a gallimaufry

Death and Mary Dazill, by Mary Fitt

How should I describe this short and compelling novel? It takes elements of the detective novel (although more The Moonstone than Agatha Christie), gothic fiction and Greek tragedy and blends them into a novel which feels like a ghost story by M.R. James (although there is nothing supernatural in it), but retold by Patricia Highsmith, and with a clever structure divided between around 1890 and around fifty years later. Now republished by Moonstone Press, it is astonishing that a novel of this quality has languished out of print for so long.

Dr Fitzbrown, Superintendent Mallett and Dr Jones are attending a funeral in Chode churchyard when they witness two old ladies drive up in an expensive car and walk to a tomb, where their chauffeur lays a wreath of hothouse flowers. Curious, they ask about them while taking tea with the local vicar. The vicar explains that they are the de Boulter sisters, Lindisfarne (Lindy) and Arran, the tomb is that of their father and brother, and that the sisters are responsible for the destruction of Mary Dazill, who occupies another grave on the far side of the churchyard. All three – Ralph and Leonard de Boulter, and Mary Dazill – died within year of each other. The vicar’s wife, Mrs Barratt, furnishes the story; her mother, Lucy Brown, was a close friend of Lindy’s and told her daughter the story.

In 1890 the de Boulters were living at Chetwynde Lodge, a grand house near Chode: Ralph had recently retired from service in Burma and withdrawn his teenaged daughters from boarding school to live with him. Frequent visitors were Leonard, his friend from Oxford, John, and Lucy Brown. Shocked at how poorly his daughters had been educated, Ralph engaged a companion-governess sort of person for them: Mary Dazill. Beautiful, self-possessed and passive, Mary’s very existence aroused great love and great fear in equal measures. Of course, it all ended very badly.

‘You don’t believe in the power of the dead, Doctor? You don’t believe that, whatever happens to their poor souls, their influence reaches out of the past – their loves, their hatreds, live on and touch the living? [...] Those two women you saw just now,’ she said, ‘Lindy and Arran de Boulter – they are living and walking monuments to the power of Mary Dazill.’

Ostensibly, most of the book consists of Mrs Barratt narrating the events of 1890ish to the pipe-smoking gentlemen in the dusty vicarage sitting-room; their reactions frame the story and provide its epilogue. In fact, Mary Fitt completely subverts this first by including the characters’ dialogue and feelings, which naturally Mrs Barratt via Lucy Brown would be unable to relate in any detail, and second by relaying scenes at which Lucy Brown was not even present and therefore could not have described to her daughter.

This is perhaps a borrowing from cinema and actually works really well. The framing device of a story told at second hand intensifies its creepiness and ambiguity, and the speculations of the listening men build in further uncertainty about how we should understand it. Is Mary Dazill (is it pronounced ‘dazzle’ or more devilishly ‘dee-el’?) a poor woman making the best of her chances, a threat to family cohesiveness (and wealth) – or something more malevolent? This double narrative creates a tension between the fictive ‘realness’ of the Victorian scenes, which we experience as if we are there, and their impossibility, because we are reminded that we could not have experienced them. As with many literary ghost stories which use a framing device, the novel’s pointing to the fact that it’s a story makes it easier for us to suspend our disbelief and accept it but at the same time doubt it.

I wrote about a later novel by Mary Fitt here, and there are similarities: an enigmatic dead woman, a sophisticated narrative structure, mysteries that are never completely resolved. Death and Mary Dazill is, I think, pacier and more succinct, stranger and more atmospheric. It is a classic and you should read it.

(Photograph of Mary Fitt, pseudonym of Kathleen Freeman, found here, where you can also read more about her)

Armadale, by Wilkie Collins

(John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Thoughts of the Past, oil on canvas, first exhibited 1859; Tate Britain; found here)

Hello again! I’m sorry, I haven’t felt like writing here for weeks – for no particular reason, we are all fine, the cats are fine, the hens are fine though on strike (and when they do bother to lay an egg, as often as not they just let it fall out wherever they happen to be and then stand on it). After a rush of children’s books and detective novels about which I felt I had nothing interesting to write, I have been wallowing in the Victorian delights of Armadale and I have Thoughts.

First serialised in 1864–66, Armadale is a wonderful chunk of nineteenth-century fiction which is usually classed, alongside Lady Audley’s Secret et al., as sensationalist, but in my opinion is more of a gothic novel. It contains everything you would wish to find in such a book: intrigue, murder, deception, fraud, a secret diary and a wicked lady whom you rather hope will triumph in her criminal ways though you fear she won’t. What makes it to my mind more gothic is its bold splash of the supernatural: its reliance on dreams, coincidences and fate to suggest another way of reading the world, its exploration of identity and its central use of the motif of the double, an old favourite of gothic writers including E.T.A. Hoffmann, Mary Shelley and James Hogg.

