a gallimaufry

'The School Friend', by Robert Aickman

What better way to welcome in the new year than with creepy stories of ghosts and doom?

Robert Aickman’s is a name I’ve often come across as a writer of the uncanny but his stories were scattered across anthologies and I had no real picture of him. In 2014, the centenary of his birth, Faber republished many of his story collections and his novel, and after only a seven-year wait I finally persuaded Father Christmas to give me his first solo book, Dark Entries. ‘The School Friend’ is the first story in that collection and it is very, very strange and horrible.

The epigraph to the story is a quote: ‘To be taken advantage of is every woman’s secret wish’, attributed to Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, née Asquith, a writer and coiner of aphorisms who married a much older man and died young. (She seems a fascinating person and I’d like to read her work!) This epigraph acquires resonance as the story progresses; it implies rape fantasy, submission, perhaps consenting to becoming a victim in order to gain what you want.

The central figure in the story is Sally Tessler, whom the narrator Mel first meets at school. Sally is precociously clever and her mathematical ability is ‘almost magical’; she dresses in a distinctive way and is beautiful. The narrator is reminded of Tessa in The Constant Nymph – a novel, play and film in which the child Tessa falls in love with an older man and dies as a teenager, unrequited. Virginity and purity are associated with Sally by the narrator. Yet Sally gives Mel a strangely illustrated copy of Petronius’s Satyricon, a Roman novel packed with sexual adventures, and surprises her by being very knowledgeable about all the activities depicted in it.

Sally lives alone with her father, Dr Tessler, ‘the victim of some serious injustice’ and very mysterious. He never leaves the house, but brings Sally up very strictly according to a ‘threefold’ regimen: ‘reading, domestic drudgery, and obedience’.  There is no mother. At the very least, this seems a very unhealthy atmosphere for a child to grow up in.

Sally gives Mel another book: an elderly copy of Faust in German. It turns out later to be a first edition. Faust memorably sells his soul to the devil for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasure. Sally wins a university scholarship, moves away and becomes a scholar in the Classics.

The death of Dr Tessler and his weirdly old-fashioned funeral (of what did he die?) brings Sally back to her old home town, to which Mel has also moved back, under a cloud. Sally moves into her father’s house and sends Mel a postcard, inviting her to tea. The postcard shows a photograph of Mitylene, the capital of the island of Lesbos, home of Sappho. Sally does not receive her own post at home but goes to collect it every day.

The tea and the house are dismal and Sally is changing; she is dirty and badly dressed; later, when she meets Mel at the supermarket, she aggressively rejects her. After Sally is seriously injured in an accident, Mel has to visit the house to ‘keep an eye on it’ at the (odd?) insistence of the ward matron. Of course she explores the house...

The house itself is weirdly suggestive of Sally’s body and Mel feels like an invader. It is unkempt and slatternly, as Sally has become, stained and hostile. It contains – what does it contain? Mutilated toys, a prison-like refuge stuffed with occult books, signs of bestial violence. Sally seems to have been trying to protect herself from something. Mel sees a horribly white-faced man in a black frock-coat who instantly vanishes: ‘I thought at first that dead or alive, it was Dr Tessler; but immediately afterwards I thought not.’

The matron tells Mel that Sally is pregnant and in a terrifying scene back at the house the two women confront each other, while upstairs Sally’s ‘baby’ grunts and snuffles like a pig. ‘Let me tell you, Mel, [...] that it’s possible for a child to be born in a manner you’d never dream of.’

‘Will you be godmother? Come and see your godchild, Mel.’
The noise was coming from the library. Distraught as I was, I now realised that the scrabbling noise was connected with the tearing to pieces of Dr Tessler’s books. But it was the wheezing, throaty cry of the creature which most turned my heart and sinews to water.

And at the end of the story, Sally and Mel meet as if nothing has happened. Sally’s appearance is as it has always been, ‘with that strange imperishable untended prettiness of hers, and her sweet absent smile. She wore a white dress.’ She has sold the house and is moving to the Cyclades; she invites Mel to join her since Mel is not happy.

