a gallimaufry

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021 is coming!

This morning I awoke to realise (1) it’s April! and (2) I hadn’t made a decision about Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week this year and July is drawing close for those of us with massed heaps of unread books reproaching us all around the house. It is time to Make Reading Plans!

Quick decision: this year I will once again try to persuade you to read some STW – but this is the last year of the reading weeks. Three is an excellent number and maybe it’s time for me (and you?) to obsess about someone new. Rallying my feeble computer skillz I have made a graphic which you are free to slap around the internet far and wide.

As usual, the Reading Week will fall in the first week of July – a time which has no especial significance in the life of STW.

Why read STW’s work? I refer you to my posts for the first week (in 2019) and the second week, plus all my STW posts and links to others’ reviews (2019 round-up and 2020 round-up), but in short STW was one of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century, distinctive, mordant and original. Her fiction concerns fourteenth-century nuns, nineteenth-century revolutionaries, Spanish peasants and English fairies. As well as novels and short stories, she could turn her hand to poetry and biography, and was a brilliant letter-writer. Her fans include Sarah Waters, Neil Gaiman, Hermione Lee and John Updike. Her biographer, Claire Harman, writes of her: ‘Every page contains something brilliant, arresting or amusing, and one comes away from it staggered.’

Reason enough to pick up one of her works.

The Sylvia Townsend Warner Society has a full bibliography, but here is a list of books I think are currently in print (with their original publication dates) – most of her novels have just become available in the Penguin Modern Classics series; some short stories (the fairy ones) have been re-published by Handheld Press (as have a collection of letters and a biography of Valentine Ackland), Persephone Books have published a collection of her wartime stories and there are four collections in the Faber Finds series:

Novels

Lolly Willowes (1926)

Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927; reissued by the NYRB with a novella under the title Mr Fortune)

The True Heart (1929)

Summer Will Show (1936)

After the Death of Don Juan (1937) 

The Corner that Held Them (1948)

The Flint Anchor (1954)

Short stories

Winter in the Air and Other Stories (1955) 

A Stranger with a Bag and Other Stories (1966) 

Kingdoms of Elfin (1977)

Scenes of Childhood and Other Stories (1981)

Selected Stories (1988)

The Music at Long Verney (2001)

Of Cats and Elfin (2020)

English Climate: The Wartime Stories of Sylvia Townsend Warner (2020)

Poetry

Selected Poems (1996)

New Collected Poems (2008)

Voices from Fairyland: The Fantastical Poems of Mary Coleridge, Charlotte Mew and Sylvia Townsend Warner (2008)

Letters

Letters (1982; Kindle only)

The Element of Lavishness: The Letters of William Maxwell and Sylvia Townsend Warner (2001)

The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White (2013)

Many of her books and her diaries are widely available second-hand too, and there is a biography by Claire Harman (who edited her diaries and her poems in the Carcanet collections).

You have two months! Get reading!

on how i spend my time now

I haven’t written about a book I’ve read this week because I have hardly been reading. Instead, I am completely addicted to the television series Line of Duty.

I had decided to watch the latest series, Series 6, as it’s shown on BBC1 because my friends are watching it. I thought the first episode was so compelling that I then rushed to the library to borrow the DVDs of the previous series. And for the last week, every moment when I haven’t been preparing lessons, teaching, cleaning, being nice to my family or waiting on the whims of the cats and the hens, I have been glued to series 1 and 2.

The series is what I would term at the macho end of the artistic scale: guns, police raids, brutality, corruption, crazy plot twists, no time to sniff the roses. Characters trot out jargon and standard phrases but the quality of the acting means that their expressions, their eyes, are often telling us more than their words. The phrase ‘line of duty’ takes on a metaphorical quality pretty early on. What and where is that line? Who crosses it (practically everyone) and why? Is it fixed? Loyalty to your colleagues is the highest virtue; how far can you let that take you before you cross the line? Line of Duty doesn’t provide any easy answers to this, everyone gets dirty one way or the other.

The two series I’ve watched so far feature the same central characters, who work for AC-12, an anti-corruption unit that investigates bent coppers. In the first series we watch the trajectory of a successful and popular detective inspector who, in order to cover up his ‘weak spot’, is drawn further and further into a web of criminality and corruption. The actor who plays him, and the writing, are so good that even as we are revolted by his actions we feel his anguish, his conviction that this is not who he is. His struggles form the core of the story. He is a classical tragic hero.

