ACOB2024

How is A Century of Books going, then?

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We are somehow halfway through 2024 (which doesn’t SOUND real, but the calendar says it is) – and that means I’m halfway through my timeline for A Century of Books. For the uninitiated, that’s a year where I’m trying to read a book published every year between 1925-2024 throughout 2024. Not in order, naturally. As I read them, I’m adding reviews to my masterlist. It’s not quite up-to-date, but I’m not doing badly on the review front.

But how am I doing with dates? Where are the gaps? You’d think I should be at about 50 books – but it’s quite that easy, as the further through the year we get, the more likely I am to be doubling-up on my reading. For example, I read nine books in June and… none of them qualified for A Century of Books. They were all repeats. Eek.

Ok, here’s how I’m doing – spliced into decades:

1925-1929: 4/5

1930-1939: 7/10

1940-1949: 5/10

1950-1959: 6/10

1960-1969: 5/10

1970-1979: 3/10

1980-1989: 4/10

1990-1999: 3/10

2000-2009: 6/10

2010-2019: 9/10

2020-2024: 4/5

In total, that means I’ve read 56 of my 100 books. Bear in mind that includes quite a few from A Book A Day in May, so I had hoped to be a little far ahead – but the numbers above also reveal my tricky eras. As I might have predicted, I am rather behind in the 1970s-1990s, so might have to dwell in that period for a while.

Incidentally, I’ve read just under 100 books so far this year, so I really need to be more disciplined in the books I’m taking off the shelves… Can’t afford a repeat of my no-qualifying-reads of June.

But we don’t need to panic yet. I think it’s very doable. Wish me luck!

Everything’s Too Something! by Virginia Graham

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Towards the end of A Book A Day in May, I read Virginia Graham’s Everything’s Too Something! (1966) and said I wanted to write about it a longer length – because it is such a delightful book, and I didn’t want to short change it.

I first came across Graham because Persephone Books publish her poetry – and that led me to her absolutely delightful correspondence with Joyce Grenfell, published as Dear Joyce, Dear Ginnie. From there, I turned to Here’s How and Say Please, which are a spoof how-to guide and a spoof etiquette guide respectively. She has that Provincial Ladyesque humour, combining self-deprecation and wry wit, and I relish it.

Everything’s Too Something! is a collection of essays that were originally published in Homes and Garden. Do magazines like that still have humorous columns in them? Are they of such joyful quality? Across the 36 short essays in this book, Graham covers some topics that link to Homes and Garden – though, curiously, they include how awful it is to have to tour around somebody’s garden. But really she turns her attention to anything – anything, that is, that would fall into the attention of a middle-class, middle-aged woman in the 1960s.

This ‘review’ is likely to end up being simply a list of quotes that amused me, so let’s just go with that. I think she (again, like E.M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady) is very good at the comic list, getting exactly the right balance of relatable observation with the slightly outlandish. For instance, here on friends of friends whom you haven’t met…

The friends of friends are always a problem. Some can be ardently welcomed into the circle, but there are always a number who not only do not get loved but are more or less mythical. Joyce can go on talking about Enid for years; how well she cooks ravioli, how she has composed a trio for horn, bassoon and drums, how sweet her chilren are, how ill her mother is, what she said to the magistrate, where she gets her corsets and a host of other intimate details relating to her life. And yet one never gets round to meeting the woman. ‘You would love her I’m sure,’ says Joyce. ‘I’m sure I would,’ you reply half-heartedly.

I’m not sure Graham would have considered herself at the forefront of 1960s feminism, but she does her bit for exposing the foibles of the patriarchy – mostly by satire. There’s a funny section on not trusting male drivers, for example, and there’s this from an essay on men and women living together:

It is unfortunate how many women are idea-prone. A man is an impractical creature, and a woman often can’t help having an idea which would get him out of the mess he is in – and, incidentally, the mess she will have to clear up. She might, for instance, have an idea about getting out the step-ladder instead of balancing the telephone directory on a stool on a table.

She might have an idea that it is better to start a bonfire with small sticks rather than full-grown trees. She might even go so far as to have an idea that the nails she has been handing one by one to her husband for an hour, might to advantage be parked on some adjacent shelf, or even in his pocket.

