Gallico

Earlier in the month I read The Lonely by Paul Gallico, and today I read the other half of the book I have it in – Ludmilla, originally published in 1955. It was printed as a separate book initially, but it is only about 50 pages – including drawings by Reisie Lonette.

For those who’ve read Gallico’s Small Miracle, it is quite similar. Set in Liechtenstein, it’s about a festival where cows are paraded with ribbons etc, and the cow at the front is the most celebrated one of the year. The Weakling cow covets the prized position, though barely produces any milk and is lean and unimpressive. But a prayer to St Ludmilla might just sort things out…

You who believe that animals are dumb and incapable of reason or emotions similar to those experience by humans will of course continue to do so. I ask you only to think of the yearning and heartache that is the lot of the poor and not-so-favoured woman, as she stares through the glass of the shop window at a gay Easter hat, a particularly fetching frock, the sheerest of stockings, or a pair of shoes with little bows that seem to dance all by themselves; lovable articles, desirable articles, magic articles out of her reach since she can neither buy them, nor earn them as a gift, yet things that she knows would transform her in a moment from someone drab and unnoticed, into a sparkling queen, a ravishing beauty that would draw all eyes to her. Or, if not all eyes, then at least a few, and if not a few, then just one pair of eyes, and in the end, the only pair that mattered. Are you a book editor? Find your job on Jooble.

Ludmilla is very slight, but has its charm. The cow is rather a lovely character. It is a curious choice to pair it with The Lonely, because they have nothing in common (except for Gallico’s not-entirely-enlightened perspective on the role and motivations of women). Gallico can be fey or dark or both, and this one couldn’t be feyer if it tried. Fun, if minor.

I bought a book ten years ago that I thought was called Ludmilla and the Lonely – turns out it is two novellas, the second and longer of which is called The Lonely. That’s what I read today – a rather lovely little wartime story, published shortly after the war in 1947. I say lovely. It starts out not so much, but things definitely improve.

Lieutenant Jerry Wright is an American stationed in England on an airbase. He is young, quite naive, a little inclined to be carried away emotionally – but popular with the men and keen to be liked by them. Back home he has doting parents and a fiancée, Catherine, whom he has known since they were both very young children. His whole life is mapped out for him, and he has never really questioned it.

Jerry has a fortnight’s leave lined up, and a fellow airman boisterously suggests that he might take a woman away for a week of no-strings passion. In his normal life, this isn’t something he’d countenance. But a mix of being in England (!) and being at war begin to make it seem possible. And he decides to ask Patches – real name Patrice – a ‘plain girl’ in the WAAF. She isn’t one of the go-getters that others are taking away for their dirty weeks. She is quiet, sweet and – unknown to him – in love with Jerry.

Now that he was with her again he was aware that there was about her an aura of innocence that made impossible the thoughts he had had of her the night before. For if she was a little nobody, a girl he had met casually through the war, who had helped him to pass the time, yet she was also a person with dignity and some unfathomed inner life of her own, which stood as a barrier between him and the use he wished to make of her.

I didn’t love Gallico’s madonna-or-whore approach to women at the beginning of the novella, though it’s never clear how much is the foolish perspective of Jerry and how much is the author. Certainly, as the story continues, it becomes much more nuanced. Not least because some of the story is told from Patches’ point of view, albeit in the third person.

They do go away together. Gallico becomes suddenly coy about actually mentioning sex, but clearly their relationship has advanced. And, yes, the ending of this story is never in doubt. All the ingredients are there that are still the ingredients of every trashy Netflix romcom, and what fun they are to watch/read.

The exact path to get to the end isn’t entirely predictable, and possibly not entirely plausible, but it was all very entertaining. And, you know what, even quite moving. I don’t often get swayed by a love story on the page, but in not many pages, Gallico has created two characters I really grew to care about. I was cheering them on.

There are only four Mrs Harris books, but I’ve been gradually working my way through the series since 2012. Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow – known as Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Moscow in the US – is the final one of these, published in 1974, an impressive sixteen years after the first in the series.

Mrs Harris is a London char lady whose exploits started (in Flowers for Mrs Harris, or Mrs ‘Arris Goes to Paris, or indeed Mrs Harris Goes to Paris) with saving up money to buy a Dior dress in France. After that, she went to America and became an MP (in separate books, naturally). And, finally, she’s off to Moscow to reunite one of her employers with his long-lost Russian love. That’s when things start to get ridiculous.