In the second series, the central character under investigation is more ambiguous. Hitherto an exemplary detective who has impoverished herself paying for her mother’s care in a home, she is (eventually) the sole survivor of an ambush on a protected witness and three police officers. Did she knowingly lead them into the ambush or has she been set up as the fall guy? Has she just been trying to do the right thing? As the series develops, we see the officers investigating her also make bad choices, commit adultery, hide their financial problems and lie about connections to the investigation in order to protect themselves or their friends. The series asks: are some actions acceptable in some circumstances and not in others? Why?

I am now impatiently waiting for the library to re-open tomorrow so that I can borrow the third series. I am also amazed that anyone remains in the police force since so many officers end up dead or compromised!

(Quentin Blake, illustration for ‘The Pig’ in Dirty Beasts by Roald Dahl, ink and watercolour, from here)

Meanwhile... I am trying to write a second children’s book. So far I have written one full draft. Then I started typing this up and got halfway through when I realised that my Cunning Plan for switching viewpoints in alternate chapters was actually a Terrible Idea. Now I have started again although with bits of the First Draft, telling the story just from one viewpoint – which has necessitated quite a bit of moving things around and changing things. I’ve also cut a sub-plot.

At the moment I have two major problems. One is trying to keep organised as I rewrite, but maybe I shouldn’t worry too much about that and hope that Future Helen sorts it out at the next stage. The other is that I now have a narrator who is a servant in an alternate nineteenth-century northern England. Obviously, her words will be read, not spoken, but I sort-of don’t want her to sound terribly middle-class while at the same time I don’t want her to end up either like Joseph in Wuthering Heights (unreadable!) or like a patronising stereotype (‘Oo arrh madam I do be heartily sorry’). My present solution is to get her to use a lot of idioms but I am not sure how well that’s working.

Anyway – I recommend Line of Duty. All of those years when people were saying it was good – they were right! Surprise! Is anyone else out there a fan?

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

ENTRY FOR THE NINETEENTH DAY OF THE SIXTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS
[...] On the way, the House showed me many wonders.
In the Forty-Fifth Vestibule I saw a Staircase that had become one vast bed of mussels. One of the Statues that lined the Wall of the Staircase was all but engulfed in a blue-black carapace of mussels with only half a staring Face and one white, out-flung Arm left free. I made a sketch of it in my Journal.
In the Fifty-Second Western Hall I came upon a Wall ablaze with so much golden Light that the Statues appeared to be dissolving into it. From there I passed into a cool little Antechamber with few Windows, where it was cool and shadowy. I saw the Statue of a Woman holding out a wide, flat Dish so that a Bear Cub could drink from it.

I have now read Piranesi and I am ready to tell you that it’s just as good as everyone says, albeit very different to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

It is impossible to write very much about it without spoiling it, and one of the pleasures is that you really don’t know at first where it’s going. So I’ll just explain that it takes the form of a series of journal entries by Piranesi (not his real name) who inhabits a vast labyrinth of abandoned stone halls. Seas wash the lower ones and clouds float through the higher ones. Many of the halls contain statues, but apart from the birds and the fish Piranesi lives alone. He has explored many of the halls and noted down his observations of them, but he has not found their limits. On his travels, he has found the bones of thirteen different people, and he cares for them, bringing food, drink and lilies as offerings. Piranesi loves the House and appreciates its beauty. His observations are a tribute to it; they are also essential to his survival since he records the tides which sporadically sweep through and would drown him if they caught him.

(Piranesi, ‘Via Appia and Via Ardeatina’, etching from Le Antichita Romane, 1756; from here)

However, there is something unsettling about the world from the beginning. Piranesi does not seem to belong there. Among the marble and the fishes, he sniffs the smell of petrol, which is out of place in this car-less place. How does he know the smell of petrol? He finds crisp packets. He is visited twice a week by the Other, who gives him a pair of brightly coloured trainers. He has a sleeping bag, a torch, plastic bowls to catch rainwater. Despite his meticulous record-keeping, there are holes in his memory. His innocence is both charming and odd; is it the result of some trauma?

Do you trust the House? I ask Myself.
Yes, I answer Myself.
And if the House has made you forget, it has done so for good reason.
But I do not understand the reason.
It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted.

