  It is an astonishing combination.

I wrote blandly, back in 2004, that One Fine Day was ‘memorable, though’, unappreciative wretch that I was!  Truth be told, I had not remembered much of the novel.  And I doubt I will remember which steps Laura took, which neighbours she encountered, nor which views she expressed.  This is the sort of novel which cannot be remembered for its contents; only for the impression it leaves.  And that I certainly shall not forget.  I’m so grateful that I returned to One Fine Day, and was given a second chance to appreciate properly the work of brilliance that it is.  I am only left wondering, of course, quite how many other novels I have underestimated in this manner…??

Others who got Stuck in this Book:

“An ordinary day, an ordinary family, ordinary lives, but an extraordinary novel.” – Margaret, BooksPlease

“The author’s love for this part of England absolutely sings through this little gem of a novel” – Geranium Cat’s Bookshelf

“But there were also fundamental changes in England’s social fabric, which this short novel portrays in exquisite and sometimes painful detail.” – Laura’s Musings

“It is a moving, elegiac novel about love, beauty, and most importantly, freedom” – Rachel, Book Snob

Country Moods and Tenses – Edith Olivier

StuckinaBook All , , 4 Comments

It’s no secret that I love Edith Olivier’s The Love Child (by the by, any of you who are enjoying Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, I definitely recommend The Love Child as a companion read).  I keep reading more books by Olivier, and being disappointed that they’re not as good… Well, this blog post mentioned Country Moods and Tenses (1941) as their favourite of her works, and it sounded like it might be useful for my thesis, so I got a copy online and read it speedily.  And I paid a teeny bit more to get this unusual and beautiful cover, created by Olivier’s friend Rex Whistler.

Sorry the photo is a bit dark, but you get the impression.

Well, long story short, it won’t replace The Love Child in my affections – but it’s still rather a lovely book to have on the shelf, and is quintessentially Olivier.  The more I read by her, especially her non-fiction, the more I realise that she sees herself primarily as a countrywoman, and as a Wiltshire-woman.  She was mayor, after all.

Country Moods and Tenses is subtitled a ‘Non-Grammarian’s Chapbook’, and in it Olivier outlines village life in five grammatical tenses/moods: Infinitive, Imperative, Indicative, Subjunctive and Conditional.  The associations between these and the chapters is somewhat fanciful (Indicative for travelling; Conditional for the changes of modern life; Subjunctive for human relationships, etc.) but it’s as good a method as any for discussing the countryside in a period where traditions and village-individuality was already fast disappearing.  There’s plenty of country folklore, which Olivier swears by:

Birds and animals have many habits which indicate the coming weather to a wise watcher.  If the partridges are still flying in coveys on February 1st, it foretells a late spring; if they pair as early as the last week of January, the season will be an early one.  Pheasants crow in the night to warn of the approach of bad weather, but lately they have decided that German bombs are as bad as tornadoes.  They are extremely sensitive to the sound of a coming raid, and can hear, or feel, the fall of a high-explosive bomb quite twenty miles away.  Then at once they lift up their voices in shrill chorus.
But it is not just the flora and fauna in which Olivier is interested.  She turns her attention to the human inhabitants of Wiltshire, including many photographs.  Those of scenery are a little underwhelming (being in black and white, they offer rather less than modern day equivalents) but the many and various photographers (including Cecil Beaton) have captured some astonishingly natural shots of labourers and villagers.  These were the most interesting to me.  Indeed, through Olivier’s country moods, it was human behaviour which most appealed to me. Those of us who are familiar with E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady will identify with this excerpt – which, by the by, is one of the elements of Olivier’s countryside which certainly hasn’t changed:

In spite of the country genius for making festivals out of buying and selling, nothing can prevent a Sale of Work from being a terribly dreary affair; yet every village must have at least one every summer.  For weeks beforehand the whole parish is busy with preparations.  A garden is lent; the morning arrives; the stalls are prettily arranged; and then, a few hours before the time fixed for the opening ceremony, the goods have to be hurriedly scrambled into the schoolroom to escape a deluge of rain.  Everyone agrees to make the best of it.  A leading lady of the neighbourhood declares the sale open.  The clergyman makes a tactful speech.  The members of the audience look feverishly round.  There is nothing at all to buy, and nobody to buy it.
One of my problems with Olivier’s writing elsewhere is that her writing is rarely witty – all a little too earnest. So I was grateful to find the above section, with its Delafieldian tones.  Although Country Moods and Tenses does lean towards the solemn for the most-part, these little flavours of humour help elevate the book.  And Olivier finds humour in her observations about the countryside she so dearly loves, in both present and past.

In the Middle Ages, the traveller in Europe (or even in England if he went beyond his own county) had to be an adventurous fellow indeed.  Morrison, who published one of the earliest road-books, tells his readers that they should certainly make their wills before leaving home; and one of his first bits of practical advice is an instruction on the different technique of duelling in each European country.  He tells the traveller that he will meet with more thieves in England than anywhere else; but he adds this encouraging postscript: “Having taken purses by the Highway, they seldom or never kill those they rob.  All private men pursue them from village to village with hue and cry.”
It is the future which Olivier cannot observe with laughter, from her 1941 vantage.  She worries about universal education meaning that village children no longer learn a trade, or follow in their parents’ farming footsteps; she is concerned about the buildings which are insensitive to their surroundings; she fears that village will become homogeneous, losing their customs and heritage.  Who’s to say that she was wrong?

