a gallimaufry

Zuleika Dobson, by Max Beerbohm

Zuleika Dobson or An Oxford Love Story is a novel that has hovered on the periphery of my reading attention for about a thousand years. It’s only the fact that it is being reissued in a very pretty edition by Michael Walmer books that I finally got round to reading it. Not knowing much about it before I started, I read it in a genuine state of suspense: however, I want to include spoilers in my discussion of it, so if you would like a similar experience to me, click away now!

Zuleika (pronounced, so I read after I’d finished it, Zu-LEE-ka) is an orphan, abandoned by her grandfather, the Warden of Judas College, Oxford, because he disapproved of her parents’ marriage. She has to earn her living as a governess, a post she is unfit for, being herself ignorant of what she is supposed to teach and – perhaps more importantly – being devastatingly attractive. Having been shunted from school-room to school-room, she learns some fairly basic magic tricks and sets herself up as a ‘prestidigitator’. To stupendous success. While her abilities are mediocre, her beauty and allure catapult her to fame and wealth. Belatedly, her grandfather invites her to stay with him in Oxford, where she exerts her femme fatale charms with – well – fatal results.

Zuleika’s great problem is that in a world where all young men fall in love with her, she can only love a man who remains impervious to her. This man is the Duke of Dorset, a man perfect in every ability but who, like Zuleika, has never been in love.

The Duke had an intense horror of unmarried girls. [...] That he should be confronted with one of them – with such an one of them! – in Oxford, seemed to be sheer violation of sanctuary.

Zuleika is thrilled – but unfortunately the Duke has fallen for her after all. She rejects him, and so he vows to kill himself. This inspires all the other undergraduates in Oxford, similarly smitten, to swear they will die for Zuleika too. But will they?

(Illustration by George Him for the 1960 Heritage edition of Zuleika Dobson, found here; if you click on the link you can see more!)

What makes this novel so unsettling is its blend of light social comedy and really dark themes. And it is funny and well observed. Oxford is mockingly but affectionately portrayed in its traditions and eccentrics. The fellows of Judas College are happiest when all the undergraduates have gone, and they can jeer at Pedby’s bungled reading of the Latin grace for years without end. The Duke belongs to a club so exclusive that during his second year he is the only member. Realising that this is unsustainable for a club he, ‘not without reluctance, but unanimously’, elects a few new members. When Zuleika complains that the Second Division boats row before the First, the Duke tells her that ‘Oxford never pretended to be strong in mathematics.’

But into this charming comedy are woven strands of delusion and cruelty. Everyone falls in love and often out of love again very easily. In the case of the mass of students, it is a form of hysteria – most of them have barely glimpsed the woman for whom they pledge to die. What then is the value of love? Is it just a trick, like Zuleika’s sleights of hand?

Zuleika and the Duke are powerful and careless of their power. Zuleika enjoys the tribute of men falling in love with her and doesn’t care what becomes of them. The Duke is so self-regarding and narcissistic he takes it as his due that the other students revere him. When he decides to kill himself, they emulate him. The deaths are not directly the fault of Zuleika or the Duke, because the undergraduates have after all freely chosen to give them their power and influence. Indeed, once the die is cast, the Duke attempts to prevent the tragedy. Zuleika, however, comes to desire it and revels in it; truly disturbing.

Zuleika Dobson was first published in 1911 and it is hard now to look back at the futile deaths of a large number of young men without the shadow of the First World War looming into mind, especially when Beerbohm describes the stormy moment before the Duke’s plunge thus:

A sudden white vertical streak slid down the sky. Then there was consonance to split the drums of the world’s ears, followed by a horrific rattling as of actual artillery – tens of thousands of gun-carriages simultaneously at the gallop, colliding, crashing, heeling over in the blackness.
Then, and yet more awful, silence; the little earth cowering voiceless under the heavens’ menace.

