'Hellish dark and smells of cheese': ISOBEL STRACHEY, Suzanna (1956)

Not (alas) the cover of my copy

Juliet glanced at her figure in a long mirror hanging beside a print of horses at full gallop, uncertain whether she accepted the probability of reflected beauty, and quickly sank into the hot water, her mind still fermenting with a host of tiny worries.

Everyone has thoughts about how they see Juliet Tancred and what she should do with her life, but she can't seem to see herself at all. She's a "stone nymph beside a fountain" or, for her long-suffering presumed fiancé, "the Madonna, the pale moon goddess and the lily-maid of Astolat" (the last better known to us mortals as the lady of Shalott).

Timothy Harper, a neighbour who has given up a promising career as a musician to take over the family estate from his hard-working mother Prim, has long been in love with Juliet, and there is considerable pressure from family and friends to finally make their relationship official. But Juliet can't bring herself to commit, perhaps in part due to the way Timothy idealizes and worships her ('Timothy gives me a sad feeling of inadequacy as if I were a damp squib which wouldn't go off.') She decides instead that she must take a flat in London and establish herself in a career.

In the meantime, she becomes intrigued by Edgar Dunn, a 40-ish friend of her family, who is married to the older Lady Suzanna Chalisfont, an elegant, attractive woman who fears her hold on Edgar is slipping as she grows older and more frail. Edgar, increasingly obsessed with Catholicism, is also regretting that he passed over a lovely young girl (of whom Juliet reminds him) to marry Suzanna, but his religion won't allow for divorce, so he contents himself with mentoring Juliet during occasional semi-clandestine meetings in London.

If that's not a complex enough stew of potential drama for you, we also get the sudden reappearance of Suzanna's first husband Stanislaus, presumed dead for over a decade, who reappears and expects to resume their old flame, which Suzanna manages to do while keeping both her husbands in the same house. And we have Tara, a friend of Juliet's from her office, upon whom Juliet more or less foists Timothy to take the pressure off of herself, then wonders if she has made a mistake when Tara falls for him hook line and sinker.

It's quite the soap opera cast, really, but of course in the hands of Isobel Strachey (of whom I've wrote a couple of times recently—see here), it becomes quite a lot more than melodrama, though—unsurprisingly if you've read those earlier posts—I wasn't entirely sure exactly what it was. Unusually for me, I waited a week or two after reading it before attempting this review, and as happened with the other two Stracheys I've read it has affected me almost more in retrospect than in actually reading it.

Ultimately, it's a story of two women, at opposite ends of their adult lives, navigating the clichéd "man's world" in their own ways. As a gay man, I think I was initially attracted most to Suzanna, who—though she would undoubtedly be irritating as hell to live with—has a glamour and pinache that seems to appeal to my people… But even with her wealth and social position, Suzanna has, quite literally, built her life around men, and around being the irresistible object of their affections. So that, on reflection, it’s the confused, awkward Juliet, whom one often wants shake, who is surely the real heroine here—even in her lack of self-assurance and inability to clearly see a future for herself, she decides she doesn't want to be a stone nymph or a madonna. Her way of avoiding it is messy, but it's the 1950s and avoiding domination by men would surely not have been easy for any woman.

If I've made this novel sound like a feminist diatribe, it's certainly not. Strachey is, for all her occasional flamboyance, far too subtle for that. She just gives you the characters, in all their imperfections, and expects you to put the pieces together, and the ending is nothing like a triumphant win for Juliet—and it's a downright tragic one for Suzanna.

When I was reading Suzanna, I was disappointed at first. It seemed rather lackluster by comparison to the other two Stracheys I've read. The bold, striking metaphors are not as prevalent here, and apart from Suzanna herself the characters seem relatively ordinary, real people you could see anywhere. I thought perhaps Strachey wasn't so inspired this time around, but now I wonder if it wasn't rather that she felt this novel more personally than most. From the few descriptions of Strachey herself that I've come across, I wonder if she didn't identify herself a bit with both her hopeful young heroine and her tragic older sophisticate. At any rate, I think this might now be my favorite of the three Stracheys I've read—like fine wines, I'm beginning to realize that Isobel Strachey novels require some aging to fully appreciate. And I now have a complete set of all seven of them to be getting on with...

