a gallimaufry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India 1600–1900, by Katie Hickman

Many of us have an idea of the memsahib, the white, middle-class British wife who lived in India during the years of the Raj, and it’s not a very complimentary one. A life of cocktail parties, bullying the servants and boredom springs to mind. It’s this easy stereotype that Katie Hickman seeks to challenge in this fascinating survey of British women who made a home, temporarily or permanently, in India before the twentieth century. If you’re remotely interested in this subject, I really can’t recommend this book enough – Hickman has a novelist’s eye for character and story, as well as a historian’s talent for analysis and research, and it’s a lively as well as informative read.

The recorded history of British women in India begins in 1617, with a Mrs Towerson, wife of an East India Company captain, voyaging to India with two female companions, Mrs Hudson and Frances Webb. Even before they reached Gujarat there was scandal, for Frances Webb secretly married a fellow-traveller, Richard Steele, and became pregnant by him. Horrors! When they arrived in the English community at Surat, it was to an unappetising all-male drinking and gaming club where they were not made welcome. The very act of embarking on a perilous eight-month journey to a land they could hardly have imagined in their wildest dreams surely marks out these women as unusually intrepid. Mrs Hudson, at least, proved also to be an astute businesswoman and left two years later with a rich cargo to sell on in Europe.

(Jan Van Ryne, A Perspective View of Fort William in the Kingdom of Bengal, belonging to the East India Company of England, 1754; found here)

In the eighteenth century, British women began travelling to India in larger numbers and recorded their experiences in diaries and letters. However, an adventurous spirit was still required of them. Eliza Fay, wife of an Irish advocate, arrived in Calicut just as a war was breaking out. Not only were she and her husband kept captive for a month in very unpleasant and frightening circumstances, but another Englishwoman nicked her teapot and tea caddy. Once freed, Mrs Fay went on to enjoy a fine life in Calcutta and write sharp-eyed letters home: little escaped her notice. (My liking for her, however, took a blow when I later read that she had a slave, Kitty Johnson, whom she abandoned on the island of St Helena.) Expatriate society was somewhat less rigid about morality than the mother country. Elizabeth Marsh was captured on a merchant ship sailing from Gibraltar to be given as a present to the Sultan of Morocco; for protection she pretended to be married to another prisoner, James Crisp. Some twenty years later she left Crisp, now in fact her husband, to travel around southern India with an unmarried man who was almost certainly her lover.

By the nineteenth century, enormous fortunes were being made in India (think of Joseph Sedley in Vanity Fair). On the whole, British and Indian women did not mix and Hickman suggests that this was due to restrictive social codes on both sides, as well as of course a lack of cultural curiosity among the British and their habit of recreating Surrey in India rather than adapting to local lifestyles. Still, there were exceptions, Fanny Parkes being perhaps the most notable and the most ready to ‘see life from the Indian perspective’. She travelled all around India, made Indian friends, learnt Indian languages, learnt to play the sitar and ate opium as well as Indian food:

How much there is to delight the eye in this bright and beautiful world! Roaming about with a good tent and a good Arab, one might be happy for ever... Oh the pleasure of vagabondizing through India!

(She also most entertainingly drove the grand and not-vagabondizing Eden sisters round the bend by popping up wherever they went on their own grand tour.)

The aristocratic Henrietta Clive was quite taken aback by the vulgarity of many of the British in India. Abjuring most of them, she learnt Persian and Hindi and interested herself in botany. She took her daughters to festivals and to visit temples and later on a seven-month tour of India, which required fourteen elephants to carry their tents and a hundred bullocks pulling carts for all their luggage (including a harp). The lands through which they travelled had just been taken by the East India Company after the Second Mysore War. Henrietta Clive marvelled unquestioningly at the plunder from Tipu Sultan’s palace: ‘What a wonderful people we are really...’

(Joshua Reynolds, Lady Henrietta Herbert [later Clive], ca. 1777; found here)

Gradually, the British became less and less open to India, and then we reach the uprising of 1857 and that’s it for tolerance. This section is very hard to read and what happened must have traumatised both the British, who could never forget the sheer horror of incidents like the massacre at Cawnpore and thus never feel secure again, and of course the Indians, who endured a terrible collective retribution.

Yet British women continued to go out to India and if they were not sympathetic to Indian culture they were undoubtedly industrious housekeepers, many of them in isolated outposts with husbands who proved less than satisfactory. Flora Annie Steel, author of the Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, was a fine example of this. Housekeeping did not satisfy her, however. Owner of squirrels and arranger of reading parties, she soon turned her attentions to education and was appointed Inspectress of Schools in the Punjab.

(Cropped photograph of Flora Annie Steel, 1904; found here)

This fascinating social history has only one drawback: inevitably you want to know more about the individual women whom Hickman discusses than she has place for, and about the land they could not or would not understand. And of course, it would be nice to have more of a perspective on them from the Indians alongside whom they lived, if there were any such record. Nevertheless, it is a lively starting point and I heartily recommend it, as does Nala the cat, who tried to eat it.

Women’s Weird: Strange Stories by Women, 1890–1940, edited by Melissa Edmundson

(Steps, by Simon Marsden)

I started to write this at the beginning of the half-term holiday, for Hallowe’en and to participate in Witch Week. It was a sullen, grey day, we’d had to cancel the little party for my daughter due to tighter Covid restrictions and even the prospect of an extra week’s half-term holiday was failing to lift my spirits. So I did not get far with it, but now that the sun is shining and the positive rate of new infections is at last falling, everything seems a lot better and I seem to be regaining the urge to write.

Here, belatedly, are my thoughts on Women’s Weird, a most enjoyable collection, and on ‘ghost stories’ in general. It is Friday 13th, so a not inauspicious day for something uncanny.