Then there’s this little snapshot of courtship vs marriage:

I remember my husband, when he was my fiancé, licked down, with his little pink tongue, all the envelopes for our wedding invitations. When it came to our first post-marriage party he refused to lick down one because, as he confessed, it made him feel sick and always had. The only thing a wife can deduce from this is that love wanes on marriage, and that her dear one is not prepared to feel sick for her now the nuptial knot has been tied.

Graham was 56 when the book was published, and had got to a time of life when she could write this next excerpt, though from the vantage of 38 I feel much the same some days:

The nice thing about getting to my age is that there are so many nice things to complain about. Of course, the young complain too, but their grumbles are usually concerned with more cosmic things such as the Condition of Man. The Condition of the Roads doesn’t worry them at all.

Most non-fiction published nowadays is described as ‘important’, and there’s definitely space for books which challenge our worldview, shows us about lives we know nothing about, educate us and so forth. I’m not sure how often, today, books are published like Everything’s Too Something! – that is to say, trivial and diverting, but also exceptionally well written. Caitlin Moran is the closest that comes to my mind, though even her writing has become increasingly keen to be important. I love that there is also room on the shelf for someone like Graham – whose writing couldn’t possibly be considered important, but is absolutely wonderful nonetheless.

Tea or Books? #128: Do We Read Plays? and Fifty Sounds vs The Housekeeper and the Professor

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Polly Barton, Yoko Ogawa, and plays – welcome to episode 128!

In the first half of today’s ‘Tea or Books?’ episode, Rachel and I revisit a topic from years ago – plays! Specifically, do we think that plays should be read on the page, as well as seen on the stage. In the second half, we compare two books with a Japanese theme: Polly Barton’s Fifty Sounds, a non-fiction about moving to Japan and learning the language, and Yoko Ogawa’s novel The Housekeeper and the Professor, translated by Stephen Snyder.

You can get in touch with suggestions, comments, questions etc (please do!) at teaorbooks[at]gmail.com – we’d love to hear from you. Find us at Spotify, Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support the podcast at Patreon. If you’re able to, we’d really appreciate any reviews and ratings you can leave us.

The books and authors we mention in this episode are:

A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton
The Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill
Weather by Jenny Offill
Conventional Wisdoms by Jocelyn Brooke
The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi
One Good Turn by Dorothy Whipple
Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple
They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple
They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple
The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell
J.B. Priestley
Tennesse Williams
The Dover Road by A.A. Milne
The Second Mrs Tanqueray by Arthur Wing Pinero
Private Lives by Noel Coward
Hay Fever by Noel Coward
Still Life by Noel Coward
Dear Octopus by Dodie Smith
Caryl Churchill
Lungs by Duncan Macmillan
People, Places and Things by Duncan Macmillan
Infinite Life by Annie Baker
Paula Vogel
White Noise by Suzan-Lori Parks
Posh by Laura Wade
The Watsons by Laura Wade
Jane Austen
Miss Elizabeth Bennet by A.A. Milne
Mr Pim Passes By by A.A. Milne
A View From the Bridge by Arthur Miller
A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Cholmeley
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

Finishing off #ABookADayInMay

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Well, here we are! For the third? fourth? year in a row, I’ve finished a book a day in May. I’ll get onto some thoughts about this year’s experience in a moment, but let’s rattle through the final three books…

24 for 3

24 for 3 (2007) by Jennie Walker

This novella is strong competition for ‘review book that sat on my shelves for the longest period’, as Bloomsbury sent it to me in 2008. It was independently published by the author the year before, so I’m considering it a 2007 title. And the author is in fact poet Charles Boyle – ‘Jennie Walker’ is a pseudonym he has used only once, so far.

24 for 3 is from the perspective of a middle-aged woman and her musings over the course of a week – mostly about her stepson, her husband, and the man she is having an affair with (whom she refers to as ‘the loss-adjustor’). As the title suggests to those in know, this is also a novella about cricket. But her husband and the loss-adjustor are cricket fanatics, and some matches between England and India recur through the week.

What’s the equivalent of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for a middle-aged man who wants a woman to have an affair with him AND ask him the rules of cricket? It did feel a bit wish-fulfilment at times, and when you know the author is a man, perhaps even less convincing as a real person.

Having said that, it is a rather beautifully written novella – a lovely observant voice, calmly exposing all sorts of truths about human nature. I marked out one paragraph, which is really more about the stepson.