But it is not the case that Strachey's brilliant figural flares are entirely absent here. I mean, what of this portrait of Timothy's mother Prim:

Prim bent over him in consternation, taut and frail, not daring to touch him, her face pinched with suppressed emotion; then laid her hand for a moment bravely on his shoulder and proceeded gently and sadly along the passage, her narrow head drooped forward on her long neck like a tulip too heavy for its stalk.

And then there's the following, in which Juliet, in a tense moment whose details I won't reveal, nervously babbles a story which may just be intended to represent her own limited perspective on life:

Her white complexion took on a high colour; she talked twice as rapidly as usual and insisted on a long exchange of funny stories including a description of somebody called Mr. Jorrocks who looked into a cupboard in mistake for a window and being asked what sort of a night it was, replied 'hellish dark and smells of cheese,' which she repeated several times with differing emphasis.

Indeed, how many of us sometimes think the world is hellish dark and smells of cheese simply because we're looking in our own cupboard instead of at reality? (That sounds rather like a sappy greeting card, though, doesn't it?)

Pennies or penises: ISOBEL STRACHEY, First Impressions (1945)

A woman was sitting bending over Barbara's hand spreading colour on to her nails with a tiny brush. Her fingers were quickly and neatly busy, her mind busy also with anxiety about money or chewing the cud of some sexual experience. Pennies or penises.

Ahem, now that I have your attention with that title and quote, I’ll remind you that having read Isobel Strachey’s final (of seven) novels, The Perfectionists, a while back and not completely knowing what to make of it, I was nevertheless intrigued enough to immediately order three more of her books. And thank heavens I did!

Having read her last, I decided I should next read Strachey’s first novel, the short but potent tale of Barbara Weatherby, a distinctly aimless girl from a high society family, from her final days in school to her rather ambivalent and surely perilous marriage to the first man she becomes infatuated with in the days just before World War II (the approach of war barely figures at all, perhaps appropriately since it's Barbara's rather shallow perceptions which are the focus). The first two chapters feature some lovely, bleakly funny scenes of boarding school life, which make it quite clear why someone like Barbara would loath it, though her friend Rosemary takes it all as seriously as a gothic tale of doom--here’s Rosemary having been scolded by the gym mistress:

'She said I'd shown signs of being unpunctual for gym lately. She said I wasn't a child any longer, and why wasn't I quicker at getting up to open the door for her when she comes through the classroom. She said she noticed that l was generally one of the last girls to get up. I can't see there's much use in my living any longer.'

Soon enough, Barbara runs away from school, and convinces her mother not to send her back. She drifts from one spot to another, or rather from a tennis party to a ball, and becomes wildly infatuated with a young man, Francis Holland, who is already engaged to one of Barbara’s friends. In the end, she marries him, but this is no Jane Austen story of a well-deserved happy ending, for by the time she succeeds in conquering Francis (he having been dumped by his fiancée for his wandering eye), she seems to have fallen out of love with him, but can’t quite extricate herself from the belief that her future is tied up with his.

First novels have a tendency to be autobiographical, but if First Impressions is, then Strachey was surely just as bold and uncompromising in her own self-examination as she routinely is in dissecting her characters. It’s a delightfully dark, cynical world Strachey has Barbara move through, but Barbara, driven by boredom and lack of motivation, isn’t allowed to see it clearly enough to save herself from her fate. And if any reader has missed all the copious foreshadowing that Barbara and Francis won’t live happily ever after, perhaps Barbara’s observations about a relative as she's walking down the aisle at her wedding will make it clear:

Beside her sat another relation, Blanche Poole, wearing a huge black velvet hat swaying with feathers and sparkling with jet bugles, but more picturesque than the hat her face below it appeared carved in magnificent lines from a grey desiccated substance with eyes dull opaque mysterious like those of an ancient statue, but unlike a statue little twitching movements which had once been the voluntary and fiery movements of an impatient nervous temperament, now become utterly involuntary and meaningless, still raked her bony frame from head to foot, as though unseaworthy and abandoned by her crew an old ship was still tossed at random upon waves she had once proudly navigated.

