RUMER GODDEN, China Court (1960) & A Fugue in Time (1945)

Well, it's only February, but I definitely know one book that belongs on this year's Furrowed Middlebrow Dozen. I've been planning for a while to get back to reading Rumer Godden. She has long been one of my favorite authors, but somehow, quite stupidly, I had complacently assumed that I had already read all of her best work—The Greengage Summer, Kingfishers Catch Fire, An Episode of Sparrows, The River, Black Narcissus—amazing and magical books all, and that's not to mention her two riveting memoirs, which I highly recommend.

Somehow I had it in mind that China Court was one of her lesser novels and might prove a disappointment after all of those brilliant books. It wasn't until the seductive new Virago editions became irresistibly cheap at Book Depository (every cloud has a silver lining—buying books from the UK has been cheaper than ever since Brexit weakened the pound…) that I finally gave it a chance. And was completely sucked in and unable to put it down for all of last weekend, then immediately moved on to A Fugue in Time.

Among other things, these two novels reinforced for me just how experimental Rumer Godden manages to be, even while remaining accessible, character-rich, and utterly compelling as a storyteller. Her books might be called Modernist Lite. And the two books do have more in common than the fact that I've read them both in the past week. In many ways, they utilize the same technique—Godden telling the stories of several generations of one family, not chronologically but rather weaving them together, all in the present tense, into one elegant, lovely tapestry. But Fugue seems like an initial attempt to achieve what China Court accomplishes brilliantly, and although Fugue seems to have been popular and well-received when it appeared, I wonder if perhaps Godden was unsatisfied with her initial experiment. Or if she merely felt, fifteen years later, that she knew how to do it more smoothly and successfully. And indeed she did!

The technique is crucial here. When I say that she tells the stories of multiple characters from different generations, all in the present tense and all interspersed together, it sounds like it could be rather chaotic. And indeed, initially there are some startling moments, such as this line from page 5:

The Eagle has flues that Bella cannot wrestle with but Cecily understands it: 'I ought to, I have known it for nearly fifty years,' ever since, at fourteen years old, she comes - 'as kitchen maid then,' says Cecily - from Wales.

Fifty years ago, but "she comes," not "she came." Or this one just one page later:

Though books nowadays are sold with their pages cut, she still keeps a paper knife in the shape of a sword on the table, the hilt damascened in black and gold; John Henry, her husband, gives it to her, long ago in Toledo.

But it's a testament to Godden's skill as a storyteller that these moments serve as cues, and one gets the hang of her technique so quickly that by a few pages later it became—for me at least—second nature, as if I'd been reading novels written this way all my life, with characters who lived at different times both acting in the present tense within the same paragraph, or even in the same sentence. And the effect it all creates—the events in one character's life reflecting off of those in her grandfather's, or the fate of another character lending deeper meaning to a moment in her descendant's childhood—is so intricate and lovely that it practically shimmers.

As much as I love the technique, though, and as astonishing as it is that Godden was able to pull it off so compellingly and even suspensefully, giving us bits and pieces that gradually build until I was practically gasping to see what she could do next, it's really the characters that make the novel so special. Here as elsewhere, Godden's women absolutely step off the page, living and breathing—you can practically feel the draft as they pass you by.

I loved all the characters here, even the ones who were deeply flawed (Godden excels at making one forgive her character's flaws and love them anyway). But one in particular, and indeed one of the most flawed, stood out for me. Eliza, the great-great-aunt of the modern day Tracy, who returns to the house following her grandmother's death, is surely one of the most poignant spinsters anywhere in literature. For her frustrations and anger, which make her undoubtedly difficult to live with (and which lead her eventually to become fabulously dishonest in a way few readers will condemn her for) stem from the stifling limitations she faces as an intelligent woman in a society that has no place for her:

Eliza will not get up because she does not want to get up. 'What is there to get up for?' asks Eliza.

Anne is up early to practise before breakfast. Her piano playing - 'never very good,' says Eliza - is the solitary accomplishment left of all that Eliza and Anne bring back from school where, at Eliza's continual 'worritting' as Polly calls it, they are sent for a year, to be 'finished'. 'Finished, we haven't started yet!' says Eliza.

