'
Since
this was one of the novels that made me want to start this blog, it's probably
high time that I get around to writing about it. I've actually already written
a review of Ferguson's later novel A Stroll
Before Sunset (1946), but then held off on posting it because for me this
one is the better book overall.
When A Footman for the Peacock first appeared
in 1940, Margery Allingham gave it what Elizabeth Maslen calls a
"reproachful" review in Time
and Tide. I haven't yet had a chance to
locate the review in its entirety, but it's not hard to see that Ferguson's humorous
approach to the war, including her loathsome aristocratic family's dodging of
evacuees and lack of any concern whatsoever for the potential ravages of war, as
well as their mocking critiques of government preparedness for the war, might
have seemed a bit too much at a time when the outcome of the war would have
been completely uncertain.
More
recently, scholar Jenny Hartley, in her wonderful Millions Like Us: British Women's Fiction of the Second World War
(a crucial resource for anyone interested in the World War II home front),
dismissed Footman as
"snobbish" and concluded that "Ferguson seems to endorse the Roundelay view
of class as a matter of 'caste' which 'permeates nearly everything.'" I love Hartley's book (and she also edited
the excellent anthology Hearts
Undefeated: Women's Writing of the Second World War), but I have to say my experience in reading the book was quite different from hers.
Although
Ferguson has a
reputation of having been politically conservative (ODNB provides this quote
from her memoir We Were Amused, about
her early suffragism: "The trouble about the vote is that it was
unlawfully withheld far too long and ultimately bestowed far too
lavishly," which perhaps doesn't exactly ooze loving kindness toward the lower classes), she is nevertheless also passionately concerned with social injustice. Alas,
Poor Lady, for example, examines—with what Persephone calls "furious
anger"—the hardships of unmarried women in the early to mid 20th century,
and does so with sensitivity and a critique of a world in
which upper class women who failed to marry were constrained to a limbo of
boredom and uselessness.
This is not to claim that no snobbishness exists in her work, of course. That might be a stretch to say about a good many of the writers I love most! But I did feel, in reading A Footman for the Peacock for a second time, that there was quite a lot more going on than just snobbishness, and I certainly didn't feel that Ferguson was endorsing the Roundelay worldview.
This is not to claim that no snobbishness exists in her work, of course. That might be a stretch to say about a good many of the writers I love most! But I did feel, in reading A Footman for the Peacock for a second time, that there was quite a lot more going on than just snobbishness, and I certainly didn't feel that Ferguson was endorsing the Roundelay worldview.
The
book centers around the family of Sir Edmund Roundelay, who is unsure of why he
was knighted. He
believed it was a mistake, and had probably been a misreading
of the list by a secretary (such things were more common than was suspected) or
that the honour was possibly meant for old Edmund Rulley who had made a fortune
in 1914 by supplying army huts at retail prices to the Government and then
buying them all back after the war at wholesale rates for cricket pavilions for
his own staffs.
His
wife, Lady Evelyn, tries to push the boundaries of acceptable behavior by
exploring restaurants not typically patronized by the gentry, but remains
ultimately only superficially aware of the lives of anyone outside her
immediate family. Sir Edmund and Lady Evelyn live
with their two daughters, Margaret and Angela, and Edmund's three eccentric
spinster aunts, Amethyst, Jacinth and Sapphire, as well a cousin, Major Dunston, and Nursie, the family's
senile old nanny, whose introduction in the novel is one of its funniest
passages:
Nursie ran true to type and was now slightly senile. She
constantly asked the family or any passing servant which battle we were
fighting now, a query that became progressively easier to answer, but she also
believed that Queen Victoria still occupied the throne, and when assured à
haute voix (Mr. Maxwell did best at this) that the present sovereign was
King Edward, George the Fifth, Edward the Eighth, or George the Sixth, would
shake her head and answer, "Ah, they'd
never get rid of Her." Nursie also believed,
and stated, that she had once seen King William the Fourth, when in service in London . If anyone pointed
out to her that, if this were so, she must now be quite one hundred and
thirteen years old, she would silence them for ever by announcing "I'm
ninety and I've got my lines
to prove it," upon which, and in spite of polite protestations
of belief and congratulation she would toddle to a chest of drawers and soon
transform her room, large though it was, into a lamentable jumble sale, at the
very bottom of which, and when the floor was ankle‐deep in clothes,
photographs, albums and various precious knicknacks the very purpose of some of
which was baffling, her birth certificate would be discovered and handed round
(only it was sometimes a wedding favour, and twice a funeral card).
Plot in
this novel is at a minimum, and what little there is is often conveyed, as in
other Ferguson novels, through long amusing digressions—whether on characters'
histories and the family history overall, on architecture and servant problems,
on the linguistic peculiarities of the residents of the nearby village of
Rohan, or on Margaret Roundelays' researches into family members' experiences
of the previous war. I will say that some readers might find this stylistic strategy irritating, but I usually find that Ferguson's digressions explore topics I've never thought about and usually reveal fascinating background for her story.