I don’t think it is a stretch to link the Oxford students’ mindless romanticism, faux chivalry and death wish with an attitude that romanticised war and honour and brought its sons to the trenches. Furthermore, the Duke’s ridiculous notion of honour traps him into going ahead with his stupid suicide. The poisonous destructiveness of this veneration of honour and death is most clearly and horribly shown in the scene of Noaks’s death. Noaks has been too cowardly to drown himself with the other young men; he is goaded to fling himself to his death by Zuleika and the Batch family in a scene which switches rapidly from comedy to horror and is surely echoed by the later practice of women sending white feathers to men who did not want to fight.

(Max Beerbohm by himself; found here)

The Duke seems to die for love of Zuleika; actually, he hates her. Seeming and being are all too often distinct in this novel. For fun and also to reinforce this idea of delusion, Beerbohm frames his novel with classical motifs. There is a comic chorus, of sorts: the ‘high grim busts’ of the Roman emperors which decorate the Sheldonian theatre and watch over the drama that plays out. On seeing Zuleika when she arrives in Oxford:

sweat started from the brows of the Emperors. They at least saw the peril that was overhanging Oxford, and they gave such warning as they could. Let that be remembered to their credit. Let that incline us to think more gently of them. [...] Here in Oxford, exposed eternally and inexorably to heat and frost, to the four winds that lash them and the rains that wear them away, they are expiating, in effigy, the abominations of their pride and cruelty and lust. Who were lechers, they are without bodies; who were tyrants, they are crowned never but with crowns of snow; who made themselves even with the gods, they are by American visitors frequently mistaken for the Twelve Apostles.

The novel’s narrator claims to be ‘Clio’s servant’ – the servant of the Muse of history (although he fears that to be so is to be ‘not quite a gentleman’). Thus he pretends that his fiction is ‘true’. He pre-empts the reader’s disbelief in his ability to record all these conversations and even thoughts accurately, by spinning a tale of being given special powers by Zeus to travel invisibly and enter minds. It is typical of the novel that he lays claim to truthfulness with an outrageous explanation, and that he plays further with the difference between seeming and being that threads through this story of delusion.

It is a book quite unlike any other that I’ve read. It is delightful and cruel by turn, both frivolous and tragic. It ends with a surprising twist on the exhortation that you be true to yourself – given by the Warden to Zuleika. Apparently, a spoof sequel was written in which Zuleika goes to Cambridge. I can’t help wondering what that might be like...

(I was sent a copy of this book to review: you can order a copy from Michael Walmer books.)

 

T.H. White: A Biography by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Over at Shiny New Books my review of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s splendid biography of T.H. White is now up!

Long-time readers of this blog will know of my love for STW’s writing. I had always wanted to read this biography but the prices of second-hand copies were too high (added now to the extra costs from Brexit of importing books to the EU gripe gripe).

Now Handheld Press has republished the book in a lovely new edition with an introduction by Gill Davies. I couldn’t crowbar much about the introduction into the review (which is already too long really, I can never stop myself), but it makes this edition far, far more valuable than the original. Davies discusses how STW researched and wrote the biography, how her talent for fiction inflected her writing, how she dealt with THW’s very dark side.

Thus it frames book very nicely and reminds us that it is a written and created artefact, the product of years of work and thought. It also, interestingly, centres STW rather than THW; I think it’s true to say that many if not most people who read the book now will read it because of their interest in her work rather than his, an unusual shift.

(Photograph of Sylvia Townsend Warner at Frome Vauchurch, undated; from the Sylvia Townsend Warner website here)

 

 

 

The Agency for Scandal, by Laura Wood

I generally find January a difficult month. All the sparkly Christmas lights have been cleared away and the denuded Christmas trees lie dying on pavements or at the end of gardens. The weather is always grey and dispiriting. At our school, it is the end of one semester and the beginning of another, often demanding extra administration or meetings when really all you want to do is hide under a pile of blankets. And of course, I have blown all my New Year’s Resolutions by the end of the first week and feel disgusted and frustrated with myself.

