Virago

Waters run backwards

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The final book I read in 2010 – deftly added to the list I posted a couple of days ago – was Sarah Waters’ The Night Watch. This is my third Waters novel, and this year was the year of Third Time Lucky (c.f.: Evelyn Waugh; Muriel Sparks) – but not, as it happened, with Waters. That sounds like one of my shortest reviews, doesn’t it? Sorry, folks, but I’m not stopping there… After quite liking Affinity back in 2003 or 2004, I loved The Little Stranger this summer – and if it hadn’t been for that frustrating ending, it would have been one of my favourite reads this year. But I had caught the Waters bug, and my post-Christmas read was The Night Watch, only approx. four years after everyone else.

For those who haven’t read this already, I’ll give you a quick overview. The unusual angle of The Night Watch is that it is told backwards. Events kick off in 1947, and work their way backwards to 1941, stopping off in 1944. That’s not as many stepping stones as I expected, when I read various reviews of this novel in 2006, when it was published, and it does rather put the novel between two stools. On the one hand, there are all sorts of clues laid down regarding past events (further on in the narrative); on the other hand, since there are only three sections – and the final one is very short – it feels a bit like Waters didn’t let herself experiment quite enough. Al this leads me, if you’re not careful, to start talking about sjuzhet and fabula, or histoire and recit, if we’re getting all theoretical. Apologies if this is known already, but quick crash course in a bit Russian Formalism: ‘fabula’ is the chronological series of events; ‘sjuzhet’ is the way this is arranged in a narrative. So Waters has her sjuzhet all in a twist.

Which all means that Waters could be a little self-conscious when she writes this:
“I go to the cinema,” said Kay; “there’s nothing funny about that. Sometimes I sit through the films twice over. Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way – people’s pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures. Or perhaps that’s just me…”But, as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself.

There are plenty of characters, and plenty of things going on, in The Night Watch. Sarah Waters being Sarah Waters, quite a lot of the novel is about being a lesbian in wartime (I loved the if-you’re-in-the-know reference to ‘Quaint Irene’ from Mapp and Lucia as the name of a boat) – and four of the central characters are lesbians, who seem to all be in love with each other at various stages of the novel. Well, one of them – Mickey – appears to be immune to the charms of Helen, Julia, and Kay, but they are all embroiled with one another. To be honest, I didn’t find any of the female characters particularly well delineated – throw in Viv, Helen’s colleague at a sort of post-war dating agency, and they all rather blurred into one. Even Julia’s novelistic career didn’t help me remember which one was which until we were a hundred or so pages in.

Not so the men. Viv’s brother Duncan is doing a menial job in a factory, and has a surprise reunion with Robert Fraser. Duncan’s naive, bulky uncertainty and Robert’s confident charm are done very well – but the reader has no idea what sort of reunion is taking place. Were they colleagues, comrades-in-arms, or romantically involved? I couldn’t possibly tell you, of course…

I’m being a bit critical, so I shall redress the balance – Waters’ structure is often done very well. The careful laying of clues, and all manner of mysterious events, lead to plenty of gasp-moments in the second half. Obviously I shan’t reveal these, but the secret passing of a ring; curious Uncle Horace; and whispers of infidelity are all clues to watch out for… and lead to satisfying ‘oh, right’ moments later.

But as with The Little Stranger, which was almost all compelling reading but had a dud 100 pages, The Night Watch is longer than it needs to be, and drags occasionally. At her best, Waters can tear a story along – but at her worst, it feels rather self-indulgent and unedited.

And then… I feel a bit mean, quoting this bit, as it’s the worst offender – but:
“What’s the matter? Aren’t you happy?”

“Happy?” Viv blinked. “I don’t know. Is anybody happy? Really happy, I mean? People pretend they are.”

“I don’t know either,” said Helen, after a moment. “Happiness is such a fragile sort of thing these days. It’s as though there’s only so much to go round.”Do people talk like this? Did people ever talk like this – except in novels? It’s the sort of thing 1930s plays are scattered with, but I doubt it ever spilled over into read life…

But I’m only picking all these holes because I’m trying to work out why The Night Watch got shortlisted for all sorts of awards. There is so much to like in Waters’ novel, and it was definitely compelling reading much of the time. Writing the narrative backwards is a good idea executed without pretension, but also perhaps without reaching its potential. But somehow, for me, Waters missed the mark. The Little Stranger was very nearly a brilliant novel. The Night Watch was very nearly a very good novel. I’ve not read all of Waters’ novels, but… is she destined to always fall short from her potential? Or am I a lone voice in the wilderness? Fans of Waters – convince me!

