Unnecessary Rankings! R.C. Sherriff

It was my birthday yesterday and I’ll my bookish gifts at some point (it will surprise nobody to know I got a few), but for today let’s do some more Unnecessary Ranking! This time I’ve picked R.C. Sherriff – famous initially for Journey’s End (which I haven’t read or seen) but brought back more broadly by reprints from Persephone Books. He isn’t the most prolific writer, and I haven’t read all of his novels, so it’s not the longest list.

As ever, I’d love to know your own rankings…

6. Chedworth (1944)

The only book of his that I wouldn’t consider a success. Wing Commander Derek Chedworth marries a vaudeville dancer and she comes to live at his ancestral home – a promising premise that never really comes off. Sherriff is usually so brilliant at character, setting, and pace – so I don’t know why Chedworth fell flat.

5. The Hopkin’s Manuscript (1939)

All his other books (that I’ve read) are brilliant, so don’t read this low ranking as a negative. It’s a very domestic spin on an apocalypse, and the only reason I prefer other Sherriff novels is that this has a science fiction starting point that isn’t necessarily my most-loved genre.

4. The Fortnight in September (1931)

When I first read this, I wouldn’t have believed there’d be three Sherriff books I’d like even more – because it is sheer perfection, on its own terms. A family plan for, and then take, their annual holiday to the seaside. The family are growing up, and their usual lodgings are growing old. An astonishingly good book about nothing and everything.

3. The Wells of St. Mary’s (1962)

If The Hopkins Manuscript isn’t my favourite genre, then The Wells of St. Mary’s is – the domestic novel that incorporates the fantastic. Or does it? When some abandoned wells start curing people’s illnesses, it becomes a huge tourist attractions. The reader is left trying to work out how much is magical…

2. No Leading Lady (1968)

R.C. Sherriff’s autobiography is that rare example of an author really telling you about their craft, in delightful detail. Half the book is about the genesis, writing, production, success, and aftermath of his break-out play Journey’s End. He glosses over his private life, and even some of his work, but I’ve read very few autobiographies that I enjoyed anywhere near as much.

1. Greengates (1936)

The most similar to The Fortnight in September, in terms of being a narrow lens on a very domestic set up. When Mr Baldwin retires, he and his wife decide to move to a new housing estate – and this gentle novel is simply about that process. In almost any author’s hands it would be nothing – in Sherriff’s, it is a masterpiece.

I’d love to hear your Sherriff rankings, or which of his books you’d like to try next!

R.C. Sherriff’s wonderful autobiography

R.C. Sherriff has had something of a renaissance in the past few years, thanks to the good people at Persephone Books. They’ve published A Fortnight in SeptemberGreengates, and The Hopkins Manuscript, and other publishers have followed suit. The film adaptation of Journey’s End was very well received recently, and the play remains a text that is often studied in schools, I believe. And yet nobody has reprinted his autobiography, 1968’s No Leading Lady.

It goes for big sums online, but I didn’t know that I stumbled upon it in a Marylebone bookshop in 2019. It was only on the way home that I googled it and found that I secured something of a bargain – and, as so often, it took me a few years to read it. And oh my goodness, I absolutely loved it.

Many authors tend to write their autobiographies with their own lens for nostalgia. They will dwell on childhood memories and anecdotes about family members with no claim to distinction, beyond association with the author. Some rush through their writing career with some sense of embarrassment – others even end their books before they have gained success. I often find this approach infuriating. After all, I am interested in them because they are authors – not because they once left their hat on a train on the way to boarding school.

So, hurrah and hurray to R.C. Sherriff! In the first paragraph, we are thrown into the maelstrom of his writing:

I had left home early that morning on my round of calls, to be back in good time to change and get to the theatre well before the curtain went up. It was the first night of my first play in the West End, and I wanted to find out whether the director had been able to rescue anything from the shambles of the dress rehearsal. I had been at the theatre until near midnight the previous evening, and had caught the last train home worn out with worry and disappointment. The whole thing had crumbled to pieces; the play was in ruins, with the curtain due to go up on the first performance in a matter of hours.

I wondered if this would be an introduction to get our attention, and he’d jump back into the past. Well, he does after a few pages of this – but only back to the beginning of that play’s genesis. And yes, the play is Journey’s End, based on Sherriff’s experiences of World War One – well, based on his knowledge of life in the trenches, rather than specifically based on his life. And it started life as a play to raise money for the rowing club that Sherriff was in.

