When I posted a while back about my love/hate relationship
with Ena Limebeer's The Dove and Roebuck,
I wrote a little about my reluctance to write about books that I don't
completely enjoy. Since I started this
blog to share information about writers and works that don't usually get much
attention, writing about how disappointed or lukewarm I am about a book no one happens
to be reading or even planning to read (or in fact has so much as heard of)
seems like beating the proverbial dead horse.
But this book posed a bit of a dilemma for me. It was
one of those books that I occasionally grab (with some difficulty, in this case)
from a library purely because I've read contemporary reviews and thought it
sounded intriguing. I had come across a Saturday Review discussion of the novel, summarizing the situation
of a woman who has abandoned her family for many years and is now returning
home, and something about that decription intrigued me.
Mary Crosbie apparently wrote seven novels from the 1900s to
1920s, the present title being her fifth. About her other novels—Disciples (1907), Kinsmen's
Clay (1910), Bridget Considine (1914), Escapade (1917), Rekindled Fires (1929),
and The Old Road (1929)—I know nothing thus far apart from
their titles. The present novel is dedicated, for what it's worth, to
Helen Beauclerk, another writer on my list, whom I haven't yet read either but
who is somewhat more well-known than Crosbie (everything is relative, but
Beauclerk had at least a couple of modest bestsellers, which does not appear to
have been the case with Crosbie).
Researcher John Herrington was able to track down some of
the details of Crosbie's life—born in Lancashire in 1876, real name Muriel Maud
Dolley (or D'Oyley in some records), unclear if Crosbie was a married name or a
pseudonym, though John found no record of a marriage, lived in Liverpool as a
young woman, died 1958. Which still leaves quite a few gaps and makes me wonder
what experiences in her life might have led her to the dramatic plot of There and Back Again.
Ultimately, I decided to go ahead and write about the novel,
despite the fact that it's not one of my favorites. Because even if I didn't
love it, it really is quite interesting. It's a literary novel, and the
fact that what has been a very personal sort of novel of family relationships
is suddenly disrupted—nearly three quarters of the way through—by the outbreak
of World War I gives it a unique and intriguing structure. Crosbie even
perhaps has a bit in common with writers like Winifred Holtby, who also
explored the Great War and its impacts on personal relationships in a serious,
literary way.
The novel focuses on Catherine Aysgarth, a wife and mother
whose peculiar situation is described early on:
She was married at seventeen. This is
fact, not a means of accounting for her grown-up children. She came from an
Irish schoolroom to that northern home of Vincent Aysgarth's between the moors
and the hills, with the passion of her young marriage alight and her coltish
ardors at their spring. Ignorant, and reckoning all experience in terms of
emotion, and all feeling as having a moral content, as the Victorians always
did (the italics of their parents being still warm upon the air) she came to
Dallas, gave her husband three children in four years and two years later left
him—left him in so far that she left undone all conjugal duty, though she never
in the phrase of the day "deceived" him. She bought Ardenac with old
Aunt Alicia's money and henceforth spent more than half the year away from husband,
home and children, gathering around her friends who, whatever their other
limitations, were not careful with the Aysgarth cares nor dense with the
Aysgarth density.
Of her children, she took only Val with her when she made
her escape, because "even at the age of five Val had a will and a loud
cry. Toby, aged four, was docile. Fortune, aged two, was inarticulate. But Val
could and did assert herself." And as the novel opens, Catherine,
now in her forties, has returned to the fold because Val—perhaps tasting a
touch too fully of her mother's urge for freedom—has run a bit wild, had an
affair (about which we hear little but receive nevertheless a clear impression
that Val is now viewed as damaged goods), and finally, most tragically, has
lost her vision in an automobile accident.
The novel centers around Catherine's gradual reacclimation
to the demands of her now-grown family, and around Val's bitterness and gradual
coming to terms with her disability. Catherine attempts to intervene when
Toby seduces a married woman, and Val has romances with two different men, both
of whom were first interested in her mother (a fact which seems to arouse, by
turns, Val's satisfaction and her resentment) and both of whom now seem to love
Val as much for her tragic air and her association with Catherine as for her
true self. And finally, the latter portion of the novel centers around
the onslaught of World War I and its attendant calamities.
There and Back Again has many strengths, not
least of which is its elegant, sometimes almost archaic prose, which, combined
with its focus on an eccentric, tragic family, makes me wonder if Crosbie might
have been influenced by Faulkner (whom I also mentioned in relation to Ena
Limebeer, come to think of it). Even such a trivial musing as this one,
about a widowed neighbor woman, manages to evoke a deeper sadness:
There was a little Georgian house at
the edge of the village, flat-faced, with a scallop-shell porch over the door
and close-clipped ivy around its windows. It was known locally as Miss
Lavinia's, though Miss Lavinia had been dead thirty years. For just so long,
her mousey little widowed sister had lived there, without impressing her
personality on the house or the village. Mrs. Barlow-up-at-Miss Lavinia's was
the name by which her neighbors knew her till she died.
The effects of the war on Catherine's emotional self are
eloquently and effectively described, and there's a particular passage—in which
Val recalls to Catherine their time in the Paris of the early modernist
period—which I can't help quoting as it made me yearn to have been there
(though not necessarily in the company of Catherine and Val):
"D'you remember the first
Indépendent, Mother? Or the first we saw anyway. In a big tent in the Cours la
Reine. Doesn't it seem ages ago? Women with mauve hair and green faces were new
then, and to talk rhythm and planes instead of line and color was new too. Was
it there that we saw the first Archipenko statues-that Venus with the square
breasts?"