A Game of Hide and Seek

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I promised a Virago Modern Classic, and a Virago Modern Classic I will deliver. I’ve already read a couple Elizabeth Taylor novels, Angel and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (click on the titles if you fancy reading my thoughts on them, but to summarise – they’re very good) and Nicola Beauman’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor, but there’s plenty of way to go – and when my supervisor told me I should take a look at A Game of Hide and Seek, how could I resist?

The ‘game’ in question is both literal and metaphorical. The novel opens with Harriet and Vesey (query: is this actually a name?) playing a game of hide-and-seek – and this game follows them throughout the rest of their lives… they chase each other, misunderstanding each other’s emotions and failing to say the right thing at the right times, and often saying the wrong thing. Vesey goes to Oxford; Harriet remains behind – and marries somebody else. Later, of course, Vesey reappears – and the same old feelings reappear as well.

I didn’t really want to write out the plot of A Game of Hide and Seek because, like so many of the best novels, the plot isn’t that important. A thousand novelists have written novels with this plot (for another good one, see EM Delafield’s Late and Soon) and explored the emotions that such a recrudescence can have. But few of them will have Elizabeth Taylor’s talent.

Confession time: I read the first half of this on the bus to and from London, and wasn’t very excited about it. I was tired, I had a headache, I was reading the words but not really getting anything out of it. It was only when I returned, busless, to my reading that I understood what an exceptionally well written novel A Game of Hide and Seek was. Taylor excels at the metaphor which is unusual and yet exactly conveys an image. One of my favourites was this:
Harriet tried to put on a polite and considering look. She loved the music, but could not allow herself to enjoy it among strangers. Sunk too far back in her too large chair, she felt helpless, like a beetle turned on its back; and as if she could never rise again, nor find the right phrases of appreciation. How many authors would think of that image, of a beetle turned on its back? And yet it works so very well. That is, to my mind, what sets Taylor apart from other authors – and makes it hard to explain exactly why – that she writes the sort of novel that many could write, but concentrates so much on avoiding cliche and finding new life in her characters, that she is on another level. Another example? It’s always difficult to ‘show’ good writing, isn’t it? But this is a paragraph I highlighted as being representative – the sort of writing which one has to read slowly, to enjoy it fully. The fog lay close to the windows. The train seemed to be grovelling its way towards London, but the banks on either side were obscured. Harriet wondered if they were passing open fields or the backs of factories, and she cleaned a space on the window with her glove, but all she could see reflected were her own frightened eyes.You can just tell that every word is carefully chosen, can’t you? This is all sounding a bit earnest, so I’m also going to quote my favourite line from the novel, which is often humorous as well as serious: “The meat has over-excited them,” Harriet thought. She had always heard that it inflamed the baser instincts.Quite so, Elizabeth, quite so.

I won’t go over the top, this isn’t the best novel I’ve ever read – but it is some of the best writing that I’ve read for a while. If you chose novels for their plot, you might not think too much of A Game of Hide and Seek. If you chose novels for their writing style and characterisation, this may well be something you’ll love – and admire. Not often that those two can go hand in hand – but Elizabeth Taylor is the woman for the job.

Try Anything Twice

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[N.B. this post migrated from my old site and, like all of them, it messed up the quotations a bit – this one has turned into one huge paragraph and I no longer know where the gaps should be!]

Good things come to those who wait, we are told, and that’s generally how I treat books which come to my shelves. A few leap immediately to hand, read within minutes of arriving, but most are left – like fine wines – to mature. And so it is that Try Anything Twice by Jan Struther, which arrived in October 2007 from lovely Ruth (aka Crafty Person), has finally been read. And it’s like a hot cup of tea on a wintery afternoon.

Jan Struther is best known for Mrs. Miniver – which I wrote a bit about back here – the voice of quintessential middle-class Englishness leading up to World War Two. Though she altered dramatically for the film, there was still that kernel of being England’s everywoman (within the remit of those with servants and children at boarding school and jolly outings.) Though Try Anything Twice doesn’t feature Mrs. M, the voice is instantly recognisable. Published in 1938, the volume collects articles and essays that Jan Struther wrote for Spectator, New Statesman, Punch, and other journals. They’re all from that middle-class world, but what an observant world it can be – whether noting the vagaries of updating an address book (‘Zazoulian, the little Armenian painter. His pictures are not very good, nor his conversation amusing, and it is eighteen months since you saw him: but a “Z” is a “Z”‘) or going to a Registry Office to find a nanny (one who is neither a dragon nor a duchess) or the poetic potential of a builder’s plans.

