a gallimaufry

The Long View, by Elizabeth Jane Howard

This is only the second novel by Elizabeth Jane Howard I have ever read: this is a slightly embarrassing admission because everyone loves her work and has read all the Cazalet Chronicles. Not I.

Here is an even worse admission: I disliked the novel I had read, and that novel was Falling, which I have seen described as a ‘late masterpiece’.

 The reason: what I call Jo Bettany Syndrome. For those of you who did not devote a substantial part of their youth to endlessly reading and rereading Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series, Jo Bettany was the heroine of the first dozen or so novels. Jo was clever and kind, a talented writer, immensely popular with girls and teachers alike; she played pranks but good-hearted ones, she sang with a beautiful bell-like voice which regularly reduced listeners to tears and she saved someone from death in every other book or so. When she grew up, she settled near her beloved school where she offered wise guidance to foolish schoolgirls, she wrote bestselling yet critically acclaimed novels, married a doctor and had about 35 children all of whom went to the Chalet School. In other words, she was so perfect that even child-Helen suspected that there was some sort of wish-fulfilment going on here on the part of EMBD. And when I sense it in a novel, I find I really dislike it. And in Falling, I felt the character of Daisy was just too good, even her weaknesses weren’t really weaknesses, and this irritated me. (Subsequently, I discovered that Falling was based on something which had really happened to EJH, perhaps this is why?) And because I am superficial, this meant that although I appreciated EJH’s great skill as a writer, I didn’t like the book.

Still, everyone loves EJH’s work, so when I saw The Long View in my local charity shop among the elderly paperbacks by Dick Francis and Hammond Innes, I decided to give her another go.

‘Let us do whatever you would most enjoy.’
This made them both actually laugh; it was his age-old preface to doing exactly what he would most enjoy.

Written in 1956, The Long View is the portrait of a marriage, from even before Antonia and Conrad first meet to their imminent divorce. The novel is divided into five sections, gradually moving back in time, so that we begin with 1950 and then move back to 1942, 1937, 1927 and 1926. It is a really clever way to structure the book, because of course your curiosity is aroused: why did their marriage fail? In fact, why did they marry in the first place? (I can’t help but wonder whether Martin Amis, EJH’s stepson, was inspired by The Long View to write his own time-backwards novel, Time’s Arrow, albeit he handles it very differently.) Apparently, EJH chose this structure to discover ‘whether one could not better understand people and their situations by slowly stripping them of their experiences’: the result is an astonishing success.

(Elizabeth Jane Howard; found here)

At the outset, the Flemings appear to have an idyllic existence: class, taste, plenty of money, good looks, busy social lives. However, this is a façade; behind it lurks pain, infidelity and bullying. The first, 1950 section, is the only section which is written from multiple points of view; it presents our main characters as other people as well as themselves see them, and it also gives a more rounded perspective on their two children, Julian and Deirdre, who are poised to make many of the same mistakes their parents made. Neglected and despised by their father, protected as far as possible from him by their mother, they are more than usually distant from their parents than most children of that time and class.

For the rest, most of the novel is shown from Antonia’s point of view (‘Mrs Fleming’ as she is reduced to being called in the later part of her marriage) and she is presented usually in terms of her relationship to a man. Her beauty, her clothes, her jewellery, her gestures, are all very closely observed, as if she were an object. She is the sort of person who looks lovely even when she is tired or crying. Someone asks her what she does and she tries to explain that she doesn’t look after the children, she doesn’t cook:

‘I do the arranging of it. There is a lot of arranging, you know. I read, and look at pictures, and garden, and listen to music – and Conrad minds awfully about clothes so I spend a certain amount of time on them – [...] I suppose I’m a sort of scene-shifter for Conrad,’ she finished. ‘He likes an elaborate setting, and he likes it to vary. I try to do that for him.’

She has schooled herself to please men, particularly her husband, and attached her self-worth to succeeding in this, but it is at a cost to herself. Certainly the crushing of her spirit began long before Conrad entered her life, and the final section of the book, 1926, is powerful. Despite this, by the time I finished the novel I hoped that her divorce might finally free Antonia.

We also dip into Conrad’s perspective. This works well because not only does it prevent him from being a monster, we also see how reasonable, charming, restless and clever he is, how attractive that can be, and how that masks his total selfishness and contempt for women. We experience him as Antonia might have done, the surprise when he turns.

