a gallimaufry

Storm Jameson Reading Week cancelled

I am really sorry, but I am not going to run Storm Jameson Reading Week this year. Although I should be absolutely delighted if someone else would like to take it on?

Why am I ditching it? Well, ’tis a mixture of Covid and Brexit, the gift that just keeps on giving. The reason I chose Storm Jameson for a reading week was that she is so neglected and her work is out of print. This has also turned out to be my undoing, because I only actually own one book by her. And since last summer, obtaining anything from the UK if you live in Europe, has become more difficult.

Because I am an idiot I didn’t realise this until I ordered a second-hand copy of Barchester Towers as I am on a bit of a Trollope jag. The book and postage cost me about £6, I think. The import duties? €19. So that is the end of international second-hand book-shopping for me.

Plan B was to stock up on books during visits at Christmas and Easter. Alas! I had to cancel my Christmas visit when the risks from Covid (too boring to go into) rendered it unwise. Now I only have one trip before Storm Jameson Reading Week, and I have to carry back a load of Christmas presents as well… All in all, it has tipped over from Something Fun into Something that is Giving Me Disproportionate Levels of Worry.

Obviously this is very disappointing. I still would like to host a reading week for someone, but it seems most sensible to limit myself to someone whose books I already possess. I’ve been pondering this for a while and the other day my eye lighted upon … Isak Dinesen (or Karen Blixen).

Now, I appreciate she is considerably better known than Storm Jameson, and her work is in print and easily  available. But she has a substantial and varied body of work, encompassing short stories, memoir and one novel, and I think she is worthy of greater attention. I did hesitate because I remember her being a frightful snob and almost certainly racist, a contentious figure and rather a particular taste. Still, I am queen of this here blog and ultimately my word goes. Let it be done!

I shall put together a post about her in the next few days, and I hope very much that you will join me!

 

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)

Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week 2021 round-up – and competition!

Thank you to everyone who has written a post and sent me the link to it! There are some wonderful reviews out there for any readers or potential readers of Sylvia Townsend Warner to look at – and I recommend you do...

Lory at Entering the Enchanted Castle wrote about The Corner That Held Them:

The Corner That Held Them is a striking evocation of medieval life, with all its stinks, vermin and diseases, along with the persistent human doggedness that was needed to keep people going through all that. Lively and discursive as Chaucer’s pilgrims, it’s not at all a conventional narrative, leading the reader along a winding road that seemingly goes off into thin air at the end. Though it’s set within and around a community of women religious, the imaginary English convent of Oby, it never becomes otherworldly and distant from the everyday; the world and its concerns are always present in the microcosm of this subset of flawed humanity.

So did Harriet Devine:

What, then, is this book really about? STW is too complex and original a writer for there to be an obvious answer. On one level it just looks like a meander through a series of everyday events, with some dramatic interludes. But that seems in many ways to be the point - this tiny microcosm presents a little slice of human life which, though far distant from us in time, represents the way people have always adapted to living together and still do today.

Meanwhile, Ali at HeavenAli has written about English Climate: Wartime Stories:

It feels as if these are the very people Sylvia Townsend Warner saw around her, perhaps interacted with, took part in, or listened to, their conversations – there is such an authenticity to the exchanges between characters. [...] These stories are really excellent providing some rich texture to the times in which they were first written. Witty, lively with a slight seam of darkness running through them, these show Sylvia Townsend Warner to have been a consummate short story writer.

Simon at StuckInABook wrote about another collection of short stories, from the 1960s, A Spirit Rises:

In her novels, Sylvia Townsend Warner travels widely through time and space. In her short stories, she tends to stick to contemporary England – and this is doubtless one of the reasons I love them so much. She doesn’t need to take us to another world; she can turn her observant eye to the world directly in front of her. And nobody is as good as Warner at the slightly unexpected twists of wording that show deep below the surface of people and their relationships with one another. [...]
A Spirit Rises isn’t quite as meteorically wonderful as [Swans on an Autumn River], but it’s not all that far off – it certainly includes the finest writing I’ve read this year, and I know will reward careful, slow, luxurious re-reading. If you’ve only encountered Warner the novelist, please don’t hesitate in exploring her extraordinary talent as a writer of short stories.