…

'We learned some French, which we shall never speak, the use of the globes, for places we shall never see, and we brought it all home in a portmanteau of pride,' says Eliza.

Indeed, her eventual descent into dishonesty (which I won't give away here, as it's so much fun to read about) is a central and far-reaching plot development which will reverberate in the novel's present, with modern day Tracy, seeking her own unlikely happiness at China Court.

In fact, a good many of the women who have lived at China Court have had tragic lives, though this doesn't make the novel ultimately any less uplifting. Somehow, Godden was able to remind me at times both of the Brontës and of William Faulkner (of all things), and yet there's a fundamentally hopeful, compassionate perspective in the novel that's quite diffferent from those darker works.

At any rate, enough said. I loved it. I'm planning to read it again soon. If you haven't read it (or, heaven forbid, if you haven't read anything by Godden yet), then for Pete's sake get a copy and read it.

As I mentioned, from China Court I immediately went on to read the earlier A Fugue in Time, and I also quite enjoyed it. It felt familiar to me after China Court, and the technique and characters are similarly seductive. But for me, there's just no comparison. Fugue has many of the same elements, but the technique seemed to me not nearly so polished. For example, one of the strategies Godden uses here to evoke all the different periods in the house's past is to make lists—lists of sounds the house has heard over the years, of all the types of notes that have been written, of people passing by outside the house, of the various possessions of the house, of holidays celebrated, of births and deaths in the house. Some of these are quite interesting, mind you, but they do rather slow the pace and force you out of the novel's narrative.

There are also vividly portrayed women here, and Selina, neglected daughter and frustrated woman, is a sort of rough draft of Eliza in the later book, and Griselda, who, adapting to managing a house, ordering meals, supervising servants, worries that the house will consume all her life and energy, is a striking character herself.

There is much to like in Fugue, and I suspect that if I had read it first I would have enjoyed it even more. But for me, there's no doubt that China Court is the richer, more lively, and more brilliantly executed novel. As such, I can't recommend it highly enough.

(On the other hand, author Jo Walton wrote in more detail about Fugue here, and it was interesting to read someone's take who clearly loves the earlier book more than the latter.)

Reading diary: ELIZABETH BERRIDGE, VERILY ANDERSON

ELIZABETH BERRIDGE, Across the Common (1964)

I occasionally waver a bit regarding the date limits of this blog and of my Overwhelming List.  I wrote a little bit early on in my blogging about the 1910 start date and my justification for that—using Virginia Woolf's convenient comment about a change in human nature around that year.  But I also ponder the 1960 end date sometimes.  It was rather random, really, and I've come across more than one interesting writer (think Mary Hocking) who only published their first works in 1961 or 1962.

But then I read a novel like Elizabeth Berridge's Across the Common, from 1964, and I think, okay, the 1960 cutoff makes sense after all...

It’s not that I actively disliked the novel.  Berridge is a masterful writer, and her earlier collection, Tell It to a Stranger, with its wartime stories, is a favorite. And it’s also not (he said defensively) that there aren’t numerous writers from after 1960 whose work I admire and enjoy, even if I don’t often write about them here.

It’s just that Across the Common seems to highlight the possibility that on or about 1960 human nature may have—unbeknownst to Virginia Woolf—shifted again.  The story of Louise, a troubled young woman who leaves her husband and returns to the home where she grew up and the three eccentric aunts who helped raise her, and while there uncovers a dark secret from the past, the novel possesses the signature Sixties confessional style—the first person narrator who meticulously analyzes the significance of her or his own personal experience and feelings.  As in Doris Lessing’s trailblazing The Golden Notebook two years earlier, or the dark poetry of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, both of whom had only recently appeared on the literary scene, self-analysis was, clearly, the thing. 

I would guess that this could be explained in part by the rise in popularity of psychotherapy about this time.  And, perhaps particularly for women writers and readers who were pushing for or simply trying to adjust to changes in the world around them and that world's expectations for women, it must have been a very liberating, very necessary form of self-exploration.  But it is certainly rather different from most of the writers and works that came before.  There have been first-person narrators since the birth of the novel, but the earnest belief in self-exploration as a serious and crucial undertaking seems to have been an innovation of the Sixties.  

