RACHEL FERGUSON, A Harp in Lowndes Square (1936)

It should have been a profoundly humorous sight. I can only say that it was beastly, for I knew in my heart that this furious pursuit wasn't the first; that once there were those who ran before her as I was running, and one who could not run so fast ... what she had done then I don't ever wish to know, and try not to think of.

I love it when a favorite author challenges my assumptions and expectations of their work, and this eerie quotation from Rachel Ferguson's sixth novel, A Harp in Lowndes Square (published the year before Alas, Poor Lady, which is available from Persephone) may give at least an inkling of just how surprising this book was. I'm calling it Ferguson's version of a ghost story, though like most of her novels its genre takes a back seat to her completely unique authorial voice and the peculiar depths of its plot. What's more, it is one of her most serious and passionate works, despite being leavened now and then with her usual hilarity.

The story begins with a short, eerie prologue, the significance of which one only fully realizes at the end of the book (I won't spoil it, of course, but I highly recommend immediately circling back to it when you finish the novel). A child, Anne, in her dingy bedroom at the top of a large house, hears noises downstairs late at night and wonders who it could be:

It leaves us speculating upon what Anne, the woman, would have made of that evening in Lowndes Square, when—still the younger Miss Vallant—she peered over those banisters and heard a young, unknown man and woman many flights below, and warmed to the voices of her son and daughter who were to be.

That's right. There's something about this unusual family that allows its members, in varying ways, to perceive the sights, sounds, and emotions of other times, and here Anne is warming to the voices of her future children (though what exactly they're doing in the old family home in the middle of the night you'll have to find out for yourself).

This family proclivity is particularly pronounced in said son and daughter, twins Vere and James, who have "the sight," which enables them to witness and even re-experience scenes from other times (including, on one memorable and startling occasion at Hampton Court, seeing Henry VIII and young Edward VI discussing tennis and eating apples). And they're not only sensitive to events from other times, but to each other's experiences: Vere experiences befuddlement and dulled senses when James gets drunk for the first time, and James experiences discomfort when Vere is on dates with young men. Vere, the narrator of the novel, also notes the suffering of houses as a result of neglect, the hidden emotions of furniture, and the echoes of past dances in ballrooms!

But it is ultimately their own family history which becomes the twins' obsession, as well as their most vivid and painful experience with the ghosts of the past. It begins with a curiosity about their mother's tortured relationship with her own mother, the formidable and apparently heartless Lady Vallant, who gleefully torments her servants as well as her family. And when the twins question their little-known aunts (the family is not close-knit, to say the least), they hear for the first time about Myra, "the aunt who died," "that shadow of whose very existence our own mother had never told us." Their curiosity is aroused, and they are on their way, determined to uncover the history behind their mother's silence.

Giving you a sort of scoop (in lieu of any pics of Harp's original
dustjacket), here's the artwork, by Danish painter Peter Ilsted,
that we plan to feature on the Furrowed Middlebrow edition of the novel.
I think it's wonderfully evocative, with just a touch of eerieness?

If that sounds rather straightforward, however, it isn't quite. This is, after all, a Rachel Ferguson novel, and so there are numerous entertaining digressions, distractions, and ramblings. World War I begins, though it figures little in the story apart from explaining James's absence for long periods and allowing a tighter focus on Vere's experiences. We get a preview of Ferguson's subsequent novel, Alas, Poor Lady, in the sad figure of Miss Chilcot, the family's old governess, a downtrodden gentlewoman whom Vere tracks down dying of starvation and neglect in a hospital. And then there's Vere's strange, more-or-less platonic relationship with an aging actor (and his wife), which is certainly a unique Ferguson touch.

But the center of the novel is the dreadful Lady Vallant and the sad, mysterious Myra. Of all the terrible mothers portrayed in the fiction of this time, Lady Vallant must stand as one of the towering figures of maternal monsterdom, and unlike some novels (including Monica Tindall's marvelous The Late Mrs Prioleau, which I wrote about here not long ago), there is little in Harp to explain or justify her cruelty, so that the reader is left wondering at her and trying to fathom her mindset.

Perhaps it's because of the pain and sadness Vere and James uncover that Harp feels, despite occasional moments of hilarity, surprisingly serious for a Rachel Ferguson novel. She was daft and silly in earlier works like The Brontës Went to Woolworth's, and she would be daft and silly again with A Footman for the Peacock. But perhaps Harp allowed Ferguson to tap into more personal, deeper concerns. That said, though, when her sense of humor presents itself, it's just as charming as ever, as when Vere and James are told that Lady Vallant keeps her servants on "board wages" and don't quite understand:

Board wages certainly sounded bleak, and for some time we all believed it meant sleeping on a plank.

Here as elsewhere, Ferguson is interested in class distinctions, though she also shows considerable interest in and sensitivity with the servants, as when Vere visits the "downstairs" areas of Lady Vallant's house:

He led me down to the rooms I had never seen. I asked to see the kitchen and was shown it. The warren of sitting-rooms and pantrys was small and freakishly ventilated; some of them, including the larders, had no windows at all and gas light burnt there all the year round, they told me. Furniture obviously taken from the upper floors made the staff comfortable enough and I saw that the dining table of the upper servants, still covered with breakfast things, sported an imposing array of our family silver. The cook was drinking a jorum of tea out of a cup that looked uncommonly like Crown Derby. And I said nothing: neither did Hutchins, for which I respected him. If you appropriate, do it in the grand manner. And that underworld of men and women, the majority of whom had so far only materialized to me as a row of decorous behinds at dining-room prayers, emerged as human beings, and I think we pleased each other reasonably well. Their laws of precedence, I knew, were tricksy, but I managed to make only two mistakes: confused the upper with the under housemaid and 'spoke' to the kitchenmaid who is, socially, dumb.