By a series of miscommunications, mistaken identities, and misunderstandings of what ‘char lady’ could possibly mean, Mrs Harris and her friend Violet Butterfield (the wonderful Vi, who wants none of the adventures that Mrs H seems to thrive on) are believed to be spies by the KGB and believed to be aristocracy by others high up in Russia. What they actually are is two lucky women who won some sort of raffle.

I was feeling in the mood for something silly and light, and Gallico’s series is entirely reliable for that. If you liked the others, you’ll certainly like this – if you can face reading about Russian collusion in the current environment (it did feel oddly topical). I continue to be fascinated by the extraordinary range that Gallico has in his writing, from dark to frothy, poignant to funny, and (indeed) very good to not at all good. This one sits in the thoroughly-enjoyable category – completely ridiculous, but also entirely fitted the mood I was in when I picked it up.

I don’t think I’ve read any author whose work is as disparate as Paul Gallico (and I probably start all my reviews of his books by saying that.)  I started with the novel I still consider his best, of the ones I’ve read: the dark fairy-tale Love of Seven Dolls.  Then there is the whimsical (Jennie), the amusing and eccentric (the Mrs. Harris series), the adventure story (although I’ve not read it, The Poseidon Adventure surely falls into this category.)

I started The Foolish Immortals (1953) hoping that it would be in one category, it shifted into another, and then it revealed a whole new facet of Gallico’s writing arsenal.  Confused?  I’ll try to explain…

The concept of The Foolish Immortals immediately appealed to me, because it sounded like the sort of topic which could easily be given the Love of Seven Dolls treatment, revolving (as it did) around manipulation, wilful delusion, and a touch of distorted fairy-tale – the last of which seems to be the ingredient which appears, in some form or other, in all the Gallico novels I’ve read.

Hannah Bascombe is rich, old, American heiress, who has successfully invested the money her business man father left her to make herself one of the richest people in the world.  There is only one aspect of her life over which she does not have ultimate control – and that is its span.  She has, she notes, reached her three-score-and-ten, and cannot have many decades left to live.  And yet… and yet, she hopes that money and power might be able to secure her immortality.

Enter, stage-left, Joe Sears.  He is a poor man and a chancer, clever and manipulative, and sees an opportunity.  Having enlisted the dubious help of a young (but visually ageless) ex-soldier called Ben-Isaac (in case Gallico didn’t signpost it well enough, he’s Jewish), Sears manages to get an appointment with Hannah Bascombe.  To do so, he has to get past her beautiful, utterly dependent niece Clary – but, having manoeuvred his way to Hannah, he recognises her vulnerability, and thinks that it could be a good way to make himself some money…

“What if you were able to duplicate their years?  Supposing you were able to outwit the Philistines waiting to trample your vineyards by outliving them, like Mahlalaleel, Cainan, Jared and Enoch, generation after generation down through the centuries until no living man would remember when you were born and not even unborn generations of the future could hope to be alive when you died?”
He offers Hannah this possibility, based on the ages to which people are described as living in the Old Testament (often many centuries) – suggesting that he knows where they can find a food which will give Hannah the same longevity.  And it’s in Israel.

A bit of persuasion later, and they’re off.  Nobody really trusts anybody else on this venture, and everybody is out for themselves.  Things grow even trickier to decipher (for the reader too) when they stumble across a man purported to be Ben-Isaac’s missing, much-beloved uncle – a much-lauded academic who is, it turns out, working on the land.  Sears is, naturally, suspicious of this stranger, particularly when he takes over and Hannah appoints him the leader of their venture.  Who is scamming whom?

And this is where Gallico’s other genres come into play.  There is a sizeable amount of what I admired in Love of Seven Dolls, but Sears is never quite as credible a villain as Monsieur Nicholas – in neither a fairytale nor a realistic way – simply because Sears is quite an inconsistent character.  Which matches the change in genres – in Israel, things turn rather ‘adventure novel’ for a while, as they caught up in a shoot-out.  I know this sort of thing is supposed to be very exciting, but I find it unutterably tedious, and ended up skipping most of that section.

So we come onto the genre I’d yet to encounter in Gallico’s novels – the spiritual or religious theme.  As you might know, I am a Christian, but I don’t often read novels which feature faith – and, I have to say, I was a bit nervous to see how skilfully Gallico would handle it.  And, I’ve got to say, I was quite impressed – both the Jewish and Christian characters experience direct or indirect encounters with God while travelling through Israel, and these sections were moving (although, it must be conceded, entirely out of kilter with the rest of the novel.)