Then his stepmother apologises for speaking to him the way she did and this is sad, almost as sad as the way his parents spend years of their lives fussing about his table manners or whether he’s cleaned his teeth or his toenails need cutting or he’s getting enough vitamin A or B or Q and then suddenly they stop, they ignore him completely, as if the whole family thing has just been a game to pass the time, like throwing balled-up socks. Although after they’ve dropped out oft he game they still insist, when they bother to notice that he’s still around, that the rules apply to him, and that his vitamn levels are the most important things in his life.

I did find the cricket sections more tiresome, as I find pretty much anything about sport in any context. But otherwise it was a really good little book, and it’s a shame there aren’t any more novellas under Walker’s name. Better late than never?

Everything’s Too Something! (1966) by Virginia Graham

This is a collection of short humorous essays collected from Homes and Garden, of all places. I love Graham’s writing, and I want to review this collection properly – rather than in a speedy A Book A Day in May fashion – so watch this space. She deserves to be better known, and I think she might have been if she’d written this sort of thing thirty years earlier. To tide you over, here’s a paragraph that gives a sense of her tone (and probably, on reflection, couldn’t have been written in the 1930s):

Individualists naturally ahve this tendency to think that laws are not made for them, but in a crowded world, and certainly in this sardine tin of an island, it is difificult to be illegal without inconveniencing somebody else. Contemporary youth, of course, asserts its freedom from conventionality by hitting people over the head with milk bottles, and this causes no little inconvenience too; but even the nonconformists who do not go as far as breaking the law often break the code of good manners by which we painstakingly live with each other.

The Thirteenth Tale (2006) by Diane Setterfield

Everybody was reading this when I started blogging and look, only the best part of 20 years later, I’ve listened to the audiobook!

The premise is fun. Vida Winter is the most famous writer in the UK and famously secretive about her life. Whenever she’s been asked about her history, she’s made up one after another fanciful tales. It’s become part of her lore. But, out of the blue, she writes to Margaret Lea requesting – well, more or less demanding – that Margaret write her biography. So off Margaret goes to Vida Winter’s mansion, kept in residence and regularly taken into Vida’s past with long accounts of her childhood, told by Setterfield as a separate narrative. Margaret is your classic heroine of any book like this: bookishly obsessed with the Brontes, feisty when needed, introspective and clever.

The title of the book, incidentally, comes from a collection of Vida Winter’s stories called Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, which only has 12 stories in it. What happened to the thirteenth tale?

I enjoyed the book, and Setterfield is definitely an excellent and involving storyteller. I’m always a bit dubious of narratives-within-narratives but it captivated me more than I thought it would. It wasn’t always immediately obvious (in the audiobook) whether we were in present-day with Margaret as ‘I’ or in the distant past with Vida as ‘I’. Perhaps it is marked out more obviously in the print edition?

I think the narrative-within-narrative device was stretched a bit far when it turns into somebody’s rediscovered diary late in the book, but perhaps Setterfield was harkening to her gothic antecedents. Anyway, it was a fun and diverting novel. I wouldn’t necessarily race to read another by her, but I’m glad I finally read The Thirteenth Tale.

A couple more #ABookADayInMay books (Sylvia Townsend Warner + Marjorie Stewart)

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We’re nearly there, everyone! The end is in sight, and it looks HOPEFUL that I’m going to make it. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been harder this year for various reasons – but we can save those thoughts for another day. Today, let’s look quickly at my choices for Day 27 and Day 28.

Image borrowed from Scott’s excellent review

A Garland of Straw (1943) by Sylvia Townsend Warner

I bought most of Warner’s short story collections in one fell swoop in 2011, and since then I’ve been rationing myself – and I have hardly any left. This collection was published in 1943 and most of the stories are war-centred, and chiefly set in the UK. Because they were published in the New Yorker rather than at home, she doesn’t assume too much knowledge about the home front in England – which means they can be accessed easily by the 21st-century reader.