But as someone who occasionally wrestles with social anxieties of my own, my favorite passage, and the one that made me laugh the most, is Ferguson's suggestion for shocking oneself out of one's worries:

I once knew a man who cured himself of melancholia by putting £200 out of a Bank balance of £350 on the Derby. His action so shocked him that it drove away his bogeys, and a girl we all know, on being presented at Court, was so ill with nerves that she nearly fainted; she was on the verge oflosing consciousness and just managed to lean forward to some dowager sitting by her daughter and to stammer, quite untruly, 'I think your dress is fussy and unbecoming'. In the whispered melee that followed the faintness was forgotten for the whole evening.

Ferguson is always interesting in her turns of phrase, sometimes incorporating the contemporary parlance of the day that might otherwise be lost. Two things struck me along these lines in this novel. First, there is a reference to the "maroons" sounding before an air raid; has anyone else ever heard this term for sirens? A Google search brings up one or two such usages, but it seems to not have been a common one?

And then there's this offhand comment from Vere: "The story, as Americans say 'listened badly', and I knew it." Do Americans say such things?! I have to admit that, though I've never heard this expression, I do rather like it and may have to start using it in conversation. So perhaps there is something about it that appeals to Americans…

At any rate, some of you will recall that I announced not long ago that the Furrowed Middlebrow imprint will be reprinting three of Ferguson's best (in my humble opinion) novels this October, and Harp is one of those three. I was already excited enough about that, but in putting together that edition, we discovered that no less a figure than Gillian Tindall, acclaimed novelist and historian (and, relevent to readers of this blog, daughter of Ursula Orange), published a short piece about Ferguson in the Literary Review at the time of Persephone's release of Alas, Poor Lady. In that piece, Tindall not only speaks enthusiastically about Ferguson in general, but particularly singles out A Harp in Lowndes Square as one of her most intriguing works. She ends by noting, "I wish someone would reissue this book." (!!)

Think of this post, then, as a preview of coming attractions. A Harp in Lowndes Square is a unique and rather tragic entry in Ferguson's wildly varied body of work, and I'm delighted that others will now have a chance to read it.

MONICA TINDALL, The Late Mrs Prioleau (1946) (and a very exciting tidbit)

It came into my mind suddenly that we might be living in the first chapter of one of my own detective stories, the kind of story I always felt to be so improbable. A woman lay dead upstairs waiting to be screwed down; in another bedroom a man was having hysterics; in the kitchen a grey parrot was imitating both their voices; and in the sitting-room crouched the pugs, glaring at us now with rage and terror in their popping eyes. Soon a car would drive up and Henry's sisters would join us, and Mr Galvain the man of business; and I, the stranger in the family, wearing black for a woman I had never known, sat in this unfamiliar cheerless room waiting to meet them.

I do love it when a handy passage does such a great job of setting the scene of a novel, especially when the passage is as evocative as this one.

Susan Prioleau, who narrates this novel (which is, tragically, Monica Tindall's only book), is newly married to Henry, the youngest of the titular Mrs. Prioleau's four children, and because Henry has little contact with his family—least of all with his mother—Susan's only "meeting" with her mother-in-law is at her funeral. Indeed, it's also her first meeting with Henry's two sisters, Melissa and Norrie, and his older brother, Austin, who has always been the clear favorite and who has been rendered practically an invalid, both physically and mentally, by his mother's babying. (He's the man having hysterics in the bedroom in the quoted passage.) Henry's father has been dead for years, and he and his sisters have been alienated from their mother for most of their adult lives.

From the beginning (the story is set just on the cusp of World War II and continues well into the war years), Susan senses a mystery, and it comes naturally to her to try to determine the source of the family's dysfunctionality:

Before I married I made a living of a sort as a reporter and a writer of detective stories. I was not especially successful because I have neither a thick enough skin to make good capital out of other people's misfortunes, nor credulity to believe in my own fiction sufficiently to make it interesting. But I still see people as "copy" though I no longer make my money out of them, and deduction is as much a game with me as it was with my own pet detective, Ambrose Honorius Barty, now mercifully defunct. I still try to discover the job of the man beside me in the bus by the Holmesian method of looking at his coat sleeve and the toes of his boots, and almost unconsciously I interview the people I meet, trying to ask them the right questions and sort out the answers.

This all makes Susan the perfect choice for an unsentimental, unbiased unearthing of the truth behind Helena Prioleau's startling transformation from the charming, witty, artistic girl some of the characters recall from the distant past to the Gorgon-like domestic dominatrix she became after her marriage. And her investigations make reading about it as addictive and compelling as any detective novel.

Indeed, Tindall takes on a rather gutsy challenge. In the first half of the novel, through conversations with her new in-laws and with family friends, she presents a classic ogre of a mother—one of a surprising number of such characters in middlebrow fiction, as I've noted here before, so commonly mocked or condemned as to have become a virtual stereotype of the period—delineating the alienation of Helena's children (all but one), her habits of writing scathing letters that may even have driven a servant to suicide, and a shocking incident with the pet pugs to whom Austin is devoted, among other things. Then, in the second half of the novel, Tindall has Susan steadily uncovering the traces of what has made Helena the monster she is, and she does this (largely via Susan's convenient discovery of Helena's long-forgotten journal and some letters) in a strikingly subtle, realistic, and convincing way that raises Helena far above the level of a stereotype.

I was almost shocked to find myself feeling sympathy for the late Mrs Prioleau in the latter part of the novel. And yet Tindall doesn't oversimplify, and doesn't take the easy route, which a lesser writer might have followed, of suggesting that Helena is a mere victim with no responsibility for the trajectory of her life. She achieves something more complex, suggesting that tragedy didn't create the dark side in Helena but merely helped make it dominant (and suggesting by implication that such darker potentials perhaps reside in each of us). As a result of such subtlety, the novel's gut-wrenching conclusion leaves the reader fascinated and conflicted in all sorts of wonderful ways about this woman who has suffered much and made others suffer with her.