Hayley at Desperate Reader enjoyed The Flint Anchor:

The book is also surprisingly open about homosexuality in the fishing community of Loseby. It was still a criminalized when the book was published, and considered as an unspeakable sin by the Barnard family, but in the working part of the town love is love and they're not fussy about where it's found. It's a powerful contrast to the Barnard's who remain in Anchor house with their limited understanding of love and the petrifying value they place on respectability. […]
What I most admire about Sylvia Townsend Warner, and find in abundance here, is her clear eyed ability to pick something apart and lay it out for our inspection without judgement or emotion. We might feel sorry for the Barnard's, we might recognise something of ourselves in them, or we might just be fascinated by the spectacle - I found this book compelling for all of those reasons and more.

And David at David’s Book World wrote a double review – of Mr Fortune’s Maggot and The True Heart:

Mr Fortune’s Maggot is focused tightly on these two characters, and in that it makes broader points about faith and colonialism. The change in Fortune’s thinking is carefully drawn, and I found the ending deeply affecting.
There’s a heightened quality to The True Heart that I really appreciated – Sukey even takes her plight to Queen Victoria – as well as a vivid sense of place.

lethe also read The True Heart and reviewed it on GoodReads:

The story has a certain dreamlike quality, which is heightened by a few sudden time-lapses. It is also probably the most light-hearted and fairytale-like of all STW's novels. There is never really any doubt that Sukey will succeed in her quest. Whenever things start to look hopeless, there is always a kind stranger that will help her on her way, so that even being received by Queen Victoria, whom she intends to implore for assistance, does not seem quite such an outlandish idea.

lethe wrote about Lolly Willowes too – a re-read, which is always interesting, especially if you can compare it to your first encounter:

I still love Parts 1 and 2 as much as I did when I first read it back in 2002, but I'm still not happy about the turn of events in Part 3.

 

 

If you have written a review and haven’t sent me a link yet, please do! Even if it’s after the end of the week – I can still add it over the next fortnight or so.

Thank you to everyone who has joined in this week, reading and/or writing, and thank you to everyone who has taken part in any of the STW Reading Weeks. For me, this is the last one – though I’d be delighted if anyone else felt like continuing it. To mark this, I am holding an actual competition, the first one I’ve ever done.

COMPETITION!!!

I have an unread Penguin Modern Classics edition of each of The Flint Anchor and The True Heart. (The back story: I ordered them a few months ago from the Book Depository and they did not arrive; the Book Depository very kindly sent me replacement copies and then of course another week later the original books arrived, their packaging plastered in cross yellow stickers about infringing some article or other, and the Book Depository said I could keep them.)

If you would like to win a copy, please write your name in the comments + which book you’d prefer (you can write both and I’ll add your name to both draws) before midnight next Sunday (10th July). The competition is open to anyone in the EU or UK but not further afield for regrettable reasons of stinginess.

NEXT YEAR?

And finally! I think I’d like to host another reading week next year – but who should it be? Ideally it’s someone who should have a bit more attention, whose work is reasonably easy to acquire. I’m thinking about Storm Jameson or Alice Thomas Ellis at the moment, but if you’ve any ideas I’d love to hear them.

The Hidden River, by Storm Jameson

One of the pleasures of re-arranging my books was finding books I’d forgotten about. Over the years I have amassed a very small stash of work by Storm Jameson, without reading a single one or in fact having much of an idea about either her or her writing. High time, in other words, to get reading. I chose The Hidden River because my copy is a Reprint Society edition, which suggests that it was popular and probably pretty good. It had no jacket so I had absolutely no idea what it was about.

(Portrait of Margaret ‘Storm’ Jameson, by Howard Coster; National Portrait Gallery)

Adam Hartley is driving down to the Loire valley to visit some old friends when he stops to overnight in a hotel at ‘the town of V––’. He overhears the proprietress in angry conversation, and asks the waiter what it means.