The Other is the one who has named Piranesi. He does not seem to feel the beauty or the kindness of the House. He believes that that it is the repository of some secret and powerful knowledge which he intends to find and exploit. He knows that to stay too long in this world is to pay a price. He perceives the House as a prison, which presumably is why he has chosen the name Piranesi.

(Piranesi, ‘The Pier with the Chains’, etching from Carceri d'Inventione, 1750/1761; from here)

The question that the reader has is not, What will happen to Piranesi? but, What is this place and what does it mean? This places Piranesi in a tradition of Absurdist and Surreal literature in which characters are trapped in places that do not seem to be our world and are forced to reflect on themselves. I am thinking of Silvina Ocampo’s The Topless Tower, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, that sort of literature, though there are probably better-known examples which I just can’t remember. Unusually, Piranesi experiences the labyrinthine House as a benign, living entity. He feels a religious awe for it and his existence, his record-keeping, is a sort of worship. And without, I hope, giving too much away, it is a place that others long for even before they have seen it (this is explored in the interviews at the end of the novel). It is both a place of escape and a prison.

The novel abounds in literary allusions which give us further ways to understand the House. There is an epigraph from The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis, and at the heart of that novel is the Wood Between the Worlds which contains the entrances to many different universes. Something similar occurs in this novel. There is also an abandoned city (although Charn is dead, and the House is living) and a magician who likes to experiment upon people, both of which may be relevant to Piranesi.

Near the beginning of the novel, Piranesi encounters an albatross.

Still it continued, straight towards me, and the strangest thought came to me: perhaps the albatross and I were destined to merge and become another order of being entirely: an Angel! This thought both excited and frightened me, but still I remained, arms outstretched, mirroring the albatross’s  flight. [...] The moment that he reached me – the moment that I thought we would collide like Planets and become one! – I gave out a sort of gasping cry – Aahhhh! In the same instant, I felt some sort of pent-up tension go out of me, a tension I did not know I had until that moment. Vast, white wings passed over me.

Far from shooting it with a crossbow, as did the Ancient Mariner, he feels kinship with the bird, concern for its chick. And the arrival of the albatross heralds significant changes for Piranesi.

(Piranesi, detail from ‘The Triumphal Arch’, etching from Grotteschi, 1748; from here)

A final literary allusion is to ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges. In this story, two characters discuss the ancestor of one of them, who declared he would write a novel and create a garden labyrinth. When he died, his relatives found a jumble of papers which made no sense. Stephen Albert, the man who has translated these papers, explains that novel is the labyrinth. In most fiction, characters are presented with questions, they make a choice and the consequences of that choice follow. But in this novel, every possible choice is explored, every forking path, and the book just carries on expanding. This seems to me to bear a relationship to the nature of the House, which is endless and apparently living. Perhaps it is created by the collective imagination, constantly expanding, prison and freedom. It is, after all, an artifice constructed between the sea and the sky.

She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India 1600–1900, by Katie Hickman

Many of us have an idea of the memsahib, the white, middle-class British wife who lived in India during the years of the Raj, and it’s not a very complimentary one. A life of cocktail parties, bullying the servants and boredom springs to mind. It’s this easy stereotype that Katie Hickman seeks to challenge in this fascinating survey of British women who made a home, temporarily or permanently, in India before the twentieth century. If you’re remotely interested in this subject, I really can’t recommend this book enough – Hickman has a novelist’s eye for character and story, as well as a historian’s talent for analysis and research, and it’s a lively as well as informative read.

The recorded history of British women in India begins in 1617, with a Mrs Towerson, wife of an East India Company captain, voyaging to India with two female companions, Mrs Hudson and Frances Webb. Even before they reached Gujarat there was scandal, for Frances Webb secretly married a fellow-traveller, Richard Steele, and became pregnant by him. Horrors! When they arrived in the English community at Surat, it was to an unappetising all-male drinking and gaming club where they were not made welcome. The very act of embarking on a perilous eight-month journey to a land they could hardly have imagined in their wildest dreams surely marks out these women as unusually intrepid. Mrs Hudson, at least, proved also to be an astute businesswoman and left two years later with a rich cargo to sell on in Europe.