Marvellously, the first 200 pages of No Leading Lady – more than half the book – is about Journey’s End. Sherriff goes gradually from this humble start to trying (and failing) to get an agent for it. People were put off by it having no leading lady (one of the reasons for the autobiography’s title) and by believing, in the mid-1920s, that no audience had an appetite for being taken back to the trenches.

You’d have to read those 200 pages to experience the hopes and failures, the gradual back and forth of getting to success. Sherriff is turned down many times before he finally gets somebody willing to put on the play at a private club – where the lead part is played by a then-unknown actor called Laurence Olivier. It gets rave reviews, but this doesn’t translate into a proper transfer for the fee-paying public. Eventually, though, someone gives it a chance… and it is a runaway hit.

I have raced through the gradual way Sherriff reveals this, and he goes on to chart its fortunes in the West End, in America, as a film etc. I loved how steadily, slowly he did – he is not coy to tell us about the financial aspect, or the various setbacks that were obstacles before this ‘overnight’ success. We so seldom get this level of detail about a writer’s work, and I absolutely loved it – and I haven’t even read or seen Journey’s End! He does assume you’ll have familiarity with it, but I didn’t find it much mattered. Whenever I review a Sherriff book, I say that is a perfect storyteller – and No Leading Lady is another example of this perfection. He measures the pace so brilliantly, so that the 200 pages feel fully earned.

From another writer, it might have felt braggy. But even when Sherriff is discussing his big pay-outs, enthusiastic reviews, or huge audiences, he does so with a sort of childlike disbelief that you can’t help be happy on his behalf. He never felt something like this could happen to him, a humble insurance salesman (oh, and I loved the sections on his insurance work too). The other part of the book which gets a lot of focus is his time as an undergraduate at Oxford – delayed until his 30s, and with the same sense of being unexpectedly privileged and finding himself in a world he never thought he’d be part of.

But success isn’t guaranteed, of course. He doesn’t spend as much time writing about the next play, but it fails. So does the one after. Sherriff has over-extended himself far too much on his house – and while some of his frets about economising aren’t particularly relatable (he insists he needs two indoor servants, three gardeners and a chauffeur) he is candid about them. It is the most personal he gets. He also writes beautifully about his relationship with his mother, who goes everywhere with him. It’s an impressive balance of genuine openness about what he does write about, and a careful line around the parts of his life he doesn’t want to disclose.

Sadly, for me, he decides not to write much about his novels – except for The Fortnight in September, his first novel which restored his renown. The others don’t even get a mention, and I would have loved to read more about some of my favourites. He also worked for a time as a scriptwriter in Hollywood at a time when studios were flinging eye-watering sums at well-known writers to try to lure them. He writes a lot about his first screenplay, an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but skates past others – including the one that got him an Oscar nomination, which isn’t mentioned in the book.

I can see that some publishers wouldn’t want to reprint No Leading Lady. It doesn’t follow the usual trajectory of an autobiography, and some might think it would only be of interest to fans of Journey’s End. But I thought it was a spectacular, involving and delightful look at a writer’s life. Sherriff is such a brilliant storyteller that I would happily hear him tell any story – in this book, he captivated me completely.

The Wells of St Mary’s by R.C. Sherriff

I was a little late in the day to R.C. Sherriff, but have now read and loved all three of his novels that Persephone publish – with Greengates being my favourite, I think. And naturally it made me want to read more of his. Bello have republished a few as ebooks and POD, but I got this quirky little paperback online relatively cheaply – and, while on holiday, read The Wells of St Mary’s (1962). It’s a few decades later than the Persephone novels, but every bit as good.

Our narrator is Peter Joyce, who lives in a large house on the outskirts of a village called St Mary’s. He is a magistrate and retired colonel. The Joyces have lived there for many years, but being landed gentry doesn’t bring the same riches it once did. Joyce is rather down on his luck financially, at least compared to his family’s former wealth – he does still have a butler – and its made him a bit cautious to invite old friends to stay. But one old friend does come – Lord Colindale (whom he also calls Colin – is his name Colin Colindale??) They haven’t been in touch for a while, and when Lord Colindale arrives, Joyce sees why – Colindale was renowned for being a powerful man of politics, journalism, and public life, and now he can’t move more than a few feet without the use of crutches. His vitality has been taken by rheumatism.

Don’t stop reading, if you think a novel about rheumatism doesn’t sound very gripping! I should also mention that, very early on, Joyce says that the account he is writing is connected with a murder. We don’t know who will be murdered, and we are constantly watching out for developments in the novel, to see who the victim and perpetrator will be, and why.