I have to say that The Late Mrs Prioleau is already my favorite novel of the year so far, and one of my all-time favorite rediscoveries of a "lost" work. I think it will be particularly fascinating for any readers who have their own complicated relationships with parents. For instance, the following passage is the very best summary I've ever read of my own mother's strategy of domination, which lurked always in the background while I was growing up:

"She used to make terrible scenes sometimes over nothing at all, and you could feel them brewing like a storm. It made me feel insecure all the time, and any psychologist will tell you how bad that is for children. She'd pick on one of us or one of the maids, and fly into a rage about some perfectly idiotic thing until she had whoever it was provoked into answering back ... generally if it was a maid she gave notice. Then Mother was the aggrieved person, and the odd part was that by the end you generally thought she was, and begged her pardon humbly because she had behaved quite outrageously. To this day I don't know how she did it. "

I don't know how mine did it either. But Tindall also touchingly examines the effects of such an upbringing on Henry's sister Melissa and her approach to child-rearing. It would undoubtedly make many modern parents cringe, but for better or worse I might have been tempted to use the same logic had I ever (heaven forbid!) become a parent myself (and it may well be healthier than the neurotic helicopter parenting most of us have witnessed in recent years):

We were sitting on the beach. It was high tide and windy, with waves breaking on the sands. The children were burying a dead crab one of them had found; Melissa was scrawling designs of sea-gulls on a drawing-block, and I was reading. Suddenly I heard her gasp. Her son, with the impulsive bravery of his five years, was walking deliberately into the sea. I scrambled up, but she clutched my arm, holding me back. "Let him learn," she whispered, white-faced and rigid. We must have been some fifty yards away from the children, yet she watched without cry or movement until Peter was swept off his feet and rolled over in the inevitable wave. She waded in then, and fished him out.

…

Melissa broke off. She was gazing at Peter who was poised, rather dangerously it seemed, on a high piece of pointed rock. He looked at us unhappily, his mouth open for the first sob. His mother shouted at him. "You got up there," she said, "and you can jolly well get down!" Anxiously he looked down to the comfortable sand below him, and then slowly and carefully began to climb from bis perch.

"See what it's like, Susan?" Her voice was sad. "He's all right this time, as it happens, but he might have fallen and hurt himself badly. He's so tiny still. Only ... I simply daren't. When I think of how Mother undermined Austin … with the best will in the world …"

But one certainly needn't have any personal associations with ogre mothers and dysfunctional families to relish Tindall's brilliant little novel. I can't recommend it highly enough, and I'm tempted even as I write this to pick it up and start reading it all over again.

But now I have to explain the exciting way that this book found its way onto my radar…

I can start by noting that Tindall—who is such a new discovery that I haven't had a chance to add her to my Overwhelming List yet—is in fact the sister-in-law of another author on the list, Ursula Orange, about whom you may recall that I've written several times. She is also therefore the aunt of yet another author on my list, novelist and historian Gillian Tindall, who is the daughter of Ursula Orange.

I made the connection of Orange and Gillian Tindall only after I had already written about several of Orange's novels and made lots of speculations about her.  A bit later, a commenter mentioned that Tindall had written about her mother in her wonderful book Footprints in Paris: A Few Streets, A Few Lives (2009). It was from that book that I learned the tragic truth about Orange's suicide at the age of 46.

But the connection to Monica Tindall, and the existence of her one and only novel, came to me more directly and in much more exciting fashion. Imagine my surprise to awaken one morning recently to find an email from none other than Gillian Tindall herself! Apart from anything else, this certainly marks the first time I've been in direct contact with one of the authors on my list! (Tindall quite precociously published her debut novel, No Name in the Street, in 1959, just in time to qualify for my list.)

Needless to say, I was thrilled to hear from Gillian, who was very gracious and generous and informative in sharing her thoughts about her mother's little-known work and also in recommending her aunt's (perhaps even more obscure) novel. I might perhaps be able to add a bit more about this in a future post, but for now, I'll merely thank her for contacting me and for opening the door to this wonderful novel!

Book report: ELIZABETH ELIOT (2 of 2)

Eliot's third novel, Mrs. Martell (1953), follows an utterly self-absorbed, superficial woman from her teens to her second marriage. But if that sounds unpleasant, in Eliot's hands it's not at all. Obsessed with money and class and all the appearances of a sophisticated life, but coming herself from genteel poverty, Cathie Martell rarely loses her focus on getting what she wants out of life, regardless of the feelings or happiness of those (her Aunt Violet, for example, who finances her education, or her first husband, or the man she's set her sights on to be her second—not to mention that man's current wife) who get in her way.

A critic's blurb about Mrs. Martell, from the back cover of Eliot's subsequent novel Starter's Orders (1955), says, "Only an artist in character study could make Cathie Martell tolerable; Miss Eliot goes further and makes her real." And it is indeed remarkable that the novel is so completely enjoyable despite having such an unlikeable main character. But I think it's Eliot's sharp eye for detail and her sense of humor that allow her to pull it off.

Another terrible photo, but the best I could
find for this book

The humor is a bit more muted here than in her first two novels (another critic notes that this is so "because wickedness is a sad business"), but it's still very much present. Sometimes it's that wonderful surprise ending to an otherwise innocuous observation, as here when Cathie is bored on a train and wishes for a handsome man to help her pass the time:

Even so, an encounter with a tall and handsome stranger would have been a pleasant interlude, but alas, he did not appear. Once, in the corridor, and right at the beginning of the journey, she thought she had found him; but later when he came into the dining-car he was surrounded by a gaggle of five or six bright adolescents all of whom addressed him as 'Daddy'; and they were accompanied by a depressed middle-aged woman who inevitably was Mother; impossible to imagine her as having ever been anything else.

One imagines the poor Mother must have sometimes had trouble imagining herself as anything else too! And here, in a dispute with Aunt Violet, a younger Cathie lets her propensity for drama get the best of her:

'As far as I am concerned, Aunt Violet, I don't want another penny of your money. I can go out and earn my bread,' and she saw a distinct picture of herself working her fingers to the bone and being seduced by goodness knows whom.

Blurbs from the back cover of Starter's Orders

And once or twice, even in this more serious novel, Eliot drops in an instance of pure silliness, as in this discussion at a ski lodge after one of Cathie's companions breaks a collar bone:

'Such a shame to break something at the beginning of the fortnight.' The elderly lady who had waylaid Laura in the hall of the hotel clicked anxiously over her knitting-needles.