(Jan Van Ryne, A Perspective View of Fort William in the Kingdom of Bengal, belonging to the East India Company of England, 1754; found here)

In the eighteenth century, British women began travelling to India in larger numbers and recorded their experiences in diaries and letters. However, an adventurous spirit was still required of them. Eliza Fay, wife of an Irish advocate, arrived in Calicut just as a war was breaking out. Not only were she and her husband kept captive for a month in very unpleasant and frightening circumstances, but another Englishwoman nicked her teapot and tea caddy. Once freed, Mrs Fay went on to enjoy a fine life in Calcutta and write sharp-eyed letters home: little escaped her notice. (My liking for her, however, took a blow when I later read that she had a slave, Kitty Johnson, whom she abandoned on the island of St Helena.) Expatriate society was somewhat less rigid about morality than the mother country. Elizabeth Marsh was captured on a merchant ship sailing from Gibraltar to be given as a present to the Sultan of Morocco; for protection she pretended to be married to another prisoner, James Crisp. Some twenty years later she left Crisp, now in fact her husband, to travel around southern India with an unmarried man who was almost certainly her lover.

By the nineteenth century, enormous fortunes were being made in India (think of Joseph Sedley in Vanity Fair). On the whole, British and Indian women did not mix and Hickman suggests that this was due to restrictive social codes on both sides, as well as of course a lack of cultural curiosity among the British and their habit of recreating Surrey in India rather than adapting to local lifestyles. Still, there were exceptions, Fanny Parkes being perhaps the most notable and the most ready to ‘see life from the Indian perspective’. She travelled all around India, made Indian friends, learnt Indian languages, learnt to play the sitar and ate opium as well as Indian food:

How much there is to delight the eye in this bright and beautiful world! Roaming about with a good tent and a good Arab, one might be happy for ever... Oh the pleasure of vagabondizing through India!

(She also most entertainingly drove the grand and not-vagabondizing Eden sisters round the bend by popping up wherever they went on their own grand tour.)

The aristocratic Henrietta Clive was quite taken aback by the vulgarity of many of the British in India. Abjuring most of them, she learnt Persian and Hindi and interested herself in botany. She took her daughters to festivals and to visit temples and later on a seven-month tour of India, which required fourteen elephants to carry their tents and a hundred bullocks pulling carts for all their luggage (including a harp). The lands through which they travelled had just been taken by the East India Company after the Second Mysore War. Henrietta Clive marvelled unquestioningly at the plunder from Tipu Sultan’s palace: ‘What a wonderful people we are really...’

(Joshua Reynolds, Lady Henrietta Herbert [later Clive], ca. 1777; found here)

Gradually, the British became less and less open to India, and then we reach the uprising of 1857 and that’s it for tolerance. This section is very hard to read and what happened must have traumatised both the British, who could never forget the sheer horror of incidents like the massacre at Cawnpore and thus never feel secure again, and of course the Indians, who endured a terrible collective retribution.

Yet British women continued to go out to India and if they were not sympathetic to Indian culture they were undoubtedly industrious housekeepers, many of them in isolated outposts with husbands who proved less than satisfactory. Flora Annie Steel, author of the Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, was a fine example of this. Housekeeping did not satisfy her, however. Owner of squirrels and arranger of reading parties, she soon turned her attentions to education and was appointed Inspectress of Schools in the Punjab.

(Cropped photograph of Flora Annie Steel, 1904; found here)

This fascinating social history has only one drawback: inevitably you want to know more about the individual women whom Hickman discusses than she has place for, and about the land they could not or would not understand. And of course, it would be nice to have more of a perspective on them from the Indians alongside whom they lived, if there were any such record. Nevertheless, it is a lively starting point and I heartily recommend it, as does Nala the cat, who tried to eat it.

reading notes, 5th March 2021

(Dogwalking chez gallimaufry; French school, early nineteenth century, A Young Woman Standing Reading a Book in the Woods, her Dog beside her, oil on canvas; found here)

Writing about books takes me an insanely long time, and sometimes I don’t have an insanely long time to devote to it. Sometimes I read a book and I enjoy it but I don’t have anything to say about it. So I thought what I might do, fairly regularly, is write a short post about what I’ve been reading and what I’m looking forward to reading, no real analysis, no spoilers. And then I hope that in the comments, you’ll tell us what you’ve been reading and are looking forward to reading.