‘It’s quite a story,’ he said softly. ‘Our patronne’s sister, who is a widow, has a daughter, a young tart [...] born it, if you ask me. [...] She ran away at sixteen and went to Dreux. The next year – it was ’41 – she took up with a German in the Gestapo, and as if that wasn’t enough, she got a lad she’d known all her life arrested and packed off to a camp. He died there. Naturally, after the war, she was sentenced to death, but the sentence was changed to life imprisonment. And now the poor lad’s mother has been suing widow Pilon for damages for her son’s death, because, says she, if the girl had been brought up decently, she wouldn’t have taken to bad ways. [...] What’s more, [...] yesterday the court agreed with her. Her daughter’s morals have cost Madame Germaine Pilon nine hundred thousand francs in damages and costs. How’s that for justice?’

Hartley was too shocked to be tactful. [...] ‘Justice? It’s entirely unjust,’ he retorted. ‘Punish the criminal if you like – why not? But why torment her mother?’

For it is 1949, France is struggling to come to terms with the repercussions of the Occupation, and Adam Hartley is returning to the area where he worked in Special Intelligence during the war and the family who sheltered him, the Monneries. Jean Monnerie was a local Résistance leader, now the local mayor. He, his younger brother Robert and Robert’s fianceé Elizabeth worked with Adam, and Robert was murdered for this by the Nazis. In fact, behind Adam’s visit is his very specific desire to discover who betrayed Robert. Yet not all of the Monneries were ‘on the right side of history’, as we say these days. Their uncle Daniel has been imprisoned for his friendship with a Nazi general. Jean wishes to start afresh and put the war behind them all; Marie, Robert’s mother, refuses to do so:

‘You think it’s absurd to tear away the silence stifling us, we ought to tread on it and press it down, press it over Robert’s eyes, and hands. And on all the others. Torture is indecent – so don’t look at it, shut your eyes, don’t listen to their cries. Don’t see ... ah! It oughtn’t to have happened, it was an aberration, a tiny flaw in our age of reason – and the polite, the sensible thing now is to forget it and go to sleep. No, I tell you. No one must sleep. [...] I couldn’t be so unkind to him.’

Thus, in microcosm, the family represents the deep fissures in French society and the novel explores, very sensitively, how to come to terms with this. Most of it is dialogue and most of it occurs in a series of scenes over just a few days, so that feels very like a play (indeed, Marie’s theatricality is commented upon). This works well  both for discussing ideas of justice and for the characters to express very intense emotions – it somehow just stops them from becoming melodramatic, because the setting is not quite ‘realist’ fiction but something slightly artificial.

What, exactly, should justice be? Adam hasn’t really considered this before he sets in motion the hunt for Robert’s betrayer. In the guise of Cousin Marie, who wears a ‘Greek’ dress and thus seems very much like a character from an Aeschylus tragedy, it is akin to revenge. Blood spilt requires redress in the form of further blood. There is little room for mercy in her philosophy, though it is just about there. Jean, meanwhile, fears that few people’s behaviour in that dark time bears much scrutiny. After all, was his uncle’s crime so much worse than those of the unpunished farmers who for years profiteered from the war at the expense of their French neighbours? Was the crime of the person who ultimately betrayed Robert in a moment of fear so much worse? Did the invaders ‘infect’ people with their own evil? Do the families of collaborators and traitors bear some responsibility for their crimes? Should it matter that traitors who would have been executed during the war receive a much more lenient punishment now? But is it really desirable or even possible to try to continue living as if the past has no bearing on the present?

This is such a tight, humane, thoughtful novel about an enormously complex problem, which doesn’t shy away from how complicated people can be nor from the lack of easy answers. I am astonished that it isn’t better known and that is isn’t even in print at the moment.

(Duncan I. Grant, photograph of members of the Maquis in La Tresorerie, near Boulogne-sur-Mer, 14 September 1944; Library and Archives Canada; found here)