'Yes,' Laura agreed, 'oh, yes.'

'When I was out here with my boys last year, we had two broken legs; but only on the very last day.'

'Even so, it must have been dreadful.'

'Of course they didn't both belong to us.'

Like most of Eliot's other novels, I think Mrs. Martell is a novel that will only improve on re-reading.

I did say "most," because, although it saddens me to admit that a new favorite author has her flaws, I'm not quite so sure that the same is true of Eliot's fourth novel, Starter's Orders (1955).

Front flap from
Starter's Orders

Now, if you're a big fan of horseracing, and are looking to read about it in fairly intimate detail—exploring the thoughts and feelings not only of the principle characters (a stable owner and the woman who may become his wife), but also of grooms and trainers and owners and bookies and gamblers, as well as several relatives and servants of the main characters—then you'll be happily in your element here. But those—like me—who can hardly tell the difference between a horserace and a game of croquet are likely to find less excitement here.

Starter's Orders seems to be in the nature of an experiment for Eliot—an attempt at a Dickensian variety of character with the budget-busting cast of thousands that a Hollywood extravaganza has on offer. And since Eliot is a polished and very talented author, I admit that even some of the scenes showing the care and handling of horses, or detailing the anxious preparations for a race, did pull me in and hold my interest, added to the fact that, when the focus is on the main characters and their slowly progressing relationship, Eliot produces more or less her usual sparkling, entertaining prose. Plus, even a not-entirely-successful novel can be interesting when examining a very good author's body of work, so perhaps I will revisit the novel someday and see what I come up with.

By contrast, however, Eliot's fifth and final novel, Cecil (1962), which appeared after an uncharacteristic seven year gap in publication, tops off her too-short literary career in style. Here, Eliot tries to get at something very subtle and elusive—portraying a dysfunctional (to say the least) mother/son relationship from the perspective of an in-law who only sees them now and again over the course of several years. Anne, the narrator, is the sister-in-law of the title character, and although she develops strong feelings about Henry and his mother, Lady Guthrie, one is also aware that her knowledge and perception is limited.

In lieu of a cover image of
Cecil, the back flap of Starter's
Orders, with enthusiastic praise
for Alice

Eliot's intent is clearly not to make the relationship obvious, but to show it only as it can be wrestled with and perceived in glimmers and fragments and suspicions. It's an ambitious project, and one that fans of Henry James, for example, may happily sink their teeth into, but it's also always a fascinating and entertaining project. Just as I recently wrote about Rachel Ferguson's Evenfield, Eliot too manages to create genuinely serious literature without making the reader's experience feel like serious work. The shades of meaning and possible interpretations are there if you want to sample them, but you'll have fun even if you don't.

What's more, Cecil is an excellent portrayal of a theme I haven't commented on here for a while—that of the maleficent malingerer, here encapsulated in Lady Guthrie, who (if Anne's observations are to be believed) ruins the life of her son as thoroughly as if she set out to do so meticulously and calculatedly (but wait, perhaps she did?). Yet even as loathsome as she seems, I found Lady Guthrie completely believable, not just a comic book villain, and there are no easy answers for her or any of Eliot's other characters. And perhaps even Lady Guthrie's loathsomeness, as observed by Anne, is placed in some doubt, for one may wonder how much of it is real and how much is built up in Anne's own mind:

Lady Guthrie and Cecil arrived, as threatened, on the sixth of August. I had not, as I have said, seen Cecil for nearly three years or Lady Guthrie for seven. In the interval my feelings towards her, mainly, naturally, owing to the circumstances which had surrounded the breaking off of the engagement, had undergone a considerable change. As I waited for the carriage I realized that whereas before I had been accustomed to think of her as a selfish and often foolish woman I now regarded her as a veritable ogress. In my imagination, untouched by any sight of the reality, the soft features had become witchlike; the embonpoint had turned to layers of repulsive flesh. My first sight of Lady Guthrie, not very surprisingly, proved me to have been completely wrong. The appearance of the woman who was ushered into the drawing-room differed very little from that of the one who had last left it in 1887.

I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure, even now, what to think of Cecil's relationship with his mother, and I can't decide if this is because Eliot handled her ending with just a bit too much subtlety, or if this impression—that one almost perceives the truth, that if one just strains a bit more, re-reads earlier passages, seeks the clues a bit more aggressively, then one will see it all—is precisely the point Eliot wanted to make—that we can never see all of the clues, never perceive all the truth about other people and their motivations. And this is not to mention the ways in which the narrator's speculations sometimes reflect upon her own relationships with her husband and children—and perhaps the ways in which her ability to understand Cecil and his mother are limited by her own experiences as a mother.

Certainly, some dark secret about Cecil is implied here and there, but it is kept as vague as the misbehavior of schoolboy Miles in James's The Turn of the Screw, of which Cecil's implied but vague crimes reminded me.

But even feeling not completely sure about the ending, this is one of my favorite Eliot novels (though it's true I've felt that about all of her novels as I've finished them, except for the aforementioned Starter's Orders). More serious than the others, and somewhat inexplicably set in the late Victorian period—though its tone feels just the same as the others which are set in the 1950s—it nevertheless sparkles with Eliot's sharp observations and charming prose. It's less laugh-out-loud funny than her earliest works, though it does still have its moments, and I can't resist sharing one longish dialogue between Anne and Lady Guthrie, from very early on, as they discuss Lady Guthrie's current interest in spiritualism:

'If it hadn't been for the poltergeists,' idly Lady Guthrie picked up the silver trumpet used for blowing out the little spirit lamp under the kettle, 'I am convinced that my private hour with him would not have ended as it did.'

Exactly how the hour had ended she had not told us but apparently she and Mr Jackson had failed to communicate with the spirit of her sister Marion.'

I nodded sympathetically, thinking what a pity it was that of all Lady Guthrie's sisters, Marion, the only one who had died, should also be the only one in whose advice, if only it could be obtained, she seemed to place any confidence.

'Perhaps,' I said, 'if you were to try again on your way back through London?'