(Elizabeth Jane Howard and her first husband, Peter Scott; found here)

What I loved about this novel was EJH’s skill in describing the world as her characters see it, every word perfectly chosen. Plunged into the middle of this complex relationship as the reader is, the minute level of detail in which it’s chronicled makes it feel claustrophobic. EJH expertly delineates mood and emotion, and the constant shifts in them, in a way that seemed truthful and pinpoint accurate, and is always coolly observed. She shows someone absorbing pain and damage over years, feeling exquisitely differentiated degrees of shame, guilt, humiliation, someone who lives emotionally on the brink at all times, trying to provide that ‘elaborate setting’ and fearing the smallest slip.

So, yes, I shall be reading more of her work in the future... And yes, I did experience a soupçon of Jo Bettany Syndrome, but not much and this time it didn’t bother me, perhaps I am becoming a better person.

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)

 

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my Nine-Year-Old Self, by Katherine Langrish

When I was nine years old I wrote a book called Tales of Narnia, and I still have it. In spiky blue ink, written in my best handwriting with only occasional crossings-out and spelling mistakes, it runs for eighty-six numbered pages and fills an old hard-covered notebook from front to back. [...] I covered the notebook with a paper wrapper which I painted dark blue, and stuck a poster-paint picture I’d made of Aslan on the front. He looks very stiff, very yellow and rather cross.

So begins this lovely ramble through C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It is really for people who, like Langrish, adored the books when they read them as a child but perhaps have not revisited them since. So a chapter is devoted to each book, including a detailed retelling each story and extensive quotes. As we explore, Langrish considers how Lewis’s personal beliefs, the historical situation (shortly after the Second World War and during the Cold War) and literary and folkloric works contributed to each book. Her knowledge is impressive but lightly worn, so that it’s like reading along with a good friend whose ideas you mostly but not completely agree with.

Langrish is even-handed, although she admits she likes some books more than others (and does anyone truly love The Last Battle?), she is alert to beautiful writing wherever she finds it. She considers the darker side of the books: racism? Yes, definitely. Misogyny? More mixed. There are strong girls in every book, and some great villainesses; but on the other side there is the Susan problem and, though I don’t think Langrish mentions it, no strong and likeable adult females. Do these problems mean that we shouldn’t read the books any more? Of course not!

And I had not realised it, until Langrish pointed it out, how thoroughly Lewis loathed schools. There are plenty of references to them in the books and they are always awful places.

I was impressed by Langrish’s tracing of motifs and plots to their source material. This includes Victorian and Edwardian children’s books and fantasy literature, Mediaeval and Renaissance poetry, fairy tales, Greek, Roman and Norse myths, the Arabian Nights, Christian theology and of course the Bible. Lewis’s uses of these gives different flavours to the books: for instance, there is a strong debt to E. Nesbit in much of The Magician’s Nephew, but more of a Mediaeval romance feeling to The Silver Chair. Langrish also argues persuasively for the influence of more recent history on some of the books. So Maugrim’s secret police surely draws on the Cheka and the Stasi, Nickabrick on the struggles of Irish revolutionaries, and the silver chair on the horrors of trench warfare.It is all very illuminating and gave me a new respect for Lewis’s skills as a children’s writer and as someone who understood children. (The only real remaining mystery: why did Edmund love Turkish Delight so much?) Langrish’s emphasis on her own responses to the books keeps it from ever threatening to become dry. Passages such as Aslan’s death and rebirth, or the creation of Narnia, still move and delight her; Caspian’s lengthy back story bores her.  A particular joy is how she contrasts her adult reactions with her child ones. At the end of The Silver Chair, grown-up liberal Langrish disapproves of the way Jill and Eustace deal with the bullies but nine-year-old Katherine loved it.

This is the kind of book to read on a rainy Sunday afternoon with the kind of tea and toasted muffins you would eat in a faun’s cave in Narnia. Although you will then spend your Sunday evening grubbing about in the attic looking for your battered Puffin paperbacks...

(All the illustrations on this page are by Pauline Baynes; this last one is the cover illustration for The Last Battle - rather different from the one on my Puffin edition!)

