a gallimaufry

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)

Hexwood, by Diana Wynne Jones

Some thousand years ago in February I wrote about The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern and postulated that it might have been influenced by video games. (This was, I admit, quite a reach since I don’t play video games, but knowing very little about something has rarely prevented me from pontificating.) Anyway, in the comments we wondered about a subgenre of fiction influenced by video games. Chris mentioned Codex by Lev Grossman but I don’t think we came up with any others.

Now, perhaps here is a third novel to add to that subgenre: Diana Wynne Jones’s Hexwood, from 1993, which uses elements of gaming as its plot in a far more fundamental way than I think Morgenstern did.

First of all, what is Hexwood? To teenaged Ann, lying in bed with a virus, it is the housing estate on which she lives – with Hexwood Farm, a derelict old place behind crumbling walls. People enter it but never seem to leave. To Hume, it is a woodland filled with strange creatures, a castle, a white van. To the Reigners, it is an old library and archive on Earth, a remote and backward outpost in their intergalactic empire.

But in all these guises Hexwood houses the Bannus, an ancient computer whose function is to make decisions by creating an ever-expanding theta-field and:

live action scenarios of any set of facts and people you care to feed into it. [It] acts little plays for you, until you find the right one and tell it to stop.

What does that mean? It means that it generates an alternative reality into which it pulls people and circumstances. In this alternative reality the people play out different scenarios, on and on, until an outcome is reached and someone stops the machine. And each of these scenarios is itself a sort of alternate reality, since the people playing them have no memory of the previous versions.

At the beginning of the book, a young man called Harrison Scudamore has succeeded in getting himself employed by Rayner Hexwood, the manifestation of the Reigner Corporation on Earth, and has switched on the Bannus. More and more people are being sucked into it to play out its scenarios. Can anyone stop it – and how? 

This device of the playing out of versions of a similar story is very like that of many video games, in which you have a character and a set of circumstances and at each stage a variety of possible decisions which shape the way that the game moves. And one (or possibly more!) set of decisions will lead you to a successful outcome and the winning of the game.

In many of her novels, Diana Wynne Jones uses alternate worlds and realities (The Homeward Bounders, Fire and Hemlock, the Chrestomanci series, to name but a few), so the conceit of the computer game is obviously attractive to her. The Bannus layers different realities over each other, but what is ‘real’ and what is ‘game’ is further complicated by the lies and misdirections of some characters and the confusion of others over who they ‘really’ are – since they inhabit more than one identity. Furthermore, time is not linear but skips back and forth. The Fisher King has apparently been in his castle for years at the beginning of the novel, but in fact only arrives there halfway through. (This makes much more sense in the book.)

Hexwood I think goes further, in asking questions about free will and control, which again come from the device of the video game. When someone plays a video game, they know they are playing and they know what their goal is, even if they only have control over their own character. In Hexwood you are in the game, but you don’t know it, you think you are in the ‘real’ world and acting from your own free will. The Bannus is the one who is playing, and without your consent or even knowledge, since your memory is wiped each time.

Wynne Jones make the parallel with political systems clear. If the Bannus, compelling people to play a game they do not understand and removing parts of their memories to do so, has a sinister aspect, how much more does the Reigner Corporation, which seeks to control and (mis)shape people to suit their own ends, treating them as having no more value than some pixels on a screen? The training of children to become Servants – official assassins to the Reigners – is truly chilling. Yet the power of the Corporation, like that of the Bannus, seems so great as to be unstoppable.

Of course, there is a lot of fun too. Wynne Jones also throws in dragons, a robot, Arthurian legend, a magician and problematic middle managers, all handled with her customary verve and humour. It is complex and even the outline I have given is not accurate because what happens right up until the end of the novel is that your perception of what is happening – and even what the Bannus is – is constantly shifting (due to the lies and misdirections I mentioned before). It’s also a timely reminder that the checks and balances built in to any system of government are both deeply important and deeply vulnerable so we should fight for them while we still have them, ahem British government (yes I know it is a cheap political point sorry).

What do you think? Have you read Hexwood? Can you think of any other novels which use video games in some way?

wittering on

Happy Monday, everyone!