'I shall certainly attempt it but sometimes with so many wishing to speak to us it can be very difficult. On Sunday at the public meeting there were a great many messages; most of them I'm bound to say rather silly.'

Abruptly Lady Guthrie, without attempting to do anything supernatural with it, which is what I'd been vaguely afraid of, replaced the trumpet on the tea-table. 'Half of them might just as well have been written on the back of picture postcards of Brighton, "All well here, everything very beautiful, don't worry."'

What a shame that Eliot didn't continue to write fiction after 1962. As wonderful as Alice and Henry are, she evolved tremendously as an author by 1962, and I would have loved to see where she might have got to if she had gone on. From the beginning, she was a very smart, sophisticated, and clever author, and by 1962 she had become a very subtle one as well. She certainly deserves to be more widely read…

EDWARD CANDY, Parents' Day (1967)

This interlibrary loan request was, like many of my requests, an impulse.  Edward Candy (a pseudonym for Barbara Alison Neville) was qualified as a doctor (one of a surprising number of women doctors on my Overwhelming List—a sub-list may be coming at some point...), but left the profession to raise her family.  I first came across her when Lisa Perry mentioned enjoying her three mystery novels, but ultimately my fascination with novels about schools won out over my love for good mysteries, and this summary of Parents' Day from detecs.org sealed the deal:

Parents' Day is all about the interaction of parents, staff and teenagers during the annual parents' day at Cilrheddyn, a small coeducational boarding school in Pembrokeshire. The characters are well delineated, but not very much happens and no crime or detection is involved.

Not exactly a rave review, but it proved enough for me.    

The novel features a dizzying array of characters and hops lightly from one set to another.  Owen and Helen Pinnegar—who name all their children from Thomas Hardy novels, including Jude, Tess, Tamsin, and Diggory—have just discovered that Owen is dying, but Owen determines to attend the parents' day anyway, to play in a Mozart recital with Jude, who is a narcissistic prodigy.  Meg Lindsay is the school's matron, whose promising career as a doctor was cut short by her seduction and its resulting pregnancy (echoes of Neville's own experiences, perhaps?), and she will today have to meet the brother of her seducer, who is one of the parents.  Then there's Vincent Hardy and his second wife, Dinah, whose son/stepson Daniel has run away as the novel opens.  They bring along Vincent's mother, a domestic dominatrix if there ever was one, who wallows in self-pity and exhausts herself with her snarking.

And there's more.  There's Henry and Emma Branksom and their slow-for-his-age son Robert, whom they are considering sending to the school.  There are interesting relations between several of the students, including Tess's friends Nancy, who has already resigned herself to being a spinster, and Kate, who is comparatively shallow and an unmitigated flirt.  And I'm sure there are even more that I've forgotten.

  

Barbara Alison Nevil (aka Edward Candy)

Quite an array of characters for a 192 page novel!  It did occasionally get just a bit overwhelming, but overall the characters were so interesting that I couldn't stop turning the pages.  In its subject matter, Parent's Day occasionally evokes my favorite school novel, Mary Bell's Summer's Day, which also mixes the experiences of staff and parents with those of some of the students.  But in its handling this novel is far closer to Ivy Compton-Burnett's More Women than Men, with a considerable helping hand from Iris Murdoch which shows up in the characters' periodic questioning of the big issues, like life and death or good and evil.  For example, this exchange between Meg and Peter, one of the male students, could have been lifted directly from Dame Ivy:

"Was it Daniel who was in Tess Pinnegar's tent, then?" Meg said, handing him a forgotten tray at the dining room door. "I am glad it was Daniel, and not you."

"What did she mean by that?" Peter said with the smirk of one who knows very well what is meant.

"I think she meant that we all trust Daniel," Celia said. "We all know he is thoroughly sensible."

"What a thing to know about anybody!" Peter said. "I am glad nobody even suspects that of me."

"You should not pretend to be worse than you are, Peter. It is such a silly pose."

"I thought it would be less silly than pretending to be better. At least, less ordinary."

Or, a bit later, Diggory Pinnegar makes this similarly Compton-Burnett-esque observation:

"Matthew says the Victorians thought all little children were as good as angels," Diggory said, "and that was why they kept on beating them, because they were always being disappointed."

If you're not a Compton-Burnett fan, though, that doesn't necessarily mean whis novel isn't for you.  Candy/Neville is not as unrelenting in the use of dialogue, nor is all of her dialogue as stiffly philosophical and unrealistic as Dame Ivy was prone to write. 

Cover of a later novel featuring an
enthusiastic blurb about Parents' Day

Parents' Day has shades of soap opera, which is surely intentional and self-referential (and perhaps even a bit postmodern) as Vincent and Dinah are screenwriters for a television soap opera set in a school.  They incessantly discuss the scripted alter-ego of the real-world school they're visiting, and provide some of the most interesting and amusing passages in the novel.  Dinah comes across rather as a blithering idiot who can barely distinguish reality from fiction, while Vincent is cynical and calculating in the ways in which he tidies up reality to reach a larger audience.  Here they are just after discovering that Daniel is avoiding them:

There were few things Dinah could not conceive of, and Daniel's defection was not among them.

"Oh, Vincent, really, there is no need to look so stunned! You know very well how unpredictable boys of Daniel's age can be. There was Terry—remember what a time the school had with him, six or seven episodes ago."

"But this is a real boy, my son, and a real school. This is actually happening, Dinah, Daniel is hiding from us!"

"Yes, it is thrilling to see how right we were about Terry; remember how horrified his parents were—they felt they had done everything for him and then the boy simply cut himself off; we were absolutely on the ball there, Vincent; their reaction was exactly what yours is now, ours, I ought to say."

Dinah sees everyone around her as grist for her screenwriting mill, and one can easily see why Daniel would like to stay away from them as long as possible.  Particularly in view of Dinah's explanation of why Daniel was send to Cilrheddyn in the first place:

"My husband's son, my stepson, is handsome too; that is really one reason why we sent him to school down here. He is not so very much younger than I am, and it would be too sad if anything like Phedre developed."

