a gallimaufry

The Love-Child, Edith Olivier

I am one of, it seems, many people who have ferreted out a copy of this book on the enthusiastic recommendation of Simon at Stuck In a Book. I had never heard of it or the author. Edith Olivier was the youngest of ten children born to the rector and later canon of Wilton. Apart from a brief foray to Oxford, where she studied at St Hugh’s for four terms, she spent her life in Wiltshire. Still, she was part of a creative social circle which included David Cecil, Rex Whistler, Osbert Sitwell, Cecil Beaton and Siegfried Sassoon. During the First World War she served in the Women’s Land Army, and was three times mayor of Wilton. She only started writing in middle age, and The Love-Child was her first novel, published in 1927 when she was fifty-five.

(Edith Olivier by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1933, vintage snapshot print, National Portrait Gallery; the setting is perhaps a little grander than Agatha's garden but it seems in the right spirit)

On the death of her mother, dull, isolated Agatha Bodenham dreams back into being Clarissa, her imaginary childhood friend whose existence had been crushed by a sarcastic governess when Agatha was fourteen. At first, as the creature of her imagination, Clarissa can only be seen by Agatha, but gradually she grows more and more real until other people can see her too. While Clarissa is a child, Agatha can keep her more or less to herself, but as she grows older the charms of the wider world prove increasingly attractive and Agatha must share her.

Clarissa’s changeling nature is emphasised; she is described as an ‘imp’, an ‘elf’, as ‘shadowy’ and ethereal; she appears and vanishes as she pleases until she dons the clothes Agatha has ordered for her. She isn’t interested in toys and she and Agatha play endless games of ‘Let’s Pretend’, which each enjoys as much as the other. ‘Agatha was Clarissa’s only toy, and she was Agatha’s.’ With Clarissa, Agatha becomes inventive, amusing and joyful. But always she fears that Clarissa will ‘go back’ to the place whence she came, even after she has ceased to disappear.

Clarissa read:

‘We often see two bodies approach each other without being impelled by any external force. The cause which produces this effect is called Attraction, or that principle whereby the minuter particles of matter tend towards each other.... By this is most satisfactorily explained the motions of the Heavenly Bodies.... These spheres, separated from each other by immense intervals, are united by some secret bond.... This power of attraction is in some degree the cause of the juices circulating in the capillary vessels of plants and animals.... The Supreme Wisdom manifests itself in the government of the Celestial bodies, and is equally apparent in that of Rational Beings.’

Clarissa read quickly, with odd little mispronunciations in the long words, and with pauses now and again between the phrases, wrinkling her forehead and staring at the book, as she tried to follow the course of the stars swinging through those vast spaces, united by that secret bond.

Agatha’s mind was not bent starwards. There at last was the great scientific truth which lay behind the appearance of Clarissa. It was the body of Agatha Bodenham herself which had attracted those minute particles of matter from which had been compounded Clarissa’s exquisite little form, and then, from those particles, by a perfectly normal law of nature, a rational being had come into existence. It was difficult to understand, but there was no doubt that Clarissa could be explained by the very same law which accounted for the appearance of the planets in the sky and the vegetables in the garden. She had her place between the stars and the cauliflowers.

[...] Clarissa said:

‘I wonder what would happen if one of the stars went just a tiny bit too far away, and got out of the attractive power of the sun.’

[...] ‘Well, I suppose it would just go out,’ Agatha said, ‘but it couldn’t really happen. That secret bond between them cannot be broken. It said so in the book.’

‘It does happen sometimes though,’ Clarissa went on; ‘and they do go out, just as you said. I mean shooting stars. They must have broken the secret bond, and I expect that’s why I always feel so dreadfully miserable when I see them disappear.’

As well as being the sister and friend Agatha never had, the daughter she never bore, Clarissa represents that lively, imaginative part of Agatha which was suppressed by her upbringing. But if Agatha depends on Clarissa for wholeness and for an outlet for all her unexpressed love, Clarissa depends on Agatha for her very existence. Like the stars in the passage above, she must remain in Agatha’s orbit to survive and this gives their relationship a special closeness which will be threatened when a young neighbour, David, falls in love with Clarissa. Olivier shows an ugly counterpart of the relationship first in Clarissa’s love for the horrible monkey and then later by the final scene (I don’t want to give away everything).

The novel explores close mother–daughter relationships, how they can be both intensely rewarding and bring out the best in the participants but also become stifling. With the advent of David, though, it seems that all love is essentially possessive; David believes that he must 'fight' Agatha to 'gain' Clarissa. The book is also about the fundamental importance of imagination in life, or at least a full, happy life. It is charming and sad and humorous too, and it’s a great pity it is not in print at the moment.