I have just finished...

Once Upon a River by Diane Setterfield. I found it in the library and for some reason I borrowed it. ‘For some reason’ because I read her first novel, The Thirteenth Tale, and began by enjoying it but found the ending unsatisfying – annoying, even. And then I read her second novel, Bellman & Black, and did not like it at all. Still, there was something about the way she writes... So I’m very glad that I persevered because I really did enjoy Once Upon a River and it was exactly the right book at the right time.

One midwinter night a man bursts into The Swan at Radcot, on the Thames, carrying a dead child in his arms, and collapses. Miraculously, the child returns to life. But who is she? Is she Amelia Vaughan, who was abducted two years ago and never seen again? Her parents believe so. Is she Alice Armstrong, whose desperate mother has drowned herself? Her father claims her. Could she be Ann, Lily White’s little sister, even though Lily is now a woman in her forties? And how can a dead child revive? It’s a novel about the stories people tell themselves, as entertainment or exploitation or as a means of surviving, where they come from and how they can change. It brings a nineteenth-century community to life, it’s funny and sad but ultimately a cheering book, and it features a sapient pig.

I am looking forward to...

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. For reasons too boring to list here, I had ordered a copy of this before it was published but was only able to get my hands on it (thanks to my kind mother) yesterday. Entirely by coincidence, I had been having a tiny Susanna Clarke fest. My daughter had received the DVD of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell for her birthday (yes it was from me, pretending to be the hens; I knew she’d enjoy it and I am of course softening her up for when she’s old enough to read the novel). We watched that, and I’d been rereading stories from The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Piranesi lives in a wonderful house quite alone, except for Tuesdays and Fridays when he’s visited by his only friend, the Other. But then messages start appearing, chalked onto the pavements: there is someone else in the house. A friend or, as the Other tells Piranesi, a foe?

What have you just finished? And what are you looking forward to reading next?

Flyaway, by Kathleen Jennings

Kathleen Jennings is an Australian illustrator with an interesting blog. I can’t remember where I first saw her work, but I do remember seeing a warm recommendation of Flyaway, her first novel, from Terri Windling. Without bothering to find out anything about it, I spent my Christmas book token on a copy and settled down to read it by the stove, one icy evening.

Our narrator is Bettina Scott, aged nineteen, living with her mother Nerida in the prettiest and tidiest house in Runagate, a small Australian town in a district ‘somewhere between the Coral Sea and the Indian Ocean but on the way to nowhere’. Despite Nerida’s careful homemaking and tender pruning of Bettina into a model of 1950s girlhood decades too late, all is not quite perfect in the Scott household since Bettina’s ‘mocking father and unloving brothers’ vanished three years previously. Bettina is busy ‘scrubbing out a little more, too, of that old childish self – the restless temper, the loose-limbed insolence’, almost but not entirely successfully. Sometimes a lie escapes. Sometimes she has a nip of the cooking brandy.

Beyond the lattice of roads, paddocks and houses, the land around Runagate has ‘a fragile beauty’ which gets ‘into your bones, into your veins’. It is a land of ‘hills and scrub’, ‘purple shadows’ and tough trees: ‘Bottle and box, paper and iron, thorned and blossomed under the unutterable light [...] Trees like lanterns, like candles, ghosts and bones’. It is a haunted landscape: ‘Memory seeped and frayed there’. It is beautiful but dangerous. People vanish into the landscape, just disappear. Bettina’s family are not the only ones.

Two strangers are seen in town and someone paints the word ‘monsters’ on the Scotts’ fence. Believing that the strangers are her brothers, returned, Bettina and two of her former schoolfriends, Gary and Trish, follows them, a small quest with a Tupperware box of sandwiches. (Trish’s mother vanished too, years ago. And so did Gary’s uncle.)

It’s a short book, complex, thorny and tangled as the lantern bush that engulfs the village school at Woodwild. I read in a state of constant fear, yet enjoying the rich and evocative prose. Bettina’s repressed and partial narrative is interwoven with stories about other disappearances and explain them in terms of magic and monstrosity, borrowing motifs from folk lore and fairy tale. The further into the bush the three companions go, the more threatening the landscape becomes. The stories are chilling: a shape-shifting megarrity which will take your place at the dinner table, a wolfish Pied Piper, a bone horse. What do these stories mean? What kernel do they transform? Fantasy and reality become so deeply entwined there is no separating them any more (perhaps just a bit too confusing, ultimately?).

