The Optimist by E.M. Delafield

E.M. Delafield is right up there with my favourite authors, but there are still some of her books on my shelves that I’ve had for the best part of 20 years. I recently took down The Optimist (1922), one of Delafield’s earlier novels and one I haven’t seen an awful lot of discussion about.

Owen Quintillian is a boy when he first spends time with the Morchard family – led by the calm dictator Canon Morchard, and accompanied by three of his young daughters (Lucilla, Flora, Valeria) and and one young son (Adrian), with another son David away at school. Canon Morchard acts as a tutor for Owen, but really this is a substitute family. Adrian is naughty and wilful, Valeria and Flora are romantic and emotional, and Lucilla is sternly obedient. Owen is perhaps the least categorisable; he is the onlooker, and almost takes the role of the reader.

I was reminded a lot of May Sinclair’s Anne Severn and the Fieldings, both in this section and in the rest of the novel – Owen, like Anne, is the only child who is both insider and outsider in the new community. He is expected to live by the rules of the household and understand its different mores and characters, but there is also a tacit understanding that he is a temporary participant.

Years later, when Owen has spent two years fighting in the war and a period recovering from shell shock in hospital, he returns to the Morchard family. Each child has grown, but the traits that were there before are still recognisable. Lucilla is still obedient, though with a weariness that wasn’t there before. The other sisters have romantic entanglements that include Owen in disastrous ways. Adrian and David are more enigmatic, being away at war – with everything that entails for the waiting family.

But the most dominant character – the ‘optimist’ of the title, mostly relating to patriotism and pro-war sentiment – is the Canon. He is a fascinating portrait of a domineering man slowly squeezing life out of his family, but not in a violent or ogreish way. Rather, as George Simmers wrote in his excellent review on Great War Fiction back in 2007, ‘Morchard is revealed as a monster of selfishness, manipulating his family by a form of moral blackmail – they are terrified of inspiring the pain he expresses when they cross him in the slightest particular.’

In fact, I will quote the same passage George used to illustrate this point:

“Valeria!” The Canon’s voice, subdued but distinct, came to them from without. “My dear, go to your room. This is not right, You are acting in defiance of my known wishes, although, no doubt, thoughtlessly. Bid your sister goodnight and go.”

Val did not even wait to carry out the first half of the Canon’s injunction. She caught up her brush and comb and left the room.

“Are my wishes so little to you, Valeria? Said her father, standing on the stairs. “It costs so small an act of self-sacrifice to be faithful to that which is least.”

“I’m sorry, father. We both forgot the time.”

“Thoughtless Valeria! Are you always to be my madcap daughter?”

His tone was very fond, and he kissed her and blessed her once more.

Valeria went to her own room.

She sat upon the side of her bed and cried a little.

His edicts always come from a firm moral code – one that sees himself as instructor and protector of the household. He is not just hurt but astonished if anybody contradicts or disobeys him, or even has a contrary opinion to him – there is one instance, later in the novel, where Lucilla must use long-learned manipulation to do what she believes is right, and he believes is wrong. In the Canon’s defence, he holds himself to the same high standards as everyone else, and repents and apologises if he contravenes them.

Owen is trying to establish himself as a writer, particularly one in revolt to most standards of Victorian behaviour, belief, and society. There is a clash here, when the Canon reads Owen’s magazine article on ‘The Myth of Self-Sacrifice’. While the narrative is largely on Owen’s side, it seems, there is also the suggestion that Owen’s views can be as self-indulgent and blinkered as the Canon’s, albeit from a different direction.

It’s a fascinating portrait of a family, and Owen is an excellent device for being both inside and outside the circle – it is only as The Optimist develops that we start to see more of Owen’s own character and flaws, and question some of the assumptions he has made about members of the family (and which we may have unquestioningly followed along with).

This is one of Delafield’s more serious novels but, being Delafield, there is a lightness of touch and an ironic sensibility that is never too far away. This sentence is quintessential Delafield, who always seems to return to the topic of self-(un)awareness in everything she writes:

Lucilla, for her consolation, reflected that few people are capable of distinguishing accurately between what they actually say, and what they subsequently wish themselves to have said, when reporting a conversation.

In George Simmer’s review, he concluded that The Optimist is ‘one of the most thought-provoking novels of the 1920s’ and among Delafield’s best. I think it is certainly one that would merit re-reading and thinking more deeply about. It is not among my favourite of Delafield’s, perhaps because that occasional lightness of tone isn’t reflected in the plot or characters and I prefer her in slightly more comic mode, with slightly more heightened characters – but I think there’s a very good argument that The Optimist is one of her most intriguing and complex novels.