The book is exactly as the title describes it and includes work by American and British authors from the tail end of the Victorian period until 1940. Although many of them are well known (if surprising: I had no idea that D.K. Broster wrote ghost stories, although why shouldn’t she?) – and include These include E. Nesbit (of course!), Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton – only a couple of the stories appear in other, similar anthologies (of which I seem to have rather more than I thought, perhaps they have been spawning while I wasn’t looking), so there is plenty of new material here for long-standing fans of creepiness.

Crucially, these aren’t just effective ghost stories. Edmundson has been looking specifically for ‘Weird’ stories, and she discusses what Weird is in her (excellent) introduction to the collection. As a very bald summary of her definition, Weird stories engage with the supernatural but are ‘something more than the traditional ghost story’, eliciting ‘a profound sense of dread [H.P. Lovecraft’s words]’ as well as ‘a stirring, a touching of nerves not usually sensitive, an awakening to more than fear – but to something like awareness or conviction or even memory [Mary Butts’ words]’, ‘an alternative path for the exploration of the numinous [Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s words]’. The stories seek to unsettle through disturbing manifestations of the supernatural, shaking our complacent view of reality. This collection, Edmundson explains, reflects the fact that ‘During the late Victorian period and into the early twentieth century, women’s supernatural fiction became much darker as newer, more ominous presences emerged [...] This collection surveys some of these experimental forms to show how these authors moved beyond the traditional ghost story and into areas of Weird fiction and dark fantasy.’

For me, a spooky story provides two experiences: the story while you’re reading it, and the story when you’ve finished it. Obviously all literary forms do this, but it seems to me especially significant in this genre. While you’re reading it, you should feel chilled, horrified, unsettled. This is difficult for a writer to achieve. Readers are cynical and they know the tropes. Don’t disturb the ancient grave or hiding place; don’t ignore the old tales. Evil deeds have consequences. Don’t be a sweet young wife or (in this collection anyway) a dog. (In fact, it may be wisest to focus on a sense of inevitability about the story than to attempt a shocking twist.) But the end of a ghost or Weird story often forces you to reinterpret what has gone before: perhaps it offers an explanation, perhaps a catharsis. A good story does both elements satisfyingly well; an exceptional story explores something else at the same time and means that you can reread the story even if you ‘know the ending’ and still find new and interesting aspects.

So, the first story in the collection, ‘The Weird of the Walfords’, contains few surprises for the seasoned reader of haunted tales. The young heir to the Walfords hates the ancestral family bed in which so many of his forefathers have died; when he inherits Walford Grange he takes an axe and chops it to pieces. Of course, bad things ensue. But what is young Humphrey really trying to destroy along with the bed? What does it represent to him – death, the stifling responsibilities of an aristocrat to the buildings and things he is supposed to keep in trust for the next generation? And in a weird and horrible way, does he get what he wants in the end?

(Ecclescraig House, by Simon Marsden)

I like best stories that don’t explain away too much. For me, ‘Let Loose’ – a truly spine-tingling account of an architect (and his dog!) who descends into a bone-stacked crypt to copy a wall-painting – is most effective when you don’t quite know what’s happening. The explanation was a bit weak, frankly, in comparison with the power of the haunting and left me with too many questions which I won’t pose here because I don’t want to spoil it for you. In creating an atmosphere of dread and winding up the tension, it is supremely skilful. It is also significant because it invents a structure of ghost story (according to Wikipedia: 1. characterful setting; 2. gentleman scholar; 3. antiquarian object whose disturbance awakens a supernatural being) which was later to be associated with M.R. James. Let it now be associated with Mary Cholmondely!

‘The Twelve Apostles’ by Eleanor Scott follows in this Cholmondely tradition and is also an excellent example of its kind. Even though you know what’s coming, and are muttering to yourself, ‘No no no don’t do it’, it’s still shocking.

(Melrose Abbey, by Simon Marsden)

‘The Shadow’, by E. Nesbit, is as different as can be from ‘Let Loose’. There is no ghost, only a shadow haunting a modern house and three people in it: a young married couple and their friend Miss Eastwich who visits them after the (never-named) husband asks her to come and cheer up his sweet young wife Mabel, who is poorly. The husband fears it is some curse; he must have a guilty conscience but he claims he does not, and we never find out – though perhaps it is connected somehow with Miss Eastwich...

Specifically feminist concerns feature in many stories, such as ‘The Giant Wistaria’ and ‘Kerfol’, while Margery Lawrence subverts a symbol of ordinary domesticity and the feminine rôles of wife, nurse and cook in the delightfully sinister ‘The Haunted Saucepan’. ‘The Book’, by Margaret Irwin, describes the collapse of a middle-class family in a truly nasty case of evil influence.

My favourite of all, however, was the last one: ‘With and Without Buttons’, by Mary Butts. Two bored sisters are irritated by their neighbour and decide to cook up a ghost to frighten him. Is what follows their own creation, gone horribly out of control, or something else that was just waiting for an opportunity? It is one of a pair of stories – the other being D.K. Broster’s ‘Couching at the Door’ – which turns articles of women’s clothing into something life-threatening (to men).

Hallowe’en and Witch Week may have ended but this time of year is perfect for stories like this – and a second volume, Women’s Weird 2, was published just a few weeks ago. And remember: Covid 19 restrictions are depressing, but at least you’re not being menaced by powers beyond the grave.