One of my most inspiring undergraduate professors, who taught a brilliant course called British Women Writers and—apparently—had a rather considerable influence on my future interests, when I mentioned having read a Margaret Drabble novel, cringed slightly and said, "Oh, yes, women in dreary flats," and—while, to be fair, that hardly covers the breadth of Drabble's work—I have a feeling she may have meant something like what I'm trying to express here.  The “feminine middlebrow” seems, in the Sixties and beyond, to be evolving into something a bit different—more overtly political and concerned with rather different themes.  So I think perhaps I have my justification for the 1960 end date after all.

At any rate, apparently this style—in Berridge’s novel, at least—can rather grate on my nerves.  As much as I love some good soul-searching à la Margaret Atwood (or, indeed, Margaret Drabble), my initial notes on Across the Common rather snarkily refer to “subjective self-absorption and the over-inflated, portentous significance of personal experience,” so it had obviously made me a bit cranky.  That might be a bit overstated in retrospect, but it is true that Berridge seems to attach tremendous meaning to the secret violence in the past, which Louise is driven to uncover as if it’s the Holy Grail.  The trouble is, the actual violence, when it is revealed, is actually rather anticlimactic.  I mean, it’s a terrible event, but it’s hard to see why it would have had the tremendous repercussions of repression and neurosis that it did—and on multiple family members, no less.  

This may be quite intentional, I suppose, to indicate that the past, once revealed, is rarely as horrifying as it might have come to seem.  But even so, the effect on me was that I wound up thinking, "Seriously?  That's it?"  I was left with the feeling that a lot of drama and hushed revelation had had to be harnessed merely to help the annoying, self-absorbed narrator decide to go back to her ridiculously kind and understanding husband. (Though I can't resist saying that perhaps too little effort went into convincing the reader why he would want to have her back…)

Ahem. 

Having been just a bit snarky about the novel, I will go on to say that there are still entertaining elements in it.  Berridge’s prose is sharp and polished, and the spinster aunts, in particular, provide worthwhile high points (I do love a good spinster aunt—how I wish I had one of my own!). 

Here, from the earliest pages of the novel, is Louise pondering her inimitable Aunt Cissie:

Aunt Cissie had the same effect on me as a lemon was supposed to have if sucked in front of an unfortunate trombonist. She dried up my juices. Her whole life had disbelief as its pivot and for this reason I had always been wary of her. Once, years ago, she had been recklessly, dogmatically sure of herself. She would argue with the wry humour of the convinced, a person on the right side of life. Since the war, which had robbed her of her second husband and her only son, something had shifted in her. A new, unbalanced cynicism revealed itself by a sarcastic twist of the mouth, a semi-quaver of a shrug. Nothing, now, could move her. She would have turned the pages of Nero's music, one felt (had he had any), whilst he fiddled, glad of the light of the flames. At seventy she believed in nothing but her own and other people's wickedness.

Ah, if only the rest of the novel had focused primarily on the aunts, rather than their irritating, wishy-washy niece, I would likely be singing a different tune!

VERILY ANDERSON, Scrambled Egg for Christmas (1970)

I've mentioned here before that Verily Anderson's Spam Tomorrow (1956), a memoir of her experiences during World War II, is one of my favorites.  I've been gradually tracking down and reading her other humorous memoirs, of which Scrambled Egg for Christmas seems to have been the last (there were other works about her family history, but no more memoirs of her own life, as far as I can tell). I wrote about one of her earlier memoirs here, and I find they're always enjoyable and are perfect for light bedside reading or days when you don't feel like thinking very much.

Anderson's memoirs, which started so cheerfully with Spam Tomorrow and Beware of Children (1958), took a darker turn, naturally enough, when her husband died suddenly not long after the latter book was published, leaving her with five children and little means of support.  Reportedly, when she became friends with actress Joyce Grenfell in the mid-1960s, Grenfell was shocked by her poverty and bought her a house in Norfolk.