As always with short stories or essays or poems – anything where there is no uniform whole – it is near impossible to write a convincing review of Try Anything Twice, especially since I read it over the course of some weeks. Verity’s review is worth seeing, by the way, but for now I think the best way to talk about the book is to give you a sample. It’s not necessarily the best in the book, but it’s fairly representative of the style of Try Anything Twice. All of the book is actually available online, but of course (!) it’s better to get hold of the book itself. If you like the following, as they say, you’ll like the book. Ladies and Gentlemen; ‘With Love From Aunt Hildegarde’

THERE are three ways of choosing presents for other people. The first is to choose something you think they would like; the second, something you would like yourself; the third, something you think they ought to have. Of these methods the first is the wisest but the least common; the second is less wise but more usually followed; while the third is wholly unforgivable and accounts for much of the post-Christmas bitterness from which we are apt to suffer. My great-aunt Hildegarde is an almost fanatical devotee of the third method. Many people would call her an ideal aunt; that is to say, she gives us presents not only at Christmas but for each of our birthdays and often in between times as well. But her gifts have, so to speak, a sting in the tail; they represent her unspoken criticisms on our habits, customs and whole mode of living. Whenever we see her firm capable handwriting on a parcel, or a box arrives from a shop with one of her cards enclosed, we pause before unpacking it any further, sit back on our haunches and wonder what we’ve done wrong now. “I know,” says T. “Last time she dined here the spout of the coffee-pot was chipped and it dribbled all down her frock.” “No,” I reply, “I know what it is. The menu-card was propped up against the candlestick, and she said how awkward it was the way it kept slipping down.” And when we open it, sure enough, if it isn’t a new china coffee-pot it is a pair of menu-holders–contrivances which we particularly dislike, even when they are not made from tooled gun-metal in the form of two hedge-sparrows rampant, regardant and proper. Once she came to tea with me on a pouring wet day and found nowhere to park her umbrella. The next day a large tubular object arrived. It had vaguely military associations, but it had been so converted and distorted that it was difficult to tell whether it had originally been a large German shell or part of a small field-gun used in the Russo-Japanese War. A third possibility is that it was once a moth-proof travelling container for a Balkan field-marshal’s top-boots. At any rate, it takes up a great deal of room in the hall. And another time, I remember, she wanted to write a note at my desk and was scandalised because there was no proper pen and ink–although, as I explained, I had three fountain-pens, any of which I was willing to lend her. Four days elapsed and I began to breathe more freely. But on the fifth there came a small square parcel containing a silver-mounted ink-pot with my initials irrevocably engraved upon it (which accounted, no doubt, for the delay). Like the umbrella stand, it was a convert; but in this case there was no difficulty in guessing its original function. To make matters quite clear, Aunt Hildegarde had attached a note saying: “I feel sure you will like to have this little memento of poor dear Blackie, on whose back you took your first ride. This is the very hoof which she used to lift so prettily to shake hands. May it bring you lots of inspiration for your little poems!!” I groaned, filled it with fountain-pen ink and set it fair and square in the middle of my writing-table, where it remains to this day, a constant reminder of the agonies and humiliations of childhood; for it was the self-same hoof with which Blackie once stood for a full five minutes on my toe, I having neither the strength nor the courage to remove her. I do not wish to look a gift-hoof in the mouth or to seem in any way ungrateful, but the thing is getting on our nerves. Not only are we developing an inferiority complex about our own home but we are becoming self-conscious about entertaining Aunt Hildegarde. We dare not give her grapes, lest she should think that we are hinting at grape-scissors; nor lobster, for fear of invoking a set of silver-plated picks. But however careful we are we cannot think of everything. We did not, for instance, foresee that she would give us an electric clock for Christmas. It is true that when she came to stay with us a month ago our drawing-room clock was not behaving quite as a good clock should. One day it was a few minutes slow and she missed the weather forecast on the wireless. And another day it ran down altogether and made her late for church. “Your Uncle Julian,” she said gently, “used to wind all the clocks in the house every Sunday morning.” But this mild fragment of reminiscence did not at all prepare us, though perhaps it should have, for the grey maple rhomboid which now adorns our mantelpiece. At least, it looks like maple, but it is actually (so the accompanying leaflet informs us) made of steel, which can neither shrink nor warp, neither rust nor tarnish. It runs off the electric mains; it needs no winding; it is guaranteed to keep absolutely perfect time; and ever since it came into the house we have felt acutely ill at ease. Our old happy-go-lucky days are over. No more can we think comfortingly as we start out rather late for a dinner-party: “Oh, well, perhaps our clock is fast,” nor, when we arrive there to find hostess champing and fellow-guests ravenous, can we murmur, “We are dreadfully sorry, but our clock was slow,” for our friends have already got to know about our new, our abominable possession. Gone too are sundry minor pleasures, such as listening for the radio Time Signal and leaping up to make a half-minute adjustment; and, better still, squandering pennies in a lordly way by dialling T.I.M. And gone–worst of all–is the small friendly sound which used to accompany our thoughts, the balanced alternation of tick and tock, like the footsteps of a little dog walking very quickly beside you on the pavement. Time now proceeds for us in a series of hard metallic clicks, one every minute, each identical with the last: it is a large, slow, hopping bird of prey which follows relentlessly behind us. For fifty-nine seconds it stands still; we escape it; we are immortal; and then with a sudden deft leap it catches us up again. Better never to escape; better to have our little trotting dog. But there is nothing to be done about it. If we did not use the clock, or if we banished it to the dining-room, Aunt Hildegarde would not only think us both mad and decadent–for what sane responsible citizen would not jump at the opportunity of being always certain of the time?–but she would also be terribly hurt. It was touching to see her when she came to tea yesterday, gazing up with reverent eyes at the angular, impersonal, implacable monster on the mantelpiece. “Your Uncle Julian,” she said, “would have found it such a boon.” The vulture took another hop forward.