Some of the best stories in here are very much wartime experiences. I loved ‘From Above’, about a woman evacuating her home because a time-bomb has been discovered nearby. ‘Noah’s Ark’ – about child evacuees in the countryside, and their disdain for rural animals in comparison to the city zoo – is brilliant on the spitefulness that can lie deep in adults. There is a sly horror in a story about a woman returning to her ancestral home, which was requisitioned for soldiers to be stationed there, and finding it so badly damaged that people think it’s been bombed. She’s excellent on the bland, friendly truisms that cannot forge any emotional comfort in a crisis, however kindly meant. Another strong story, very Warner, is on a political firebrand who cannot stop himself getting Jane Austen novels out of the library.

At their best, the stories have Warner’s inimicable airy sharpness. She can so incisive about people without any malice – a searing description with the objectivity of a photographer and the subjectivity of a gossip. This isn’t quite an example of that, but it is a very Warner opening (to ‘Out of My Happy past’):

When I was young there were two thigns that I lived for. One was music and the other was advice. In the matter of music I was fairly eclectic; I liked listening to it, performing it, transcribing it, and composing it. In the matter of advice my tastes were purer; I only liked giving it and, to itnerest me, it had to be uncontaminatedly my own.

The stories in A Garland of Straw seem shorter than most of her work (though I’d have to flick through some others to check that) – and it is a little to their detriment. Some short story writers really thrive on the incredibly brief story (Marjorie Barnard was great at that), while others make full use of 40-50 pages (Alice Munro, anyone). I think Warner is best at about 20-25 pages, and most of the stories in A Garland of Straw are under 10 pages. It doesn’t quite give her enough room to breathe, in some cases. She doesn’t really do stories that rely on shock or the striking moment. Rather, her stories are representative pieces of lives.

Some of the stories in A Gardland of Straw are a bit forgettable, and others don’t have time to flourish to their potential. And then there are some that are brilliant. It’s a bit of a mixed bag, and not a collection which shows her at her absolute best – for that, I’d recommend Swan on a Autumn River (published in the US as A Stranger With A Bag). But middling Warner short stories are still a good read, and there’s a lot to admire.

I Will Hold My House (1950) by Marjorie Stewart

I Will Hold My House is one of those novels that could be brilliant if it had been rather less ambitious. Or maybe the issue is with my memory. There are just SO many characters that it’s impossible to keep track of them all.

The novel is about a series of houses along the coast in Sussex, each with occupants facing their own crises and triumphs and regrets and hopes. I counted 26 major characters. We go in and out of the houses for the first chapter or two, and I made copious notes on the inside cover of what the houses were called, who lived in them, which was next to which. Often we learn these things in several stages…

There are so many that, each time Stewart cycles through them, they barely have time to do more than express a single motion before the whole whirl starts again. Gradually, some stood out more than others – but I can’t say I particularly cared about any of them. The writing was good enough – a better-than-average domestic novel, but without any bite or sharpness to set it apart. I enjoyed it enough to finish it, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill #ABookADayInMay Day 26

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Dept. of Speculation: Jenny Offill (Best of Granta)

I can’t remember who first recommended Dept. of Speculation (2014) to me, but it was on one of the posts where I talked about loving books told in fragments – specifically Kate Briggs’ This Little Art, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House and Joan Givner’s Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer. Those are all non-fiction – until I read Offill’s novel, I hadn’t tried anybody doing anything like that for fiction.

Dept. of Speculation is told in hundreds of fragment paragraphs – most over a few lines, though the longest are about a page and the shortest are one or two words. Together, they tell the story of a relationship, from dating to marriage to a lost pregnancy to a child to an affair. I don’t know if there is any autobiography in there – the unnamed female narrator of the fragments is a writing teacher who has published one novel and struggles to write the second. Offill was certainly all those things, though I couldn’t speak to her relationship.

Something I love about this splintered approach to writing is that there are no restrictions on tonal consistency. You might dive suddenly into the most heart-piercing moment of a relationship breakdown, or the joyful surprises of motherhood, or the painful fears of the same. And, next to this emotional peak, Offill will write something entirely objective – about the Voyager space mission, for instance (it is relevant in context), or – well, this is the opening fragment/vignette/call-it-what-you-will:

Antelopes have 10x vision, you said. It was the beginning or close to it. That means that on a clear night they can see the rings of Saturn.