(Walter Sickert, Girl at Window, Little Rachel, 1907, oil on canvas; Tate Gallery, London; found here)

In short, Dry January or any of the other improving initiatives on which people embark this month are not for me. I require all the booze, chocolate and hot-water bottles I can lay my hands on to get through it without becoming a right old git.

It may therefore come as no surprise to you when I write that I steer well away from challenging books in January. It’s a month of children’s books and classic detective stories for me (Children of Blood and Bone was outside my comfort zone but so compelling I had to read it anyway). And fortunately for me, the perfect antidote to January was published this month, and it comes in the form of Laura Wood’s novel The Agency for Scandal.

At the back of the book the author notes her love of Georgette Heyer and essentially The Agency for Scandal is a Heyer novel – of The Talisman Ring or The Masqueraders strain – set in Sherlock Holmes’s London and as such is absolutely perfectly pitched. If this sounds like your area of interest, then run don’t walk to the nearest library or bookshop and don’t pay attention to the YA marketing.

Our heroine is Isobel Stanhope, daughter of a baron who died leaving his family with no money. In order to keep her beloved little brother at school and her fragile mamma from learning the true horrors of the family finances, Isobel has secretly taken a job. One that makes use of her skills in acting, quick thinking and lock-picking. She works for the Aviary, an agency that investigates wrongs done to women and either rights them – or gives the women the material to blackmail their awful husbands into giving them a better life. Isobel is also hopelessly in love with the Duke of Roxton, who is of course desperately rich and handsome and unaware of her existence. Life begins to get even more interesting when the Aviary is asked to investigate Lord Morland, who just happens to fancy himself as the next prime minister – and who runs the British secret service... Soon there are burglaries, mysterious jewels, double-crossing and all-round dastardliness...

It is charming and well-paced, the characters are delightful and it is just a pleasure to spend an afternoon reading it. Yes, isobel’s skills with a lockpick and sleight of hand do rather strain credulity at times. I hope there will be sequels and I am looking forward to seeing how Wood will square a heroine who despises the empire and challenges the status quo with a hero who works for the secret service. Perhaps, though, that would be to smash with a hammer a light and skilfully written romantic comedy – and a good romantic comedy is a precious thing indeed.

(Louis Anquetin, Two Ladies in the Forest, 1889; pastel on paper; found here; a little too early for The Agency for Scandal but it captures something of the Aviary's spirit for me)

Happy 2023!

A belated Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and have started 2023 in the nicest ways possible.

For me, one of the highlights of Christmas this year was going to see the Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker in London with my mother and daughter. It was everything you would want a ballet to be: beautiful music, expertly played by the orchestra; lovely sets and costumes, and, most important of all, exquisite dancing. Not that I am an expert, but I actually cried a bit while watching it, and more than once too. The audience was filled with little girls in sparkly velvet and net dresses and it was one wonderful, happy experience. It’s shown every year and I thoroughly recommend it.

After a frantically busy couple of months, I finally and tardily finished reading Brian Attebery’s absolutely brilliant new book, Fantasy: How it Works, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. If you don’t have time to wade through my turgid prose, just go out and buy/borrow it. It explains why fantasy isn’t just childish escapism, and analyses lots of books to discuss how it works and what it does. All in a very readable, chatty style.

(And look at that gorgeous cover!)

For the rest of the holidays, I enjoyed lounging about reading both in the UK and here in Belgium. In fact, I have rearranged a corner of the sitting-room for maximal reading and lounging pleasure. It’s also easier for me to write there, for I have been writing (just not here).