Not surprisingly, then, some of this worry and darkness comes through in this volume, which, though presumably written after her economic condition had improved, deals with those years of hardship.  Here, she and her children move to London on the suggestion of a friend, attempting to rent out their old farm; she undertakes translation work without a contract, so is taken advantage of; she has a serious illness (which a friend puts down to hysteria); one friend commits suicide, another dies suddenly, and on top of everything else both Flo the horse (introduced in the earlier memoir The Flo Affair, which I reviewed in brief here a while back) and her cat Chastity die.  Hardly the stuff of farce.

Verily Anderson in later years

But the book is still highly readable, and Anderson's is a charming personality to be with, even when she's not at her best.  If the book is a little unfocused (sometimes about the move to London, sometimes about a trip to Malta and then the U.S. for an abortive lecture tour, and sometimes about her children's mild misadventures), it is still entertaining, and there are some hilarious high points.  There are two I can't resist sharing.  First, an experience with a hairstylist:

As it turned out, when I kept [the appointment], I might just as well have come straight in from the street without having made it, as did the more forceful customer who was shown into the salon in front of me. After ten more minutes wait I was about to walk out when a young faun leapt out from behind a row of coats and, flinging a nylon cape round me from behind, guided me with part of it still in my mouth to a wash basin, where he tilted my head back and wetted my hair just enough I to prevent my trying to leave again. Twenty minutes elapsed before a girl came and added the shampoo.

'Shall I give you a rinse?' she asked.

'Yes, please,' I said, supposing that otherwise I should have to wait another twenty minutes for someone else to wash the shampoo out. Too late I realised she was dying my hair what turned out an hour and a half later to be a vivid shade of particularly metallic yellow that looked like a teazle and felt like wire netting. The bill, when it was presented, bore no relation whatsoever to the price list outside.

Ah, how many cape-flinging fauns one encounters at hairdressers!

And next, here is a rather more topical (and long, but I can't resist) description of Anderson's experience as part of a BBC documentary on single women:

At the B.B.C., the producer was apologetic about forgetting the existence of widows. She had only recently married but now she would really be able to make her point over the raw deal eked out to the unwed.

'If you could just say how beastly people are to you now you're a widow,' she explained, 'and how they don't ask you to parties any more—'

'But they aren't and they do.'

'Yes, but for the purpose of tying the thing up neatly, I'm sure you could think of some occasion when you've been slighted.'

'It isn't like that. Sometimes you're sad, or awfully disappointed or lonely or you don't know how to saw a plank in half. But, if anything, people are extra considerate. The only ones who don't ask you to parties any more are the ones who only asked you before because they wanted to get something out of your husband. Really, I just can't say that widows automatically get second-class treatment.'

Nor could the career girls, the divorcee and the separated. Our producer seemed disappointed.

'It's not really how I want to play it at all,' she said. 'You see, since I've just got married, I notice an enormous difference.'

'You would,' said one of the career girls snidely and the other one tittered.

Having gathered us up, however, the producer had to make the best of her material. Some of the speakers complied a little with her wishes to sound hard-done-by but mostly we were almost exaggeratedly boastful of the brighter sides of our circumstances.

'Personally, I feel more respected, not less, now I'm on my own again,' said the divorced wife. 'I can spend money how I like, sleep with the window open, and eat green peppers which my ex-husband abhorred.'

'Yes, and it's bound to give one a bit of prestige being rid of that perpetual fear of pregnancy without even having to go on the Pill,' agreed the separated.

'I can't think what listeners will get out of what we've just recorded,' one of the career girls pointed out. 'It all sounds desperately insincere.'

'Don't worry.' The producer gave a satisfied smile. 'We can easily cut it to give it the angle I have in mind.'

Some of the women's comments might give one pause, but they are certainly amusing, and a producer's efforts to slant a documentary are unquestionably not a thing of the past!

STELLA GIBBONS, The Charmers (1965)

A few years ago, when I was in the first throes of my obsession with World War II "home front" reading, I came across Stella Gibbons' lovely novel Westwood (1946), set during the later years of the war and making haunting use of London's bombed out ruins and a general mood of exhaustion in its tale of a young woman's infatuation with the lightly bohemian world of a famous painter and his family.