This approach builds up a composite picture of the relationship that a more traditional, linear novel could do, but it will feel less fresh and perhaps a bit laboured. I don’t think you could get away with the same sharp philosophy or character insight that Offill can use – for instance, this next fragment works because of the format of the book. I think it would feel awkward in a less formally innovative novel:

There is such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

I wasn’t sure that a novel in vignettes could sustain the level of character development one would hope for – particularly over the course of several years. But somehow Offill manages to portray the shifting state of the marriage, and the similarly evolving relationship of mother and daughter. You can convey so much in snapshots.

Stop writing I love you, said the note my daughter wrote over the one I had left in her lunchbox. For a long time, she had asked for a note like that every day, but now a week after turning six, she puts a stop to it. I feel odd, strangely light-headed when I read the note. It is a feeling from a long time ago, the feeling of someone breaking up with me suddenly. My husband kisses me. “Don’t worry, love. Really, it’s nothing.”

There is so much nuance in the novel. It’s not a case of marriage-collapsed-by-adultery. There is a complex response to it, with some of the complexity being what falls between the vignettes. The absence of every detail doesn’t diminish the novel. Somehow it elevates it.

I was so impressed by Dept. of Speculation (incidentally, the curious title refers to the faux ‘return address’ both the man and the woman would put on the back of letters). I think it’ll stay in my mind for a long time, and I’ll doubtless re-read. If you have any other recommendations of fiction or non-fiction told in vignettes, or fragments of paragraphs, I’d love to hear them.

A round up of audiobooks (#ABookADayInMay, sort of)

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Today’s book was finishing off an audiobook that I don’t have masses to say about, so I thought I’d use it as an excuse to round up a whole bunch of audiobooks I’ve listened to this year – so I can tick them off on my A Century of Books list. Buckle up and discover the variety of books I listen to on audio!

Superforecasting (2015) by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
A non-fiction about people who are particularly adept at forecasting the future – not in terms of psychic powers, but through teamwork, second guessing themselves, a deep understanding of logic and a good dose of humility. It was an interesting listen, though not quite what I thought it would be. Some of it was how-to, and I have no aspirations to being a superforecaster. But I enjoyed hearing about the people who are (without it being a book I’d necessarily rush to recommend to people).

Excellent Women (1952) by Barbara Pym
This was a re-read for book club, and (as recently discussed) I have really leant into re-reading by audiobook. It was 20 years since I read Excellent Women and I didn’t remember anything about it except that I was disappointed it was set in London. This time around, forewarned that it wasn’t in a village, I could concentrate no how much I enjoyed the humour of this story: about a single woman called Mildred, her travails trying to get to know her boisterously feuding neighbours, her various almost-romances with clergy, and the weight of expectations on her shoulders as one of society’s ‘excellent women’.

Passing (1929) by Nella Larsen
This was an absolutely excellent book about Black women ‘passing’ as white, and the consequences of it, that I must write about properly one day.

Life With Picasso (1964) by Francoise Gilet
An absolutely fascinating portrait of life not-quite-married to a total narcissist. It sounds like living with and loving Picasso was absolutely exhausting, and it’s no wonder he tried to get the book thrown out before publication. My one qualm with the book is that Gilet recounts extremely detailed conversations at enormous length, many years after they happened. Whoever did the introduction to the book tries to claim that Gilet often told her these conversations over the years in exactly the same words, but methinks the lady doth protest too much. (The book is also rather too long – the nuances of life among artists in mid-century Europe is my favourite, perhaps, but it wouldn’t be the same sort of book if it weren’t dominated by Picasso and his selfishness.)

From Bauhas to Our House (1981) by Tom Wolfe
A short non-fiction, basically railing against modern architecture – and, along the way, giving a potted history of architecture in America. It was less personality-driven and funny than I’d imagined, and more informative (though I don’t think I remembered many of those details.)

True Stories (1996) by Helen Garner
My journey into Helen Garner’s non-fiction continues apace, and I enjoyed this collection of essays from across Garner’s career. The 1991 label is a bit misleading, because they come from several decades of career. It’s a real mix, and I particularly appreciated the extended section on Garner’s siblings and their dynamics as adults (‘If there are five of you, you form a complex network of shifting alliances’) – the other books I’ve read by her are less revealing about her own life.