Summer is definitely over now, and with it the pleasure of life opening up again after the Covid-19 restrictions. The numbers of people admitted to hospital and dying are slowly rising, here in Belgium and also across much of Europe. It all feels as if we’re in March 2020 again – but this time, with all the Brexit highlights of 2019 thrown in: the dire warnings, the impending deadline, the uncertainty over whether agreement between the UK and the EU can be achieved, the fear that it won’t.

So I’m back to checking the news every five seconds and I note that I haven’t read much over the last few weeks, though I have started a lot of books. A noticeable exception was the latest instalment in Christelle Dabos’s fantasy quartet: The Memory of Babel.

This series, The Mirror Visitor, is set on what might be Earth in the future, after an event called the Rupture which has split the planet into many pieces, called Arks. The Arks float in a shared atmosphere and each one has a presiding Family Spirit, who has special Powers, some of which can be inherited by their offspring. Ophelia, an unassuming archivist, is able to ‘read’ objects with her hands as well as to bring them to life; she also has the more unusual ability to travel through mirrors. To her surprise, a marriage is arranged between her and Thorn, the arrogant, rude Treasurer on the icy Pole Ark. What is the purpose of this marriage?

Unravelling this and associated mysteries brings Ophelia repeatedly into danger as she explores the origins of the Arks and the Spirits themselves. The books unspool at a tremendous pace and are quite complex (I had to reread the first two because I had forgotten so many important details). There is steam punk, a floating city, people who can fold space or create illusions as real as reality, a nightclub in the catacombs, murders, disguises, doubles, a circus, an animated woolly scarf. Reading, libraries and books are of central importance and I feel convinced that the secrets of the world’s origins are going to be quite meta. I’ll have to wait at least a year to find out!

I have also decided to avoid a Leonard Bast demise and put away some of my books. For a while now, I’ve been havering between two positions: (1) I love all my books and will not be parted from them and (2) I don’t really care about most of my books and am too weighed down by materialism and the need to possess things – let me bet rid of them all! I have read with admiration of people purging their bookshelves down to a core of books they really love, and have looked enviously at other people’s extensive book collection while re-reading a book I’ve had for thirty years.

Since we have an attic, I finally decided to take the easy way out, not make a proper decision and put some books into boxes up there. Then I spent months on and off wondering which books to keep up there. It seemed better to emboxen whole categories of book, rather than skim through the shelves and pick out some I thought myself less likely to re-read in the near future (which might then languish for ever). This past weekend I finally did it. Books that went up there: most of my old children’s books (though by no means all) and what I call ‘girly fantasy’ (Patricia McKillip, Theodora Goss, Peter Beagle, etc.). Detective fiction may also go up there.

Behind the piles of books I found some forgotten treasures lurking on the shelves! This was an unexpected bonus.

But now, gazing at the wall o’ books in the sitting room, I am bitterly regretting the impulse a few years ago that made me re-shelve my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. It’s actually not very practical AT ALL. I want to return to alphabetical order! However, I do not think I can face the massive task of re-shelving once more...

(Gratuitous painting by the Napolitan artist Colantonio of St Jerome in his study; obviously the lion is the best bit but St Jerome is almost as untidy as I am; painted 1445–6 and now in the National Museum of Capodimonte; found here)

A Day to Remember to Forget, by Rosalind Brackenbury

It’s the late 1960s and Phil and Lucy have just decided to get married; they are still students but have fallen in love with an old farmhouse they intend to buy even if it’s not entirely clear how they’ll pay for it (‘when the loot runs out, I’ll sell books and vegetables,’ says Phil airily). They are on their way to Phil’s childhood home in suburbia, for his mother’s fiftieth birthday. This novel centres on that birthday and on the relationships between the members of Phil’s family, the Ridgelys. It explores the tensions between generations, the frustrations of love and the power of domesticity. By soaking the reader in the thoughts of Lucy, Phil, Phil’s mother Felicity, and Mrs Fletcher, the Ridgelys’ elderly neighbour, Rosalind Brackenbury weaves a striking and acute novel that has stayed with me. Unlike a lot of ‘stream-of-consciousness-type’ novels, it has a physicality, an earthiness to it. The characters are so deeply and solidly imagined that it’s impossible not to believe in them and I catch myself wondering what happened to them all, where is Lucy now aged almost seventy?