"That was only one of the reasons," Vincent said while Emma glanced at Harry in alarm, which her husband's ignorance of Racine made quite superfluous. "Daniel is a bright boy who needed more individual attention than he would get at an ordinary grammar school."

Oh, dear.  As we see no evidence that Daniel takes any interest in Dinah whatsoever, it seems rather more likely that Dinah—clearly much younger than Vincent—is imagining Daniel's potential attraction to her for her own narcissistic pleasure and for how it might spice up their lives and provide fuel for her writing.

I found Parents' Day as entertaining and compelling as a soap opera.  If the ending felt like a bit of an anticlimax, that's possibly just my failure as a reader, but it doesn't change the fact that I couldn't put the book down for two days.  I don't think I could wholeheartedly choose this novel as a reprint for my fantasy publishing house, Furrowed Middlebrow Books, but if I were to kick things up a notch and begin Furrowed Middlebrow Productions, then there's no question I would start development on Parents' Day the BBC mini-series without delay.  It seems like a perfect candidate for dramatization.

Just one final quote because I can't just leave that earlier reference to Iris Murdoch hanging, and this is one of the most striking passages of the novel and one which makes Daniel a particularly intriguing and likeable character.  For those of you who are fans of Murdoch, couldn't you see this as having been penned by the brilliant Dame Iris?:

Daniel awoke with a start: a mouse had run up his arm, its whiskers brushed against his neck. For a moment he could not grasp what had happened, and thought it was a spider or something else offensive and cold-blooded. He dashed the back of his hand against his throat and the little animal was knocked on to the pew beside him. He put out a hand to pick it up, but it whisked out of his reach and down to the floor faster almost than his glance could follow. He was glad his thoughtless movement had not injured it, and somehow pleased that his sleeping self had seemed so little of a menace.

And now, I can't help but wonder how the obvious influence of Ivy Compton-Burnett and the more sporadic influence of Iris Murdoch might have played out in Neville's three mystery novels.  So perhaps I'm not done with her yet.

Hopeless No More Part 2: RICHMAL CROMPTON, Mrs Frensham Describes a Circle (1942)

I'm completely embarrassed by how long it has taken me to get back around to the five "no longer hopeless" WWII novels generously made available to me by Grant Hurlock. I reported on the first of them—Ruth Adam's highly entertaining mystery novel Murder in the Home Guard—way back in November, and I promised to keep reporting on them "soon."

Um, yeah. Well, who's to say that I didn't intend for "soon" to mean "nearly two months from now"? But as it turns out, I was darn near too late to refer to this one as any kind of hopeless, as Greyladies happily announced a few weeks ago that they will be reprinting it in February. For now, though, it still counts, as I defy you to find a copy of it anywhere until the Greyladies version is released. (Here's hoping that I'll have to race against time to post on the other three before they get reprinted as well—but somehow I doubt if that will happen.)

Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle is a distinctly odd novel—as odd as its name, in fact, which is meant to imply that the title character comes full circle in the course of Crompton's story (though details of how it applies would give away a bit too much of the plot). In some ways, it's very much a cozy read, with an array of entertaining, quirky, likeable (or pleasantly unlikeable) characters, amusing and interesting situations, and—for the most part—ultimate happy endings. And with a wartime home front setting, no less.

On the other hand, there is some very real darkness lurking around the edges, which perhaps qualifies it as the first "uncozy" I've talked about in a while. I've used that concept a few times before to describe novels that have unexpected depths within what at first appears to be pure ice cream for the brain. In fact, although Crompton's style is quite different from that of Elizabeth Goudge, on a couple of occasions Mrs. Frensham reminded me of Goudge's The Castle on the Hill, one of my favorite World War II novels and one which also has considerable unexpected depth.

This was particularly true in Crompton's descriptions of Mrs. Frensham's relationship with her husband. As the novel opens, Mrs. Frensham is more or less completely isolated from friends and even from her daughter Anice, due to her husband Philip's severe mental illness following a breakdown several years before. He is unable to bear the anxiety caused by visitors, even his own daughter, but Mrs. Frensham refuses to allow him to be hospitalized, which would cause him still more trauma. So they live isolated together, and Mrs. Frensham can only make occasional forays into the life of the village.

Clearly, something will happen to change this situation, and there is an air of inevitability, only a short while later, to the random bomb which falls on their cottage, injuring Mrs. Frensham and killing Philip outright. And Mrs. Frensham's reaction to this loss, when she awakes in hospital, is perhaps a bit surprising:

Mrs. Frensham relaxed against the pillow, and a wave of exultant triumph swept through her. Philip was safe. Life couldn't hurt him any more. Life couldn't hurt her any more, either, for it had only been able to hurt her through him. … Her mind was becoming clearer every moment, so clear that she could face the fears that had preyed on her for so long, the fear that she might die before Philip, that they might take him from her again.

…

The feeling of freedom that uplifted her was strange and unexpected. It was as if she had been carrying a heavy burden and were suddenly relieved of it. Her very soul felt lightened. It didn't even seem to matter who won the war, now that Philip wasn't here to be hurt or frightened. Cruelty and evil and suffering could fill the whole world, for all she cared, now that they couldn't touch Philip. …

I was taken aback at first by such a reaction, but having given it some thought I find it an entirely plausible reaction to the intense stress she has dealt with in trying to protect Philip from reality. Possibly even more surprising, though, is that it's not long until she begins to feel Philip as a sort of phantasmatic presence inside her head, one which even occasionally guides her behavior—even encouraging her to intervene in the lives of other characters, or offer advice she wouldn't have thought of giving herself. A rather interesting twist which, of course, has the result of bringing her out of her isolation.

And the other characters are certainly able to use her and her phantom husband's help. After Philip's death, she stays for a time with her daughter, Anice, whose husband is away in the military, and re-acquaints herself with her grandchildren—Peter, who's yearning to join the R.A.F.; Ellen, who is jealous of her younger sister and bitter because she thinks the boy the likes loves someone else; and Pam, who is happy enough apart from Ellen's constant sniping. And then there are the in-laws, led off by Mrs. Tylney, a domestic dominatrix par excellence (a character type I haven't had a chance to mention lately, though it appears to have been quite common in middlebrow women's fiction), and her poor, beaten-down, manipulated husband, Edmund, and two daughters—Paula, who is devastated and even suicidal following a romance with a married man, and Beryl, neurotically phobic about confrontation but engaged to a man Mrs. Tylney feels is unworthy of the family, a combination that obviously spells trouble. Oh, and let's not forget Miss Fraser, Anice's live-in "mother's help," obsessed with an array of petty grievances against all and sundry, who finds an outlet in her war work at the local A.R.P. headquarters.