Far too creepy to read on your own at night, you will enjoy this in daylight if you like the work of Kelly Link, Zoe Gilbert or Angela Carter. But really, it is unlike anything I have ever read: an eerie song to the power of land and story.

(Kathleen Jennings, Into the Woods, silhouette; from her portfolio here)

a late start

Hello and a happy new year!

(Virginia Lee, clay sculpture and drawing; from her blog here)

I suppose I’ve been hibernating, in a way, these past few months. It turns out that December was quite a difficult month for me and by the time we reached the holidays all I wanted to do was hide and read. And then the transition period for Brexit ended, and there we were, me here in Belgium and my fellow countrymen in Britain, and even though I was completely prepared for it and knew what to expect, I suddenly felt excluded and rejected by my own country. Which was irrational, but there we are.

Anyway, after that massive whinge I can assure you I am feeling a lot better now. ‘What’s happening in Belgium?’ I hear you cry. Well, like everyone else we are mainly avoiding other people and most things – museums, galleries, theatres, cafés – are closed. Schools are not, although secondary schools and adult education centres are providing a mixture of online and in-school lessons. Hairdressers have just re-opened! People all across the land fluffed their grey roots and danced for joy. (Not me, as I’m a home-haircut person.) We’ve just had a verrrry cold week, which displeased the hens. We were warned by experts that icicles Can Be Dangerous. I played in the snow and never knowingly wore fewer than three pairs of socks.

(Boris Zvorykin, illustration for Snegurochka, 1925; gouache and ink; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

I’ve read a lot of good books and I will write about some of them here. I might change some things about this blog, I might not. I’ve been practising driving the car (I had about eleventy billion lessons in the summer and autumn, and now I have a special learner’s licence which means I can drive alone without my husband!!!!). The driving part is not so bad and I can now do this without turning into a trembling wreck, but I’m not terribly accurate at parking. Yet.

And I’ve gritted my teeth and got back to work on novel #2. It had been languishing since April last year. I had written a first draft, and then made a proper plan, and got halfway through a second draft when I abandoned it. Blowing the dust off it, I’ve realised that narrating it from two alternating viewpoints wasn’t working so I have been changing and planning some more and pulling out a subplot that was a bit rubbish. (A lot rubbish.) And then the wonderful Golden Egg Academy ran a series of free seminars for aspiring children’s writers over one weekend. The seminars were great: inspiring but also very practical and full of tips you could take away and put to immediate use. Judging by them, Golden Egg’s creative writing courses are extremely good and worth every penny but even so sadly beyond the gallimaufry purse at present (and anyway my writing is still very much a self-indulgence and not really a serious pursuit). So this was truly an opportunity and a boon.

I found a tiny snowdrop in our front garden this morning. That seems as good a sign as any to wriggle out of my nest of dead leaves and moss and emerge blinking into 2021.

merry Christmas

(Stanley Spencer, The Nativity, UCL Art Museum, via Art UK; photo: UCL Culture; estate of Stanley Spencer/Bridgeman Images)

I am sorry I have not posted here for a while, December has been more difficult than I anticipated.

Still, a merry Christmas to anyone who happens upon this page! And may 2021 be better to you than 2020 has been. Possibly the only – but important! – good thing I am taking from 2020 is how very, very wonderful friends and family are. (Also: booze.) Cherish yours – and take good care of yourselves too. Enjoy the holidays, see you in the new year, be splendid.

Advent 2020

It is the beginning of Advent and, like Hayley, I am contemplating Christmas. For the past four years or so, I have always spent Christmas with my daughter at my parents’ house. (My husband mainly doesn’t care about Christmas, rousing himself occasionally to actual dislike of it, so we’d heartlessly leave him behind to keep the cats and hens and hamsters company.)

Christmas in Belgium is slightly different from Christmas in Britain, slightly – slightly – less commercial. Belgians also put up lights and decorate trees, and their Christmas markets are famous. (Although I was most disappointed by our local market for many years, which was purportedly on a ‘Charles Dickens’ theme. Yes – had Charles Dickens been a cowboy! Unless he’s also famous for novels set in the American Wild West...)

