"[S]he was behaving towards him as a man does to a mistress": MONICA STIRLING, Some Darling Folly (1955) & Adventurers Please Abstain (1952)

"There's never anything for me to be obstinate about where my husband's concerned." 

She seemed to expect Remy to share her pleasure in this fact. This puzzled him. Knowing many women who didn't care for their husbands, he was inclined to forget that this attitude is not general.

Remy Malet is an actor with the Comédie-Française and, perhaps even more integral to his identity, a practiced womanizer, with a polished, debonair finesse, who even as he tires of one lover is already selecting his next conquest. As Some Darling Folly begins, he is in a favorite shop when he spots Sophie Dubois, wife of a well-known defense attorney, and is bewitched.

Sophie, lovely and delicate and, despite (or perhaps because of) her traumatic experiences in World War II, still just beginning to find her mature self, seems like an easy mark, and indeed a poignant choice of victim to Remy's charms. But it's not quite so simple. Sophie has more depth and wit about her than Remy (or indeed, the reader, at first) could have expected, and doesn't react as he expects her to:

At first he presumed Sophie was acting, that she thought a light hearted attitude the one likeliest to hold him. Presently it struck him that she was behaving towards him as a man does to a mistress, rather than as a woman does to a lover.

Add to this that Sophie's American cousin Liza, a musical comedy actress, arrives in Paris to renew an old romance with Remy, her attempts to cool his passion for Sophie with manipulations and untruths complicating matters in unexpected ways.

Seduction is not for me the most riveting topic for a novel, and I confess that at first I was almost exasperated, despite the charm of the characters and the novel's setting in and around the Paris theatre. Remy is about as shallow a predator as can be imagined, and Sophie, though likable, seemed frustratingly immature. But I've read enough Stirling by now (heaven knows!) to have faith in her ability, and to know that she always has some unexpected magic to work, and here too there is far more depth than one initially expects. The book ultimately rather cleverly subverts the traditional romantic structure, and as we learn more about the tragedies of Sophie's past, and understand more about her psyche, we realize that her affair with Remy may ironically be more likely to save her marriage than destroy it. 

The affair also leads Sophie to become intensely invested in her husband's current court case, defending a young woman who, having served in the resistance and spent time in a concentration camp, is now accused of murdering her employer. This is a woman who has fallen through the cracks of society, and who now, in the postwar years, finds her earlier heroism and suffering taking second fiddle to her perceived sexual immorality. It's a fascinating tale within a tale, and one which helps draw the story to its satisfying conclusion.

I should mention for sensitive readers: although Sophie's wartime traumas are only described in retrospect, as she recounts them to Remy, they are quite traumatic, and as harrowing as anything in Frances Faviell's A Chelsea Concerto. Particularly knowing to what extent Stirling's writing seems to have been grounded in her own experiences as a journalist during the war. One shudders to think that of course such things must have happened to more than one woman during the Blitz.

If Some Darling Folly isn't finally my absolute favorite of Stirling's novels (that's probably Ladies with a Unicorn), it's nevertheless a very strong entry in her oeuvre, and just about the time I was reading it, I finally managed to snag a copy of one of the only Stirling books I was missing, her 1952 story collection Adventurers Please Abstain. So naturally I plunged right in.

I wish I could say that Adventurers was as brilliant overall as her later collection, Journeys We Shall Never Make, which I've previously reviewed. But that collection seems to have had newer stories, written in the 1950s when Stirling was in her absolute prime as an artist. The stories in Adventurers, on the other hand, sometimes feel like assignments in a university creative writing class--far too contrived and obvious, dialogue that is cynical a la Hemingway (who must have influenced Stirling) but without the sparkle and revelation of greater depths. There's the title story, for example, about an apparently deranged woman who places an ad for marriage and proceeds to drive the young respondent to murder her ... just minutes before the men from the mental institution show up to take her. Along similar lines is "The Moral Issue", in which a woman who feels her life has been ruined by a decadent older woman's lies stages the perfect murder, which reads like an adolescent boy's fantasy. And there's "Portrait of a Business Man", in which a young girl learns about the different forms of heroism via a shady friend of her father's … in the most obvious and sentimental ways possible.