When I wrote a while back about Crompton's earlier novel, Leadon Hill, I expressed some frustration with how few of the characters were likeable and how (it seemed to me) self-righteous the main character often seemed toward them. By the time she wrote Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle, however, Crompton had obviously improved her technique considerably, and here a good many of the characters are amusing and likeable even in their imperfections, and those who aren't are, for the most part, presented as having reasons for being what they are. We learn that even Mrs. Tylney, the darkest character of all, is haunted by the death of her youngest son, and may be dominating everyone else around her as a result of her feeling of helplessness at his loss. As a result, this seems like a far more mature novel to me, almost as satisfying as Family Roundabout, the novel Persephone chose to reprint, or Crompton's even later novel, Matty and the Dearingroydes, which was also a Greyladies reprint and which I enthusiastically reviewed a while back.

As with most wartime novels, some of my favorite parts of Mrs. Frensham are the glimpses it offers of home front life. I love the notion (mentioned in other books of the time as well) that folks would brag about their brushes with danger:

Anice, going into Medleigh every day to do her shopping, brought back a report of the gossip and doings of the little town. Everyone seemed to take a pride in being exposed, as they thought, to special danger.

"It's the railway they're after. It runs right at the bottom of our garden."

"They're trying to get that gun encampment on the common. We're practically next door to it."

"They're aiming at the gas-works, you know. It's only a stone's-throw from our house."

While a W.A.A.F. girl, travelling in the same bus as Anice, told her with gloomy satisfaction that whenever she and her friend moved to a fresh billet a bomb seemed to fall in the immediate neighbourhood. " Well, it looks as if someone was giving us away," she said. " I mean, a thing like that can't always be chance."

Later on, there's a mention of "bomb snobs" that I found amusing:

"There were two in the Tube when I was going home last night." … "They were each going all-out and it was a case of Greek meets Greek, because one had been through the Coventry raids and the other through the Plymouth raids. The atmosphere became more and more strained and by the end they were barely on speaking terms."

And I always enjoy references to the clever responses of business-owners whose businesses have been damaged:

A bomb had exploded recently in the middle of High Street and most of the shop windows had been broken. Some shopkeepers had had fresh glass put in, others, less optimistic, had had them boarded up, leaving small holes in the middle through which the contents could be seen. There was a certain fascination about these little peepholes, and more passers-by seemed to look into them than at the fuller displays. A hairdresser's window, not yet mended, bore a notice "We are blasted well open"; and a dyer's and cleaner's, "We are still alive and ready to dye for you''.

That last one might even replace "More open than usual" as my favorite sign on a bomb-damaged retail shop.

All in all, then, I'm so glad this novel will be commercially available again and that others won't find it hopeless at all to get their hands on. I hope some of you check it out, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

RICHMAL CROMPTON, Matty and the Dearingroydes (1956)

I recently discussed Richmal Crompton’s Leadon Hill (1927) here, and although I was a bit lukewarm on it, there were plenty of examples of good writing and genuinely interesting themes to make it clear I had to read this one—the only other of Crompton’s novels that seems to be fairly readily available in the U.S.  Leadon Hill and Matty and the Dearingroydes are the two Crompton books that have been reprinted by Greyladies.  But I happened to look on Amazon and found a really lovely little hardcover edition with an intact dustcover for a reasonable price.  I had to grab it up—sorry, Greyladies, I promise to order something else soon, and if you reprint more Cromptons, I’m guaranteed to order those too, since all her other titles are at least $100 in the U.S.!

At first, I thought I might have the same problem with Matty that I had with Leadon Hill.  Crompton seems to like plots about more or less bohemian characters loosening up strait-laced folks, or at least mocking and condemning their hypocrisies.  Always a popular plotline, and that's fine with me (it works well in reverse too, as Miss Pettigrew has shown).  But in Leadon Hill, I felt Crompton was a bit heavy-handed about it, with a full cast of truly loathsome characters observed by a rather annoyingly self-righteous main character (but I still liked it, even if it doesn’t sound like I did!). 

In Matty and the Dearingroydes, however, written nearly three decades after Leadon Hill (and about a decade after Family Roundabout, an excellent Crompton novel reprinted by Persephone), it’s clear that a more subtle and thoughtful writer is at work.

The story begins with Matty Dearingroyde, the sixty-ish owner of a shop dedicated to used clothing, books, and other odds and ends, approaching a chi-chi suburban London house in search of used clothing to buy.  In a nutshell, the house turns out to belong to the rather loathsome Matthew & Marion Dearingroyde, who discover that Matty is actually their cousin—daughter of Matthew’s disowned artist/bohemian/ne’er-do-well brother.  No doubt they would quickly forget this fact if it weren't that Matthew is planning to run for Parliament and doesn’t want it known that he has an eccentric poor relation running a seedy little shop.  So he suggests that she give up the shop and become properly one of the family, spending a month each in his home and the homes of two of his other siblings.

That pretty much sets the stage for a "Boudu Saved from Drowning" type plot that rollicks along in a compulsively readable way.  I stayed up way too late two nights in a row because I couldn't break away.

Obviously, the compulsiveness of the novel is not due to its startling originality of plot.  Rather, it's in strong, clever writing.  Although plotwise it would be hard not to know what's coming, you never know how cleverly Crompton is going to present it, and in some ways that's almost better, to me, than a surprising or original plot.

There are plenty of humorous passages.  For example, when Matty is first considering Matthew's offer to come and live with them, she finds herself talking it over with the dresses in her shop, including the “crushed-looking garment, resigned and innocent, that did not, Matty felt, know much about life” and the one with “an air of worldly wisdom” that “had seen things, been places, known people, wasn’t to be bamboozled.”