One Valium or Two?

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Now, I am neither a housewife in the 1980s nor a single woman in the 1990s, but I have recently been discovering what these predicaments are like – through fiction-based-on-fact and fact-based-on-fiction, respectively. Today I’ll talk about the housewife in the 1980s…

I picked up Diane Harpwood’s Tea & Tranquillisers: The Diary of a Happy Housewife (1981) in a charity shop for a pound. I was enticed by the cover, and the fact that it was published by Virago, into thinking that it might be a 1980s version of EM Delafield’s superlatively wonderful Diary of a Provincial Lady. In some ways it fits… Jane Bennett has been married for ten years, has two children, and is a housewife always watching the pennies. Where Delafield’s experience as a housewife was in this house in Devon…


…Diane Harpwood and her heroine are based in a small, rather depressing neighbourhood. Jane constantly fights with her husband David, despite also being rather smitten by him. She admires her friend Cathy for doing a correspondence course to get some A Levels (or perhaps O Levels, I forget) but is herself stuck in domestic drudgery. Here’s an illustrative excerpt:
Saturday 28th: I left home tonight, flew the nest, scarpered. I’d had E-nough, and enough they say is as good as a feast, or in my case a glut. So the atmosphere in the old homestead has been a trifle chilled tonight.

I’ve been on my feet since half-past six this morning and my bum has scarcely come into contact with a chair all day. I’ve been making beds, tidying up, changing sh*tty nappies, tidying up, washing sh*tty nappies, tidying up, preparing, cooking and clearing up after breakfast, lunch and tea, washing the kitchen floor which is permanently filthy with bits of petrifying food and assorted muck carried in on everyone’s shoes, except for today, when it was clean for a while.By now you’ll be getting the gist. Perhaps you’re nodding your head in thoughtful sympathy. Or perhaps, like me, you’re wishing she’d drowned herself in the sink at breakfast. The blurb describes Tea & Tranquillisers as ‘hilarious and heartbreaking’ and… well, it’s not. There were moments of pathos in amongst the whinging, but for the most part this book was utterly humourless. Just page after page of complaining about her lot. If you want a book about being a poor housewife (though a bit earlier) look at Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns. For an updated look at provincial motherhood, you can do no better than Provincial Daughter, by EM Delafield’s own daughter, RM Dashwood. But not this book… oh, that EM Delafield could have written it! Yes, her life was probably rather easier, at least on the manual labour front – but she turned a wry, self-deprecating eye upon her life and her dilemmas. There is a world between self-deprecating and self-pity.

And, lest you think I’m being all chauvinistic, this is not a feminist book by any stretch of the imagination. There are all sorts of household jobs and decisions that she can only envisage a man doing, and quite often you want to shake her and say “a woman is quite capable of a bit of DIY, you don’t have to wait for your husband to do it while you make the dinner!”

As you can see, I was quite frustrated by Tea & Tranquillisers… it wasn’t all bad, there were some quite touching moments, but on the whole I thought it was an ill-conceived, humourless whine. If you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Tomorrow I’ll be writing about that single woman in the 1990s… and, just to give you a sneak preview, the book in question meets with rather more favour! Oh, and it’s not Bridget Jones’ Diary…

Life and Death of Harriett Frean

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Today we’re headed to more Stuck-in-a-Book familiar territory – good old Virago Modern Classics.