I spent September to the endish of December following the Golden Egg Academy 12-week Write Your Successful Children’s Novel course. It was brilliant and if you are thinking of writing for children, I highly recommend it. There are no entry requirements, and week by week you learn how you actually put a book together, what to think about, what to develop and how to structure it. It is really practical, and handily it’s distance learning so you can do it at your own pace. Pretty much every week there is a Zoom or FaceBook meeting with the course leader, Imogen Cooper, who is just the nicest person as well as hugely experienced, and you can ask questions and get advice. At the end you can send in your first 2000 words plus a synopsis for one of the Golden Egg editors to evaluate. I have to say that the feedback was very helpful and perceptive.

After another busy few weeks at work I am keen to get back to work on my book. One of the elements I hadn’t been sure about was having a dual narrative, and the editor suggested that sticking to one viewpoint would be better. My book’s other massive weakness, caused by my tendency to plot as I go along rather than before I start, is that there is too much going on and not enough focus on the main theme. So it’s time to prune and plan (at least a bit) before getting back down to writing. The feedback has really enthused me to carry on. I hope to have a reasonable first draft ready by the end of the summer, so that I can re-apply for the 12-month course on developing your children’s novel.

Because of all this I have mainly been reading children’s novels, especially recently published ones. Here are some of them, in short!

The Poisoned Pie Mystery, by Nicki Thornton  

A boy to whom accidents just keep on happening, a talking cat who is also a master detective and a lot of cake… This is a brisk and chirpy novel for children of about 9+. The author does something quite daring with the parents, which I did not see coming.

The Hounds of the Mórrigan, by Pat O’Shea

An older work but a wonderful immersion into Irish mythology, as Pidge and Brigit journey through a magical landscape in search of a drop of the Mórrigan’s blood. Truly magical, the many joys of this book include the characterisation of the children, who act and speak like real children, and the creatures they encounter.

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

In a mythical sort-of version of Nigeria called Orïsha, the maji are people who used to have magical powers but lost them suddenly twelve years ago. Now they are oppressed and enslaved by the majority kosídan and their cruel king, but maybe there is a way for teenaged Zélie and her friends to restore magic and end the tyranny. This is the first YA novel I have ever read and my was it bloodthirsty! But the story is compelling and I loved the setting.

The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, by Julie Berry

I don’t think this book is very well known outside the US? But it should be. An exciting opportunity is delivered to the students of St Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies in nineteenth-century Ely, when their horrid headmistress and her brother both drop dead: poisoned. Rather than informing the authorities, the girls decide to continue as usual and enjoy their freedom, pretending that the two victims are still alive. Of course, this becomes increasingly farcical and meanwhile the murderer is still lurking about. A bouncy entertaining read and the American author gets pretty much everything British spot on and believe me that is high praise.

 

Golden Egg Academy

Once again I have been ignoring this blog… Increasingly, I wonder what it’s for, maybe it will just peter out… 

My latest excuse is that my free time is being hoovered up by the Golden Egg Academy’s 12-week course Write Your Successful Children’s Novel. An embarrassingly long time ago now I actually completed a children’s book which was, in retrospect, objectively terrible on pretty much every level. But I did finish it, which is something! Anyway, I sent it to a few agents and unsurprisingly none expressed the tiniest amount of interest.

I didn’t give up, and started writing another book which I think has more promise – at least this one has some dramatic tension, for a start. However, I kept changing my mind about fundamental aspects of it and starting again and faffing. Eventually I conceded that I really didn’t have much idea what I was doing and if I wanted ever to produce something a child might want to read, I would have to pull myself together, inject some discipline and get some help.

The Golden Egg Academy was set up by Imogen Cooper, who used to be Editorial Director at Chicken House. She felt frustrated that she received many interesting submissions which had promise but needed much more work and guidance than a publisher could give. In particular, there were talented writers who did not understand the craft of writing, or how writing for children differs from writing for adults. The Academy offers courses and workshops for picture book writers as well as novel writers, of different lengths and for writers at different stage of their writing process. It is unusual in that it is specifically for children’s books and the team is made up of industry professionals rather than writers or academics.