(The photographs in this post are all by Simon Marsden, whose beautiful book The Haunted Realm captured my imagination as a teenager. His pictures derive their eerie, Weird atmosphere from his use of infrared film)

A Day to Remember to Forget, by Rosalind Brackenbury

It’s the late 1960s and Phil and Lucy have just decided to get married; they are still students but have fallen in love with an old farmhouse they intend to buy even if it’s not entirely clear how they’ll pay for it (‘when the loot runs out, I’ll sell books and vegetables,’ says Phil airily). They are on their way to Phil’s childhood home in suburbia, for his mother’s fiftieth birthday. This novel centres on that birthday and on the relationships between the members of Phil’s family, the Ridgelys. It explores the tensions between generations, the frustrations of love and the power of domesticity. By soaking the reader in the thoughts of Lucy, Phil, Phil’s mother Felicity, and Mrs Fletcher, the Ridgelys’ elderly neighbour, Rosalind Brackenbury weaves a striking and acute novel that has stayed with me. Unlike a lot of ‘stream-of-consciousness-type’ novels, it has a physicality, an earthiness to it. The characters are so deeply and solidly imagined that it’s impossible not to believe in them and I catch myself wondering what happened to them all, where is Lucy now aged almost seventy?

(Carel Weight, The Departing Angel, 1961; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

Felicity Ridgely is the very definition of house-proud. Her home is spotlessly clean, she works ceaselessly to ensure that her kitchen is ordered and her linen ironed. Why this is so important, she no longer knows. She spends most of her birthday cooking, preparing and clearing up meals for the rest of the family: breakfast, a roast lunch, afternoon tea, supper. Her husband, George, and her sons try to lure her away, to have a drink, to rest, but she refuses. She takes no pleasure in all this housework – in fact, she deeply resents it and plays the martyr constantly. But if it were to be taken away from her, her life would be empty. She has nothing else.

She and George are conventional in their attitudes – pathologically so, in Phil’s eyes. They mistrust Mrs Fletcher, who lives next door in a dark, decaying house: her husband was a conscientious objector and died unhappily. They cannot express their love for their sons. Felicity feels her blunders painfully, but cannot pull herself out of the pattern that elicits them. But their worst crime, according to Phil, is their dishonesty. They lie about the past and Phil’s childhood.

Andrew, Phil’s elder brother, is kinder to them:

‘I see they had to invent it all,’ Andrew said, ‘because they’re so bloody miserable now. Because they can’t stand not having had a happy past to gloat over, so they invent one, they allow themselves to see it all different because otherwise life would be intolerable. [...] So don’t take it away from them. Because it’s cruel, and unnecessary. [...] Shit, they didn’t even have a chance to find out who they were and where they lived before they were slap-bang in the middle of a bloody war, shooting hell out of a bunch of other kids on the other side of Europe. They didn’t have a chance. They couldn’t say, me first, and this is what I want, and I want to live in a big house in the country and nobody bugging me please.’

Andrew has followed the path laid out by his parents – university, job, marriage, child – but he has adapted it to suit himself and sublimated his resentment. Phil, however, wants none of it, rejects ‘all the rubbish’ of this sort of life, ‘nothing natural or living or real’. Rejection is the only way he believes he can survive.

Phil said, ‘But how can one have a choice, really? Everything’s there before you’re born. All the things other generations have done, in their turn, I suppose, without a choice. And they go on after one’s dead. You can’t change anything. You can only decide not to accept it. You just have to go and do your own thing, as they say, and let the rest get stuffed, if they want to. It’s too late. One doesn’t have time.’
‘Just one life,’ Mrs Fletcher said, not answering him, her eyes blurred now with fatigue. ‘Just a few years. You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

Yet of course it’s a qualified rejection, because the life he envisages is, like Andrew’s, ultimately only a different version of the same thing. It’s property ownership, marriage and children, just with long hair and cigarettes and swearing. When he and Lucy visit Mrs Fletcher for a glass of sherry, they describe their dreams with great enthusiasm:

‘But a house,’ Lucy plunged in, her thin hands in the air, gesturing around a shape. ‘A house can mean more than just walls, more than just a place. You know? One makes something, expresses something. And sometimes, one just finds the perfect thing, the perfect place, something that’s been sort of waiting for one.’
‘And if one falls in love,’ said Mrs Fletcher, ‘one must act.’
‘Yes! That’s just what happened! It was as if it had been left there for us, just at the right moment. That’s why we have to have it, at whatever risk. Because I do think, don’t you...’ her hands moved again, swiftly, ‘that if one is offered something great one is offered a risk too; and if you can accept the risk, you get the greatness. Oh, dear, I am explaining it badly. But no, this is what happens, if you fall in love with a person, isn’t it? You risk your whole self, you give yourself away – oh, completely – and it’s the most awful risk, but if the person accepts you, then you have the greatness too, oh, and everything.’

Mrs Fletcher, who once also defied convention for the love of a man named Phil, is gently sceptical. And underneath, Lucy is a little sceptical too. Does she really want to marry Phil? (She’s only nineteen.) She imagines the perfect life, but will the house provide that, or will it prove a trap like the one that has caught Felicity? Will her marriage be a union of equals, or will she end up afraid of Phil? At the end of the novel she and Phil drive out at dusk to see the house, and it is surrounded by little fires as the farmers burn the stubble: a potent and ambiguous image.

Lucy and Phil’s dream is essentially static. They will achieve the perfect house, the perfect state. What will happen after they are perfectly married and living in the perfect house? They don’t seem to know, other than that it will be wonderful. Yet, Brackenbury’s novel warns, do not expect romantic love to endure, do not stake all your happiness on it. Do not assume that loving your children will be enough, because you will easily warp and damage that love. ‘You make choices all the time, of a sort. But who’s to tell you if you were right?’