I've since learned that practically everyone else in the universe seems to love Stella Gibbons mainly because of her debut novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932), and many readers are more lukewarm about her other work. But at the time I was ambivalent about Westwood for the opposite reason.  I had been lukewarm on Cold Comfort Farm when I read it several years earlier (is this more or less shocking than my passionate dislike of Rebecca, I wonder???), and I was afraid Westwood might be too much like it. As it turned out, I could almost have believed Westwood was by a completely different author. The humor is understated, the character development stronger, and its themes of change and growth and disillusionment are handled with far more subtlety and depth. (BTW, I finally re-read CCF last year and enjoyed it much more than my first go-round, though it's still far from my favorite Gibbons.)

After Westwood, I moved on to The Bachelor (1943), the only other of Gibbons' wartime novels I could track down. Mind you, I read both of these in beat-up, grungy, highly allergy-inducing wartime editions that hailed from dusty library storage vaults.

Happily, in the last few years, Vintage Classics UK has reprinted a dozen or more of Gibbons' best novels, including the afore-mentioned and both of her other wartime novels, The Rich House (1941) and The Matchmaker (1949), which I also really love. Some of these were made available from the likes of Awesome Books and Book Depository, but not all of them are, so when Andy and I were in London a couple of years ago, I scurried into Hatchard's (surely what heaven would look like for me) and stocked up. Amazingly, it was my only real book splurge in London—apart from a quick and costly trip to the lovely Persephone Books shop, of course—but that (like most of this post so far) is beside the point. At any rate, though, it's embarrassing to admit that it has taken me this long to get around to reading one of the books acquired in that splurge.

The Charmers centers around Christine Smith, a single woman in her fifties or perhaps sixties, who has recently been let go from the office job she held for decades and, as the novel opens, is interviewing for a new position as housekeeper for a group of artistic types who are moving to a large house in Hampstead.  They include a famous actor whose jobs and finances are dwindling, an illustrator for a magazine featuring romantic fiction, and a dress designer—all entertaining and well-developed characters, if not always likeable ones.

Original cover, Hodder & Stoughton edition

We learn early on that, until the fairly recent death of her parents, Christine has lived at home in the role—like that of so many other unmarried daughters—of unpaid servant.  We also learn that she is attempting to break free from the restrictiveness and superficiality of "Mortimer Road" (which she repeatedly describes as being obsessed with the latest electrical gadgets, as if toasters and blenders are their religious idols), but remains haunted by its conservative, bourgeois voice:

Alone under the benevolent glow of the lamps, the rather sturdy figure opened her bad and took out a new-looking cigarette-case and a mildly expensive lighter.  The smoke went down into her lungs with the sensation of mingled discomfort and satisfaction that was becoming familiar.  She coughed.

Christine doesn't smoke.  It's such a relief to us, when all the girls do nowadays.

The inward voice was old and contented.  It had made that remark for more than a quarter of a century, following it with remarks about expense and, as time went on, about horrors which might result from the pernicious habit.

And behind the voice of Mortimer Road seems to lurk a more primal figure, represented for Christine by Mrs. Benson, who was her working class landlady at the boarding house she moved to after her parents death.  Gibbons is often concerned with class relations, and the mutual loathing of Christine and Mrs. Benson comes to mean more than just a humorous interlude:

Hadn't every action of the Smiths, ever since she could remember, been taken with the object of leaving Mrs. Benson as far behind as possible?  Hadn't they scrambled up and away from her as fast and as far as they could scram, taking her position down there for granted, never mentioning her but with contempt and hatred and fear?

Christine gets the job as housekeeper, and is indeed "charmed" by her employers' laid-back, lightly bohemian lifestyle—though it's made clear that they are in fact only somewhat less bourgeois than Christine herself.  ("Real artists don’t get themselves up in special clothes," one of them tells another who fancies herself a potter and has purchased special, colorful and highly fashionable smocks for the purpose.)  Still, their attitudes are liberating to her, and she can think gratefully of her escape from Mrs. Benson when looking out over a garden-party the group is throwing:

Lovely, thought Christine, leaning against the frame of the open window, really lovely.  Oh, I am glad she can't see it; she'd say something about being glad she hadn't to wash all that lot up.  I can never be thankful enough for living with nice people.