Into Egypt, by Rosalind Brackenbury

Into Egypt is the third of Rosalind Brackenbury’s novels to be re-published by Walmer Books, and if you haven’t yet discovered her writing you are in for a treat. Her first novel, A Day to Remember to Forget, depicts a family coming together for a Sunday birthday lunch, evoked from different viewpoints. Her second, A Virtual Image, follows an Englishwoman driving through France in pursuit of her friend. Into Egypt, first published in 1973, centres around a young English girl who travels out to Israel in 1962 to ‘find herself’. It is written in the prose that I love, Brackenbury’s long, flowing sentences which are flexible enough to contain great subtlety and nuance, to chart shifts in characters’ thoughts and feelings with delicacy. The world that we perceive through those characters is described with careful, almost overwhelming detail; it is sensuous and heightened, as if we are experiencing everything in High Definition, and infused with the characters’ emotions. Here the main character, Jo, has been struggling with her unhappy boyfriend, Francis; the way that her view out of their London flat is described reveals the misery and the fleeting beauties of their relationship:

The chill settles upon me, the cold breath of a late May morning with no sun beyond the panes of glass. From our kitchen window we can see one tree in the small back garden of a house below our flat, one lilac tree with its white trumpet blooms dingy and its leaves matt with dust; and the smell of the lilac still rises to our window when we open it on fine nights, when we lean out and see the glow over the river, the sun setting on the pink chimneys of the power station, the clouds trawling the windy sky.

Into Egypt has two epigraphs. The first is from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’:

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Time is treated in a structurally complex way in the novel, which chops between Jo travelling in Israel in 1962, incidents in Jo’s childhood, Gilbert’s earlier life, Jo in London five years later, and Jo on a second trip to Israel in 1972. In terms of the novel, it means that sometimes we are experiencing events as they happen and sometimes we are looking back or already know something in advance. We learn early on, for example, that the young kibbutznik Gilbert, whom Jo meets on the boat out to Haifa and becomes close to, will be killed a few  years later, giving his plans for the future, the descriptions of his vigorous, strong body, a ghostlike quality.

(Students working in a kibbutz garden; found here)

Israel’s history marks the present wherever you look. Jo looks at the Mount of Olives, the Wailing Wall, Mount Zion, the past is everywhere visible and loaded with symbolism. The dreams of the kibbutzniks are based on the ancient idea of the Promised Land, the place where their ancestors lived. They have plans for the future but are rooted in what has come before. More recent history is just as prominent: the bullet holes in walls, the no-man’s land in Jerusalem. As the sun sets in Safad, Jo sees:

below there are the abandoned Arab houses set upon the slopes, that change from honey white and lose the light from their windows and turn blind black eyes down the valley, further still.

For Zvi Mosseri, the historian Jo meets in Jerusalem, the past is a trap, the old dreams need to be tempered and Israelis and Arabs must work together, overcome the fears and hatreds of the entrapping past. Clever, tormented Francis in London would agree: complaining about Freud, he says:

‘All this stuff about one’s childhood, when what one’s supposed to do nowadays is to face the existential reality of the present moment. [...] The present makes the past irrelevant. For the purposes of therapy, anyway. Don’t you see that using the past as the only explanation of the present denies any play of free will?’

And so, perhaps, the gaps in the narrative and the shifts back and forth in time force us to focus on the moment being told to us.

(Jaffa Road in Jerusalem, 1962; from here)

The second epigraph is from Exodus:

Fear not to go into Egypt.

You can see into Egypt from the kibbutz at Gan Hagar, on the border ‘the huts and the United Nations men playing cards, and the guns laid in readiness against the wooden walls, and the flags marking the boundary line’. Gilbert tells Jo:

‘It’s the same earth, you know. Same land, same farmers. Only we can never go into Egypt, and they can never come over to us.’

Where you work the land, you belong, in Gilbert’s mind. Visiting London, he is lost in its ‘insubstantial charade’. The only English person he considers ‘real’ is a cowherd he meets out in the countryside: ‘It was true: work was the universal reality.’ This clear vision, this kibbutz life of hard work which totally absorbs you, appeals to Jo too. There is a part of her that craves certainty and hopes that Israel will provide exactly that:

And I stand apart, I listen, I judge, I am looking for right and wrong, black and white, the absolutes which I must have come here to find.

It is the same part that, years later, drives her to visit her boyfriend’s therapist for an ‘explanation’ of what has happened to him. Yet she also suspects these certainties. One of her childhood memories is of arranging her crayons in order of the colours of the spectrum:

but when the arrangement is finished there are two pencils left, the white and the black [...] To put one at each end seems to mock the gradations of subtle colour within, for they are too extreme, too absolute; they are not a part of the rainbow but something exterior and hard to place; perhaps they are not even colours. To avoid the decision she puts them separately in her satchel.

For this reason, she is also attracted to the ambiguities and complexities Zvi offers her. Moderation makes sense to her, though it is more difficult than black-and-white.

Exodus is about a journey; Into Egypt is full of journeys, interior and exterior. In the end, there are no answers and no final destinations, the point is to fear not to go into Egypt, to take the risk and keep moving.

'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)

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!

 

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)