BETTY TRASK (as ANN DELAMAIN), Mabel Has Mink (1950) & Merry Widows Waltz (1943)

If one researches her books by looking through contemporary reviews and snippets in ads, Betty Trask, who also published as Ann Delamain (as in the case of both books mentioned here), can sound every bit as alluring and glowing with potential as the likes of Dorothy Lambert or Elizabeth Fair. Humorous romances, often with small town or village settings, with eccentric and varied characters—you know these are like opium to me. But having sampled a couple of her books—the first an inexpensive copy found on Abe Books, the second one pursued all the way to the British Library—I have to say, reluctantly (and probably without having given up completely yet), that she's not quite living up to that potential for me.

The blurb for Mabel Has Mink would undoubtedly have pulled me in (and simultaneously annoyed me a bit—see exclamation points), even if it hadn't been virtually the only affordable copy of one of her novels:

Not many writers could rivet the reader's sympathetic attention so closely to a heroine over sixty. [!!!]

But Ann Delamain does just that. Mabel, with a forcefulness and vitality years behind her age dominates the villagers and keeps her two sisters firmly up to the standards of "good" families in which all three had formerly been domestically employed. The story is concerned with Paddy Howland, whom Mabel, in service with the Howland family, had practically brought up. For him she would—and did, make every sacrifice.

The blurb goes on to reveal most of the plot developments, but I'll cut it off on the off chance that anyone actually comes across a copy (but yes, Paddy is as selfish and irritating as even this brief mention makes him sound). 

In short, this is a sort of tragicomic, 1950s precursor to Keeping Up Appearances, with Mabel Barter as a sixty-something aunt of Hyacinth Bucket. It's difficult (especially for an American) to grasp all of the implied or suggested class differentiations that Mabel recognizes, but it's clear that Mabel sees herself as considerably more genteel than the two sisters she lives with, not to mention the rest of the villagers in Ringerton—first because the family she was in service with was such a very superior one, but also due to the fact that she was soon advanced to the more prestigious position of nurse/governess. (Scholars interested in class distinctions could do worse than perusing this novel.)

Betty Trask (aka Ann Delamain)

The novel describes what happens when her former charge comes back into Mabel's life with a possibly shady young wife whose money never seems to run out, and Mabel becomes obsessed with her dear boy once again, and just as determined as ever to keep him on the straight and narrow and hold him to the old-fashioned standards she still associates with her upper-class employers. There are certainly some amusing and entertaining moments, though I'm not sure Mabel (any more than Hyacinth Bucket herself) is able to entirely "rivet the reader's sympathetic attention"—she's generally amusing, but also a bit exhausting and (like Hyacinth) hardly a person one would want to endure having tea with! But it's also true that I couldn't stop reading till the end, because it really wasn't clear how this atypical plot was going to resolve itself. In the end, though, I would say that it was pleasant and highly readable, but not a book to inspire joyous re-reads.

Trask/Delamain's writing was charming enough, however, that another not-very-informative blurb ("A story of refugees who tried to bring the sunshine, the laughter, gaiety, and music of Old Vienna to a small English country town") forced me to track another of her novels, Merry Widows Waltz, all the way to the British Library… 

Over the years, sampling various less-than-addictive forgotten titles run across in my research, I've gradually determined the need for a unique subcategory of middlebrow novels, though I'm afraid I haven't a very snappy name for it yet. The "Pleasant Enough if You're Snowbound in a Remote Hotel with No WiFi and No Other Books (and No Imminent Murders to Solve)" moniker is perhaps a bit clunky, but it does capture the gist of the feelings such books inspire.

Merry Widows Waltz, for which I had held out high hopes based on that blurb, seems to fit this category (PEIYSIARHWNWANOB(ANIMTS) for short), as have a few other books sampled recently. (I should note right from the start that I didn't finish reading this one—I got about halfway before getting distracted by more enticing reads, so I don't claim this as any kind of definitive review, only a report of my experience.)