There are a few more twists and turns, a few more rugs pulled from under feet, and The Foolish Immortals concludes.  It is a very interesting, but maddeningly inconsistent novel.  Not inconsistent in quality (perhaps), but in style and tone.  It’s as though Gallico wanted to write a novel which took place in Israel, and couldn’t decide whether it should be about faith, boyish adventure, or unsettling manipulation – and so threw all of them in together.

Yet again, this is a book I’m criticising for not being written in the way I’d hoped it would be – but with, I think, greater justification than with yesterday’s post on Consider the Years, because in the case of The Foolish Immortals, it started off in the way I’d expected.  With this ingenious idea, Gallico could have written one of my favourite novels.  As it turns out, he’s written a good book, which I find quite intriguing, a little bewildering, and not insignificantly disappointing.

(image source)

I’ve finished so few books lately, and have been so dissatisfied with the number of reviews I’ve been able to post, that I have turned to the small pile of books I finished months and months ago, but never quite got around to reviewing.  So I’m looking back over the hazy mists of time, trying to remember not only what I thought about a book, but what on earth happened in it.

Lucky for me, Paul Gallico’s 1960 novel Mrs. Harris Goes to New York has a little synopsis right there in the title.  The sequel to his charming novel Flowers For Mrs. Harris (published in America as Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris, and republished together recently by Bloomsbury, with its aspirate in place), Mrs. Harris Goes to New York does, indeed, see Mrs. Harris travel off to see the Empire State.  This time, though, it’s not with a dress in mind, though – she and her friend Violet Butterfield (familiarly Vi) are off to reunite a mistreated adopted boy with his long-lost American father.

In case you haven’t encountered Mrs. Harris before, she is a no-nonsense, salt-of-the-earth charlady, who (in the first book) unexpectedly develops an all-abiding passion to own a Christian Dior dress like the one she has seen in the wardrobe of one of the women for whom she works.  Mrs. Harris is a wonderful creation – speaking her mind, with its curious mixture of straight-talking and dewy-eyed romance.  Romance for adventure, that is, not for menfolk – Mr. Harris is good and buried before the series begins. 

I mentioned in the ‘strange things that happened in books I read this year’ section of my review of 2012 that I’d read one book where somebody went door-to-door searching for people called Mr. Black (that was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and one where somebody went door-to-door searching for people called Mr. Brown.  That was Mrs. Harris Goes to New York – since she did not know exactly who might Henry Brown’s father, she needed to go and visit every Mr. Brown in New York…

Few native New Yorkers ever penetrated so deeply into their city as did Mrs. Harris, who ranged from the homes of the wealthy on the broad avenues neighbouring Central Park, where there was light and air and indefinable smell of the rich, to the crooked down-town streets and the slums of the Bowery and Lower East Side.
It’s a fun conceit for a novel – I wonder if Jonathan Saffron Foer was deliberately mimicking it? – and Mrs. Harris is an excellent character to use repeatedly in first-encounters – it shows how Cockney and brazen she can be, as well as the endlessly charming effect she has on everybody she meets.

Paul Gallico’s novels often hover on the edge of fairy-tale.  The first one I read, which remains easily my favourite (and is on my 50 Books list over in the right-hand column) was Love of Seven Dolls, which is very much the darkest of his books that I’ve read – but was still very certainly mixed with fairy-tale.  That was what saved it from being terrifyingly sinister.  The two Mrs. Harris novels I’ve read are much more lighthearted, and Mrs. Harris herself is very much a fairy-tale creation.  She enchants everyone she meets – and I mean that almost literally, in that she seems to be a fairy godmother, changing their lives for the better through Cockney wisdom and irrepressible optimism.  And perhaps a little bit of magic.

There are quite a few other Paul Gallico novels on my shelves, waiting to be read – including the next two in this series, Mrs. Harris, MP and Mrs. Harris Goes To Moscow, which Bloomsbury also publish and kindly sent me.  I’m also excited about reading The Foolish Immortals and The House That Wouldn’t Go Away.  I’ll report back on all of these as and when I manage to read them – but, for now, for when you want to be a little charmed yourself, you could do a heck of a lot worse than spending an hour or two in the delightful company of London’s finest, Mrs. Harris.