I’ve heard quite a bit about May Sinclair (she first used the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’, doncha know) but not read anything by her – in Thame I came across Life and Death of Harriett Frean, and, being so short, it leapt immediately to the top of my tbr pile. And I read it in a morning – it’s got 184 pages but there’s so little text on each one that it’s more like 90 pages of an average book. And somehow, in this tiny amount of space, May Sinclair manages to include an entire, long life.

There aren’t many incidents in Harriett Frean’s life, at least not significant ones. She lives her life as a spinster, in the benevolent shadow of her parents – to the end of her days, she proudly and frequently announces ‘I’m Hilton Frean’s daughter’. The one event of note is a tangled love triangle (doesn’t that sound very like Hollyoaks? Obviously it’s nothing of the sort.) Her close friend Priscilla always protests that she will never be married, and forces Harriett to pledge the same vow… when Robin comes along, both their resolves are tested. The novel becomes a ‘what might have been’ – questioning whether moral choices are black and white, and what happens to those who choose the path not labelled ‘happy ever after.’

The thread I found most interesting (and one familiar from other Virago Modern Classics such as The Love Child by Edith Olivier, and The Third Miss Symons by F. M. Mayor, as well as Persephone Books’ Alas, Poor Lady by Rachel Ferguson which I must write about soon) is the life of a spinster with her mother. Or, more importantly, the life of a spinster once her mother has died. These paragraphs are subtly rather clever:

Next spring, a year after her mother’s death, she felt the vague stirring of her individual soul. She was free to choose her own vicar; she left her mother’s Dr. Braithwaite who was broad and twice married, and went to Canon Wrench, who was unmarried and high. There was something stimulating in the short, happy service, the rich music, the incense, and the processions. She made new covers for the drawing-room, in cretonne, a gay pattern of pomegranate and blue-green leaves. And as she had always had the cutlets broiled plain because her mother liked them that way, now she had them breaded.

And Mrs. Hancock wanted to know why Harriett has forsaken her dear mother’s church; and when Connie Pennefeather saw the covers she told Harriett she was lucky to be able to afford new cretonne. It was more than she could; she seemed to think Harriett had no business to afford it. As for the breaded cutlets, Hannah opened her eyes and said, ‘That was how the mistress always had them, ma’am, when you was away.’
Lives of mutual self-sacrifice have, in the end, benefited neither of them. Sometimes May Sinclair seems to be dragging her novel into polemic territory – not necessarily a bad thing, but I’d question some of Sinclair’s advertised morals on occasion – but that aside, Life and Death of Harriett Frean is a slight, sharp view of so many women’s situations in the early twentieth century. Not particularly cheerful, it must be said, but very powerful – the blurb compares it to Woolf, and others which I forget, but they’re right – if this novel doesn’t quite deserve to be considered a classic of Modernism, it’s not very far off. What’s more, it’s in print from Virago – though if I know you, and I think I do, you’ll be hunting for the proper green VMC edition…

Bowen Out

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Have you ever settled down to a new author, really confident that you’ll enjoy the book in front of you. You’ve heard great things about the author from those whose opinions you respect. You like all the authors to whom this author is compared. It’s the right period, right genre, right topic. And yet… somehow it doesn’t work at all.
That was my experience with Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September.

I’ve read Bowen’s name so often in books about the period, heard it in conversation, always put her down as someone I’ll really enjoy, one day, and then… no. It’s not that I thought the book was *bad* – I could see that the writing was very good – but somehow it was a struggle. Despite being quite a short book, I lost track of who was who (or whom was who, or something) and what was going on. The novel, by the way, is ‘a comedy of manners set in the time of the Irish Troubles.’ It’s set in a big family house, where tennis-parties remain the focus, against the strife and riots. (By the way, the book cover shown isn’t the one I read, but it interested me because it’s the same cover image that Persephone used for their Persephone Classics version of Cheerful Weather For The Wedding by Julia Strachey, blogged about here, not Mariana by Monica Dickens as I wrote before…)

Sometimes I thought I was getting the hang of it. This paragraph is, I think, a great example of Bowen’s writing:

He listened, took off his trench-coat, stepped to the drawing-room door. The five tall windows stood open on rain and the sound of leaves, rain stuttered along the sills, the grey of the mirrors shivered. Polished tables were cold little lakes of light. The smell of sandalwood boxes, a kind of glaze on the air from all the chintzes numbed his earthy vitality, he became all ribs and uniform.