The collection contains 23 stories in all, and happily there are a few which really do rank with Stirling's best. When she began to develop her sort of "Proust Lite" style, of characters reflecting on the joys and traumas of their past, she really hit her stride, and perhaps my favorite in this vein is "Out of Mourning", in which a middle-aged princess, the English widow of an Italian prince, sorts through her attics looking for items to donate to refugees and finds traces of her tragic romance at 19, when she intended to kill herself over a man she has now almost completely forgotten. I love her musing over the things she finds before she makes her discovery:

Shaking her head and muttering to herself--a habit that had grown on her since her husband's death--the Princess turned to a heavy leather trunk and heaved up its massive lid. Rugs to the right, boots to the left--what a lot these old trunks contained: motoring goggles--well after all one never can tell what's going to come in useful; a fencing mask--I must say I can't think of any immediate use for that; and a box of tin soldiers, mostly chipped--dear me, what regular magpies they were; a chamber pot--and cracked too, well really; six rosaries--they'll be glad of those, poor souls; a leather jacket--just right for Guiseppe, excellent; Aunt Angelica's water colours--no wonder she had to be put in a home, though as to that, look at William Blake; a stuffed parrot--no, one must draw the line somewhere; a thick rug-and the moths seem to have been quite forbearing too; binoculars--one never knows, maybe the military government ....

Also powerful is "Rose's Cousin", the wonderfully Proustian tale of elderly Frenchman in a cemetery, recalling old friends, many of them buried there, not to mention Proust himself with whom he once had dinner, and "the famous Monsieur Willy" and his wife Colette, "a funny little girl with eyes like a lion's and a pointed chin". He has a charming encounter with a little girl, and then encounters two young men arguing about literature (including "something that sounds like Henrimiller"). And "It's Later than You Think" gives us an English girl traveling in France and Italy and attempting to recover from her romance with an Italian boy taken away by the war.

At some point in its long, illustrious life my
copy of Adventurers was sold by no lesser
bookshop than Galignani, still operating at the
same address today

On somewhat different lines is "The Anarchist", a short, humorous  monologue with distinct traces of Dorothy Parker, spoken by an American woman whose friend is visiting from England after the war. The Yank is typically conservative, and her British friend seems not to agree… Also on a lighter note is "A Letter from an Editor", about a widowed woman writer whose latest stories are rejected as too serious. Her editor wants something more romantic and frivolous, so she takes her children to the beach, where she meets an old friend of her husband's and perhaps finds her romance. Presumably her wry attitude toward writing and editors is at least somewhat autobiographical. I was amused, before the entry of her late husband's friend, by her attempts to formulate a frivolous story out of a couple on the beach:

Away to the right a middle-aged woman in a one-piece bathing suit was paddling. Her sensible rubber cap bulged over earphones of hair, and her body was so fat it would have done nicely for a Dunlop Tyres advertisement. Every now and again she twittered at a man seated on the beach. Her husband, no doubt. He was a small man dressed in a coquettishly feathered Tyrolean hat, green jacket, and leather shorts neatly pulled up from knobbly old-ivory knees. Very probably these two were devoted to each other. And very probably, thought Charlotte, I could write a story about them on "Un Coeur Simple" lines--if I were Flaubert. Closing her eyes, she tried to visualize the fat bather as a slim girl, the Tyrolean husband all eagerness in an open-necked shirt. They were young when Hitler came into power, young and anti-Nazi and ... and this won't do, this leads to concentration camps, this is where we came in.

Stirling herself may well have had similar difficulties reigning in her use of the war and the serious dramas unfolding around her to write lighter, humorous stories like this one, but I'm happy she succeeded now and again.

So, Adventurers is not her best book by any means, but I will say that, taking the best stories from Stirling's two story collections, one could really create one absolutely brilliant collection worthy of being on a shelf with Mansfield. Hmmmmm....