And yet, the novel is also about how difficult it is to break away from one's past, from the worldview and sensibility from which one has come, and that's what made the novel particularly interesting for me—perhaps especially since I can relate somewhat to Christine's situation.  Gibbons refuses to oversimplify the process, or to imply that one can ever escape completely, and the result is complex and powerful.  But this might also render Christine a less sympathetic or likeable character for some readers.  For example, she innocently hires a young Anglo-African cleaner and then, when the others react to his presence by trotting out both degrading and idealizing stereotypes, she rather too readily seems to accept their views (even while, it is suggested, she may be physically attracted to him).  She is a flawed, conflicted character, trying to free herself but not always successful.

And Gibbons also shows us another reason total escape may be difficult:

[S]he sometimes had a sensation as if every tradition she had ever held was being swept away in a great flood of novelty, that, though it usually carried her along willingly and even pleasurably, must sometimes be resisted if she were not to feel entirely without roots.

Now, while I found Christine's efforts to escape her stultifying past to be the most thought-provoking part of the novel, I don't want to imply that The Charmers is not, first and foremost, a very sharp, funny novel.  Nearly every page is loaded with Gibbons' sly wit, such as this description, from early in the novel, of a contractor doing renovations on the house:

Mr. Ryan, who was comely and carried no transistor set, began a rigmarole in an unintelligible Irish accent which gradually, for lack of hearers who could understand what he was saying, died away.  He walked off, looking sarcastically at a slide-rule.

While I'm not sure exactly how one looks sarcastically at a slide-rule, I couldn't help but laugh at the thought.  (I have been attempting to gaze snidely at the television and peer mordantly at the dishwasher ever since.)  

And here is Gibbons' description of the mood in the house after the dress designer, Miss Marriott, arrives home with the psychosomatic cold she always gets after each new collection is released:

There now settled over the kitchen an atmosphere suggesting that someone desperately ill had arrived at a log-cabin in the middle of a blizzard.

Even some of the book's most serious topics are handled with frequent humor.  For instance, there is an ongoing theme in the novel about the conflict between those who take an interest in world events and those who are indifferent.  The pseudo-intellectual "charmers" pride themselves on their concern for "The Problems," even when it is clearly completely superficial, as in the following conversation about Christine:

"Do you see any signs of her mind getting wider?"

"From time to time.  But only a very little.  She is quite shockingly indifferent to what's going on in the rest of the world.  The whole of India could starve to death this week-end, for all she cares."

"I don't care much myself."

"I know you don't but at least you do feel guilty…"

Surely a very "middlebrow" perspective, that guilt somehow makes one a superior person!  And there's also this passage about trendy critics who demand social concern in popular culture—which Gibbons seems to feel is every bit as superficial as the lip service the charmers pay to it:

And even Agatha Christie, Mr. Meredith said, had come in for a slating from them over the past few years; presumably because she had made a fortune out of not writing plays about The Problems.  The sight of a tennis-racquet on the stage, said James with an unaccustomed flight of fancy, threw those chaps into the sort of state other chaps got into about blood sports or hanging.

All of these themes and concerns work together in surprisingly complex ways, and I feel—as I always do when I really am challenged and intrigued by a book—that a re-reading would bring to light new depths and discords.  For example, I haven't even mentioned Christine's (sort of) love interest, who plays a crucial role, or the ghost of a singer who was part of the charmers' circle of friends but was killed in the war, or "That Day," a crucial experience Christine has had a few months before the novel begins:

And then she had mislaid, rather than lost, her way for perhaps five or seven minutes, and during that time she had come upon a church, an old church, shadowed by the sweeping branches of a cedar burdened in dazzling snow.  The sight of it, and the long curve of a snow-covered wall bordering the graveyard in which it stood, filled her with an unfamiliar, exquisite emotion.

Perhaps it is impossible for people who have often experienced this feeling to conceive the effect it had upon a mind stunned and dimmed for more than half a century by ugly sounds and commonplace sights, and it is true that Christine's visitor had to find its way, and afterwards, for more than a year now, she had thought of the moment as "That Day", and had wanted to have the feeling again.

This spiritual experience seems to inform Christine's growth away from "Mortimer Road," and when the sensation does return, it may signal Christine's outgrowing of the charmers themselves, so that we are left with a sense that her efforts to push against her own biases and limitations will continue.