50 Great Myths Of Popular Psychology (2009) by Scott Lilienfeld et al
What a rich book! Lilienfeld (and a bunch of other authors) go through 50 myths of popular psychology – neatly explaining why all of them are false, and why a lot of what is passed down in popular consciousness or stereotype isn’t accurate. Some are widely known not to be true (e.g. we only use 10% of our brain), some aren’t myths I’d ever heard (e.g. people with dyslexia see words back-to-front), while some were truly revelatory to me (there ISN’T safety in numbers). Each chapter ends with a list of other mythbusting dealt with quickly, so there’s actually far more than 50 in here. I listened for free on Audible Plus Catalogue, but you can also get the ebook free from Lilienfeld’s website. My one critique of his reasoning is how often ‘people widely believed this’ is evdienced by ‘it appears in films’. I don’t think people believe in time travel, but that appears in films…

There we go! I can fill up some gaps on A Century of Books, and hopefully have given you some possible reading options.

A couple of #ABookADayInMay disappointments

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Inevitably, not every book in A Book A Day in May is going to be a success. The past couple of days have both been novellas that are gonna go straight to a charity shop (unless someone from the UK would like me to post to you – in which case, let me know). (You might not want to when you’ve read the reviews.)

The Cheval Glass (1973) by Ursula Bloom

When I read Tea Is So Intoxicating by Mary Essex – one of Bloom’s pseudonyms, and now in the British Library Women Writers series – I was amazed that a book so enjoyable and well-crafted could be written by an author of 500+ novels. How could one maintain that level of quantity AND quality? Well, I’ve long suspected that she saved her best work for the ‘Mary Essex’ name – and The Cheval Glass suggests that might be the case. It’s the first fiction I’ve read under her own name, and it’s pretty bad.

Pearl is a young girl living in a family’s ancestral home. Her mother Mary was taken very ill during childbirth and becomes an invalid, having to stay in bed most of the time – so Pearl entertains herself by rambling around the large house and its attics, inventing friends to play with. More on that later.

While Mary is ill, her husband (James) falls in love with Hilary, an artist who has rented a house in the village. This happens entirely off the page. We no sooner encounter her than this love is taken as read. Curiously (in one of several signs of terrible editing), we hear about the meeting twice. We also hear, twice, about Mary getting terminal cancer. Quite how that relates to difficult childbirth, I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s the sort of novel where people decide to Honourably Do The Right Thing and then tell each other about it thoroughly unnatural dialogue. Here’s James, speaking to Hilary…

In a low voice he said, “I could never part with you, Hilary. This love has come to pass and is for ever. When the hour comes and she goes,” he choked a trigle uneasily, for it hurt him, “when the hour is here, we will marry after a reasonable waiting period, and the neighbourhood will think that we became so accustomed to each other during her illness that this automatically ensued. They will accept it as being that.”

Alongside all of this is the significance of the cheval glass. It has been in the family for generations – and, in it, Pearl starts to see one of her ancestors from generations ago. Here she is, telling Hilary about it:

“There is a lady here,” she whispered, complacemently and calmly. “Another lady,” she said, as though this was merely a piece of information which she accepted as being true. No more.

“Another lady?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“In the glass,” said the child, and stared up at her with a curious look in her eyes. She went on more slowly. “It is so very difficult to tell anybody who is grown-up, but she lives here. She does not always come when I want her. But most times. She is here.”

It’s a promising premise, but Bloom does very little about it. Everybody more or less immediately accepts that the mirror is a portal to the past, and ‘the lady’ (always in inverted commas) doesn’t seem to have anything more pressing to pass on than vague relationship advice to Hilary. Poor Pearl seems to disappear from the novel after the first half, having been seemingly its heroine, and The Cheval Glass becomes about Hilary’s rather tedious love triangle/square.

It’s a very weak novel, and shows clear signs of having been written at speed without any editing. Every sentence is clunky, and I found it rather a chore to get through. From now on, I think I’ll stick to Bloom when she appears as Mary Essex. Such a shame, since the cover is so striking.

The Grasshoppers Come (1931) by David Garnett

This one isn’t bad so much as it is not my taste. From the title, I thought it would be about nature – and that is how things start, with a three-page description of the heat and the ‘stridulations’ of grasshoppers:

As each day of the early summer passed, the sun grew hotter, the fine windless weather more settled, and the stridulation noisier, more incessant, and the little whirlpools, which seemed to catch up the flying insects over the reeds, larger and more powerful, holding them up longer in flight.