And later, when Matty spends her month with Matthew's sister Flora, who runs a (wannabe) high-class boarding house, we meet the two "lady" tenants who are Flora's pride and joy (as well as her albatross).  When the two women—Lady Purlock and Mrs. Borrowdale—return from a society wedding, we see them in their full pretentious glory:

For a few days they were inclined to be more critical than usual of the domestic arrangements of Shottery Place and blossomed out into more elaborate evening toilettes—Lady Purlock even appearing one evening with an ornament in her hair that closely resembled a tiara—then gradually they resigned themselves once more to an atmosphere that Lady Purlock described in her more gloomy moments as “incurably middle class.”

This reminded me a great deal of the Painton sisters in Leadon Hill, who hilariously "never could quite conquer the idea that there was something vulgar about deck chairs."

The other boarding-house guests are also funny and worth getting to know—Miss Hastings, a busybody involved with every local organization; Miss Winterton, a gruff, manly dominator who can't get enough of hiking all over England (and whom possibly we are to see as lesbian) and Miss Tenby, her passive but increasing bored and exhausted companion; the Redbrooks, whose young daughter died five years ago and who are still engaged in full-time mourning more out of habit than real sentiment; Mr. Appleby, an attorney who spends his time obsessively researching a book he will likely never write; and Colonel & Mrs. Knighton, whose hobby is shopping for houses they have no intention of buying.

Unsurprisingly, Matty is able to help many of them with her no-nonsense, no-pretense, tell-it-as-it-is approach.  But meanwhile Matty herself is interestingly conflicted.  She is trying to be a lady, because her mother wanted her to be, but she has always been "bilingual":

And Matty, who had inherited Jasper’s buoyancy and lightness of heart, adapted herself easily to the situation.  Within doors, under her mother’s anxious eye, she played her part as Matilda Dearingroyde of gentle speech and irreproachable manners.  Out of doors, with the children who went to school with her and used the street as their playground, she was wild and reckless as the best of them, with a shrill cockney voice and the manners of her comrades.  She assimilated both parts with a sort of monkey-like quickness and with no conscious deception.  She was bilingual and came to have a sort of dual personality, accommodating herself to her company automatically and instinctively.

And now that she's trying to acknowledge only the Matilda side of her personality, she keeps having little "break-outs":

Matty was demure and precise-looking in her plain black dress, her hair brushed straight back from her forehead, her feet encased in neat, low-heeled shoes.  She had had a slight “break-out” yesterday and had bought a vulgar scarf depicting the efforts of a fat man to swat a bluebottle, but her courage had failed her at the last minute and she had not put it on.

Sometimes, the return of the repressed Matty is fairly subdued, as when she befriends Matthew & Marion's poor victimized daughter by commenting on the strict running of the Dearingroyde home:

“It’s been running itself on the same lines for so long.  It does rather make one want to clean the brass on Wednesday instead of Tuesday just to give it a shock.”

And sometimes, as it emerges later, the break-outs can be a bit more extreme (but I'll leave that for the reader to discover)…

The final month of Matty's family tour is spent with the truly loathsome Olivia, her doormat of a son, and her daughter-in-law.  Olivia is a prime example of the maleficent malingerer I've started really noticing in a lot of the novels I read.  I think it was a character type I just took for granted for a long time, but it seems to have been a real theme for a lot of writers, and one that they felt strongly about and were eager to explore.

In this case, as with some of the other characters I've commented on, the maleficent Olivia is not actually ill in any apparent way, but merely uses threats of heart attack or total despair to manipulate her son.

After one of Olivia's melodramatic scenes, Matty observes her closely:

Matty’s eyes followed her as she bustled about the room, getting out the cards and card table.  The scene had left no traces.  Her face was not ravaged by her tears.  There was, on the other hand, a sort of bloom and sleekness about her, as if she had derived some sensual satisfaction from it.

Although Olivia is the kind of completely unsympathetic character whose prevalence in Leadon Hill grated on me, in this novel Matty's response is more practical and less about feeling superior than Marcia's in the earlier novel, which makes the scenes more entertaining.  That approach, too, along with the presence of a fair number of likeable characters (and a few realistically believable annoying ones), meant that, for me, the seriousness of the Olivia scenes actually added to the depth of the novel.

The final outcome of the novel, to the extent that it's not fairly obvious from the beginning, I'll leave to you to enjoy for yourself!

Having read two of Crompton's novels in the past couple of weeks, I might not add her to the top tier of my very favorite writers.  But I do have to say that I always seem to find interesting and sometimes surprising depth in her work.  For example, midway through the book Matthew and Marion throw a party, supposedly for their daughter Christine (whom they use as a pawn in their ongoing power struggle), but really to promote Matthew's run for Parliament.  Matty observes Christine actually enjoying herself, forgetting about her parents manipulations of her.  Matty comments:

“Forgetting only puts off remembering, but it gives one a sort of respite.  And it’s all so new to her.  It helps her to grow up.  Unhappy children take a long time to grow up because they build an imaginary world for themselves that’s more real to them than the real world and they can’t find their way out.”

I thought a lot about this quote, and I think it's a strikingly perceptive observation.  I've certainly known people to whom it would seem to apply. 

So if Crompton is not always the most polished of writers, or her characters are not always perfectly rounded or believable, I find myself forgiving those faults, because her sense of humor, her originality in rounding out her plots (if not the plots themselves are not so original), and her sharp understanding of human nature help—for me—to sand off her rough edges.

One last note: On the D. E. Stevenson discussion list, there was a recent discussion about the habit, in the early to mid 20th century, of mothers allowing small babies to sleep outside in their prams.  We noted that it was obviously a safer time, with fewer threats to the child's safety and perhaps a stronger sense of community keeping them safer, but we also realized that there must have been practical considerations, as for example the prevalence of cigarette smoking and coal-burning, that might have given fresh air an extra advantage. There was an example in Stevenson's The Young Mrs. Savage, and, for those keeping track, there is another example here!