…
"Why, yes, before your time,
Edward. You'd never have taken me to the Cigale on Montmartre and stayed there
till we turned out to wander down to the Halles. Oh, the smell of the morning!
The flowers and the clean streets and the market carts !" She laughed, and
then sang out, "Cigares, cigarettes, bonbons, toutes les
photographies," with the program seller's twang. "And the winter of
the floods! When the Gare St. Lazare was awash and the new Tube under the
river, too; it smelt like the bottom of a pond for months afterwards. The river
was yellow, carrying along with it trees and broken boats, and the sky was
yellow, too, lying close to the tops of the houses, and the Quais were yellow
with dirty snow. And there was talk of blowing up the Pont d'Alma, and
everybody walked over it 'for the last time.' And that night there was a big
clap of thunder and some newspaper man, without going to see, wired to London
that the bridge had been blown up."
According to Wikipedia, the Salon
des Indépendants was only held at the Cours-la-Reine from 1901 to
1907, so this helps to date the scene Val is recalling. In 1906, one of
the major paintings would have been Henri Matisse's Joy of Living,
below—it's only loosely relevant to this post, but it adds a splash of cheerful
color to an otherwise image-less post. Oh, for a time machine to travel
back to the exhibition (and perhaps pick up one or two or a dozen Picassos and
Cezannes for a few francs each along the way)!
 |
| Henri Matisse's Joy of Living, from the 1906 Salon des Indépendants |
There's little enough of humor in this novel, though there
was one passage that jumped out at me, about the arrival of Isabella, an elderly
spinster aunt:
Isabella's eyes roved over the gilt
cornices and paused on the lustered chandelier. She might have been noting the
imperfection of housemaids or inquiring the Divine will.
So why didn't I love the novel? Initially, I thought I
would—I read the first third or so in greedy gulps. But by then, the
idealization of Catherine by many of the characters—especially the fawning
Arthur, who has adored her in France and now, apparently having no life of his
own, keeps coming for long visits during which he follows her around like a
puppy—started to wear on me:
Arthur, carrying his weight of talk
unspent, thought, "Catherine is changed." He could not tell where the
difference lay, but it somehow affronted him. The legend of Catherine that
Ardenac made was romantic with the romanticism of the eighteen nineties, but it
was very comfortable. Catherine, whose silence had the spacious freshness of
hilltop air—Catherine who fled from Life—the capital letter sort of life—but
gave rest and a hearth fire and food for body and mind to those who lived it;
Catherine, auditor not actor, and therefore interested, kind, ironic,
observant, detached, forever almost within reach and forever at a safe
distance.
Arthur's views of Catherine—and, at times, the perspective
on her offered by Val and Toby and even Vincent, the husband she
abandoned—reminded me of Nick's view of Gatsby in The Great Gatsby.
A sort of hero-worship which, in Gatsby, is presented ironically—in
the sense that the reader fairly quickly realizes that Nick is a nitwit and one
needn't take his idealizations at face value. But here, while Arthur is
pretty clearly a nitwit too, the other characters aren't, and ultimately it
seems that the reader is supposed to really believe that Catherine is a superior
sort of being, too advanced for earthly cares, and to feel that perhaps the
final surrendering of her hard-won freedom that comes with the arrival of World
War I is a sad comedown for such a romantically exotic figure. But
unfortunately, I could never quite see what the characters—and apparently
Crosbie herself—were seeing in Catherine. I didn't dislike her, but I was
never affected by the mystique that supposedly surrounded her. And that
kept me at a bit of a distance from the novel.
Perhaps as in Rebecca, with
which I have confessed my similar inability to engage, you have to buy into the
supposed romantic splendor of a character (and in this case a living, breathing
one, which makes it even more challenging to pull off) in order to accept the
other characters as anything less than moderately mad. I seem to be altogether too
unromantic to view any of my fellow humans as astonishing, brilliant, beautiful
demi-gods—more's the pity, perhaps.
In fact, for me, in an odd sort of way There and
Back Again came to seem like a cross between a Faulknerian family saga
and a Mills & Boon romance. When Catherine finds herself
enmeshed—this time, it seems, permanently—in her family and its day-to-day
life, I wondered if perhaps women readers of the time were merely supposed to
have identified with her, to have imagined themselves as similarly romantic
free spirits tragically tamed? But perhaps
this is just my own limitations as a reader. There's no doubt this was intended
to be a serious novel, and there's likewise no doubt that Crosbie treated her
themes elegantly. I wonder if some of you might really quite like the
book, and if so I would be delighted if a smarter and more careful or sensitive
reader would show me everything that I've missed.
Perhaps some of what I've missed lies in this brilliantly
odd passage near the end of the novel. On
the surface, it's about a chicken—not often considered a romantic demi-god of a
bird—but here it certainly seems to evoke a bit more than mere poultry, coming
as it does in a novel about a mother who has abandoned her brood:
Martin came one day when she was in the
barn, debating with Amos Cliff the prospects of a sitting hen. This was a small
peevish bird, called Ophelia, because she seemed madder than most hens. Having
declined to brood in spring, she was seized with maternal fervor at midsummer,
and three several private nests of hers had been broken up by Amos. But she was
as persevering as she was peevish, and at last her obstinacy won her the
seclusion of an empty whisky case, in which she now sat with thirteen eggs more
or less underneath her. She churred fretfully when Amos lifted her out of the
box and scattered a handful of oats on the ground before her. But after
stretching first one wing and then the other discontentedly she began to feed
with darting haste.
At the least, it's a lovely description. At the most…?
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