(Carel Weight, The Departing Angel, 1961; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

Felicity Ridgely is the very definition of house-proud. Her home is spotlessly clean, she works ceaselessly to ensure that her kitchen is ordered and her linen ironed. Why this is so important, she no longer knows. She spends most of her birthday cooking, preparing and clearing up meals for the rest of the family: breakfast, a roast lunch, afternoon tea, supper. Her husband, George, and her sons try to lure her away, to have a drink, to rest, but she refuses. She takes no pleasure in all this housework – in fact, she deeply resents it and plays the martyr constantly. But if it were to be taken away from her, her life would be empty. She has nothing else.

She and George are conventional in their attitudes – pathologically so, in Phil’s eyes. They mistrust Mrs Fletcher, who lives next door in a dark, decaying house: her husband was a conscientious objector and died unhappily. They cannot express their love for their sons. Felicity feels her blunders painfully, but cannot pull herself out of the pattern that elicits them. But their worst crime, according to Phil, is their dishonesty. They lie about the past and Phil’s childhood.

Andrew, Phil’s elder brother, is kinder to them:

‘I see they had to invent it all,’ Andrew said, ‘because they’re so bloody miserable now. Because they can’t stand not having had a happy past to gloat over, so they invent one, they allow themselves to see it all different because otherwise life would be intolerable. [...] So don’t take it away from them. Because it’s cruel, and unnecessary. [...] Shit, they didn’t even have a chance to find out who they were and where they lived before they were slap-bang in the middle of a bloody war, shooting hell out of a bunch of other kids on the other side of Europe. They didn’t have a chance. They couldn’t say, me first, and this is what I want, and I want to live in a big house in the country and nobody bugging me please.’

Andrew has followed the path laid out by his parents – university, job, marriage, child – but he has adapted it to suit himself and sublimated his resentment. Phil, however, wants none of it, rejects ‘all the rubbish’ of this sort of life, ‘nothing natural or living or real’. Rejection is the only way he believes he can survive.

Phil said, ‘But how can one have a choice, really? Everything’s there before you’re born. All the things other generations have done, in their turn, I suppose, without a choice. And they go on after one’s dead. You can’t change anything. You can only decide not to accept it. You just have to go and do your own thing, as they say, and let the rest get stuffed, if they want to. It’s too late. One doesn’t have time.’
‘Just one life,’ Mrs Fletcher said, not answering him, her eyes blurred now with fatigue. ‘Just a few years. You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

Yet of course it’s a qualified rejection, because the life he envisages is, like Andrew’s, ultimately only a different version of the same thing. It’s property ownership, marriage and children, just with long hair and cigarettes and swearing. When he and Lucy visit Mrs Fletcher for a glass of sherry, they describe their dreams with great enthusiasm:

‘But a house,’ Lucy plunged in, her thin hands in the air, gesturing around a shape. ‘A house can mean more than just walls, more than just a place. You know? One makes something, expresses something. And sometimes, one just finds the perfect thing, the perfect place, something that’s been sort of waiting for one.’
‘And if one falls in love,’ said Mrs Fletcher, ‘one must act.’
‘Yes! That’s just what happened! It was as if it had been left there for us, just at the right moment. That’s why we have to have it, at whatever risk. Because I do think, don’t you...’ her hands moved again, swiftly, ‘that if one is offered something great one is offered a risk too; and if you can accept the risk, you get the greatness. Oh, dear, I am explaining it badly. But no, this is what happens, if you fall in love with a person, isn’t it? You risk your whole self, you give yourself away – oh, completely – and it’s the most awful risk, but if the person accepts you, then you have the greatness too, oh, and everything.’

Mrs Fletcher, who once also defied convention for the love of a man named Phil, is gently sceptical. And underneath, Lucy is a little sceptical too. Does she really want to marry Phil? (She’s only nineteen.) She imagines the perfect life, but will the house provide that, or will it prove a trap like the one that has caught Felicity? Will her marriage be a union of equals, or will she end up afraid of Phil? At the end of the novel she and Phil drive out at dusk to see the house, and it is surrounded by little fires as the farmers burn the stubble: a potent and ambiguous image.