And so it goes on. These moments, I could see that the writing is beautiful… but then I’d get lost and listless again. Perhaps it’s because Bowen’s writing is so often visually descriptive? I can’t ‘see’ things when I read – visual description rarely works for me, unless I concentrate fiercely on it. Hmm.

I was talking to someone at lunch the other day who told me that The Heat of the Day is much better, and that I shouldn’t give up on Elizabeth Bowen yet… can anyone else convince me to persevere? Explain perhaps why I struggled? Or give examples of their own stumbling blocks in books or authors that they fully anticipated loving?

Mrs. Palfrey

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I read Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont a few weeks ago, but was waiting until I’d seen the film as well before writing about it here. Consequently I’ve forgotten all sorts of details, but I’ll do my best…

The novel concerns Mrs. Palfrey at, you guessed it, the Claremont – ‘One rainy Sunday in January Mrs. Palfrey, recently widowed, arrives at the Claremont Hotel in the Cromwell Road. Here she will spend her remaining days. Her fellow residents are a magnificently eccentric group who live off crumbs of affection, obsessive interest in the relentless round of hotel meals, and undying curiosity.’ So says the blurb on my beautiful Virago edition (I used a postcard of David Hockney’s My Parents for a bookmark, see below, and his mother is startlingly similar to the Virago cover Mrs. Mabel Whitehead by Margaret Foreman. Same pose, same hair, everything.)

The characters sharing the Claremont with Mrs. Palfrey are all in various stages of boredom and hopelessness, but Elizabeth Taylor is subtle enough with her pen to show these states as brittleness or insatiable nosiness or indulging in risque jokes. Mrs. Arbuthnot is bossy; Mrs. Burton drinks; Mrs. Post gossips; Mr. Osmond complains of the lack of male company. Into this web Mrs. Palfrey stumbles, her daughter too busy and grandson too selfish to care much about her. Again, Taylor doesn’t lay it on too thick – there are no villains in this piece, only humans. The life in a hotel, which acts as a retirement home in all but name, is beautifully observed, and perfectly nuanced. As an example (but how can one exemplify subtlety?) here is a couple of paragraphs from early in the novel:

The chief gathering-place for the residents was the vestibule where, about an hour before both luncheon and dinner, the menu was put up in a frame by the lift. People, at those times, seemed to be hovering – reading old church notices on the board, tapping the barometer, inquiring at the desk about letters, or looking out at the street. None wished to appear greedy, or obsessed by food: but food made the breaks in the day, and menus offered a little choosing, and satisfactions and dissatisfactions, as once life had.

When the card was fixed into the frame, although awaited, it was for a time ignored. Then, perhaps Mrs. Arbuthnot, on her slow progress to the lift, would pause nonchalantly, though scarcely staying a second. There was not much to memorise – the choice of two or three dishes, and the fact (which Mrs. Arbuthnot knew, but Mrs. Palfrey had not yet learned) that the menus came round fortnightly, or more often. There were permutations, but no innovations.

The stumbling minutiae of their lives, delicately and acutely portrayed. The central interest in their lives is the visitation of relatives. Each has a store of potential visitors, and an even more valuable reserve of reasons why they haven’t been able to visit. Mrs. Palfrey naively makes known that her grandson Desmond lives near the Claremont, and is sure to come and see her… which he does not do. When she falls outside a flat, and a young man comes to her aid, she finds in many ways a substitute grandson. Ludovic Myers (for it is he) gives her a cup of tea, and is kind. A writer, and a bohemian of sorts, he is enough unlike Mrs. Palfrey to make their friendship diverting, and enough like her to prevent it being ridiculous. Both alone, in their own ways, it is somehow not long before he is masquerading as her grandson.

Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont does not go in for high drama, and this fraudulence never provides it. What the unusual pairing does offer is a touching, but not saccharine, breath of life into Mrs. Palfrey’s old age – but this is no Disney transformation. Elizabeth Taylor brilliantly continues to tread the line between fairy tale and misery literature – the line, I suppose, of reality. And never has reality been more beautiful written nor more honestly and unmanipulatively told.

So, I loved the book. Come back tomorrow to see what I thought about the film…

Sisters By A River

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Continuing my Barbara Comyns interest, I spent my train journey back from Liverpool reading her first novel Sisters By A River. I bought the novel in Somerset, but there are loads available on Amazon. I say ‘novel’, but there is no structure to this book, really – lots and lots of little essays or vignettes or really just anecdotes. They’re vaguely chronological. I was especially interested by this novel as it’s openly based in Bidford-on-Avon in Warwickshire, where my very close friend Lorna was brought up, and I’ve been several times.