Mel gives away little information about herself. A writer, she has returned to her parents’ house after an unnamed ‘catastrophe’ which she refuses ever to enumerate. She has a distant relationship with her own father, and she says that she went ‘swiftly to the bad’ but in what way we do not know. She is knowing, almost certainly not telling us everything, and what she does tell us seems both portentous and banal.

The story coalesces around the two women’s sexuality and allies it with knowledge and creativity. It is hard not to see Dr Tessler as oppressive and incestuous. Perhaps he has made a Faust-like pact; perhaps Sally has. Returning to the house as an adult, Sally does not clean it as she did as a child but instead becomes like it, dresses herself in it. She seems to be terrorised by some supernatural creature which may even be raping her, but does not flee. Is it that same creature she calls her child? Does she have to undergo an appalling test of her courage to expurgate a traumatic past?

The working of the story is subtle. It is told slantwise and partially, so that we have the sense of a meaning but not the meaning itself, and nothing is ever explained. The surface events are unsettling but they become very much more disturbing when you try to piece them together. And because we can’t explain it, we cannot close the book feeling that we are safe from it.

Happy New Year!

(The illustrations are by Charles Keeping: for an edition of Beowulf translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland, picture found here; and for The Wedding Ghost by Leon Garfield, found here)

The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris

As I mentioned yesterday, I have mainly been reading light detective fiction over the past few months. However, some weeks ago I did bestir myselfto read something a little different, when I noticed The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris, in the library. A novel about publishing and race? Yes please!

It is the story of Nella, a 26-year-old editorial assistant who is the only Black woman at Wagner Books in New York; politically active, she tries to raise her white colleagues’ interest in diversity with no success. She is initially delighted when another Black woman, Hazel, is recruited: finally things are changing and she has a friend and ally! But Hazel is not all that she seems, and while she charms the office Nella receives anonymous notes warning her to leave Wagner and increasingly alienates herself from her boss and co-workers. What is going on?

(There will be spoilers!)

I found this novel frustrating because it is so close to being a really brilliant work. The micro-aggressions that Nella has to bear from her white colleagues, their insensitivity and self-congratulatory behaviour struck this white reader as uncomfortably accurate. Nella’s downfall is brought about by her honest assessment of a novel about a Black opoid addict written by a white man, a novel Wagner is keen to publish as it will make them look good but which is, in Nella’s eyes, packed with racial and gender stereotyping to an unacceptable degree. The publication process of this novel brings out the smug worst in the white editors and Harris has a lot of fun with this at their expense. She also shows very powerfully how wearying it is to be in such an environment, where you can never really stop being Black and just get on with stuff in the way white people take for granted. The underlying idea of OBGs was clever, and I thought that the reasons why young Black women bought into it – why shouldn’t they be ambitious? Why shouldn’t they have an easy time of it? – compelling and sympathetic. The Other Black Girl is also sharp about social class, about envy, about that feeling that you’re being pushed aside by someone but cannot quite put your finger on anything that they’ve done.

The trouble was, for me, that while the satire was nicely done there were weaknesses in terms of plot and character. The role of hair grease in the plot was a bit unconvincing, but OK. More problematic: the build-up was slow but there was no menace. Women are fleeing and going into hiding, but nothing that terrible ever happened to anyone (one character was abducted but then released unharmed, that was it). The worst-case scenario for Nella, if she resisted the OBG network, seemed to be she’d leave Wagner and get another job somewhere else, which – is not that bad? I’d also have liked the characters to have had a little more depth. Overall, it struck me as very clever idea by a talented new writer, but that it hadn’t quite developed far enough into fiction.

Yet – it has stayed with me longer than other, more competently structured novels. So I am looking forward to Harris’s next book.

glad tidings!

Merry Christmas everyone!