But then it becomes clear that it’s other flying things that are going to take centre stage – for this is also an aerodrome. Garnett cleverly describes the planes in similar manner:

Round and round they flew, some higher up wandering off a little way over the surrounding country, others lower down, and these lower machines were continually shutting off their engines and gliding almost silently in to land, dropping their tails as they settled down and bounced upon the earth, when, after a short run, they stopped until suddenly the engine was opened up again, and they would roar across the grass into the eye of the wind and fly away.

From here, it becomes a novella about life at an air base and descriptions of flying, with a variety of pilots I struggled to tell apart except one of them is a woman (in an era where all female pilots seemed to be celebrities). I suppose, in 1931, reading about flying was quite thrilling. I found it all a little tepid.

The Grasshoppers Come then gets into adventure mode, I think, with all manner of challenges and obstacles to the flying. Towards the end someone is stranded after a crash and has to survive of the self-same grasshoppers of the title, and I found this section the most compelling – perhaps because it didn’t rely on flying as inherently interesting.

So, there we go. Two more novellas off the shelf and off to a charity shop!

The Chip and the Block by E.M. Delafield – #ABookADayInMay Day 22

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E.M. Delafield was a very prolific novelist, and even though I’ve been reading her steadily for more than 20 years, there is still a handful of her books I’ve not read. I am pretty sure I’ve owned The Chip and the Block (1925) for the best part of those 20 years, and I finally got it down from my special Delafield shelf yesterday – and it’s lovely to spend more time in her company. (I will note that she needlessly uses the n-word in the first line, which was not an auspicious beginning, and I’m glad didn’t continue beyond that.)

If you’ve only read The Diary of a Provincial Lady and its sequels, you might think of E.M. Delafield primarily as a comic writer. And, yes, she is brilliant at comedy – often weaving dry humour into most of her more serious novels. I think The Chip and the Block is one of the least overtly funny – though there is dark humour, and the comedy that comes from somebody being totally lacking in self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge (and, yes, its lack) is the dominant theme in E.M. Delafield’s oeuvre, taken as a whole. In The Chip and the Block, it is seen chiefly in Charles Ellery, also known as Chas. He is the patriarch of a small family, with his tired, good wife Mary and his three children – Paul, Jeannie, and Victor. As the novel opens, the children are young – Victor, the youngest, is only recently engaging in conversations. The whole family has been recovering from influenza, and the most affected are Victor and Charles. Victor has been seriously ill. Charles has declared himself so. This telling scene happens during the recuperation period:

“Come along!” Father shouted gaily, catching Jeannie by the hand.

“You’re forgetting your stick, Father,” said Victor’s baby voice.

He pointed to the stick that had fallen unnoticed to the ground.

Father looked at Victor, and Victor looked back at his father. Paul could not help noticing them.

Although he was so unobservant about things and places, he always noticed people, and he often felt curious certainties as to what they were thinking and feeling.

This time he did not feel any certainties at all, but only a little uneasiness that he could not possibly have explained even to himself.

It is emblematic of many personalities. Paul is also watching, bewildering by the world even while he can perceive things that others miss. He is often close to tears, and fears his father’s ready wrath – which irritates him even more. Jeannie is content, happy to dismiss any sad feelings, and amiably unintelligent. And Victor? If Charles is the block, he is the chip. He sees through his father’s masquerades – while also being given to many of the same foibles as he grows older.

Delafield’s portrait of Charles is so frustratingly accurate. We all know people who have at least some echo of his personality. Charles is a fairly unsuccessful writer, totally given to self-mythologising. He is ruthlessly selfish but presents himself as angelically selfless, always berating his children for not considering anybody except themselves. He tells stories of finding Beethoven so beautiful as a four-year-old that he bursts into tears of artistic joy (his sharp elderly mother says he was seven years old, and cried because he’d eaten too many plums). He claims to have slaved night and day to write books while the children played and cried around his feet – while they distinctly remember being kept far from his study, and shouted out if they made any noise.

Charles doesn’t develop or grow as a character, it is fair to say, but Delafield has drawn him so well that it doesn’t matter. His arguments and self-presentation are so eloquently twisted that it is hard to disagree with him – and he certainly wouldn’t brook any contradiction, given his self-proclaimed artistic and sensitive temperament. But he is a nightmare to be near, poisoning the family around him.