(Rex Whistler, Edith Olivier, oil, Wilton Town Council, found at the Persephone Post; I don't have any further information about this painting. Edith Olivier met Rex Whistler in 1924 when she was holidaying with her friend Lady Pamela Grey in Italy and Lady Pamela’s son, Stephen Tennant, brought along a friend from the Slade – Whistler. Their good friendship lasted until his death, and while Edith helped launch Rex’s career he and his friends encouraged her writing. The title page of the edition of The Love-Child I have bears an illustration by Whistler, if we ever get any sunshine in Belgium ever again I shall photograph it and post it here)

(Edited to add: here's the title page:)

 

Tip for home hairdressers: After administering a haircut, always check that the hair on the left side of your/your victim's head is not two inches shorter than the hair on the right side, preferably before you/he/she/it sally forth for the afternoon, as humiliation may ensue.

Gormenghast on BBC Radio 4

It’s the centenary year of the birth of Mervyn Peake! How did I not know that? In my late teens I was obsessed with his work, starting with the Gormenghast trilogy but quickly embracing his poetry and art. I haven’t looked at any of it for ages, but particularly remember the novels and the illustrations for ‘The Ancient Mariner’ with (for me) an unusual clarity.

 
(Page of manuscript from Titus Groan showing Fuschia and Steerpike; it seems Peake sketched his characters as he wrote; taken from the Gormenghast website which is stuffed full of information about Peake)

I feel I should mark the occasion by rereading Gormenghast, but my copies are languishing in my parents’ house in England (my parents are most long-suffering and put up with boxes of books even though really I am far too old for this sort of thing and should go and sort them out) (one of these days). However, help is at hand! There is a terrific six-part serialisation of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels on BBC Radio 4 at the moment: The History of Titus Groan. I think it works much better on radio than as a television series, and the cast is wonderful (it includes Paul Rhys, Miranda Richardson, James Fleet, Tamsin Greig and Mark Benton).

('Swelter with Kitchen Urchin', pen-and-ink drawing, also from the Gormenghast website; Swelter is practically engulfing the child)

There’s also a programme about Peake from his children’s perspective: 'A Hundred Years of Mervyn Peake', and an exhibition at the British Library, The Worlds of Mervyn Peake; I am most disappointed that I won't be able to see it.

Hermes in Paris, by Peter Vansittart

(Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Portrait of Napoleon III (1855), now  in Museo Napoleonico, Rome; found here)

Towards the end of Hermes in Paris is a powerful chapter in which Napoleon III, weary and in pain, sits alone in his study contemplating the stand-off with Prussia. He looks at his two-volume set of Caesar and recalls a paragraph:

The kings are expelled from Rome. They vanish, because their mission is accomplished. We may say there exists, morally, physically, a governing rule which allows institutions and certain individuals alike a fated limit, marked by the extent of their usefulness. Until that limit, fixed by Providence, is reached, all opposition fails: conspiracies, revolts, all crumble against the irresistible force which supports what some wish to demolish; but if, on the contrary, a state of affairs, outwardly immovable, ceases to benefit human progress, neither the empyrium of traditions, nor courage, nor memories of past glories can delay by one single day the collapse decreed by Fate. Once the moment arrives, when the kings cease to be indispensable, they are toppled by the merest accident.

(Franz Xaver Winterhalter, The Empress Eugenie Surrounded by her Ladies in Waiting (1855), now in Château de Compiègne; found here; Vansittart refers to it in the novel)

This could be the epigraph of this strange, rich and fascinating novel. It takes place in Paris in 1870, just before the fall of the Second Empire to the Prussians. Hermes, trickster god, ‘always entertained by whatever goes awry: an ill-balanced marriage, a gullible child, a sententious but ludicrous lawsuit, adroit swindles, sea disasters, the breaking of oaths, [...] revolution, when the Minister of the Interior flees to the interior’, is haunting the cafés, unlit passages and high-society parties. Attracted by the imminence of catastrophe, which as yet only he can scent, he amuses himself with the petty hypocrisies of humanity which are particularly evident in this society of ‘seems, not is’. He ‘befriends’ two other outsiders and observers of the city: Jean-Luc de Massonier, a radical journalist rendered vulnerable by his spite and cowardice, and Emile, a young boy who roams Paris’s underbelly:

Streets had a way of making visible the unseen, angels were possible, a horse looked decidedly human. [...] The streets themselves were perpetual fairs, with water-sellers in cocked hats, blind men, dancing bears, organ-grinders with monkeys, lovers being ugly behind a statue or fountain, old soldiers with faces like dried-up oilcloth ready to thrust a hand into your trouser pocket, however little there was to find. The reek of vegetables and dog, the smell of a man damp from running.

His friendship is not to their advantage.

Meanwhile the politicians rant and posture, the aristocrats attend masked balls, the journalists spit vitriol at the powerful and crowds of ordinary people mass into a demonstration or disperse, uncertain of what to do. Gossip and hearsay drive and confuse people. In the end, war is declared over the flimsiest trifle.