I am really enjoying the course I’m following. There’s one module per week, with videos, slides and tasks, and at the moment we are grappling with my great bugbear, structure. (One of my great bugbears, should I say.) Although there are live Zoom and FaceBook sessions (yes I have finally joined FaceBook but only for this course!), plus feedback on the beginning of your novel, you can do most of it at your own pace and the materials remain accessible for the duration of the universe. This is a terrific bonus if you have a job, a family or other demands on your time. There’s also a FaceBook group for everyone on the course where we can talk shop, which is fun. Everyone is lovely and friendly. I mean, if my novel would just write itself now I would be in heaven.

So for now I am going to go back to my post-it notes and my 32,000 flabby words. I will also try and write a bit more here, and I have two books to review for Shiny New Books which both look exciting. But you’ll have to wait for those...

 

High Windows, by Philip Larkin

(Photograph of Philip Larkin found here)

To be absolutely honest, I was a bit disappointed when I first read this. Although I knew of Larkin’s reputation and had read a few of his more famous poems, I didn’t really know his work and was expecting great things. I loved some of the poems in this collection (‘The Trees’, ‘Solar’, ‘To the Sea’, for instance), but others struck me as just a bit – banal. It took me a little while to appreciate him.

By way of example, here is one of the less-famous poems, an ekphrastic piece (I love the word ekphrastic!) inspired by one of those Dutch Old Master genre paintings. You can hear Larkin reading it out himself here.

The Card-Players

Jan van Hogspeuw staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.

Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!

I initially found the crude humour – ooh look, rude names! – childish. There are bodily functions: pissing, belching, snoring, farting and gobbing. There is mud and ale. But there is something more than basic physicality too. The rafters are ‘ham-hung’, evoking meaty buttocks (hams), yet garlanded with croaked-out scraps of songs ‘about love’, aspiring to something more transcendent. The ‘lamplit cave’, in which the four card-players booze away, holds the ‘secret, bestial peace’ of their existence. Outside, however, are gales and ‘starlessness’, fresh rain falling and, most beautifully of all, ‘wet century-wide trees’ clashing above the tavern. Human existence, in the tavern, is brutish, but beyond and all around lies a wild and pitiless world. ‘Rain, wind and fire!’ – there is a glory in it and even in the sottish defiance of the drunken men (Jan van Hogespeuw pisses ‘at’ the dark, as if taunting it).

(Adriaen Brouwer, Kaartspelers en Brassers [Card Players and Drinkers], oil on panel, seventeenth century; Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp; found here)

I cannot find a painting which actually resembles the one in ‘The Card Players’ in every detail. (Does that mean it’s not truly ekphrastic?) There was of course a genre of Flemish and Dutch painting showing interior scenes, and a subgenre of that showing taverns. Artists like David Teniers the Younger and Adriaen Brouwer tended to show the interior of the tavern and not the countryside without, which Larkin includes in his vision. Perhaps Larkin imagined the picture in his poem, combining works he had seen.

To me, his poem works like those pictures. Teniers and Brouwer turned commonplace, even ugly scenes, into fit subjects for art through their perceptiveness and skilful brushwork. Larkin describes a vulgar scene similar to theirs and similarly turns it into art.

(Aert van der Neer, Moonlit Landscape with Bridge, oil on panel, probably between 1648 and 1650; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; found here)

The rest of the collection High Windows echoes the juxtaposition of human degradation and natural beauty in ‘The Card Players’. ‘The Trees’ and ‘Solar’ are joyful celebrations of life. On the other hand, lighted rooms, in hotels, hospitals and homes, evoke loneliness and isolation with great power. Buildings are usually dreary and functional. ‘Going, Going’ laments the loss of countryside to urban encroachment and pollution. (Though I think poems like ‘Going, Going’ and ‘Posterity’ remain a bit one-note, the language unallusive.)

‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, however, is beautiful because the way he describes the empty hotel – without guests, it has no meaning – brilliantly suggests loneliness and death, a spirit-fled corpse. This is done through the specific details of light and dark, silence, ash, ‘shoeless’ corridors, lack of home, ‘Night comes on’.

Light spreads darkly downwards from the high
Clusters of lights over empty chairs
That face each other, coloured differently.
Through open doors, the dining-room declares
A larger loneliness of knives and glass
And silence laid like carpet. A porter reads
An unsold evening paper. Hours pass,
And all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds,
Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.

In shoeless corridors, the lights burn. How
Isolated, like a fort, it is –
The headed paper, made for writing home
(If home existed) letters of exile: Now
Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.

In ‘Sad Steps’ the poet himself, like Jan van Hogespeuw, has a nocturnal piss on a stormy night. He draws the curtain to see ‘the wind-picked sky’. For him, unlike Jan, ‘There’s something laughable’ about the night scene and about the way humans have projected romantic notions onto moonlit skies. He feels that:

The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

is a reminder of his lost youth. In the titular poem, he imagines looking through other, ‘high windows’ to the endless nothingness beyond.

So, I am converted to Philip Larkin after all.

 

Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St John Mandel

(Nala recommends that you read this book...)

Olive is a novelist in 2203. Born and raised on a lunar colony, she is on a book tour of Earth just as a pandemic is spreading across the planet. In a lecture near the end of Sea of Tranquility, she utters one of the most consoling thoughts I have read recently:

‘ – and my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world. […]
‘But all of this raises an interesting question,’ Olive said. ‘What if it always is the end of the world? […]
‘Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world […] as a continuous and never-ending process.’

Sea of Tranquility is an elegantly constructed novel which encompasses almost five hundred years of human history with the lightest of touches. In 1912, Edwin St John St Andrew is a ‘remittance man’, a younger son of a wealthy British family sent off to the colonies to keep him out of the way, experiences something strange and inexplicable in a Canadian forest. This experience links him with Vincent in 1994, a young girl who films the anomaly, and her friend Mirella; with Alan, a violinist in an airship terminal in 2200; and with Olive. What can it signify?

The novel moves through time until 2401 when an investigation is launched. Then we move backwards again, with a new understanding of the earlier sections, until we reach the final revelation. The neatness of the structure, the resolution and the way the elements of the novel are related to each other create a lovely feeling of harmony. The book’s disclosures about time and existence are not exactly radical, but beautifully expressed through the stories of particular, fallible, likeable people. The sweep of history may be grand and impersonal, but what matters is us, always on the cusp of loss; the texture of our daily lives, our loves and griefs. I am still thinking about it. I like it a lot.

(... She has not actually read it herself, you understand)

 

September again

Hello! Remember me?

Over this long, hot summer I have occasionally contemplated posting something here. But I have not.

Reader, I have mainly been lying on the sofa grumbling about the weather.

I have not even read very much, because I have joined Twitter and I cannot cope. There is so much information! I have to spend eight hours a day just reading updates from people I don’t know and watching important films of animals doing amusing things! Fortunately, I have no friends except for a bot, so I don’t have to write anything interesting myself.

I am at @hejparry should you wish to say hello because I am far too weedy to introduce myself to anyone.

Although I did read Barchester Towers which I unreservedly recommend to you all despite my being on Team Slope the whole time and thus doomed to disappointment.

(How I spent the summer in my imagination: Claude Monet, La Liseuse (The Reader), 1872; oil on canvas; Walters Art Collection, found here)

I have written some more of my second novel. The first one was objectively bad in every way. This one I hope is going to be an improvement on that low bar. I am now on about draft number five and when I have finished it, it will be akin to most people’s first drafts i.e. still a baggy mess. I keep changing my mind about significant elements and then have to start again. When people describe Important Qualities for a Writer, they don’t usually mention Decisiveness and yet it should be there. I am mostly enjoying the experience and would do more if I could let go of the worry: will this ever be any good? Ultimately, of course, I want it to be read and loved by actual children and so it has to be extremely good.

