The Story of Stanley Brent by Elizabeth Berridge – #NovNov Day 10

I read a book published by Michael Walmer yesterday, albeit in a different edition – and today I read one that was published by his imprint and sent to me as a review copy last year: The Story of Stanley Brent by Elizabeth Berridge, from 1945. It is so short a novella that it is practically a long short story – coming in at only 75 pages.

In it, it tells the story of Stanley Brent from the moment he proposes to Ada all the way to his death, and a little beyond. It encapsulates the ordinary life of a fairly ordinary man in the early 20th century. He is unimaginative and conservative, struggling to make an impression at work and barely making a mark on the wider world. Even his engagement and early marriage are a little awkward and understated. This is not a great romance. And, like so many women of the era, the mechanics of marriage are an unpleasant surprise to Ada:

Ada pushed a corner of the pillow into her mouth, nearly overcome with nausea. Her mother had told her nothing of what she might expect. That her body, washed meticulously and yet ignored by her, should attain such an importance, should cause a good and decent man like Stanley to be so – so bestial and undignified, was shattering. If Stanley could not be trusted, who could? And yet her friends who were married seemed happy enough, they had children… at this a fearful doubt struck her. Suppose they, as Stanley had said, taut and angry, his patience gone, suppose they enjoyed this hateful and frightening thing?

But they do have children, and Stanley is an affectionate but oddly passive father. The household economics do not thrive, and Berridge sketches out a decline.

It is all very brief – a pencil portrait that gives the outline of a life, with occasional forays into deeper detail. In it, we get glimpses of post-natal depression, of the General Strike, of alcoholism. It flashes past.

All in all, it is a curio. Berridge writes well, and I think could easily have turned this cast and the span of the lives here into a full-length novel. The fact that it instead blurs the line between novella and short story perhaps echoes the very insignificance of Brent’s life.