(Studio of Bernardo Daddi, The Nativity, c. 1340–90; Wallace Collection; it was included in the Guardian’s Art Weekly email and I really like it)

I hope that you are enjoying the holidays and that Father Christmas brought you lots of lovely books and other gifts and – despite Covid – some happy times with friends and family.

I haven’t been exactly an exemplary blogger for the past couple of months: lots of work coupled with a fortnight of Covid, and then a while to get back into the swing of things, pushed this gallimaufry to the back of the heap of things I was supposed to do. (To be clear: I wasn’t very ill with Covid just verrrry tired for longer than I had anticipated.) Also, I’ve mainly been reading what I consider ‘chocolate’ books: light, undemanding, not much to write about them. Though I do recommend that anyone contemplating going down with Covid gets in a stock of Ngaio Marsh novels, absolutely the thing for it.

I do have some things I want to write about now and I shall do so!

But first – a cup of tea and one of my Christmas presents, Treacle Walker by Alan Garner. What are you reading?

Halloween, by John Burnside

This is the first poem in John Burnside’s 1994 collection, The Myth of the Twin. I have recently started reading it, having had it all these years, because of my new book arrangement. (Here we see why some of us benefit from having physical, paper books instead of digital books; I had quite forgotten I owned it until I picked it up.) It’s a lovely collection, and this poem is obviously fitted for this time of year.

I have peeled back the bark from the tree
to smell its ghost,
and walked the boundaries of ice and bone
where the parish returns to itself
in a flurry of snow;

I have learned to observe the winters:
the apples that fall for days
in abandoned yards,
the fernwork of ice and water
sealing me up with the dead
in misted rooms

as I come to define my place:
barn owls hunting in pairs along the hedge,
the smell of frost on the linen, the smell of leaves
and the whiteness that breeds in the flaked
leaf mould, like the first elusive threads
of unmade souls.

The village is over there, in a pool of bells,
and beyond that nothing,
or only the other versions of myself,
familiar and strange, and swaddled in their time
as I am, standing out beneath the moon
or stooping to a clutch of twigs and straw
to breathe a little life into the fire.

To me, the poem has a sort of smudgy quality, like old black-and-white photographs that are faded and sometimes over-exposed. It speaks to traditions, it doesn’t feel modern, and I wonder if the ‘I’ of the poem is a ghost ‘version of myself’, walking the place that they haunt but aware of other selves, other times, other villages that are peopled or abandoned. Anyway, I like it very much and I hope you do too.

(The photograph is of Tyneham, the village in Dorset that the villagers were forced to leave during the Second World War and never permitted to return to; found in the Dorset Echo, here. It doesn’t quite have the right atmosphere for the poem, but almost...)

 

catching up

Oh dear! Where did the time go? I am almost embarrassed to come back here after so long. How are you all? Did you enjoy the summer?

I have mainly been having a lovely time. International travelling rules were relaxed just in time for me to pop over to the UK in August to see my family. I fell upon the charity bookshops of Ipswich with joy and managed a small but respectable haul (I am limited by what I can carry back on the Eurostar and my suitcase also held the Folio Society edition of The Lord of the Rings which is possibly the heaviest three-volume set ever published, my arms are now six inches longer).

Here is my swag, rounded out with a few books I filched from my mother’s box of books to go to Oxfam:

But! Not a single work by Storm Jameson! It seems my dreams of second-hand bookshops stuffed with her books are indeed dreams with no basis in reality. Bother.

I have mentioned before that I decided to rearrange the majority of my fiction, poetry and plays chronologically. Dear friends, do not do this. In theory it was a wonderful plan which would reveal very clearly the development of (mainly) English literature; in practice it is difficult to sustain because you have to keep checking publication dates every time you want to shelve a book (so you don’t bother and shove books in where there’s space and then everything becomes even more chaotic) – quite apart from what to do about books published many years after they were written, collected works, etc. I had known that it would take longer to find any book I wanted but I thought this would yield pleasant rambles through my books as I sought a particular volume. In fact it’s just annoying. But I am too lazy to re-organise everything again.