(I did also bake some cakes with my daughter for her party)

And finally, although I do not watch much television, I did watch Marriage, and I am here to tell you all that all the people who disliked it are Wrong. It is often uncomfortable, but brilliant.

What have you been doing? What can you recommend?

 

Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, by Francesca Wade

Glossing over my long absence from the Internet, I am back to enthuse about a book that most of you have already heard of and maybe read. (If you have read it, write your Thoughts in the comment section below this post!) I shall have to write about it from memory, because I do not actually have a copy, I borrowed my mother’s while I was in Britain. Perhaps this is no bad thing, it will curb my propensity to ramble on. (Or will it?)

Quite by chance, Francesca Wade discovered that between the two world wars five women writers lived in Mecklenburgh Square in London: HD, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jane Ellen Harrison, Eileen Power and Virginia Woolf. (I hadn’t ever heard of Harrison and Power: Harrison was a brilliant classical scholar who left Cambridge University in her seventies to set up house with Hope Mirrlees and translate and promote Russian literature; Power was a distinguished mediaeval historian who argued the importance of economic and social history, as well as being a Sinophile, prominent socialist and pacifist, and holder of wild parties.) At that time, Mecklenburgh Square was a place where a middle-class woman of modest means could rent a room of her own, alongside artists, radicals and poor families; a little rackety and Bohemian though not too much, certainly quite cheap and in close proximity to the British Library and University College, London.

A group biography of this sort explores the ways in which five women found, and then fought to keep, their rooms of their own. Not all of the women lived in Mecklenburgh Square very long – Woolf hardly at all – so Wade explores her five lives by moving back and forth in time around their sojourns there. She also uses the geographical centre of Mecklenburgh Square to pull together numerous threads of cultural life between the wars. Certain preoccupations absorbed all five. How did talented, curious and clever women navigate a world which denied them equality? Harrison and Power had to work for an institution, Cambridge University, which refused to award degrees to women; Woolf wasn’t even permitted a proper education and had to teach herself. Was it possible to marry – or have a fulfilling relationship – without sacrificing one’s work, if one was a woman? For HD and Sayers, pregnant outside wedlock, this involved particularly painful choices.

Shaping one’s own story was also important. HD wrote and rewrote versions of her autobiography many times over her life, as if trying on different dresses; Woolf skived off labouring away on her biography of Roger Fry to dash out ‘A Sketch of the Past’, scatterings of childhood memories. During the Blitz she watched London’s physical past being bombed to smithereens; eventually her own home and many of her possessions were also obliterated, tangible links with her youth and family gone for ever. Harrison and Power both destroyed their papers (Harrison burnt hers almost gleefully when she left Newnham), with terrible consequences for their posthumous reputations, their radical contributions to history forgotten or reattributed to men.

(Photograph of Mecklenburgh Square, ca 1930; Camden Local Studies and Archives, found here)

Other interests were more particular. Power was a socialist and her story encompasses developments in socialist thought as well as the rise of the League of Nations Union, pacifism and internationalism, all of which shaped post-WWI society. Both Power and Woolf became increasingly uncomfortable with the knowledge of their privileges and their reliance on the labour of working-class women. Through Harrison, we learn about the Russian diaspora and its influence on western European culture. Through HD, we learn about the Imagists and the difficulty of living a truly Bohemian life. (Also: that HD was a total slob who never emptied her ashtrays or washed up her wine glasses.)

Square Haunting is a book which has deservedly won a lot of praise. It is a marvellous group biography, full of detail and perceptiveness. It not only brings to life five women and their era; it also reminds us of the importance of taking the time and having the space to think, as imperative now as it was one hundred years ago.

