This is the third novel of Rose Macaulay’s I’ve read, the other two being The World My Wilderness, a very
long time ago, and The Towers of Trebizond, which I reread more recently. I loved them both, and so when I saw a copy of Told by an Idiot in a second-hand bookshop I snapped it up. (I note that its previous owner was H.P. Hulbert of St Barnabas Vicarage in Bristol, who dated its acquisition as 23rd June 1938, and I (another HP) paid £5 for this nice hardback copy and brought it to Belgium; where will it go next, I wonder?) And then I didn’t read it for twenty years. Ah well, its time has finally come.
Told by an Idiot was first published in 1923 and follows the fortunes of the Garden family from the late nineteenth century until after the First World War. It has an arresting opening:
One evening, shortly before Christmas, in the days when our forefathers, being young, possessed the earth, – in brief in the year 1879, – Mrs Garden came briskly into the drawing-room from Mr Garden’s study and said in her crisp, even voice to her six children, ‘Well, my dears, I have to tell you something. Poor papa has lost his faith again.’
Papa being a vicar, this loss of faith is rather a pity, especially since the Gardens really like the vicarage they are living in. However, Papa, an inveterate seeker of truth, has had and continues to have during the novel many losses of faith and many discoveries of new faiths: Anglicanism, Roman Catholicisim, Unitarianism, Quakerism, Theosophy, Spiritualism, he works through them all...
His six children, all very different characters, grow up, marry (or not), work (or not), have children (or not). The years pass. Indeed, this book reminded me very strongly of Virginia Woolf’s (later) The Years, which I had read as an undergraduate and not since. When I got it down to look at it, I found it quite different to Macaulay’s novel. Woolf focuses on the individual’s experience in the moment. Macaulay, however, shifts the emphasis so that it is on time passing and on the larger movements – political, social, artistic – that churn through the years. Her characters play out their little lives against this.
(Undated photograph of Rose Macaulay, found here)
So, Macaulay discusses the Irish Question, militant suffragettes, nationalism, imperialism. Her discussions are dry, amused and partisan, they are not histories. (One thing surprised me, in these days of the pandemic: not one mention of the Spanish flu outbreak of 1919.) She gives her novel two epigraphs which form the principal themes of the novel and explain its emphasis. One is the quote from King Lear from which the title is drawn, and which expresses the smallness of our lives, ‘full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’. The other is a line by Paul Morand, from Fermé la nuit: ‘L’histoire, comme une idiote, mécaniquement se répète’ – history repeats itself. And what is striking, and perfectly illustrates her point, is that we are still discussing the same ideas today – for instance:
To make up for the stagnation of home politics, there was, in 1906 and 1907, plenty of international activity. The nations of Europe were ostensibly drawing together, a happy family. [...] A rapprochement took place between ourselves and Russia, for it was quite the fashion in Europe to fraternise with Russia, her armies were so huge, even if not, apparently, very good at what armies are supposed to be good at. There were those in this country who held that it was not quite nice to fraternise with Russia, disapproving of her governmental system, and of the Tsar’s very natural suppression of the Duma that had for a few days and by an oversight so strangely existed and actually dared to demand constitutional reform. There were those in Great Britain who said that we should not be at all friendly with a government so little liberal in mentality. But, after all, you must take nations as you find them, and their domestic affairs are quite their own concern, and one should not be provincial in one’s judgements[...]
More subtly, Macaulay notes the latest vogues in literature, for example the rise of George Bernard Shaw, but infuses her own prose with echoes of earlier writers (most obviously Shakespeare). Thus in art it is the same: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
There are six Garden children: Vicky, conventional and full of joy in life; Maurice, the embittered editor of a radical magazine; Rome, the distant cynic; Stanley, enthusiastic and idealistic; Irving, comfortable and rich; and Una, placid and content. They possess characteristics of their parents but are also very much themselves. The ones who interest Macaulay most are Maurice, Rome and Stanley, as well as Imogen, Vicky’s daughter, who longs to be a boy and join the Navy.
There is a necessary difficulty to writing a novel like this, which is keeping in balance the discussions of the wider context of the times with the individual lives of the characters. Macaulay’s characters are vivid and interesting and sometimes one wants more of them and less of the politics, or at least I did. But that would be to wish the novel to be something other than it is. The strength of this strategy is that the reader gets a real taste of the times, in particular the intellectual currents of the times, which would not be easily – not so pithily, anyway – conveyed in a more character-centric novel.
(Philip Wilson Steer, The Swiss Alps at the Earls Court Exhibition, 1887; Tate Gallery)
Some of the most sensitive writing is about Imogen, so I will end with a particularly lovely passage about her when she is in her early twenties and writing.
Imogen was happy. She felt her life to be pleasure-soaked; a lovely, an elegant cry of joy. [...] Imagination brimmed the cup of her spirit like golden wine. She felt happy and good, like a child in an orchard, ripe apples and pears tumbling in soft grass about her, the silver boat of the moon riding in a green sky. For her birds sang, sweet bells chimed and clashed, the stars made a queer, thin, tinkling song on still and moonless nights. The people hurrying about the city streets and squares were kind and merry and good, like brownies; the city itself was a great, gay booth, decked and lit. Dawn came on a golden tide of peace; noon drove a flaming chariot behind the horses of the sun; evening spread soft wings, tender and blue and green; night was as sweet as a dream of apple blossoms by running water. When she wrote, whether by day or by night, her brain felt clear and lit, as by a still, bright taper burning steadily. Her thoughts, her words, rose up in her swiftly, like silver fishes in a springing rock pool; round and round they swam, and she caught them and landed them before they got away.
What I particularly like about this description is I think it tells you something of Imogen’s writing, joyful and romantic, original and with echoes of earlier writers, and that she writes in response to the world around her but that her writing then further shapes that response. in an endless loop of delight.