I can’t stand books which use incorrect spelling to reproduce the mind of a child (which put me off Our Spoons Came From Woolworths a bit) but I discovered in the Introduction that Barbara Comyns couldn’t actually spell as an adult, and the publishers decided not to edit her manuscript (the Intro says she couldn’ spell because her mother went deaf when Barbara was young… I couldn’t really see the connection).

This book is actually autobiography – never sure how accurate, and it certainly has all the surrealism I’ve grown to expect from Comyns. Her childhood makes the Mitfords seem dull. Quite similar, actually – six daughters in her case, in a rambling old house with an angry, mad father. The mother is also pretty mad, and the children are fairly uncontrolled, running riot over the house and area, making their own rules and creating their own world. This is representative of the insanity (spelling mistakes intentional! ):

‘Things at home were getting pretty grim about this time, Daddy was particularly mororse and glum through money worries, then he would drink and try and forget but it only made things worse, he never got jolly when he drank, just miserable, I can’t think why he did it. Mammie was always quarreling with him, they were the two best people at agvergating each other I have ever met, she was getting awfully sick of us too, more even than usual, she had got an awful new habit of thinking people were falling in love with her, it was very trying and embarising, we would come on her gazeing into space, her lips moving in an imaginaru conversation with a ficticious lover, she even went so far as to tell Daddy she had lovers and was unfaithful to him, this caused the most frightful rows, usually ending in him throwing all her clothes out of her bedroom window or Mammie running down to the river bank screaming and saying she was going to drown herself, sometimes waving an unloaded revolver above her head, but she never did commit suicide, sometimes the maids, if they were new, would run after her and drag her back to the house, but we would just sit on the chicken pen roof or somewhere peaceful.’

Long sentences, as you see! Everything in the book is told with a child’s calm indifference and no sense of causality. Difficult to know how disingenuous the writing is – either way, it is very effective, and this bizarre autobiographical- novel-anecdotal- chat is quite unlike anything I’ve ever read. At first I thought I’d find it too affected, but in the end I loved it. Would make great reading alongside Mitford stuff.

The tone throughout was rather surreal – ‘Daddy very much dislike finding odd human bones about the house, they had a habbit of getting tucked down the sides of the morning-room chairs’ is the comment on an archeological dig in the garden – but even more surreal when you realise it’s mostly true. Tales of ugly dresses and bad haircuts are told in the same captivating, undemonstrative style as those of Grannie dying and Father throwing a beehive over Mother. If this motley assortment of remembrances were made-up… well, I don’t think they could have been. Such a bizarre childhood, so of its time, and yet utterly fascinating. Completely devoid of charm, but somehow, in a way, it charmed me. I still think Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead is Comyn’s best book, of the five I’ve read (standardised spelling for a start!) but Sisters by a River is mesmorising, and a book I’ll return to many times from sheer incredulity and amazement.

Thought I’d just finish off these thoughts by quoting the blurb Barbara Comyns wrote herself in 1947:

The river is the Avon, and on its banks the five sisters are born. The river is frozen, the river is flooded, the sun shines on the water and moving lights are reflected on the walls of the house. It is Good Friday and the maids hang a hot cross bun from the kitchen ceiling. An earwig crawls into the sweep’s ear and stays there for ten years. Moths are resurrected from the dead and bats becomes entangled in young girls’ hair. Lessons are done in the greenish light under the ash-tree and always there is the sound of water swirling through the weir. A feeling of decay comes to the house, at first in a sudden puff down a dark passage and the damp smell of cellars, then ivy grows unchecked over the windows and angry shouts split the summer air, sour milk is in the larder and the father takes out his gun. The children see a dreadful snoring figure in a white nightshift, then lot numbers appear on the furniture and the family is dispersed…

Enchanting

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A while ago I asked about books which just fitted the environment in which they were read, and wanted something which would fit a meadow in spring. Danielle, Susan D. and IslandSparrow all suggested Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, and since I was at home in lovely rural Somerset in April, it seemed the perfect book to try.

E von A is mentioned a lot in an online book group I’m in, especially a few years ago, and in fact I’d bought The Enchanted April in 2004 or 2005, but not got around to reading it. No real reason for its being on the backburned – though perhaps the 1980s TV shot chosen by Virago for my edition didn’t do it any favours. Well, now I’ve read it, and the novel is possibly my favourite read of 2009 so far.

For those who don’t know the premise – shy, awkward and quirky Lottie Wilkins wishes to escape a lacklustre husband who thinks she is unintelligent; she meets Rose Arbuthnot who is best summed-up by this reaction to the idea of a holiday in Italy:
No doubt a trip to Italy would be extraordinarily delightful, but there were many delightful things one would like to do, and what was strength given to one for except to help one not to do them?