Lucy and Phil’s dream is essentially static. They will achieve the perfect house, the perfect state. What will happen after they are perfectly married and living in the perfect house? They don’t seem to know, other than that it will be wonderful. Yet, Brackenbury’s novel warns, do not expect romantic love to endure, do not stake all your happiness on it. Do not assume that loving your children will be enough, because you will easily warp and damage that love. ‘You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

The edition of A Day to Remember to Forget which I read is a new one published by Michael Walmer (and sent to me to review months ago – I am really sorry Mike to have taken so long). It has an excellent introduction by Margaret Drabble, which places it in its context (1971) and discusses its novelty and even shockingness. But it’s worth reading not just as a historical document of a particular socio-cultural shift in British society, between the Boomers and their parents, but because it is a really good novel and a painfully honest description of the limits of family love. In the end, we are all alone.

(Carel Weight, The Silence, 1965; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

The end of the holidays (warning! a long post!)

(Boats at Pin Mill, Suffolk)

With the beginning of September, Belgian teachers and students return to school like swallows to the south. Last week I squeezed into the tiny study, nearly breaking my neck on assorted heaps of books, to start preparing for the new school year. Quite how it will pan out, of course I do not know, although early signs indicate that a great deal more cleaning than usual will be involved.

So here I am at the computer again after a lovely summer. Despite lurking Covid-19, the horror of the explosion in Beirut and the absolutely disgusting re-emergence of immigrant hatred expressed by British politicians and public, I have enjoyed myself. I have even been travelling! And what is peculiar is that I have travelled more than usual (well, I did in July; since I came home I’ve barely left the house...).

First, we visited some friends in France, in the mountains near Chamonix. It was astonishingly beautiful! My daughter, who has never been in mountains before, went slightly crazy – it was a mighty contrast to the flat Flemish countryside.

Then, we took advantage of what turned out to be a relatively brief period of time when one could travel to the UK without quarantining, and visited my family for the first time since the world turned topsy-turvy. This was a strange but also happy experience.

(This is the house in Essex designed by Grayson Perry, which we peered at through the hedge.)

Back here in Belgium I have started going for a run a few times a week in a feeble effort to become fitter – and I do mean feeble: dog walkers overtake me as I wheeze along. Surely at some point I will (a) improve and stop looking such a wally and (b) actually start to enjoy the experience, aren’t there supposed to be endorphins involved somewhere?

I am also – roll of drums – taking driving lessons. After I passed my theory test a hundred years ago my husband said he would teach me to drive. Readers, this will surprise you, but our lessons were not a success. So now I am taking lessons from a proper instructor, who specialises in teaching weedy people who are scared of everything and don’t really want to learn to drive anyway. (That is me.) So far no one has died, although my heart did almost give out when we had to drive on the motorway last week. So. Much. Terror. And my instructor shouting, ‘You must drive faster Helen!’ when I swear my molars were flying out the back of my head there was so much g-force.

Naturally I have been reading... and here are a few books I read.

I am working my way verrrry slowly, for it is BIG, through Fiona McCarthy’s biography of William Morris. Morris attended the boys’ public school Marlborough College not long after it had been founded. It turns out that there was a massive riot there in 1851, ‘the Rebellion’, in revenge for disciplinary measures taken against boys for bullying peasants and dancing by moonlight; the boys went berserk and threw fireworks at the masters, trashed the school and marched on the local town. For weeks on end! They even burnt the headmaster’s manuscript copy of his translation of Sophocles! School life has become considerably duller since the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps for the best.

I am also working my way, less slowly, through She Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India by Katie Hickman. This is a fascinating book and if the beginning of term doesn’t kill me dead I plan to write about it here.