Anyway, an unexpected drawback of scattering slender volumes of modern verse among novels is that you can’t really see them any more. So, when we redecorated my daughter’s bedroom and a small bookcase became surplus to requirements, I stole it for them. It’s right beside the door to the kitchen and already I’m reading more poetry than I’ve done for years. Hurrah!

At the moment I am having a Brontë fest. I reread Jane Eyre – it’s so good! And then I read Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenberg, which was fun and led me back to Juliet Barker’s The Brontës. It was abandoned half-read a couple of years ago but I am now fully absorbed in it. It is too unwieldy for the bus, so I am also rereading Wuthering Heights and loving it all over again.

And now, although I ought to be preparing a four-hour English lesson on answering the telephone and takng a message (four hours! I know! my lucky, lucky students), I will leave you with a quick list of books I’ve read recently that I recommend to you!

• The Absolute Book, by Elizabeth Knox. (Whenever I clap eyes on the spine of this novel, in my head I hear a voice saying ‘The absolute BOOK!’ with exactly the emphasis of a Georgette Heyer heroine gasping ‘You absolute SWINE!’) This is a novel which is always changing, never quite what it seems – characters move through different worlds and we move through different genres. A mash-up of Ruth Rendell, The Shadow of the Wind and Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale, streaked with darkness and splendidly evocative, it is an enjoyable read slightly let down, I felt, by the neat ending.
• The Trick is to Keep Breathing, by Janice Galloway. I’ve had this book for twenty-five years and finally its moment arrived and it was worth it. In it Joy Stone, a drama teacher, chronicles her struggle with grief and mental breakdown; this sounds grim but it is clever and witty and hopeful as well as sad. I want to read more of her work now.
• The Queen of Air and Darkness, by T.H. White. Darker and crueller than The Sword in the Stone, this is an excoriation of the chivalric code with which Arthur’s court has become associated. White depicts it as either violent or ridiculous and the novel lurches between these two extremes. I found it uncomfortable to read, I think that’s the point. Soon: The Ill-Made Knight.

Happy October, everyone!

 

afghanistan: some things we can do

Like pretty much everyone else with access to the media, I’ve been watching the appalling events in Afghanistan unfold, both astonished and disgusted. My heart goes out to the Afghan people, utterly betrayed by Western governments. How could we leave them like this? How could we abandon thousands of people who helped us, leave them to a horrible fate at the hands of the Taliban and others? The stories that have appeared in the papers, of journalists, translators, musicians, children and women, are heartbreaking.

In times like this, as individual citizens, it may feel as if we are powerless to help but there are practical things we can do. Local groups in Britain are rallying to support Afghans who have been evacuated to their neighbourhoods and are appealing for donations of clothes, sanitary products etc. This Guardian article provides links including one for Care4Calais, a charity working with refugees arriving in the country, which detail how you can donate goods, money or your time as a volunteer. The British Red Cross is working with Afghan refugees arriving in the UK and is appealing for donations. You might also consider offering a spare room for a few weeks if you have one, via Refugees at Home.

To support those still trapped in Afghanistan, you could donate to any of the international agencies working there, such as Unicef or Save the Children. For information about local Afghan agencies and networks, there is also a Twitter thread here by Sahdya Darr of Open Rights Group which lists ways you can help, including supporting education for girls.

A group of human rights lawyers, international development experts and women's rights activists have set up an advisory group called Action for Afghanistan to help get more people who are at risk out of Afghanistan; they are asking for people to sign their petition and write to their MPs.

If you know of any other ways we can do something to help Afghans, please add it in the comments! This is just what I have been able to pick up so it’s hardly extensive. Thank you!

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, and The Passenger, by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz

I read a lot of books which I never write about here. For one thing, it takes me aaages to write a post, I’d never keep up with my reading. For another, even if I enjoy a book, I don’t necessarily have anything to say about it – other than, ‘I think it’s really good’.