(Portrait of Wilkie Collins by Napoleon Sarony, 1870; found here)

There are five Allan Armadales. Yes five! Fortunately, this is not as confusing as it might be. Allan Armadale (I) has a son, also named Allan Armadale (II), who is a reprobate. AA(I) disinherits AA(II) and decides to leave his fortune to Allan Wrentmore, his nephew, if AW will change his name to Allan Armadale (III). Surprise! He does. AA(II) then journeys out from England to ‘Barbadoes’, where AA(III) lives, befriends him and pays him a bad turn. AA(III) has his revenge on AA(II). AA(II) has a son, born in England, guess what his name is, yes it’s Allan Armadale (IV), while AA(III) also has a son and he is Allan Armadale (V). AA(V), who knows the secret of his father’s revenge, changes his name to Ozias Midwinter and adheres to his father’s deathbed admonition to avoid AA(IV) and anyone connected with him.

But of course, Midwinter fails and becomes fast friends with AA(IV). One night they are stranded on a ship with an ominous connection to AA(III)’s revenge on AA(II), and AA(IV) dreams a dream which Midwinter interprets as a prophecy. Can Midwinter avert the doom which awaits AA(IV)? Especially since AA(IV) refuses to entertain the idea that there is either a prophecy or a doom?

The friendship of AA(IV), kind-hearted but impulsive and not terribly bright – on his way to becoming a Bluff Squire in middle age – and Midwinter, clever, passionate and sensitive, is unusually intense. One character distinguishes between them as the light Armadale (AA(IV)) and the dark Armadale (Midwinter – who is mixed race). They form a sort of split self, the one associated more with the surface world, the other with what is hidden.

They fall in love with the same woman. Their closeness provokes jealousy in the women who love them and who understand they will only ever have second place in these men’s affections. (Miss Milroy loses her hold over AA(IV) when he admits to her that when she believed he was thinking lovingly of her, he was in fact thinking of Midwinter;  Miss Milroy Flounces.) Even when Allan and Midwinter quarrel, they cannot give each other up for long. Apart, they fret and do badly. Midwinter is tormented between his desire to remain with Allan and guide him (because he is a bit of a fool), and his fear that by doing so he will fulfil the prophecy in the dream. He knows that they have a secret bond, created by their fathers, but it’s a bond he can never reveal to Allan.

(George Housman Thomas, illustration from Armadale, 1866; found here)

Into their world of gentlemanly honour comes Lydia Gwilt. Obviously she is an Adventuress. Clever and beautiful, she has a dark past, a laudanum habit and a disreputable friend by name of Mrs Oldershaw; she also has a proper reliance on Revealing All in her diary and a very snarky tone on occasion. Collins bills her past as being worse than prostitution, but when eventually it is revealed it is actually very sad and if you cannot root for Miss Gwilt to succeed in her wicked schemes you are dead to me.

Dreams, water, darkness, dawn and evening all play their part to suggest a liminal, unstable world behind the sunshine and the large country house. The split self of the two Allan Armadales is reflected in this dual world. Midwinter is associated more closely with the liminal elements; AA(IV) with the trappings of the solid, daylight world. The significant moment when AA(IV), Midwinter and Miss Gwilt encounter each other for the first time, fulfilling the initial image in the prophetic dream, occurs on the twilit Norfolk Broads, a strange landscape where water and land are mixed, and where at that moment water and night are balanced against land and day. Both AA(IV) and Midwinter love sailing, though AA(IV) seems more enthusiastic than competent, and they are happiest together on the water. But of course, this carries a risk, especially in this novel. Drowning is a repeated motif.

And coincidences abound! Needlessly far-fetched, it might seem. For instance, AA(IV) unexpectedly comes into a fortune when three adult male relatives of his die unexpectedly. One dies in connexion with a character who will later become significant; the other two are killed in an avalanche while rushing back for the first character’s funeral. It is all rather unconvincing and presented in a way that makes it even more unconvincing, but it is also completelly unnecessary. Collins had no need to have so many heirs between AA(IV) and the inheritance and no need (in terms of plot) to link the first death with the character who later becomes significant. Instead, he chose to push at the bounds of what readers will accept in order to suggest to us that perhaps this is not a preposterous coincidence, perhaps this is fate insisting on a certain outcome and even using certain people to that end.

Is the dream really prophetic? Can what it foretells be prevented or are the characters fated to live it out? Midwinter is the only character to take it seriously, yet he chooses to rationalise himself out of what he believes to be the only way to thwart it. Ultimately, it is the lawyers and the doctors and the vicars who ferret out most of the mystery, and all of the strange and dramatic happenings have a plausible explanation in rational terms. Still, this novel seems to tell us, there may be another pattern beneath the surface which we would perhaps do best not to ignore if we wish to keep our selves united.

Have you read Armadale or any other of Wilkie Collins’s novels? I’ve ordered a copy of No Name and await it impatiently...

(T.F. Goodall, Sunset on the Broads, oil, 1931; found here)

some short reviews

Time has passed and I haven’t written here.

I’ve been busy gardening...

...collecting some odd eggs from the hens...

...releasing a frog back into the wild (don’t be like Some People in my family and bring them home, leave frogs be where you find them)...