Perhaps not the ideal mindset in which to be saying “I do”?

First Impressions seems to me to have some of the same rough edges, as a novel, that I found in The Perfectionists. It feels a bit fast and loose (or perhaps I’m just being a fast and loose reader). But just as in the later novel, what’s absolutely fascinating is Strachey’s incredible command of metaphor and striking, unusual, and generally quite jaded description. A couple of rather gorgeous random examples:

Lady Rachel Morley, the vicar's wife, had a definite square face, a definite authoritative way of speaking, she wore such quiet mousy well-worn clothes that compared with her the other women looked as though they were dressed up for the stage. She welcomed Mr. Langford-Keyes' effusions steadily like a rock receiving the impact of a frothing phosphorescent wave of sea-water. The wave recoiled and left her unaltered and sensible as ever.

…

The curate stood beside him in a curious toppling position. His clothes looked as though they were being blown off him although there was no wind.

What a talent Strachey had for this sort of figural language! You would think, this being a first novel, that it was mere precociousness and would surely run out of steam in later work, but I can attest that the talent is still thriving in her last novel. And, having quoted a passage above from just one page after Barbara’s arrival at her wedding, here is the arrival itself:

As she entered the church Barbara breathed in a heavy smell of flowers and was aware, on either side of the aisle, of light coloured dresses and hats swaying on craning and bending necks as closely packed as plants in a herbaceous border, and heard a whispering like the twittering of insects and birds, soon overwhelmed by rolling waves of organ music which filled the building to the brim with a mighty reverberation of long deep notes powerful as bugle and trumpet blasts, seeming to wrestle with each other in the confined space like invisible giants or atmospheric elements.

Let me just say, if sometimes Strachey’s plotting and character development seems to have been along the lines of a literary Hunger Games (drop some odd characters into an intriguing situation and let the chips fall where they may), I can forgive her just about anything for the vividness of her language. And fortunately, I have two more of her books on my shelf...

Barbara Pym on steroids?: ISOBEL STRACHEY, The Perfectionists (1961)

[S]he bought the latest Vogue, and was sitting reflectively turning pages of gowns which distorted the human shape hanging on women as thin as rakes, posed with straddled legs and wasted bellies thrust aggressively forward, when Lawton came in from the farm.

Now if a description like that doesn’t make you sit up and take notice, I don’t know what will. And there are rather brilliant, dark, misanthropic descriptions like this here and there throughout The Perfectionists, the final novel by the eccentric Isobel Strachey, author of seven highly-praised novels 1945-1961. Having read the first few chapters, I thought, as I’ve put in my title, “Barbara Pym on steroids.” A bit darker, a bit more cynical, a bit more over the top than Ms Pym, but very much of the same species. But I haven’t quite been able to figure out how I feel about the novel as a whole.

So … naturally, I took shelter in digression, did some additional research on Strachey, and found some interesting tidbits.

She was a Strachey by marriage to the eminent Lytton’s artist nephew John, whom she then divorced, and she was herself a painter of some merit. She spent some of her youth in Argentina, where her father worked on the railroads, which clearly influenced her novel A Summer in Buenos Aires. During WWII, she worked as a translator and decoder for MI5, which one obit suggests inspired her to begin writing. It’s quite striking, as forgotten as she is today, that her novels were sufficiently famous that in 1963 a Guardian critic could suggest that Margaret Drabble was "by Elizabeth Bowen out of Isobel Strachey" and assume her readers would understand the reference. (Not certain of that comparison with Drabble, but that’s what she said.) And Strachey may also have had in common with Pym the difficulties of being an author of “comedies of manners” in a publishing world turning toward the more jaded, psychological fiction of the 1960s and after, as another obit mentions at least one additional novel, called The Dressing Gown, which she finished in 1986, the year before her death, and which remains unpublished. Other sources also suggest she continued writing after the book publications ceased. Could it also have been a factor that her final two novels were published by her son-in-law, Anthony Blond, from whom her daughter was divorced before the last appeared?