Nevertheless, she too has a situation she wishes to escape, and is intrigued by the idea of a castle for hire in Italy. Upon investigating, Lottie and Rose realise they’ll need another couple people to share the rent. Step forward Mrs. Fisher, an older lady whose life is spent remembering the wise words of Victorian writers whom she probably met in her youth – and Lady Caroline Dester, a stunning beauty who is tired of everyone ‘grabbing’ onto her, and wants to get away from being the centre of society. They all head off to Italy, including an amusing journey in which Lottie and Rose become convinced that they’ve been kidnapped, as all their Italian is ‘San Salvatore’, the name of the castle – which they repeat at intervals, to be met with empassioned nodding and agreement from the Italians travelling with them.

The castle is described beautifully, and especially the garden – attention drawn often to the wistaria, which happens to be my favourite plant. Everywhere is brightly sunny, airy, thick with the scent of flowers and bursting with nature. It could have been horribly overdone, but E von A strikes just the right note – and thank you to those who recommended it, reading the novel with equally beautiful (but rather different) countryside around me was perfect. Though it might work also as a distraction to city life where trammelled nature does anything but burst.

All four holiday-makers arrive unhappy, and all have some faults – especially the very selfish Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline. From the start, though, Lottie is certain that the castle will have a positive, almost magical, effect upon anyone staying there. And she is, of course, right. I don’t want to spoil all the events of the novel, but suffice to say each character is altered by the surroundings, friendships develop and faults evaporate. What prevents The Enchanted April from being too fairy talesque or saccharine is a wittiness and honesty which somehow make the changes in everyone seem not only realistic but inevitable, and still thoroughly heart-warming.

How the cousin of Katherine Mansfield and sister-in-law of Bertrand Russell wrote such a happy, warm novel is anybody’s guess – but I do encourage you to seek out The Enchanted April is you haven’t yet done so. It’s a beautiful novel which is also extremely well written – the style flows by, perspicacious but unassuming, and the four central characters are incredibly well drawn. Not at all stereotypes, yet definitely distinct and memorable, they seem real, with real traits and feelings and failings, and must have been very difficult to create. Simply brilliant.

And soon I’ll be writing about the next novel I read, also about four women living together in a house. It’s written by one of the authors in my 50 Books list, and was published in 1989. A prize to anyone who can guess the book…

Sylvia Townsend Warner

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One of the books I mentioned the other day was Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which I’m using for my domestic-space-and-fantasy dissertation. STW is one of those writers whose been in my peripheral vision, as it were – ever since I bought British Women Writers 1900-1950 ed. Harold Bloom – but I hadn’t made the move to buying or reading any of her work until Lolly Willowes. Which Hermione Lee mentioned in her introduction to The Love Child by Edith Olivier (and now, to go full circle, she is my supervisor for these two books and more).

Enough background. Lolly Willowes is the story of a woman who sells her soul to the devil. Like Lethe, who commented on the post about these books, I approached this rather warily – but it actually only comes into the narrative quite late, and doesn’t seem to me to be the central focus of the novel. The central character, Laura Willowes (the narrative never actually refers to her as Lolly, that’s just the name others give to her) moves in with her married brother when her father dies – she is one of those spinsters of the period who were shunted from pillar to post because they had the audacity not to marry. She puts off her suitors, one by indulging in the imaginative and positing one as a were-wolf. She decides, spontaneously, to move to a village called Great Mop (well, you would, wouldn’t you?) and set up a life for herself there. This does later involve selling her soul to the devil, unfortunately, but before it gets to that point I found Lolly Willowes a really interesting and sympathetic novel about the entrapment of families and houses and the freedom of Nature… that sounds very hippie, whereas I actually love family houses, but for Laura it is an escape from being trammeled down. And celebrates open spaces, beautiful villages and Nature.

As usual, the quality I appreciated most was the writing – and that’s impossible to define. STW writes beautifully, but not in the way of Virginia Woolf and those for whom the writing is central and the focus – more like an experienced story-teller, who knows the best patterns of words to evoke character and pathos.

I’ve been on a Sylvia Townsend Warner library spree, with The True Heart, Summer Will Show and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (which must be one of the least attractive title of which I’ve ever heard – apparently a maggot is ‘a whimsical or perverse fancy’) – anyone read these? Or any others by STW? I’m going to try and get through at least one of these next week – those in the know have told me that none match up to Lolly Willowes, but that was so very good that a second best could be enjoyable too.