On the 5th December Sinterklaas comes, riding a white horse across the roofs and perhaps accompanied by the controversial figure of Zwarte Piet. They have travelled to Belgium from Spain on a steamboat, and they have presents for all good children. Children put out shoes and among the presents may find pepernoten, oranges and chocolate letters. (No pepernoten in our house though as everyone hates them.)

Then on Christmas Eve, families meet to exchange gifts and eat together. (This spreads out the presents, quite an advantage.) Christmas Day is for going to Mass and having a nice dinner, although there are no traditional foods, you can eat whatever you like!

This year will be different. Belgium, having messed up in the second wave even more perhaps than it messed up in the first wave, remains under tight restrictions (today all the shops have reopened, which is good news for them but also for those of us who haven’t bought any presents yet). There are no Christmas markets, no cafés and no parties. We are allowed one visitor in the house, or a gathering of four adults outdoors, over the festive season.

This means a great deal of freedom and yet also a great deal of restriction in deciding how we will celebrate Christmas this year. I enjoy finding nice presents for people but since many of them live in the UK I have to start in good time or find myself under pressure, which takes away the pleasure. Usually I send a mixture of Christmas cards and Christmas emails to friends and family, but this year I am going to make a special effort to write more cards (also, E designed a Christmas card as part of one of those drives that schools have to raise money for themselves so I have a lot of jolly cards with a Pokémon character on them – nothing says ‘Christmas’ like a Pokémon character after all – and I need to find them homes). We’ll go to Mass and eat salmon and play boardgames.

I also want to do something a little bit special, because I think it would be a shame if we spent the rest of our lives looking back and saying, ‘Do you remember that dreary Christmas in 2020?’ And so we’re going to have fire in the garden on Christmas Eve, and invite a few family members to come and sit around it. My initial plan was a massive bonfire, with possibly some wild dancing around it. But this was not greeted with enthusiasm by the rest of the family, and since our guests will all be either under ten or driving, the bacchanalian possibilities are limited. Instead, we have a rather prim-looking brazier and I am looking for good recipes for hot chocolate. If you never hear from me again, you’ll know we managed to burn the house down anyway.

(The illustrations in this post are all Victorian Christmas cards. I found them here, except for the second and most startling one, which is from here. If you enjoy murderous frogs and children in teapots, you can find more nineteenth-century strangeness at both sites...)

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson

(Steps, by Simon Marsden)

I started to write this at the beginning of the half-term holiday, for Hallowe’en and to participate in Witch Week. It was a sullen, grey day, we’d had to cancel the little party for my daughter due to tighter Covid restrictions and even the prospect of an extra week’s half-term holiday was failing to lift my spirits. So I did not get far with it, but now that the sun is shining and the positive rate of new infections is at last falling, everything seems a lot better and I seem to be regaining the urge to write.

Here, belatedly, are my thoughts on Women’s Weird, a most enjoyable collection, and on ‘ghost stories’ in general. It is Friday 13th, so a not inauspicious day for something uncanny.

The book is exactly as the title describes it and includes work by American and British authors from the tail end of the Victorian period until 1940. Although many of them are well known (if surprising: I had no idea that D.K. Broster wrote ghost stories, although why shouldn’t she?) – and include These include E. Nesbit (of course!), Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton – only a couple of the stories appear in other, similar anthologies (of which I seem to have rather more than I thought, perhaps they have been spawning while I wasn’t looking), so there is plenty of new material here for long-standing fans of creepiness.

Crucially, these aren’t just effective ghost stories. Edmundson has been looking specifically for ‘Weird’ stories, and she discusses what Weird is in her (excellent) introduction to the collection. As a very bald summary of her definition, Weird stories engage with the supernatural but are ‘something more than the traditional ghost story’, eliciting ‘a profound sense of dread [H.P. Lovecraft’s words]’ as well as ‘a stirring, a touching of nerves not usually sensitive, an awakening to more than fear – but to something like awareness or conviction or even memory [Mary Butts’ words]’, ‘an alternative path for the exploration of the numinous [Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s words]’. The stories seek to unsettle through disturbing manifestations of the supernatural, shaking our complacent view of reality. This collection, Edmundson explains, reflects the fact that ‘During the late Victorian period and into the early twentieth century, women’s supernatural fiction became much darker as newer, more ominous presences emerged [...] This collection surveys some of these experimental forms to show how these authors moved beyond the traditional ghost story and into areas of Weird fiction and dark fantasy.’