Some months ago I read an article by Samantha Shannon recommending Under a Pendulum Sun, a novel by Jeanette Ng. With such a splendid title I was reaching for my purse even before I saw that it is about Victorian missionaries in Fairyland, with strong Brontë overtones. The Revd Laon Helstone has travelled to Arcadia, land of the Fae, to convert the inhabitants to Christianity. When his letters to his sister Cathy cease, she goes in search of him but no sooner arrives in Arcadia than is pent up in the creepy house of Gethsemane. Cathy’s problem is as much ‘reading’ the land and its people as it is finding Laon and surviving her encounter with Queen Mab and her fairy court. Ng’s Arcadia is properly weird and her Brontë references add depth (her version of Jane Eyre’s first encounter with Rochester is particularly cleverly done). Either I or the book ran out of steam a bit at the end – me, probably – but I do recommend this anyway.

Back in the day Ruth Rendall was pitched as P.D. James’s rival to queen of crime writers. But for me, Rendall has always been superior: James is good at place but Rendall’s characters are acutely (dispassionately!) observed and even her monsters have a credible psychological depth to a degree that James never achieves. The House of Stairs is one of her Barbara Vine novels, and is narrated by Lizzie who, by chance, encounters Bell, a woman she had known in the 1960s who has just been released from prison. Feeling compelled to write down the experiences that led to that long-ago murder, Lizzie allows herself to be drawn back into Bell’s life due to a sense of complicity in what happened and with possibly yet further terrible consequences. You may consider it as a warning against reading too much Henry James...

So how was your summer?

The King of Elfland's Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, at SNB

There are some books that are a little bit special, that may not be very popular but really speak to you. The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, is one of them. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful fantasy novel, first published in 1924 and now reissued by Gollancz with the introduction by Neil Gaiman from their 1999 edition of the book.

I originally wrote about it here in 2015 but I’ve revised (and, I hope, improved) the piece for Shiny New Books – you can read it here.

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2020 round-up

It is the end of this year’s reading week! I come to it feeling happy to have read so much more of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work, and feeling I understand it and know her just a little better than I did before. This week I read a collection of short stories, Of Cats and Elfin, and a selection of her poems in Voices from Fairyland; I also read some of her letters, which were utterly delightful and revealed her as a kind and witty friend, keenly alive to life’s comedy, and her novel Summer Will Show, which I would recommend whole-heartedly if you have not yet tried any of her work. I also read the sad and beautiful memoir For Sylvia by her partner, Valentine Ackland; if you have read STW’s diaries you might feel that Ackland treated STW badly but this casts her actions in a more sympathetic light (ironically, since she is so hard on herself).

But what have you been reading? Here I shall post links to all of your reviews. Let me know in the comments to any of this week’s posts of anything you’ve written for STW Reading Week and I’ll add it.

‘It’s only two years since I discovered STW but on the strength of what I’ve read of her so far I have no hesitation in saying she’s become one of my all time favourite authors,’ writes Harriet in her review of Mr Fortune’s Maggot. She describes it as: ‘warm, witty, frequently surprising. Yes there are obvious parallels between Lueli’s and Mr Fortune’s loss of their gods, but STW is far too subtle and complex a writer to drive this home. Just read it for its charm and humour and wisdom.’

Harriet also links to previous reviews she’s written: of the short story collections Swans on an Autumn River, Kingdoms of Elfin and Of Cats and Elfins, and the novel Lolly Willowes.

STW wrote a biography of T.H. White and Simon of Stuck in a Book reviewed it: ‘I had expected something a little more distinctive stylistically from this deeply distinctive writer. But perhaps she decided not to make herself the star of the book. Yet she cannot help sometimes writing as an exasperated friend – ‘Of course, he should have gone to see her. Rush on by new projects, he didn’t.’ – and sometimes as a fellow author giving her opinion on a work in progress.

‘There is enough in here to delight the reader who comes because they love Warner. There could be more, and I would have welcomed it, but then it might have cloaked the emerging of the curious, sad, impassioned, conflicted, enthusiastic, inventive, restricted T.H. White.’

Hayley at Desperate Reader has read Lolly Willowes, years after first trying and failing with it. She writes: ‘What I really can’t understand though is how I missed the humour and sharpness of this book last time around when it’s the first thing that hit me this time. It doesn’t much matter because I got here in the end, which feels like the greatest good luck.