While taking his friend on a short tour of the village, they come across St Mary’s Well. It is on Joyce’s land, and still manned by an old man who has worked for the family since Joyce’s grandfather’s time – if ‘worked’ is the word, since he is often drunk and very few people come to the wells. It has been used since Roman times, and there is a building around the well, but the locals wouldn’t dream of going – and the number of tourists fighting their way down the overgrown path to the well is dwindling. But it has supposedly miraculous health-restoring qualities, and Colindale decides to take a drink.

And – yes! He finds the next morning that he doesn’t need his crutches. He is miraculously cured by the water of the well!

From here, things in the village start to change. Colindale uses his public position to tell the world about the well – and the next day the roads are jammed with cars getting there. The village puts together a committee to decide how they will make the most of this potential windfall, and most of the villagers sink their savings into shares. After all these highs, obviously not all will go well… but that’s all I’m going to say. And it’s obvious from early on, because Sherriff ends an awful lot of chapters with things like ‘but that was before the worst day of our lives’ etc.

I love fantastic fiction, and the premise of this novel puts it in that category. But more than that, I love Sherriff’s writing. In all of his novels, he is so, so good at unshowy writing that just drags you in and keeps you captivated, while being constantly gentle and character-led. It’s a real gift, and the sort of talent that doesn’t come around all that often. Whatever his genre or his idea, he gets us right in the midst of the community – he can sell any premise without the reader blinking an eye, and there is as much nuanced humanity in his sci-fi post-apocalypse as in the tale of a retired couple buying a house as there is in this novel about a miraculous well.

I was a bit worried that there wouldn’t be enough fiction on my end-of-year list, but this would be a worthy addition. And now I need to track down the rest of his novels, evidently…

R.C. Sherriff over at Vulpes Libris

A quick note to say that I’m over at Vulpes Libris today, talking about how much I like The Fortnight in September and Greengates by R.C. Sherriff. If you listened to our Tea or Books? episode on them, then there’s not much that will come as a surprise to you – but I thought there’d be plenty of people who don’t listen to podcasts who might need a nudge towards reading those fab novels!

Speaking of Tea or Books? – apologies for a bit of a longer break than anticipated, but Rachel and I will be recording this weekend. If you have any thoughts about Messalina of the Suburbs by E.M. Delafield or A Pin To See The Peepshow by F Tennyson Jesse, then do feel free to send in a comment or a voicemail. You can send voice recordings to simonthomasoxford[at]gmail.com – it would be great fun to include those!

 

Tea or Books? #31: lists, yes or no? and The Fortnight in September vs Greengates

Happy new year! Rachel and I are back from a bit of a podcast break, and raring to go for the New Year.


 
Tea or Books logoIn this episode, we look at two novels by R.C. Sherriff, both published by Persephone, and we also look back over 2016 and debate whether or not we make and read Best Books of the Year lists. Look, it’s just a way for us to shoe-horn in an overview of our favourite reads from 2016.

As always, we’d love to know what you’d choose from each category, and any ideas you have for future episodes. We’re always so grateful for those – though sometimes we haven’t yet read the authors people mention. We’ll work on it!

Listen to us above, via iTunes, or your podcast app of choice. I’ve been asking people to leave a review at the iTunes site, but it turns out you can only do that through the iTunes app or programme, maybe?

Anyway, we’ll loving being back – apologies for a bit of poor sound quality at times – and here are the books and authors we mention in this episode:

Witness for the Prosecution by R.C. Sherriff
4.50 From Paddington by Agatha Christie
Magnificent Obsession by Helen Rappaport
Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
Third Girl by Agatha Christie
Curiosity by Alberto Manguel
Over the Footlights and Other Fancies by Stephen Leacock
The Lark by E. Nesbit
Patricia Brent, Spinster by Herbert Jenkins
The Lost Europeans by Emanuel Litvinoff
Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry
The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Complete Works by William Shakespeare
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Mapp and Lucia by E.F. Benson
Messalina of the Suburbs by E.M. Delafield
A Pin to See The Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse
To The Bright Edge of the World by Eowyn Ivey
Margaret Atwood
Possession by A.S. Byatt
Terms and Conditions by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Daisy’s Aunt by E.F. Benson
Compton Mackenzie
A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Museum of Cheats by Sylvia Townsend Warner
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Fortnight in September by R.C. Sherriff
Greengates by R.C. Sherriff
The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff
Bricks and Mortar by Helen Ashton
Journey’s End by R.C. Sherriff
(The Cataclysm turns out to be The Hopkins Manuscript under the same name!)