The edition of A Day to Remember to Forget which I read is a new one published by Michael Walmer (and sent to me to review months ago – I am really sorry Mike to have taken so long). It has an excellent introduction by Margaret Drabble, which places it in its context (1971) and discusses its novelty and even shockingness. But it’s worth reading not just as a historical document of a particular socio-cultural shift in British society, between the Boomers and their parents, but because it is a really good novel and a painfully honest description of the limits of family love. In the end, we are all alone.

(Carel Weight, The Silence, 1965; Royal Academy of Arts; found here)

Hot Milk, by Deborah Levy

So, this is the novel which you, dear readers, voted that I should read...

I had seen some good reviews of Hot Milk, which is the second of Deborah Levy’s novels to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, so I was very pleased when I found a copy in the English-language section of my local library. It did not disappoint.

The book is narrated by twenty-five-year-old Sofia Papastergiadis, former PhD candidate in anthropology, current waitress and coffee-maker in a West London café, who has accompanied her mother Rose to Almería in a last-ditch attempt to find a cure for Rose’s mysterious partial paralysis. Nestled between the barren hills and the poisoned sea is the clinic of Mr Gómez, built of veined white marble and shaped like a breast. As Rose submits to Gómez’s unorthodox treatments, Sofia ministers to her, swims in the sea and embarks on sexual relationships with Juan in the beach injury hut and Ingrid, the German seamstress.

Very subtly, the novel explores femininity. Sofia (‘wisdom’) perceives her world in terms of symbols, symbols that for the most part she chooses not to pin down with a specific, single interpretation but leave open, to accumulate layers of meaning. (And perhaps she is afraid of misreading them, as she misreads the word Ingrid embroiders on her silk top.) An example is the image of Medusa, enmeshed in ideas about female bodies and what they ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ to do. Stung by ‘medusa’ jellyfish, Sofia identifies herself several times as a monster, despising her body as failing to match contemporary ideals of slenderness. Ingrid also self-identifies as a monster, perhaps because of what she did to her sister, perhaps because of her desire for Sofia. Sofia, however, usually perceives Ingrid as a hero figure, like Perseus rather than Medusa: Ingrid wears silver sandals laced up her calves, she has a bow and arrow to shoot lizards and is interested in decapitation. This is made very explicit near the end of the novel, when she rides a horse at Sofia, ‘in her helmet and boots. High in the dizzying sky an eagle spread its wings and circled the horse’. Rose is also associated with monstrousness, craving amputation like the beheaded Medusa, like the jellyfish ‘in limbo, like something cut loose’. Sofia experiences that desire of her mother’s to cut off her feet as being a desire to cut herself off from Sofia (‘Her legs are my legs. Her pain is my pain’).

In their different ways, Rose and Sofia are trying to reject what one might call the ideals of womanhood. Sofia destroys some images of females; she crushes a doll (already broken) under the wheel of her car and later hurls a vase to the floor. The vase is a ‘fake’, a copy of an Ancient Greek black figure vase, showing seven slave women fetching water. Its destruction inspires Sofia to visit her father in Greece, meeting him for the first time in fourteen years. It may also be part of her attempt to reject her current rôle as handmaiden to her mother. She does, however, purchase an air-freshener from the market in the shape of a woman with ‘massive belly and heavy breasts’, a form closer to her image of herself.

Rose, meanwhile, is withdrawing from the traditional definition of motherhood. Conventional mothers include Alexandra, the very young second wife of Sofia’s father, who devotes her time to breastfeeding her new baby in an atmosphere of stifling solicitousness, and – bathetically – Jodo the cat, who gives birth to kittens in the breast-shaped clinic. Jodo is also described suckling her kittens. Rose does not want to be nurturing and nourishing in this way any longer. Instead, she reverses things. She demands that her daughter tend to her, and bring her endless glasses of water (in place of milk?), water that is never the right water. The novel is set against the Greek government-debt crisis, and Greece seems to figure as a sort of cultural parental figure. What debts do Sofia, her father and Rose owe each other? Can and should they be repaid?

Sofia is content with this but also not content. She wants a bigger life, but her passivity and diffidence paralyse her. At the novel’s opening the screen of her laptop splinters, which she takes as a metaphor for herself: ‘My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I.’ From breakage may come rebirth: Sofia crushes the doll and smashes the vase, she visits her father, she starts laying plans to escape to the US and continue her PhD. The end of the novel, however, makes it seem unlikely  that she will succeed.

(Deborah Levy, 2013, photographed for the Observer)

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

I picked this up on a whim in the library last week. I’ve seen the film, a little while ago, and I’ve read a few reviews of it, so it didn’t hold any secrets plotwise. However, I was curious to see how it worked as a novel and what the writing was like – and whether it was actually all that good. I had quite low expectations, because I felt that the film had started well but then got schlocky. (I assume that I am the last person on Earth to read this novel so as usual there will be lots of spoilers in what I write so if I’m wrong and you are the last person on Earth to read this novel and you haven’t read it yet, stop here.)

Having low expectations and time to read it carefully instead of racing through to find out what happened really benefitted my experience with this book. It was miles better than I had anticipated, and the main characters were drawn with some subtlety. I still think the murder of Desi is a bit too much and Amy becomes too great a monster, but it worked better in the book and the ramifications of it were also well handled. Book-Amy was a more rounded and believable character than Film-Amy (in the novel, there is much more from her viewpoint).

It struck me that one at least of the core themes of the book is authenticity and fakery and the grey area in between. Early on in the investigation, Nick muses nihilistically:

It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative [...] We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or a TV show. [...] and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is cleaner, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore. I don’t know that we are actually human at this point [...] If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul-mate, because we don’t have genuine souls.