Since Millions Like Us is concerned with literary representations of wartime conditions and culture, Hartley might have been most interested in the second
half of the novel, when the war is underway and the Roundelays are merrily
refusing to harbor refugees, gleefully dodging evacuees, and generally mocking
the war efforts of those around them—from the servants who are seeking greater
freedom and better treatment in factories to those who are trying to enforce
blackouts, distribute gas masks, or provide for the safety of evacuated
children. (Indeed, if Ferguson had been taken at the time to be sympathizing with such behavior, I would have thought the novel might even have been censored, or at least have received a good many more "reproachful" reviews.)
By contrast, in the first half of the novel the approaching war is barely mentioned at all (highlighting the dithering, inbred obliviousness of the Roundelays to the realities around them), but for me, this section really forms the crucial foundation of the
novel—as well as giving it its title. For amidst all of the digressions into family history, we also learn how Sir Edmund loves to take visitors on tours of the
house, and the pièce de résistance of the tour is always, in the servants' quarters, a room on one window of which the words "Heryn I dye, Thomas Picocke. 1792" have been
scratched. Sir Edmund loves that this part of the tour never fails to arouse the romantic fantasies
of his guests (including such daft speculation as that it was "a last message of the
Princes in the Tower"). Sir Edmund
corrects them and complacently reveals the truth. Picocke, Sir Edmund says,
was, in point of fact, a running footman, his duty to footslog
over hill, over dale, through bush, through briar, herald and warning to the
approaching town or hamlet or to any pedestrian that the coach of his master
was imminent, and that a way for it must instantly be cleared. Hardly human,
the running footman was more in the nature of a social gesture to the world at
large, an earnest of the importance of the family he served, a panting
castemark. Without change of linen at the end of a heating run in all weathers,
including winter's snows, the running footman must wait for hours in the kitchen, steaming in front of the
open hearth, before word was brought him via a chain of house servants, that
his family above-stairs had concluded its visit. He then took staff and nerved
himself for the return footslogging. Oh yes, these fellows, poor devils, died
off like flies of consumption—the local graveyards were known to be peppered
with them. Pay? Oh, five pounds a year, livery and all found. And, oh yes, it
might interest Sir Edmund's visitors to know that the staff borne by these footmen
possessed a metal cap at the tip in which was placed one hard boiled egg to
sustain them during the runs.
Amazingly
(to me), the running footman was a real type of servant in medieval England (and for some time later?),
who really did run ahead of his master's carriage, on the lookout for obstacles
and to alert those at the destination of the master's arrival and prepare his
accommodations. One can imagine, too,
that they must really very often have led short, horrific lives.
Ferguson certainly seems to intend that the reader sympathize with the poor
footman who was, for all intents and purposes, murdered by the custom of the day
and the Roundelays' casual cruelty. He is, in a real sense, the protagonist of the novel (even if he can't deliver glorious monologues in his present, peacock state). We
even see a humorously insensitive excerpt from the diary of a former lady of the house, who reports
on her boredom during long carriage rides and coolly equates the footman with the horses:
[S]ometimes there is nothing to see for hours except hedges
and fields and, if the road takes a curve, the footman running in front. I watch
him out of sheer boredom and wonder when the horses will catch him up, as they
sometimes do, which makes Marcus angry and the coachman sulky, and shout at
him. Once, he actually got left behind by the coach and Marcus said if it
happened again he'd have to go. And, of course, it does look bad to arrive in a village
and see your courier whooping for breath in a ditch fifty yards behind, as if
the horses sat down suddenly and refused to stir.
But
it's Lady Evelyn's discovery of an old song, still sung in the nearby village
of Rohan, which highlights the fact that the present Roundelays too—with the
possible exception of the youngest daughter, Angela—remain
as oblivious to the suffering of others as they have ever been. Evelyn hears the song performed by the
farrier of Rohan, and imagines that its subject is a fox hunt. The song goes (in part):
Run, running runner, run,
The horses o'ertake you
Though breath shall forsake you,
Run, running runner, run.
Run, running runner, run,
The hoofbeats are gaining,
Lungs bursting and straining:
Run, running runner, run.
Run, running runner, run,
Is there sweat on your breast?
(They are nearing the crest)
Run, running runner, run.
Bodies are cheap, are cheap,
One body for a noble,
Two bodies for a noble,
Three bodies for a noble
(Run, running runner, run).
Evelyn
is haunted by the song—in part perhaps because the suffering of others hasn't been made
suitably catchy for her enjoyment (!!):
"Possibly its dreadfulness is just due to the fact that it's
all wrong from the
lyricist's point of view: no neat verse and chorus with everything tied
up in an effective bow at the end. As it is, it's just a tussock of raw suffering." She distances herself further from that suffering by
blaming the farrier for inflicting the song on her ("It was, she thought,
as though over the years he had been concealing his real nature from her.
Treacherous, almost...or at least unfriendly") and by reassuring herself
that such cruelty only existed in the distant past.