For me, a spooky story provides two experiences: the story while you’re reading it, and the story when you’ve finished it. Obviously all literary forms do this, but it seems to me especially significant in this genre. While you’re reading it, you should feel chilled, horrified, unsettled. This is difficult for a writer to achieve. Readers are cynical and they know the tropes. Don’t disturb the ancient grave or hiding place; don’t ignore the old tales. Evil deeds have consequences. Don’t be a sweet young wife or (in this collection anyway) a dog. (In fact, it may be wisest to focus on a sense of inevitability about the story than to attempt a shocking twist.) But the end of a ghost or Weird story often forces you to reinterpret what has gone before: perhaps it offers an explanation, perhaps a catharsis. A good story does both elements satisfyingly well; an exceptional story explores something else at the same time and means that you can reread the story even if you ‘know the ending’ and still find new and interesting aspects.

So, the first story in the collection, ‘The Weird of the Walfords’, contains few surprises for the seasoned reader of haunted tales. The young heir to the Walfords hates the ancestral family bed in which so many of his forefathers have died; when he inherits Walford Grange he takes an axe and chops it to pieces. Of course, bad things ensue. But what is young Humphrey really trying to destroy along with the bed? What does it represent to him – death, the stifling responsibilities of an aristocrat to the buildings and things he is supposed to keep in trust for the next generation? And in a weird and horrible way, does he get what he wants in the end?

(Ecclescraig House, by Simon Marsden)

I like best stories that don’t explain away too much. For me, ‘Let Loose’ – a truly spine-tingling account of an architect (and his dog!) who descends into a bone-stacked crypt to copy a wall-painting – is most effective when you don’t quite know what’s happening. The explanation was a bit weak, frankly, in comparison with the power of the haunting and left me with too many questions which I won’t pose here because I don’t want to spoil it for you. In creating an atmosphere of dread and winding up the tension, it is supremely skilful. It is also significant because it invents a structure of ghost story (according to Wikipedia: 1. characterful setting; 2. gentleman scholar; 3. antiquarian object whose disturbance awakens a supernatural being) which was later to be associated with M.R. James. Let it now be associated with Mary Cholmondely!

‘The Twelve Apostles’ by Eleanor Scott follows in this Cholmondely tradition and is also an excellent example of its kind. Even though you know what’s coming, and are muttering to yourself, ‘No no no don’t do it’, it’s still shocking.

(Melrose Abbey, by Simon Marsden)

‘The Shadow’, by E. Nesbit, is as different as can be from ‘Let Loose’. There is no ghost, only a shadow haunting a modern house and three people in it: a young married couple and their friend Miss Eastwich who visits them after the (never-named) husband asks her to come and cheer up his sweet young wife Mabel, who is poorly. The husband fears it is some curse; he must have a guilty conscience but he claims he does not, and we never find out – though perhaps it is connected somehow with Miss Eastwich...

Specifically feminist concerns feature in many stories, such as ‘The Giant Wistaria’ and ‘Kerfol’, while Margery Lawrence subverts a symbol of ordinary domesticity and the feminine rôles of wife, nurse and cook in the delightfully sinister ‘The Haunted Saucepan’. ‘The Book’, by Margaret Irwin, describes the collapse of a middle-class family in a truly nasty case of evil influence.

My favourite of all, however, was the last one: ‘With and Without Buttons’, by Mary Butts. Two bored sisters are irritated by their neighbour and decide to cook up a ghost to frighten him. Is what follows their own creation, gone horribly out of control, or something else that was just waiting for an opportunity? It is one of a pair of stories – the other being D.K. Broster’s ‘Couching at the Door’ – which turns articles of women’s clothing into something life-threatening (to men).

Hallowe’en and Witch Week may have ended but this time of year is perfect for stories like this – and a second volume, Women’s Weird 2, was published just a few weeks ago. And remember: Covid 19 restrictions are depressing, but at least you’re not being menaced by powers beyond the grave.

(The photographs in this post are all by Simon Marsden, whose beautiful book The Haunted Realm captured my imagination as a teenager. His pictures derive their eerie, Weird atmosphere from his use of infrared film)