So saturated are we with these second-hand experiences, Nick argues, that we are lost. If we consciously model our behaviour on how a character from a film behaves, we have no authenticity. But if we try to avoid doing that, we confuse others (who do expect us to react like a character from a film) and make ourselves so self-conscious that we can’t behave ‘authentically’ anyway. This is what happens to Nick. He is so hyper-aware of all his second-hand experiences that he cannot behave as people expect him to behave; instead he is awkward and uncomfortable, with the result that everyone immediately assumes he must be guilty of murdering his wife. (I was reminded here of the way that many people treated Kate McCann, the mother of the little girl who vanished from her hotel room. Mrs McCann was considered to be insufficiently grief-stricken in public.)

(From the film: Ben Affleck as Nick, looking shifty; Rosamund Pike as Amy)

In order to be perceived as innocent, Nick has to fake genuineness. Meanwhile, as the reader progresses, his story and Amy’s diary diverge increasingly in their portraits of their marriage. Amy’s diary, as is suddenly revealed, is also fake and the mystery that everyone is trying to solve is fake too, with fake clues. Yet there is a real mystery too.

In her diary, Amy writes about how she feels compelled to play rôles – how we all do – although most of us never take is as far as Amy does. For the first few years of their relationship, Amy played a rôle and so, to some extent, did Nick. Both of them claim that they brought out the best in each other, but neither was being entirely ‘themselves’. As time passes, they come to know each other ‘better’, they see each other’s faults and the marriage starts to go wrong. Now they bring out the worst in each other. Yet are these selves really so much more authentic than the ‘better selves’ of the early relationship? Are they just different traits picked from the Automat at different times?

And at the end, Amy and Nick’s marriage is paradoxically a yet deeper sham but also, finally, more ‘authentic’, with less rôle playing. The couple know each other too well for that now. Living with a psycho-killer might not be everyone’s idea of a happy ending, but Nick understands that the ‘real’ Amy is more complex, surprising and interesting than the woman he thought he had married; he will never feel that this experience is second-hand, he will have always to be alert if he is to survive. This seems to suit him. Sometimes.

It is almost a feminist tale. Amy has had to sacrifice a lot for Nick: she’s left her home and family, she has been turned into a housewife (there’s nothing wrong with being a housewife but there is something wrong with being one against your will), she has given Nick all her money to set up a bar of dubious profitability. In return, he has been unsympathetic, neglectful and unfaithful. In both of their accounts, however self-justifying, that much is clear. Who wouldn’t, in such circumstances, spend a year plotting their fake murder and framing their spouse? Heh. But finally, Amy wins Nick’s respect. He has to be careful of her. He might be physically stronger than her, but she is infinitely cleverer and prepared to go to extremes he cannot. There is still no true equality in their relationship, because Amy has complete control over the situation and Nick has to do what she wants. I did not feel as sorry for Nick as I might have been expected to feel, as I did watching the film.

I wonder what will have happened to them in twenty years’ time? That’s a sequel I’d be curious to read.

I know that all of you reading this have already read Gone Girl (because I’m the last person etc. etc.). What were your impressions?

Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life, by Samantha Ellis

A little while ago I started reading Juliet Barker’s The Brontës; in fact I even decided to write about it on here as I read it. Unfortunately, like so many Parry projects, it fell by the wayside. There were two causes for this failure: one was that the Barker book was just too big and heavy to bring on the bus with me, which meant that I had ‘bus reading’ and the Barker, and I can’t really cope with reading more than one book at once so in the end the bus reading conquered the Barker. And then Brexit happened and I was too absorbed in politics – and then suddenly months had passed and I’d lost the momentum. But of course, I felt guilty about it.

However, bus reading or no bus reading I am inspired to pick it up again and this is entirely due to Samantha Ellis’s Take Courage, which is a sort-of biography of Anne Brontë. According to Ellis, Anne is the neglected, forgotten Brontë, usually considered – when considered at all – as mouselike and pious – boring, really. (And I would certainly agree that when people think about the Brontës, they think first and foremost of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.) Ellis herself had always been an Emily devotee, though she also admired Charlotte’s ‘toughness and spirit’. However, on a visit to the Parsonage in Haworth, Ellis reads Anne’s last letter:

‘I long to do some good in the world ... before I leave it. I have many schemes in my head for future practise – humble and limited indeed – but still I should not like them all to come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little purpose.’ This catches at my heart, and makes me breathe hard suddenly. I put the letter down. This Anne knew what she wanted. She had published two novels and many poems. She didn’t want to have to stop. She was courageous, she was tough, and she wanted more life.

Ellis is transfixed; she connects to Anne emotionally, and begins to suspect that what she had believed about Anne was untrue. So begins her journey to find a more interesting Anne, someone who turns out to be feminist, radical and courageous – not unlike Ellis herself, in fact. Reading Anne’s novels, she realises that they were not only undervalued when they were first published, they are still undervalued now.

Ellis’s first problem is that so little of what Anne wrote remains: two novels, some poems (though many have disappeared), five letters, four diary papers, two of which were co-written with Emily (they had a habit of writing a diary paper every four years, giving an update of their lives; they wrote them together if they could or separately if they were apart) and some marginalia in a few books. Otherwise she has to rely on what others wrote about Anne, and those of Anne’s possessions that still survive. Her solution is clever: she devotes each chapter of her book to one of the people closest to Anne – including the heroines of her two novels – ending with Anne herself. Each person ‘represents’ an aspect of Anne herself – so Maria, her mother, contains her origin story, her attitude towards motherhood and marriage; Tabby, the elderly servant, contains her love of the moors and nature. This approach reminded me of Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, which creates a frame around the central character by which we learn to know him. I thought this worked really well.