I have outlined a ‘plot’ of sorts but this brilliant novel  isn’t obviously plot driven. In fact, many of the subplots end abruptly, or dissolve; certainly there are no resolutions. It progresses more by symbol and suggestion. With its detached viewpoint, assumption of some degree of erudition and densely allusive prose, this is a novel which is deeply concerned with the process of history. Things happen by accident, misunderstanding, in a muddle; taken all together they create a force which is beyond anything individuals can control. Events are caught between the past and the future, gesturing at a much larger narrative. Napoleon III is overshadowed by his more famous predecessor. In contrast to Bonaparte, his foreign policy has been disastrous, and in his debased empire his ‘Tacitus’ is a second-rate journalist and the best-known composer is Offenbach, writer of grotesque and frivolous operettas. And behind the shadow of Napoleon Bonaparte is the Revolution: the powerful classes fear it and the Parisian crowd are all too conscious of it. Haussmann has ironed the city into boulevards but old Paris lingers in dark alleys and superstitions, fairs and illusions, ready to rise up  again bringing disorder. Meanwhile, the fall of the empire is prefigured but so too are the Paris Commune and the rise of Nazism with its cultural fanaticism and anti-semitism.

Vansittart died in 2008 at the age of 88; there is an obituary in the Guardian by his publisher, Peter Owen, and two more  in the Telegraph and the Independent, all of which are worth reading for their portrait of him and splendid anecdotes. It is impossible for me to do justice to him, but judging by this and Secret Protocols he is a writer whose work you must seek out immediately and read for yourself.

(Portrait of Peter Vansittart, uncredited photograph from the New York Times)

What happened?

I checked my blog stats this morning, in the not-at-all obsessive way I do every day, and yesterday 155 people came here! (Well, there were 155 views, not quite the same thing but let's pretend.)

(This lovely uncredited photo was snaffled from Duxbury Free Library)

As I have to lie down and breathe calmly if my stats hit double figures, this was quite a shock. I have no idea why these people suddenly felt the urge to come here (I can't evaluate the stats although I do know that someone once came here searching on 'Chicken with gammy leg', I hope that person was satisfied), but hello and welcome! If you're waiting for the Hermes in Paris post, it will come soon, I promise: unfortunately I cannot do anything until I have finished reading Olivia Laing's To the River which is wonderful wonderful wonderful (OK I know you are not waiting for Hermes in Paris).

Cup of tea.

Post-holiday gallimaufry

Back in Belgium after ten days' holiday staying in England with my parents, a holiday with perfect weather, a domestic slave (ha ha! But my mother did all the cooking and laundry) and lashings of proper tea (I am turning into a stereotypical expat). There were proper hedgerows, hills, slumpy old houses and elderly trees. Alas there was not enough time for lying about reading and eating cheese, but is there ever?

 

• I attended a reunion dinner at my old college. It began a little formidably as most of my contemporaries all seem to be wildly successful and wealthy but underneath they remained much the same and I had a thoroughly good time although I did behave like a nineteen-year-old and the next day suffered the worst hangover I can remember. It is strange to meet people again after the best part of twenty years because one has to update one’s mental picture of them with such a jolt, but booze smoothes this out quite quickly.

 

• It is a sad thing indeed when one is – ahem – in the late thirties and still has books and books and books cluttering up the parental abode.  Really it is about time reality kicked in and some serious book culling occurred – but yet it is so easy not to do anything at all, my parents being very kind and having long ago given up selfishly whining about needing space in their own home. Still, inspired by Rachel at Book Snob, I did attempt a cullette. Being rather weaker than Rachel, I only set aside books I had read and would definitely never read again or had bought ages ago and the moment for reading them had passed (although God knows how that book on Dryden’s poetics got in there since I loathe Dryden passionately). Still, that accounted for about fifty, or forty, which was pleasing. I put all the books aside to take down to the Samaritans’ bookshop and looked at my bookcases and they looked just as full as before I had started, which was less pleasing. Hmm.

 

• This was improved by my packing two boxes of books and sneaking them into the car when my partner wasn’t looking. I don’t have anywhere here to put them, but at the time it felt like progress. And now I have lots more to read!

 

• I ended up keeping books I really should discard because of the inscriptions in them. Does anyone else have this problem? Any solutions as to how to get around it, apart from just being less feeble?

 

• While supposedly finishing Peter Vansittart’s Hermes in Paris, I filched Many Dimensions from my mother’s bookshelves and actually sacrificed sleep (parents of wakeful toddlers will understand what a high recommendation that is) in order to finish it. I do love a villain with a nice turn of phrase – alas I cannot quote any here as the book is back in its place – and Charles Williams has just become my go-to author of light metaphysical thrillers with an unintended fillip of nostalgia.

 

• Having read the review at Stuck in a Book some time ago, I finally splashed out on a nice copy of Edith Olivier’s The Love Child as a birthday present to myself and am thoroughly enjoying it. Although I should be thinking about how to frame a piece on Hermes in Paris. Which I hereby undertake will be the very next blog post. Gauntlet.

(Woman Reading in a Study, by Mary Ferris Kelly. I could not find the original source of this picture, but information about the artist is here. My room in my parents' house doesn't resemble this one in the slightest, nor am I as elegant as the woman pictured so gripped by her book, but I did end up spending more time rereading passages of books than I did on my cull)