...attending to the whims of cats...

...and actually working too.

I have also been reading! But since my reviewing energies are all focused on preparing something for Shiny New Books, I thought I’d just mention some other books briefly here.

• Bath Tangle, by Georgette Heyer – If Heyer ever wrote an anti-Heyer novel, this is it. Her hero is so atrocious that you are simply begging the heroine not to marry him, quite opposite from the usual dynamic. He shares characteristics with some of her other, more likeable, heroes, but here we see only the dark side of them. Arrogant, rude, snobbish, bullying and guilty of sexual assault if not worse (his crime is alluded to in rather vague terms), Rotherham has not one redeeming feature and after reading this I doubt you will be able to look at Avon, Beaumaris and Alistair quite so indulgently ever again.
  (Though I did always worry about Avon and Léonie, even as a teenager that struck me as rather a dodgy relationship...)
• The Immaterial Murder Case, by Julian Symons – A rather brittle but engaging spin on the detective novel which pokes fun at the art establishment. Immaterialism is an art movement that believes in the value of what is not there, so the subject of a painting is what is omitted from it. During the opening of an exhibition of Immaterial art Stephen Follett, a universally loathed art critic, is found murdered.
  The case is narrated in turn by one of the suspects, a fairly dreadful amateur detective and a professional detective, somewhat in the manner of the multiple narratives of The Moonstone. The comedy is occasionally a little heavy-handed but I enjoyed Immaterialism a lot.
• Waiting for Willa, by Dorothy Eden – I started this hoping for something Mary-Stewartesque and it had a good premise: Grace receives a letter from her cousin Willa, who now lives in Stockholm, which is signed with their childhood code for ‘help’. When she arrives in Sweden, Willa has vanished.
  Overlooking the rather leaden writing and uninspired characterisation I read on but the dénouement was disappointing and basically everyone was an idiot. The only surprise was Grace’s callous victim-blaming at the end. Eden seems to have been very popular so perhaps this is not representative of her work?
• The White Witch, by Elizabeth Goudge – I read this over quite a long time as it has a slow pace and bears being put down and picked up again well. It’s a historical novel set during the English Civil War, and explores how a group of characters are tested by the conflict: Robert Haslewood, the squire; Froniga, his cousin and the white witch of the title; and Francis, a nobleman masquerading as an artist in order to spy for the Royalists.
  Goudge shows how courage on the battlefield is only one sort of courage, and that those without much power – children, women, gypsies, the elderly – are no less brave than the rich men who are prepared to die for their ideals. It was very soothing while Brexit madness was whirling about and a helpful antidote to cynicism.
• Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi – As ever Oyeyemi’s work defies expectations, categorisations, and cleverly seduces you into accepting whatever she throws at you. A country that may or may not exist? Gingerbread that tastes like revenge? A childhood friend who might be secretly influencing every step of your life?
  I can’t even begin to summarise this novel and am still reeling from finishing it last night, it’s rich, playful and mysterious to the end.
• The Diaries of Sylvia Warner, edited by Claire Harman – I am slowly reading these for Sylvia Townsend Warner week and they are wonderful.

Friday evening and a glass of wine are calling. Happy weekend everyone! Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them?

the space between us

(Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian, ca. 1570, oil on canvas; to be found in Skokloster Castle; from here)

Hayley of Desperate Reader has written an interesting post about a novella by Wilkie Collins, Miss or Mrs?. She picked up on two elements which made her, as a modern reader, feel uncomfortable: the youth of Nathalie, the heroine (she is fifteen, but eligible for marriage since the age of twelve – I was astounded that as recently as the 1870s the age of consent was so low) and her rôle as property, first of her father and then of her husband.

This is a good reminder that we can never read literature of the past as a contemporary would have read it. We can read footnotes and cultural histories and literature written during the period as much as we like, but we’ll always be twenty-first-century readers peering over the fence. Not that a novelist’s contemporaries would all read a novel in the same way as one another: as we know, every reader responds differently to a text. Yet all the paraphernalia which comes with reading ‘classics’, the footnotes and histories and biographies, suggests that we consider reading like a novel’s contemporaries to be desirable. Many of us want to suck out of a text all the meanings and allusions that an educated reader of the time would have savoured, to enrich our enjoyment.

Of course, there are plenty of readers who don’t bother with footnotes or context, reading only through their own cultural lense, and others who dismiss such interpretations as facile. Although I think everyone should be free to read and enjoy as they please, for myself I prefer an ‘enriched’ reading, I find it more interesting. But what Hayley’s post made me realise is that actually that gap between the experience of the reader of the past and our experience now, the gap which we attempt to narrow through the ‘paraphernalia’, is in itself interesting and can even be the point of a reading. Miss or Mrs? is intriguing to me precisely because of the gap between my sensibilities and the sensibilities of Collins’ time, the consciousness of our difference.

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Something has changed here at a gallimaufry – for the first time ever, it has been read by someone who knows me in real life. Hello Jayne! [waves] I never meant to keep it a secret, but I have never found a way of telling people about it.