In the last few weeks I’ve read two novels which fall into this category. I don’t have anything to say about them, other than, ‘I think they’re really good’. And both have been widely reviewed, so you can easily find out more about them elsewhere. Why bother to even write this, then? Well, perhaps you’ve walked past one – or both – of them in a library or bookshop and almost picked them up – and after reading this post, you might decide next time to actually pick them up and have a look.

The first one is Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. Gyasi was born in Ghana and brought up in the US, and this is her first novel – or short-story collection, since each chapter concerns a different member of the same family and builds on what has come before but is also entirely self-contained. The novel opens in the late eighteenth century with Effia, born during a fire in Fanteland (in present-day Ghana). Effia’s mother, Baaba, seems to hate her and ruins her chances of marriage to the young chief Abeeku. Instead, Effia marries James Collins, a white Englishman, and is taken to the Cape Coast Castle. In the dungeons of the Castle languish slaves, awaiting transport to the plantations in the most horrific conditions. One of these slaves, we discover in the next chapter, ‘Esi’, is a young woman who is Effia’s half-sister.

In alternating chapters we follow each generations of these two branches of the family. One, Effia’s, remains in west Africa; Esi’s endures slavery and finally freedom in the United States. On the one side, Quey becomes a slave trader and his son flees that life; on the other, H works the mines in Pratt City and Willie longs for a career as a singer. Through their stories of hardship, hope and grief, the history of the slave trade and its consequences right up to the present day are traced. Much of it is very sad but also fascinating, as each character struggles to carve a life and a destiny from what they have inherited. They are fiction, but they stand in for real people and this makes their suffering more appalling.

The other book is probably the most stressful novel I have ever read: The Passenger by Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, translated by Philip Boehm (the German title is Der Reisende). It’s Kristallnacht and Otto Silbermann, a wealthy Jewish businessman, belatedly realises he needs to flee Germany. Forced to escape from his apartment as Nazi storm-troopers bang on the door, he makes for the railway station. Can he escape?

The novel is amazingly tense. We are kept close to Silbermann, we feel his emotions and follow his trains of thought as if they are ours. Every encounter could lead to Silbermann’s arrest. ‘Don’t trust him!’ you are muttering as he engages someone in conversation. ‘Keep hold of your suitcase!’ Apart from keeping you on the edge of your seat, the great strength of this novel is that it shows how everyone, including Silbermann and we readers, becomes implicated in the horrors of Nazism. Silbermann does not ‘look like a Jew’. He resents how his non-Jewish friend Becker is embarrassed – afraid even – to be seen with him, and we resent this too. ‘Help him!’ But then, when Silbermann meets more ‘obviously’ Jewish people, he is anxious and we are anxious too – and then, Silbermann tries to distance himself just as Becker tries to distance himself, and we accept that too because we fear for him. And everything is all the more stressful because we ‘know’ what will happen to most of the Jewish characters, and even though they are fictional, they represent real people who really died. Just as in Homegoing. And the tension of The Passenger is maintained right up until the very end.

next year’s reading week

As I mentioned in my round-up post, this year was the last Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week that I shall host. I have loved doing it. Each year I’ve learnt more about STW and been ever more impressed with her writing. She will always have a special place in my heart and I’ll continue reading and re-reading her for ever.

But it is time for a change and so next summer I’m going to devote a reading week to a different writer. There was some discussion in the comments to the round-up post of who that might be. As an indecisive person, I found the enthusiasm for both Storm Jameson and Alice Thomas Ellis – unhelpful. !!! For making a decision, I mean. It’s great that they both have champions.

Therefore: a compromise! Next year, a Storm Jameson Reading Week. The year after – unless I became too addicted to Storm Jameson’s work, for there’s plenty of it to sustain several reading weeks – an Alice Thomas Ellis Reading Week.

At the moment I know very little about Margaret Ethel Storm Jameson, to give her full name. Her Wikipedia page, with a list of works, is here. There’s a rather better short life here, and more detail in this review of a biography by Elizabeth Maslen. Born in 1891, she was the first woman to receive a first-class degree in English from Leeds University and won a scholarship to pursue an MA. She wrote to support her family (she married twice and had a son), producing almost a book a year as well as reviews, articles and short stories. She also helped to found English PEN, supported refugees from Nazi Germany and was politically active. It was a full life, which continued until 1986 – too long, she felt.