(Sketch of Anne by Charlotte Brontë, ca 1834; found here)

Ellis also eschews any attempt at objectivity or impartiality. This book is driven by her enthusiasm and liking for Anne, which gives it an enormous amount of energy and personality. She speculates fearlessly and, one can’t help feeling, perceptively, on how Anne might have felt or reacted to various situations (‘Anne must have...’ pops up frequently). She tells us about her own life as she researches Anne up in Haworth, visits the places associated with her life, contemplates her own life and new relationship, and she tells us too about her reactions to the material she reads about Anne’s life:

her optimism makes me sigh. I don’t want Anne to be the good girl diligently slogging away. It seems more fun to be Charlotte and Branwell, raging and sneering at their bosses, or Emily, hating employment so much that she mostly avoided it. I don’t want Anne to be excited about setting off for her first job in April 1839 when, at the time, all her siblings were at home and writing like the wind.

In doing this, Ellis takes some risks. One is that she mines Anne’s creative writing, especially her poetry, for Anne’s own opinions. Are her poems on her religious doubts, for instance, really expressions of her own struggles with faith? Might they not be partly or even entirely manipulated by Anne’s artistic skills to create certain effects? To give a doubting reader hope, for instance, rather than articulate her own fears? Or a mixture of both? She extends this to the writings of others: she implicitly suggests that the sisters Rose and Jessy Yorke in Shirley, for instance, are Charlotte and Anne – or how Charlotte perceived their relationship – based on no evidence I could see. I felt that Ellis might be right, but she might not be; I think the role of the imagination in shaping and transmuting biographical facts should never be underestimated and this made me uncomfortable sometimes.

Another risk is that Ellis’s partisanship for Anne, while cheering and necessary, colours her judgement and, for one thing, leads her to resent Charlotte. As I wrote above, I haven’t yet finished the Barker biography so I probably shouldn’t be commenting on this, and from what I have read Charlotte does seem to have been quite a difficult person. However, Ellis does seem to put the worst interpretation on everything Charlotte does. For instance, Ellis believes that Charlotte suppressed Anne’s writing, but perhaps she was trying to protect her reputation (or doing a bit of both?); and it is just possible that in deciding to hold Anne’s funeral without her father, she was right and expecting Patrick to come and bury yet another child would have been too painful to him. It seems to be, in the world of the Brontës, that if you champion one you have to decry the others and that you can only be either/or about them. Ellis first goes to Haworth, after all, to promote her previous book, which pitched Wuthering Heights against Jane Eyre.

Yet taking risks like these creates a lively and affectionate read, through which I zipped in marked contrast to my attempts on Barker’s monumental, scrupulous, scholarly work, and the nice thing about the literary world is that we can enjoy both books and their different strengths. For Ellis’s analysis of Anne’s literary works, especially her novels, is brilliant and rightly reveals their daring, their radicalness and their ‘realness’. In Agnes Grey Anne lifted the lid on life as a governess, showing the ugly reality in which even ‘proper gentry’ behaved badly (this piece of news seems to have shocked the gentry). She also crafted a romance between a man and a woman which was both realistic and based on mutual respect (no glowering Byronic heroes here). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not only went beyond the ‘marriage plot’ (in which a novel is concerned only with the story leading up to the wedding), it looked unflinchingly and scandalously on alcoholism and a husband’s abuse of his marital rights – and it gives us a feminist heroine who fights for her and her son’s future.

(The dining-room at Haworth Parsonage with – I think – Anne’s writing desk on the table; photograph found here)

AND did you know? because I did not – unless you are reading an edition of Tenant which is based on Stevie Davies’ 1996 edition – or a first or second edition (lucky you) – then you are almost certainly reading a butchered text. !!! Most modern editions are based on a rackety edition published in 1854, years after Anne’s death. The publisher, Thomas Hodgson, wanted to issue the book cheaply, so hacked bits out to make the book fit one volume. This version has become the one most frequently reprinted ever since. Ellis lays a ‘mutilated’ edition beside the Davies edition and is shocked at the difference. Some removals seem to have been purely to cut the page count; others to subtly reduce the radicalness of the original. When I read this I jumped right out of bed and ran to my bookcase to check my own copy: yes, I do have the framing story, but other parts, including Anne’s preface, have been removed. Horrors! I’ll have to buy another book! And I’ll have to buy Agnes Grey, because I’ve never read it. Oh dear. What a painful duty.

In short: if you don’t know much about the Brontës, this strikes me as a great place to start. If you already do know a lot about the Brontës, you will enjoy revisting them in the company of a clever and opinionated friend.

Disclaimer: Samantha Ellis generously donated this book as part of a bundle of her work to be auctioned in the Authors for Grenfell fundraiser; and when I won it she inscribed all the books for me. Of course I only bid on her bundle because I like her work anyway, but it’s always nice to know that an author is a kind person ...

shiny new books: Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s review & Q&A

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve written a review for Shiny New Books, and it’s now up!

The book I wrote about is Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved and Died in the 1940s by Anne Sebba and it really is splendid. Sebba has done an enormous amount of research to put together a very detailed, year-by-year picture of life in Paris for women, and she’s written it in a way that is completely engrossing. If you are even slightly interested in the history of the Second World War or in how people navigate complex moral choices under a poisonous authoritarian régime, this is a fascinating book to read.

I was also able to do a Q&A with the author about the background to Les Parisiennes, which you can find here. Anne Sebba worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters before turning her hand to non-fiction and biographies, and has a website here if you are interested. I could have asked her about a billion more questions but I didn’t want to be too nosy...