And, because I rather think from reading The Perfectionists that she would have found it hilarious, I’ll share that novelist Simon Raven (whose Wikipedia page says he was “known for his louche lifestyle as much as for his literary output”, so it could be a case of pot and kettle), in a book of essays and memoirs that was later withdrawn, said that in her youth Strachey’s legs “opened as easily and as often as a pair of scissors.”

Indeed, Strachey doesn’t seem to have been any more shy in writing about sex than she was in having it. There’s nothing explicit or pornographic in The Perfectionists, but it must, even in 1961, have raised a few eyebrows with its portrayal of a gay couple of long standing, Paul Musgrave and Claude Garland, whose domestic peace is shattered by the marital difficulties of their neighbors Lawton and Susan Cheke. And while the portrayal of the gay couple couldn’t be described as positive, none of the other characters are portrayed positively either, so there’s no real homophobia about it (beyond the use of some outdated language), even if there is considerable misanthropy.

Strachey must surely have had some gay men close to her, and a short review by Marghanita Laski of one of her earlier novels suggests (if I’m not misreading Laski’s coyness) that gay men may feature prominently there as well. (Laski says of Quick Bright Things that it’s a “charmingly silly--bit of chit-chat about a gay, feckless, divorcee, and a gawky daughter, and some perfectly delightful men”.) At any rate, whatever their shortcomings, Paul and Claude are entirely plausible--Claude a die-hard misogynist disgusted at the mere thought of women and their parts, who occasionally attempts to convert handsome local lads to his way of thinking, while Paul leans toward bisexuality (though indeed quite sluggishly, as it has taken him 20 years to feel the urge).

Susan’s problems, during which she comes to rely on--and seduce--Paul, are based on having married a farmer, Lawton, who is really in love with a London society lady old enough to be his mother. Eleanor Locke is a well-to-do manipulator who has kept Lawton on a leash as her lover since well before her husband died, but refuses to marry him for the sake of appearances. She gives him the farm to keep him handy, but a couple of years after his marriage begins to regret letting him get that far and begins to tug on the leash. Crises and tragedy ensue (though the tragedy, in Strachey, is viewed as cynically as everything else, so there’s no need to shed a tear).

Strachey is undoubtedly a writer--some of her descriptions, as dark and threatening as any midnight mire, are breathtaking. Check out this description of the local fair:

The tent where the beer was sold was slushy with black mud. Country people stood sturdily about, some bursting with glee like ripe, rosy apples, others grim, lined and dour like cadaverous cheeses, glistening in the lamplight. The soft greyness outside faintly pricked with stars and seemingly transparent to all eternity had suddenly turned to inky blackness enclosing them tightly in a little glittering cave. All seemed aware of each other's perspiring faces and eager to communicate either good cheer or gloom; or held proudly apart with shining eye-balls and a flashing ring displayed on brown fingers curved round the smooth column of a glass. A man in corduroy trousers and a thick jacket, tilted his battered felt to the back of his head and bravely began to sing above the hurdy-gurdy din.

Apples and cadaverous cheeses, oh my.

And by 1961 her perspective on her youthful indulgences must have soured a bit, judging by this hilarious but distinctly unromantic kiss:

She shivered with wet and cold and he put his arms round her and they sat pressed cheek-to-cheek gathering warmth like a connected radiator. Presently she gripped his hands as he felt for her breasts and they were drawn to rubbing their rubbery, soft lips together.

In her descriptions and her unforgiving perspective on human frailties, then, Strachey is undoubtedly brilliant and entertaining. But her characters, almost entirely portrayed as selfish, weak, vain, manipulative, or destructive (indeed sometimes all of the above), did begin to wear on me and even bore me well before the end of the novel. And the plotting as well seems a bit aimless, with perhaps the most intriguing character of all, the local vicar, featuring prominently only in the last 20 pages or so, rather a waste of some glorious description and an almost-actually-likable character.

On the other hand, as I’ve gone back and looked over marked passages to write this post, I’ve been a bit wowed all over again by Strachey’s language and daring, and have been inspired to order three more of her novels. So I'm not sure it's appropriate to say that I either loved or hated The Perfectionists? But I may have been a bit seduced by Strachey herself.