Elizabeth Maslen writes, in ‘The Case for Storm Jameson’:

Her reputation was very high in her lifetime, as a novelist and as a writer of non-fiction — she was, like Winifred Holtby, very much in demand both as a literary critic and as a commentator on social and political issues.

She continues:

One reason why I’m interested in her is because, in my view, she offers a much-needed counterbalance to Virginia Woolf and the high modernists as regards the practice and perceived function of fiction. For there has been something very restrictive in the way academics in the Western anglophone world have tended to categorize the literature of the twentieth century. My argument is that Storm Jameson’s novels, like those of Christina Stead and Angus Wilson, for instance, have in part suffered because of this mania to define fictions by such labels as modernist, postmodernist, realist (this last usually in a derogatory sense and cited as in opposition to modernism, implying a medium which is incapable of manipulation, being in essence conservative, reactionary, old-fashioned). Throughout the twentieth century, the tendency to pigeonhole fiction within one of these categories has shown remarkable resilience, despite lessons to be learnt from post-colonial and diasporic writings – and as a result, writers who cannot be slotted into one or other of these categories have tended to be at best viewed with suspicion, at worst dismissed as ‘middlebrow’, by many academics in the West.

As far as I can see, most of Jameson’s novels were contemporary realist fiction – but she also wrote science fiction. One of her novellas is entitled: Women Against Men. Her Modern Drama in Europe (1920), an examination of the development of drama in the twentieth century, is controversial. Wikipedia describes it thus:

Though most of her commentaries are highly critical and sometimes malicious, her boldness reaches its peak when she asserts that William Butler Yeats "represents the last state in symbolic imbecility".

Well, I’ll be hunting for a copy of that...

To give you a flavour of Storm Jameson, I’ve found a few reviews of her novels online. I wrote about her novel of secrets and betrayals in post-war France, A Hidden River, and heavenali has reviewed Company Parade and Love in Winter. If you know of any more, please add the links to the comments!

Intrigued? I can’t see that any of Jameson’s work is currently in print (I may very well be completely wrong) but she is such a staple of second-hand bookshops, and doubtless online sellers, that I cannot believe it will be hard to find copies of her work. You’ve all got a year to do so! For me, this is going to be a journey of exploration, I really do not know what to expect...

(Author photographs from Bloomsbury.com and the National Portrait Gallery)

SNB review: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer's Journey, by Sarah LeFanu

Being an idiot I have completely forgotten to mention that I’ve a book review up over at Shiny New Books.

It’s of Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journey, by Sarah LeFanu, reissued by Handheld Press.

This is the journal Sarah LeFanu kept while researching her biography of Rose Macaulay, and it’s absolutely fascinating. I wolfed it down in about two sittings. Highly recommended! (Also: read the review!)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021 competition winners!

This is Manky Cat. He likes flowers and English Breakfast tea, one sugar. When I was expecting my daughter, I made him for her out of an old sock.

Manky Cat generously agreed to do the draw for the Sylvia Townsend Warner book competition.

The deadline for entries was midnight on Sunday, and so Manky Cat really should have drawn the names yesterday. Alas! He is very lazy and he didn’t do it.

However, today he has performed his duty and I can now announce the lucky winners.

For the copy of The True Heart:

Lory of Entering the Enchanted Castle.

For the copy of The Flint Anchor:

Ali of heavenali.

Congratulations to Lory and Ali! Please email me postal addresses so that I can send them off to you. (I will not entrust this to Manky Cat, who is now recuperating with a cup of English Breakfast and will take at least three days to recover from this morning’s exertion.) My email address is hejparry <at> fastmail <dot> co <dot> uk.

Thank you to everyone else who took part! I am sorry I don’t have more books so that I could send one to all of you.