But this certainly isn’t an exercise in hand-wringing.  Olivier writes joyfully about the countryside, even while documenting its changes.  Who knows quite what her purpose was in writing Country Moods and Tenses?  Surely she couldn’t have hoped to stall the changes.  Perhaps she just wanted a simple set of recollections.  It would be impossible to encompass all of 1940s village life in one book, but Olivier does capture at least her enthusiasm.  I’ll finish with one sentence, entirely honest, which demonstrates Olivier’s ethos – as well as the shifting sands she was up against:

And no one with a first-hand knowledge of the two could possibly prefer a screen decked with film-stars to a sty full of little pigs.

Look Back With Love – Dodie Smith

StuckinaBook All , , , 22 Comments

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. […]”

Right Ho, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

StuckinaBook All , , 37 Comments

I found this post in my drafts, but it was originally published in 2012 – I put it in drafts because it got a lot of spam comments, but hopefully it is back to normal now. I didn’t mean to email it out :D

My book group recently read Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) by P.G. Wodehouse.  I always like an excuse to read some Wodehouse.  A diet of nothing else would be like living on ice cream, but as an occasional snack, there is nothing better.  And it would be a mistake to think that, since PGW makes for such easy reading, that it is easy writing.  I think Wodehouse is one of the best wordsmiths (or should that be wordpsmiths?) I have read, and it is far more difficult to write a funny book than it is to write a poignant or melancholy book.

But perhaps there are people out there who have yet to read any Wodehouse?  Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the way he writes (since, let’s face it, there is minimal variety within his output.)  In the typical Wodehouse novel you will have comic misunderstandings, elaborate disguises, accidental engagements, wrathful aunts, and everybody ending up happy in the end.  This formula is more certain than ever in a Jeeves and Wooster novel, where rich, foolish young Wooster gets himself entangled in a comedy of errors, and wise butler Jeeves demurely extracts him from them.

But the sheer joy, the genius, of Wodehouse is his wordplay.  It’s the kind of thing which will either appeal or not, and is impossible to explain into funniness (which is true of all humour, probably) – Wodehouse uses language like an acrobat, dashing from hyperbole to understatement in a moment; finding the longest way to express the shortest phrase; finding the most unexpected metaphors and similes, and twisting them all together alongside absurd slang and abbreviation.  Who but Wodehouse could have written this line?

Girls are rummy.  Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m.
Or have conceived of this image, when serving an aunt with alcohol?

“Give me a drink, Bertie.”

“What sort?”

“Any sort, so long as it’s strong.”

Approach Bertram Wooster along these lines, and you catch him at his best.  St. Bernard dogs doing the square thing by Alpine travellers could not have bustled about more assiduously.

Like Richmal Crompton’s William Brown, Bertram ‘Bertie’ Wooster is nothing if not blessed with aunts – most of whom view him with an unwavering, and understandable, loathing and distrust.  But, like William Brown, Wooster is endlessly well-meaning.  This is what makes him such an attractive hero – more or less all the messes in which he finds himself are caused by trying to help others, often in the romantic department.  Although Wooster himself sees engagement as a misery beyond all others, he often attempts to help others reach this state (invariably finding himself engaged to the soppiest female present.)

But so far I have not been specific.  I should mention Right Ho, Jeeves.  Aunt Dahlia – the only aunt who can tolerate Wooster, although she demonstrates the sort of affection which is shown through terse telegrams and much use of the term ‘fathead’ – summons Wooster to her mansion in Market Snodsbury, Worcestershire.  (Not many novels feature Worcestershire, the county in which I was raised, so it’s nice to see it get a mention – and Pershore, no less, which was the nearest town to my house.  If you’re thinking the village name is ridiculous, I should mention that Upton Snodsbury is in the area, and presumably inspired Wodehouse.)  He is being summoned to distribute prizes at a school, a fate which Wooster would rather avoid, to put it mildly.  So he ropes in newt-fanatic Gussie Fink-Nottle, who had been looking for an excuse to go there.  For why, you ask?  Well, with the coincidental air which characterises so many of Wodehouse’s convoluted plots, the girl with whom Fink-Nottle is besotted happens to be staying there.  She, ‘the Bassett disaster’ as Wooster terms her, comes across pretty clearly in his first description of her:

I don’t want to wrong anybody, so I won’t go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

The romantic entanglements do not end there, of course.  Wooster’s cousin Angela and her beau Tuppy also have something of a rollercoaster relationship, just to add to festivities.  Then there is Wooster’s white jacket, which Jeeves is determined shall not be worn…

My favourite scene from this, and one which often appears in anthologies etc., is Gussie at the prize-giving.  All I’ll say is that he’s been drinking, for the first time in his life.  It’s supposed to stiffen the sinews and summon the blood, but it’s a little more chaotic than that.

This isn’t my favourite Wodehouse novel.  I think I prefer the stand-alone books to the series, perhaps because they’re all the more unexpected and strange.  But Wodehouse’s exceptionally brilliant use of language is on fine form in Right Ho, Jeeves and I certainly loved reading this.  There are many imitators, but nobody can equal Wodehouse for his strand of comic writing – and a dose of it, in between other books, is always, always welcome.