 

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Let’s skate over the fact I haven’t posted here for aaages and move on to this odd little novel, which I have just finished reading. I picked it up entirely because of the cover, which struck me as sweet but faintly unsettling too, and that cover sums up the novel itself extremely well. The protagonist, Keiko Furukura, has a narrative voice that is sweet and naïve, affectless almost, but this voice seems to suppress a sharper one, really quite dark, which surfaces now and again.

After eighteen years, Keiko is the longest-working member of staff at the Smile Mart convenience store at Hiiromachi Station in Tokyo. She has always felt herself to be an outsider, and she tells us of two incidents when she was a child which proved to her that she didn’t understand other people at all, and that she needed to be ‘cured’, somehow:

My parents were at a loss what to do about me, but they were as affectionate to me as ever. I’d never meant to make them sad or have to keep apologizing for things I did, so I decided to keep my mouth shut as best I could outside home. I would no longer do anything of my own accord, and would either just mimic what everyone else was doing, or simply follow instructions.

This is how she lives and for her, working in the convenience store is liberating. When it first opens, she says:

At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.

Being a normal cog in society means memorising the store manual, mimicking the other members of staff and taking everything about the workplace culture absolutely seriously. Every day she is the most enthusiastic participant in the morning practice session, when the staff line up and shout out the phrases they use with customers (‘We pledge to provide our customers with the best service and aim to make our store the beloved choice of store in the area!’; ‘Certainly! Right away sir!’; ‘Thank you for your custom!’). She checks the weather forecast to see how that will influence the lunch choices of the store’s clients. An untidy display upsets her deeply, and she will always do her best to reach the sales goals of the latest promotion.

It is ironic that Keiko finds herself and her freedom in the mindless platitudes and corporate rules of the convenience store. A new employee, Shiraha, sneers at the morning practice session and tells Keiko it’s like a religion. ‘Of course it is,’ she replies. Her days are an endless round of performing services, care even, for the store: replenishing the stock, tidying the shelves, serving the customers and fretting for its well-being. It is a sort of organism.

Keiko’s relationship with the store goes further. When she says she is reborn there, she means it almost literally. The food and water she consumes come from the convenience store. Her speech, behaviour and clothing are all copied from the other members of staff there:

My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues […]
My speech is especially infected by everyone around me and is currently a mix of that of Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara. I think the same goes for most people. […] Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.

This idea of infection between the members of the store staff is not really repeated in Keiko’s discussion of wider society. But it reinforces the idea that they are simply cells or smaller organisms serving a larger host. One day a disruptive customer is ejected from the store by the manager:

A wave of relief passed through the store, and the morning atmosphere returned to normal.
A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated. The threatening atmosphere that had briefly permeated the store was sept away, and the customers again concentrated on buying their coffee and pastries as if nothing had happened.

When Keiko cannot sleep, she thinks of the convenience store ‘the transparent glass box that is still stirring with life even in the darkness of night’. She keeps fit and healthy so that she can work efficiently and well at the store. She hears its voice in her head.

It is conformism. But we are shown Keiko’s society outside the store – her family and friends – and they are increasingly putting pressure on her to conform to their ideals. Working in a convenience store when you’re thirty-six and a graduate is demeaning, in their eyes. She should either get a ‘proper’ job, or marry. Towards the end of the book, Keiko realises something about her sister Mami:

She’s far happier thinking her sister [Keiko] is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.

‘I’m a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person,’ Keiko says. Normal people have social codes she doesn’t understand; the store’s rules are clear for her to follow. For eighteen years she is able to successfully repress herself, pass herself off as a ‘normal’ person and find a sort of freedom. Some religious regimens are like that: you rise through the repeated practices to a spiritual liberation. Yet now the rules have changed and her ‘normal’ act is itself perceived by her family as not acceptable any longer. They want a different normal for her, but one that she cannot give them. Thus, weirdly enough, Keiko’s choice to continue working in a convenience store becomes in the end not quite an uncomplicated act of defiance, but at least a conscious choice of the kind of conformism to which she wishes to adhere.