‘I'm really beginning to wonder if Sylvia Townsend Warner might be the most under rated writer though, and why that should be.’

lethe wrote about Of Cats and Elfins over at Goodreads: ‘Both cats and elfins are heartless creatures, and therefore perfectly suited to STW's sometimes sardonic wit. [...] Since we had a spell of gorgeous weather, I started off with The Cat's Cradle Book. [...] I liked them all, [...] especially "Bluebeard's Daughter". "Bluebeard" has always been one of my favourite fairytales and I enjoyed reading about the life of his forgotten offspring.’

‘I was hooked and mainlining right from page one and spent a wonderful week or so in late January, totally lost in the universe Warner created.  Have any of you watched Bladerunner, with its AI replicants who were “more real than real”?  Although the comparison jars a bit, it pretty accurately describes how I experienced the small corner of the medieval universe Warner creates.  In this I found her skill to be comparable to the great 19th century realists, whose fictional universes are so skillfully constructed that we readers are deceived into thinking them snapshots of reality when of course they are no such thing.’ Janakay has written a fascinating post in which she not only reviews The Corner That Held Them but discusses more widely her love of STW’s books including her experience of Lolly Willowes:

‘I was totally entranced; I had simply never encountered anything quite like Warner’s combination of sharp social observation, realistic depictions of nature and delicate fantasy, all heightened by the mythic overtones of Lolly’s nocturnal ramblings through the dark woods adjacent to the village of Great Mop.  Lolly Willowes remains one of my favorite books and I return to it every few years, when a certain mood strikes me; unlike Lolly, I don’t ditch home and hearth but I do spend a day or two immersing myself in that singular world that Warner creates in this wonderful novel.’

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week is over for this year, but Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work is for always and worth celebrating. To me, she is a very special writer who deserves a central place in twentieth-century British literature. Thank you for reading and for taking part!

Letters, Sylvia Townsend Warner, edited by William Maxwell

For Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week last year, I read her Diaries, and they were wonderful.  Then lethe wrote that her letters were even better. And I know that Simon of Stuck in a Book is also a great fan of STW’s letters. So – what could I do? I want to write about as many facets of STW’s writing as possible. There are several different collections of her letters available, which focus on her correspondence with one or two people, but I chose this one because it was the most general and I thought would give me a good idea of her letter-writing.

Letters are a fascinating form because they are both a little private – in comparison with work that is formally published – and a little public – the writer is writing consciously for a reader, presenting a facet of herself, polishing the material, in comparison with a diary. So when you read letters to writers’ friends, you experience (at a remove, of course) what it might be like to be one of those friends. STW’s letters are kind, sensible and very funny. They are also brilliant in that, with a startling simile, a turn of phrase, a landscape, a person or even a pet will leap into life.

(Some letters written by STW and auctioned at Bonhams in 2018; that’s her handwriting! Found here with a very nice description that is worth reading)

William Maxwell was the fiction editor at the New Yorker, which is how he came to know STW; he was also no slouch in the fiction-writing department himself. In the introduction, he describes STW when he first met her in 1939:

She was dressed in black. Her voice had a slightly husky intimate quality. Her conversation was so enchanting it made my head swim. I did not want to let her out of my sight. Ever.

They became good friends and many of the letters in this collection are to him, as well as to Paul Nordoff, Bea Howe, David Garnett and Nancy Cunard; but there are also letters to less-famous friends and to her editors.

Maxwell notes that STW wrote a lot of letters, ‘thousands of them’. He writes:

The personal correspondence of writers feeds on left-over energy. There is also the element of lavishness, of enjoying the fact that they are throwing away one of their better efforts, for the chances of any given letter’s surviving are fifty-fifty, at most. And there is the element of confidence – of the relaxed backhand stroke that can place the ball anywhere in the court that it pleases the writer to have it go.