Down Below, by Leonora Carrington

(Leonora Carrington, Down Below, 1941, oil on canvas; found here)

Three days perhaps after my second Cardiazol injection, I was given back the objects which had been confiscated on my entering the sanatorium, and a few others besides. I realised that with the aid of these objects I had to set to work, combining solar systems to regulate the conduct of the World. I had a few French coins, which represented the downfall of men through their passion for money; those coins were supposed to enter into the planetary system as units and not as particular elements; should they join with other objects, wealth would no longer beget misfortune. My red-and-black refill pencil (leadless) was Intelligence. I had two bottles of eau de cologne: the flat one was the José, the other, cylindrical one, the non-José. A box of Tabu powder with a lid, half grey and half black, meant eclipse, complex, vanity, taboo, love. Two jars of face cream: the one with a black lid was night, the left side, the moon, woman, destruction; the other, with a green lid, was man, the brother, green eyes, the Sun, construction. My nail buff, shaped like a boat, evoked for me a journey into the Unknown, and also the talisman protecting that journey: the song ‘El barco velero’. My little mirror was to win over the Whole. As for my Tangee lipstick, I have but a vague memory of its significance; it probably was the meeting with colour and speech, painting and literature: Art.

Happy with my discovery, I would group these objects around each other; they wandered together on the celestial path, helping each other along and forming a complete rhythm. I gave an alchemical life t the objects according to their position and their contents. (My face cream Night, in the black-lidded jar, contained the lemon, which was an antidote to the seizure induced by Cardiazol.)

Lucid and gay, I waited impatiently for Don Luis. I said to myself: ‘I have solved the problems he set before me. I shall certainly be led Down Below.’ So I was horrified when, far from appreciating my labour, he gave me a second injection of Cardiazol.

So Leonora Carrington, incarcerated against her will in an asylum in Santandar, tries to reassert some control over her life and fate through ritual. She had been abducted from Madrid, drugged and anaesthetised, by doctors acting it seems on the instruction of her father. In the asylum she was subjected to Cardiazol, a convulsive drug therapy which induced terrifying fits; after she recovered, an escort was sent by her family to collect her and take her to a sanatorium in South Africa. When the party reached Lisbon, Carrington escaped them and took refuge in the Mexican consulate before ultimately travelling on to New York.

This dramatic episode in Carrington’s life began in May 1940. She was living in the south of France with Max Ernst, her much older lover, and he was arrested by the invading German army and sent to a concentration camp. Her loss and grief precipitated a psychotic break. She was taken by her friends over the border to Spain:

I was quite overwhelmed by my entry into Spain: I thought it was my kingdom; that the red earth was the dried blood of the Civil War. I was choked by the dead, by their thick presence in that lacerated countryside. I was in a great state of exaltation when we arrived in Barcelona that evening, convinced that we had to reach Madrid as speedily as possible. [...]

Once in Madrid, convinced that the city was the ‘world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health’, Leonora’s state of mind deteriorated further until she was forcibly sent to the institution in Santander.

Down Under was written and told (see below) shortly after the events recounted in it had taken place. Carrington retells her experiences in a way that makes no difference between what ‘really’ happened and what she ‘thought’ happened, and with no attempts to explain what might be going on or rationalise things. We are plunged into her disordered consciousness, we see only what she saw and understand only what she understood. People, like the sinister Van Ghent or Don Mariano, behave like figures in a dream; they do things but we don’t know why. We have no sense of them as human beings, only of what they represent to Carrington at that time. There is no external world, only the world of her mind.

And that world is full of fear: rightly so, for most of the male figures and administrations in Down Under seek to control or harm her. Even at her most confused or vulnerable, Carrington is acutely aware of power and who may have it (although she is not always entirely correct about this, ascribing more influence to Moro the dog than he does in fact possess). Those in power only abuse their privilege and show little compassion for Carrington. There is a sense that her recovery and certainly her subsequent escape are despite rather than thanks to those who should be caring for her.

Many of Carrington’s experiences and hallucinations heighten her sense of connexion to the natural world. She dreams she is a white colt; she is convinced that animals find her sympathetic; at one point she acts like various animals. Furthermore, she grows or the world shrinks so that her body becomes not just a symbol but literally everything. It’s as if she’s skinless. Her dysentery is a symptom of her struggle to restore the city of Madrid to health and Van Ghent’s power over her a power that extends to the whole of Spain. Weeping, she begs her friend Catherine to look at her face: ‘Don’t you see that it is the exact representation of the world?’ In the asylum, her interest in objects symbolising a greater whole continues, and her sense of the universe expands to include the entire institution. She becomes obsessed by the largest pavilion, which is called Down Below. Convinced that this is paradise, Carrington believes she can only gain entry through meditation and realisation of the Whole Truth.

(Leonora Carrington, AB EO QUOD, 1956, oil on canvas; found here)

In an interview quoted here, Carrington said:

My love for the soil, nature, the gods given to me by my mother’s mother who was Irish from Westmeath, where there is a myth about men who lived underground inside the mountains, called the ‘little people’ who belong to the race of the ‘Sidhe.’ My grandmother used to tell me we were descendents of that ancient race that magically started to live underground when their land was taken by invaders with different political religious ideas. They preferred to retire underground where they are dedicated to magic and alchemy, knowing how to change gold. (in Susan L. Aberth, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy & Art, Lund Humphries 2010)

These stories seem to feed in both to the fantasy of Down Below as a protective haven and to Carrington’s association of a personal alchemy as a means to counter hostile forces.

The book has a convoluted history. It was first written in English in New York, 1942, and subsequently lost. Carrington then dictated it in French and it was translated into English and published in 1943 in the journal VVV. The French dictation was published in Paris in 1946. The version in the NYRB series, which is the one I read, took both the French and the English texts as its basis and was reviewed and revised by Carrington herself in 1987. This history may be responsible for the particular style of the book. As Marina Warner points out in her excellent introduction, the oral/written, bilingual (and Carrington was apparently not terribly fluent in French) ancestry contributes to the very direct, almost clinical tone of the book, so very different from her other writings. Yet the ‘memories’ she describes are fresh and vivid, shocking. Perhaps Carrington was able to effectively maintain the contrast of tone and content because while she first recorded and wrote about the experiences, she was still very close to them and could recall them with great clarity; yet the repeated re-tellings and then the final editorial input forty years later gave her useful distance. The lack of bitterness, self-justification or self-pity, even when relating a gang rape, is extraordinary.