A light-hearted wartime village comedy focused on (presumably Jewish, but only presumably—see below) Austrian refugees from Hitler was, in retrospect, probably unlikely to fully pan out—though I wrote here a while back about Rose Allatini's surprising success at drawing a joyful, life-affirming humor from the situations of Jewish refugees in her delightful Family from Vienna (1941). I might have been unfairly expecting a duplicate of that pleasure here. 

Trask's tale centers on two widowed sisters, Toni Wessler and Anna Sieding, arrived in the small town of Pinsford from relative wealth and sophistication in Vienna. Anna is self-absorbed and superficial and on the hunt for a new husband, while Toni is more sensitive and responsible and tries to smooth over the disruptions caused by Anna and make the best of things (they might almost be Susan Scarlett characters). Toni's husband was dead of a heart attack just before the war began, while if there was a reference to the cause of Anna's loss, I seem to have missed it, but neither are overly distressed by their loss ("Toni put on a touch of the scent she had always used when she was married to her Siegfried, whose greatest value as a husband was his tact in ceasing, at just the right moment, to be one"). They are, however, distressed by their less affluent position in London, taken in (supposedly as secretaries, but work is, shall we say, not in the forefront) by a fellow immigrant, the formidable Hélène Moore, who years before had had the foresight to marry a wealthy Englishman and set up as the gracious lady of the manor.

The two widows have the expected difficulties settling into English village life and English cultural norms, and manage to arouse in turn antagonism, light scandal, and more than one of the local beaus. It sounds delightful, I know, and it truly is pleasant enough, but overwritten and overly wordy—Trask may have been under pressure to keep up her quota of books under both her Delamain pseudonym and her real name, amidst the pressures of wartime life, and it often felt like she was, to paraphrase Truman Capote being bitchy about Jack Kerouac, not so much writing as typing—feverishly, perkily, but ultimately without much direction or sufficient interest. As a side point, I have to wonder if publishers during WWII, with paper shortages and all, insisted on looooooooooooonnngggg paragraphs? Walls of words in tiny print—I've noticed the depressing tendency before, and it here certainly affected my level of interest.

I found it a bit difficult to really care for the characters here as well, and part of that might stem from their bewildering and invisible background. It feels as though the author specifically wanted to avoid any suggestion that the widows (or Hélène herself) might be Jewish, though it's hard to imagine what else they could possibly be. They seem unlikely to have engaged in passionately anti-Nazi political activism either. And yet they are clearly refugees, having left many of their glamorous belongings beyond when hastily leaving the country. They give the impression of having left the country because the Nazis were just a bit too gauche for their taste, or because in wartime they were having difficulty obtaining the best kind of streudel… It seems the author is trying to have her, er, streudel and eat it too—use the then-familiar trope of refugees adapting to new situations, but carefully obscure any of the trauma that would have put them in the situation in the first place. She wanted frivolous, silly, superficial refugees with no worries but finding fun and romance, and as a result, the characters don't ever seem as real or alive as even a middlebrow comedy would reasonably require them to be.

That said, if I had been unexpectedly snowbound etc., and Merry Widows Waltz the only entertainment available, I would undoubtedly have been quite content to finish it and enjoy it. With lots of other of enticing books breathing down my neck, though, I moved on to other things and opted not to worry how it all turned out (more or less happily, I'm sure).

Despite my luke-warm feelings here, I do have one more Trask title (under her own name this time) among my British Library treasures—Only the Best (1935) is set in a department store—shades of Babbacombe's, I fervently hope?

I have to note that Andrew Hall has created a fascinating webpage to share his research on Trask here, and I owe grateful thanks to him as well for discovering in the process that Trask and Delamain were one and the same author—until he emailed me his findings, I had two separate entries for them. One fact Andrew discusses on his page is that, as obscure as Trask's own books have become today, a book award was established in her name in 1984, the Betty Trask Prize, and is still awarded to this day, including to some prestigious and recognizable authors whom Andrew mentions (though he also notes that the Society of Authors, who administer the prize, have long ignored the criteria she specified). But at least her name lives on. Even if her books don't…