The letters he has brought together span 1921–78, the year of her death (in which she writes: ‘But I shall not re-read Colette. I have looked forward to doing this, & find to my grief that I have outlived her.’). Her letters encompass Significant Events, such as her visit to Spain during the Civil War and her experiences of the Second World War. She writes, especially to her American friends, about odd aspects of life during that conflict. Here she starts describing firewatching, but quickly goes off along a very STW path:

Tonight armed with whistles, perhaps fortified with whistles would be a better term for it, Valentine and I will be out firewatching. It is a most pastoral and contemplative pursuit. We walk up and down a section of quiet country lanes awaiting the descent of possible incendiary bombs. If they did, it would become our duty to blow a series of short blasts on our whistles. [...] The only snag is – as you will readily understand – one cannot rehearse the series of short blasts, in case the rehearsal gave rise to false alarms and despondencies. I have tried mine out very quietly in the toilet, it seems to go all right, but how am I to know if a mezza voce whistle is going to be as good ff? The other temptation is resisting being owls. Valentines whistle is just a whole tone lower than mine, and the same interval exists between the male and female owl, and we might have such lovely conversations. It always seems to me that owls are very happy in their married lives, perhaps because they never speak during the day. (To Paul Nordoff, 1941)

There are of course mentions of her literary work and of the world of arts:

A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week. (To Alyse Gregory, 1951)

I remember a dress rehearsal of Heartbreak House when [George Bernard] Shaw bounded on to the stage and became a young girl. He was infinitely better at it than the actress, even when she had studied him, he far out-girled her. He had a tirra-lirra twirl of the waist that I went home and practised by the hour. I couldn’t do it either. (To William Maxwell, 1952)

The letters about her partner Valentine Ackland’s illness and death are very moving. On her bereavement:

Her love is everywhere. It follows me as I go about the house, meets me in the garden, sends swans into my dreams. In a strange, underwater or above-earth way I am very nearly happy. (To Marchette and Joy Chute, 1969)

(Great Eye Folly, Salthouse, Norfolk, where STW and Ackland stayed in 1950–51; damaged in the floods of 1953, it no longer exists; from Literary Norfolk)

And she spins wonderful stories, like this one:

About a mile from Tangley [Hall] there is a deserted farm called The Warren. I came on it quite by accident for it lies in a little dell among woods, far from the road and the field-path to it is vanishing from disuse. I found a way in and walked over the house as much as I dared for the staircase is broken away and all the timber eaten with dry rot. The parlour windows are grown over with nettles and gooseberry run wild, and growing up through the broken stone floor is a flourishing elder-bush, singularly bright green from its indoor life. The doors and chimney-pieces are carved with names and dates, mostly 18th cent.
I was very pleased with my find, and when I had done with the polite part of the house I turned to the back-kitchens and wash-houses. These were even more dilapidated and darkened, and I was just thinking that I had had enough of them when I saw an archway leading into a sort of cellar with a barrel roof. I went in looking at the roof and nearly fell into a well. It was so dark and smooth and plumb with the floor that it looked like a slate. It then seemed to me that this deserted house I had been pitying so was uncommonly disappointed that I hadn’t gone a step further into its trap. It had been waiting so long for something to happen; and a drowned lady would have been a pleasant secret to hint of to the woods on a winter’s night. (To David Garnett, 1925)

Many of her letters concern domesticity, and they are so fun and so sharp. STW looks around her at her garden, her neighbours, herself, and revels in the beauty and strangeness and writes them down as little gifts for her correspondents, garnished with a sprig of laughter. She has a poet’s ear for cadence, and a novelist’s eye for the telling detail. All I want to do is quote from them. So I shall.

As for the cold – the north-wind is raving, and the air is bruised and black, and even William [the pug] has come in and settled down by the fire for the rest of the day. (To Oliver Warner, 1933)

We have eaten cold partridge legs out of doors, sitting on a heap of dry rushes on a heath, and watched, very disapprovingly, by two church towers, one to the east and one to the west. It is impossible to frolic anywhere in this country without a church tower on the horizon to eye one. There they rear themselves, like melancholy teeth from an old jaw.(On Norfolk; to Llewellyn Powys, 1934)

Your lovely parcel came, thank you very much for it. Valentine, like a wasp, has already got at the maple syrup. You send the most understanding parcels, it is as though your astral body came across to inspect our store-cupboard. (To Marchette Chute, 1953)

I have been sent a diary, and on the title-page is printed: The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on – Which of course is indisputable, but yet casts a rather sombre shade over the dotted lines on which I shall note that Mary Tomkins is coming to tea, that the chimney sweeper is coming to sweep. (To William Maxwell, 1957)

Oh, and I also learnt from these letters that she wrote libretti as well! Is there nothing to which STW could not turn her hand?