(Leonora Carrington, Crookhey Hall, 1947, casein on masonite; Crookhey Hall was Carrington’s childhood home and its gloomy neo-Gothic architecture had a profound influence on her; found here)

The Hearing Trumpet, by Leonora Carrington

(Leonora Carrington, Untitled, c. 1949–50, oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

This year is the centenary year of Leonora Carrington’s birth. She is best known as an outstanding artist, and for many years most of her writings have been out of print. Being a fan of her novel, The Hearing Trumpet, I have long wanted to read her short stories but second-hand copies of the Virago collection, The Seventh Horse and Other Stories, always seemed remarkably expensive. Now, to mark the anniversary, her collected stories are being re-issued in the US by Dorothy, a publishing project; I eagerly tried to order a copy but for some reason was unable to obtain them, so instead I have contented myself with the seemingly less complete The Debutante and Other Stories, published in the UK by Silver Press (UK), along with children’s book called The Milk of Dreams and her account of being institutionalised, Down Under (both published by NYRB). I’ve decided to try and write about all of them here. Meanwhile, to prepare myself I am re-reading The Hearing Trumpet and looking again at the lovely pictures in Susan L. Aberth’s Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries).

Carrington led an exciting life, as you can read in Marina Warner’s recent piece in the Guardian or Karen’s nice review of a new biography of her in Shiny New Books by Joanna Moorehead. Carrington wrote The Hearing Trumpet in 1950, in a noisy café in Mexico City according to Aberth, but it wasn’t actually published until 1974, and then in French. Fantastical and many-tentacled, it is one of the weirdest novels I’ve ever read, and funny too, consistently overturning the reader’s expectations and appearing to have been thrown together quite casually. Our heroine is also unusual: Marian Leatherby is ninety-two years old:

Here I may add that I consider that I am still a useful member of society and I believe still capable of being pleasant and amusing when the occasion seems fit. The fact that I have no teeth and never could wear dentures dos not in anyway discomfort me. I don’t have to bite anybody and there are all sorts of soft edible foods easy to procure and digestible to the stomach. Mashed vegetables, chocolate and bread dipped in warm water make the base of my simple diet. I never eat meat as I think it is wrong to deprive animals of their life when they are so difficult to chew anyway. [...]

Indeed I do have a short grey beard which conventional people would find repulsive. Personally I found it rather gallant.

Marian is a widow who lives in her son Galahad’s house, in a room overlooking ‘a fine back yard which I share with my two cats, a hen, the maid and her two children, some flies and a cactus plant called maguey.’ The gift of a splendid hearing trumpet, from her bald and excitable friend Carmella, allows Marian to overhear Galahad and his wife plotting to send her away to an old people’s home.

‘Remember Galahad,’ added Muriel, ‘those old people do not have feelings like you or I. She would be much happier in an institution where there’s proper help to take care of her. They are very well run today. This place I told you about in Santa Brigida is run by the Well of Light Brotherhood [...] It is all very efficiently organised and reasonably inexpensive.’

However, advance knowledge doesn’t help Marian very much and she is shipped off to the institution:

First impression are never very clear, I can only say there seemed to be several court yards, cloisters, stagnant fountains, trees, shrubs, lawns. The main building was in fact a castle, surrounded by pavilions with incongruous shapes. Pixielike dwellings shaped like toadstools, swiss chalets, railway carriages, one or two ordinary bungalows, something shaped like a boat, another like what I took to be an Egyptian mummy.

These odd buildings are the sleeping places of the old ladies (the toadstool is particularly inconvenient). The institution is run by Dr Gambit and his horrible wife along the lines of a Christian cult. But just as you are imagining that this is going to be a comic novel, tensions among the institutions’ inmates lead to murder; and just as you think it’s going to be a comic novel with a murder, an ancient book containing the gothic tale of the abbess Doña Rosalinda Alvarez Cruz della Cueva takes the plot in another direction; in fact, whenever you feel you have any idea as to what’s going on, the novel swerves into completely unexpected territory involving, among others, alchemy, orgies, cookery, werewolves and apocalypse. It gallops on, pell mell, faster and faster until abruptly ending.

(Leonora Carrington, Nine Nine Nine, 1948, oil on canvas, private collection; found here)

Marian, from the beginning a devotee of the planet Venus, is repeatedly guided by golden bees and bee society – led by a queen, dominated by the sisterhood, altruistic, fruitful and renewing the fertility of the plants around them – is in direct contrast to the dessicated Christianity practised by the Gambits and the mean-minded hypocrisy of Marian’s family. It is reflected in Abbess Rosalinda’s convent, blasphemously given over to indulgence, sensualism and levitating. In the Womb of the World, Marian has an encounter which is both fairytale and eucharist, Baba Yaga and Last Supper. The total destruction of the existing world order and orientation, far from being a catastrophe, in fact signals the rebirth of the Goddess and a better future:

Ice ages pass, and although the world is frozen over we suppose someday grass and flowers will grow again. In the meantime I keep a daily record on three wax tablets.

After I die Anubeth’s werecubs will continue the document, till the planet is peopled with cats, werewolves, bees and goats. We all fervently hope this will be an improvement on humanity, which deliberately renounced the Pneuma of the Goddess.

(Leonora Carrington, unattributed photograph from here)