The
"unfriendliness" of the farrier who brings the song to
her attention is, by the way, strikingly echoed a short while later when the peacock (the reincarnation
of the tragic footman) begins acting aggressively and a plan is made to give
him to a neighbor. The kitchenmaid, who,
we discover, is the descendant (and presumed reincarnation) of Thomas Picocke's lover,
is upset at the prospect (and jealous when Evelyn mentions the peahens who will keep him company on the neighbor's estate). Evelyn explains:
"But we don't want him, Sue. I'm
sorry if he's
your pet" (for some reason the girl winced at this), "but can't you look at it from the poor thing's
point of view? He must
be fearfully lonely here, that's probably why he's
so unfriendly to everybody."
"Unfriendly?"
Sue clenched
her hands in her apron...
Any expression
of the suffering of others seems, to Evelyn, "unfriendly."
 |
| In lieu of a dust jacket, an appropriately "unfriendly"-looking (possibly Nazi-sympathizing?) peacock |
This,
then, is where we are in the novel when the war breaks out, and these revelations of the Roundelays' history of callous disregard, and the insight
into Evelyn's ultimately superficial and abstract sympathy for the mistreated, are meant, I think, to cast their light on the loathsome family's arrogant indifference in
the face of war. Which fortunately doesn't make them any less hilarious, and the novel is joyous in highlighting all of their imbecilic hypocrisy and meanness of spirit.
Even
in the very funny passage where Nursie's deranged behavior finally convinces
the poor evacuee billeting officer to permanently exempt them from hosting evacuees, I was struck by the glimpse Ferguson gives
us of the realities that the Roundelays ignore, describing the
officer's day trying to find homes for evacuees:
Mr. Mallet reddened. He had had an appalling day, ranging from
tears to threats and abuse. He had helplessly placed a girl of nine in the care
of a hard-faced woman who admitted she hated all children; had put, willy‐nilly,
two more into an unventilated cottage where the elder would have to share bed
with an asthmatic of seventy‐two, he had even suspected a case of
whooping‐cough in the boy he had installed with a young married couple with a
six‐months‐old baby...his own underclothes felt prophetically acrawl...
This
is an overly long analysis, but it's because I wanted to try to convey why I think this is not only a highly enjoyable novel, but also perhaps a really significant one. It seemed to me to be a very serious (albeit hilarious—as perhaps all
really serious novels should be?) exploration of a long tradition of cruelty,
and one which is perhaps as much modernist as middlebrow, as Ferguson is, in her way, a
highly experimental, intellectual writer whose work is characterized
by layer upon layer upon layer of
irony. Ultimately, the war here is
perhaps just grist for Ferguson's mill, another way of showing the Roundelays in the worst possible light, and her casual use of a very real war—in a
frighteningly early and uncertain phase—as a mere piece of a larger theme, was perhaps a little too coolly intellectual for a wartime literary world understandably dominated by gung-ho
characters with can-do attitudes, or by thrillers wherein the bad guys always
lost.
But
what was perhaps too "in your face" in its time may be enjoyed now for its mix of zaniness and a real analysis of exploitation and indifference. And so that I don't lose track of how genuinely funny the
book is, here are a couple of random glimpses. When
the war begins, the older daughter Margaret writes to her German friend
Ortrud. After numerous unintentionally
insensitive remarks about the war, Margaret reaches a climax of dim-witted tactlessness:
My dear, this is just a
line to hope you and your mother and Mr. Bohm are all well and reasonably
happy. I see in the newspapers that you've been short of butter and stand in
queues for ages. We aren't, yet, and don't: You'd never know there was a war
impending here, any more than you did in the last one, and I can guess how you
must be missing fats, because—
Margaret leant back,
appalled, and murmured "Glory!"
And later,
Major Dunston tells of his mother's new obsession with the Second Coming, and
Aunt Jessie ponders the meaning of it:
"It's
The Second Coming, now. ...
It's been The New Messiah for some
time. Goes to meetings full of Indian pansies. Beats me."
Miss Jessie compressed her lips and rose. It was a great pity
that Chrissy, one's own sister, should make a travesty of sacred subjects and lay
herself open to getting talked about like that. Maxwell was far from young, but
he was still only a nephew. About the actual question of this New Messiah of
Chrissy's, Jessie herself
refused to be drawn into discussion though she had once written to her sister
and pointed out that we had one already therefore there could not be another.
Surely Chrissy would understand all the things behind that reminder: that one
had not been able, of reverence, to bring oneself to write? That if there were
two, what was to be done with the first one and where did religion stand if
Christ was, after all, the wrong one? Though to decorate the meetings with
pansies was a pretty idea enough.
The
last line can still make me laugh after at least ten readings. (And Ferguson's rather odd perspective on gay men, which will come up in my review of A Stroll Before Sunset, makes me wonder if that line might not be a subtle mockery of Major Dunston's blasé homophobia.)
By the way, it's
actually not completely impossible to track down copies of A
Footman for the Peacock. I managed
to get it from the library, and a few copies do crop up now and then at online
booksellers. It's not likely to be
cheap, but for what it's worth, I can't think of very many books it would be
more worthwhile to splurge on!
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