The novel progresses until the children are grown up, and the second half of the novel looks more at the legacies of this upbringing – including careers, romances, and the inescapable expectations of their father. Again, they develop entirely in line with the personalities they showed as infants. Is that true? Perhaps, though I imagine there is more scope in reality for people to be distinct from their past selves. I hope I’m not very like my eight-year-old self, though maybe that is wishful thinking.

Anyway, I think this is a strong, convincing and engaging contribution to E.M. Delafield’s wide output. I did miss the wit that characterises most of her books, and she clearly wanted to do something more sombre and serious. On its own merits, it’s very good indeed.

A very short novella by Vita Sackville-West #ABookADayInMay no.21

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I read Vita Sackville-West’s The Death of Noble Godavary back in 2019, as part of another book-a-day project, but it’s taken me another five years to read the second novella in the slim volume. It’s not mentioned on the cover, but there is a 60-page novella in there too, called Gottfried Künstler. I’m pretty sure it’s a novella rather than a long short story, but who’s counting. (Well, me, I suppose.)

The story is slightly inexplicably set in Germany in 1523, though the dialogue and most of the details feel a lot more 20th-century than 16th. It is the depths of winter and opening scene is the whole town gathered to skate on the frozen river. Everybody is there, from every class and community. Among them is our hero, Gottfried. As with everything in this beautifully written novella, Sackville-West describes his skating in a lovely way:

Besides – for he was fastidious and proud – he liked the idea of cutting his patterns as it were in space; if he left a mark at all, it would soon be obliterated; he liked doing something very difficult, which no eye would observe or be able to follow, and which he himself would not be able exactly to repeat. Indeed, one of the reasons why he loved the ice was because it so soon dissolved and was lost without trace into the commonwealth of waters; so fine, so enchanted, so steely, so perfect in itself, when it was there, it was yet so brief; in such a way, he thought, he would wish the best of himself to crystallise once into existence and then be lost and forgotten.

The novella was published in 1932 but there is a note saying it was written in 1929 – I wondered if Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf compared notes on their skating scenes, since there is such memorable skating in 1929’s Orlando.

Off he glides, but everything changes when he falls and hits his head. The local doctor assists, but doesn’t take him home – since he worries his wife would object, and he is scared of her disapproval (an enjoyable dose of character comedy in these side figures). Physically, he is not too bad – but he has lost his memory completely. He has absolutely no idea who he is.

The only person who will help him in Anna. She lives alone, always seen hooded, and rumours abound that she is a witch. The townspeople seem content to gossip about and ostracise her, rather than anything more concrete, and nobody puts up much of a fuss when she invites Gottfried to stay with her. At which point, Sackville-West breaks the fourth wall in a way I appreciated.

The sophisticated reader of novels will long before now have completed this story according to lending library experience, by assuming either that (a) Gottfried Künstler fell in love with Anna Rothe, (b) that Anna Rothe fell in love with Gottfried Künstler, (c) that – most promising of all – Gottfried Künstler and Anna Rothe fell in love with one another. A great disappointment is in store for the sophisticated reader of novels: none of these three things happened.

As she adds, again rather beautifully, ‘Love is not the only thing in the world, though novelists appear to believe so; and fortunately there are other ways of resolving the confusion of life into some sort of synthesis.’ For much of the novella, Sackville-West depicts and celebrates the chaste, sweet, naive friendship that springs up between the two. We don’t know all that much about Gottfried before his accident, but he has clearly transformed – into a man with a simple, fervent love of the natural world and the small adventures of life. They make a snowman together, for goodness’ sake.

There is almost no dialogue for most of Gottfried Künstler, which I think helps us remain at a bit of a distance – watching the two get to know each other and find great joy in that. Usually I love dialogue in a story, but in this novella its absence helped prevent it becoming cloying or fey. It felt in many ways like a fable.

And, like a fable, there is a darker twist in the tale – which I shan’t spoil. It felt fitting, and was done very well, but it was appropriately sad too.

More or less every time I write about Sackville-West, I mention that we do her a disservice when we only think of her in relation to Woolf. She is an exceptionally good writer, and this little-known example of her work is another instance of that writing. It might, in fact, be the purest distillation of it that I’ve read.