Gibbons only published three more novels after The Charmers—though she wrote two more after that which she never attempted to publish (and which were the subject of a rather bogus news release last year which treated them as if they were newly discovered—presumably an effort by her heirs to stir up interest in finally publishing them—here's hoping the effort paid off!).  Written 33 years after Cold Comfort Farm, this is the work of a far more mature writer, who portrays the irony and sadness of life with subtlety and depth, and also with the growing spiritual concerns that were characteristic of her late work.  If you only know the earlier novel, I can't urge you enough to try out some of her later work.  While I might recommend starting with The Rich House or Westwood, The Charmers has become a favorite of mine as well, and provides a good sampling of Gibbons', er, charms.

MARGARET HASSETT, Educating Elizabeth (1937)

I'll be getting back to my World War II Book List in the next few days, but in the meantime I wanted to talk about a book I read recently that belongs on another list I'll be finishing up soon—my list of grown-up school stories.

It's a sad fact of life for all readers—and perhaps particularly for a blogger focused on the most obscure of obscure titles, some of which surely have perfectly good reasons for being forgotten—that disappointments are inevitable. Sometimes even the most highly anticipated books—those books we imagine blissfully curling up with on a rainy day with a nice hot cup of tea and losing ourselves in for hours—just don't quite live up to their potential. Sometimes even on a rainy day, we find ourselves putting down the highly-anticipated book, getting back out of bed, and cleaning out our closets instead of continuing to face the disappointment.

Okay, it's true that books are very rarely that disappointing for me—it takes a lot to drive me back into the closet for any reason. Ahem. But the principle is sound.

Now, I don't want to overstate the case when it comes to Margaret Hassett's Educating Elizabeth. In all truth, I enjoyed quite a lot of it, it had many unquestionably high points, and I imagine a few of you reading this might enjoy it as well (I'll try to explain both the strengths and the weaknesses I found in it as clearly as possible). But I had been anticipating this novel ever since I stumbled across Hassett's Austen-esque later novel, Sallypark, and enthusiastically reviewed it last year. And the anticipation had been building during a relatively extended search for a library willing to lend the book (thank you kindly, University of Alberta!).

Add to that the fact that I've become increasingly obsessed in the past year with school stories written for adults, as you may already have noticed from several recent posts, and such a story from an author I already knew and liked—and one that practically no one had heard of to boot—seemed to hold great potential for being memorable and bloggable-about. So perhaps I just brought too much anticipation with me.

At any rate, on the spectrum of girls' school novels written for adults, Educating Elizabeth falls somewhere between Clemence Dane's rather mean-spirited Regiment of Women and Mary Bell's joyful, smart, funny Summer's Day. It's certainly funny, and it's certainly a bit spiteful—most of the women teachers presented are little more than caricatures to be mocked for their various oddities and idiosyncrasies—but it's not out-and-out vicious, and even caricature can be entertaining sometimes, even if it doesn't provide much in the way of character development.

Educating Elizabeth follows the travails of 37-year-old Elizabeth Hillary, who has just left a happy, secure teaching post at a lovely, successful Suffolk girls' school with a kindly, supportive headmistress, in order to become a headmistress herself at the Ellen Jebb Memorial High School in a town called Roytoun (fictional as far as I can tell) in Scotland—a school whose glory days are but a distant memory:

The dingiest classroom in a slum school was not more dingy than the Ellen Jebb Staffroom; even Miss Dinwiddie could not remember when it was painted last. It would be hard to say whether it was more depressing empty or full; one was more conscious of its drabness and untidiness and of the bars outside the windows when it was empty, but on the rare occasions when every mistress was in her place, the spectacle of all those mature forms seated in silence at desks too small for them, with the grizzled heads of the ladies Dinwiddie, Mutch and Shillen in the front row, had something nightmarish about it, suggesting that they had all died and gone to a hell for teachers.

Elizabeth's new staff, particularly her second in command, the aforementioned Miss Dinwiddie, is, er, problematic to say the least—ridiculously, exaggeratedly so. And this description, early on, of the decidedly bleak staffroom sets the stage for the epic conflict that forms the centerpiece of the story. For Elizabeth, bless her heart, decides to relocate said staffroom to some storage rooms on an upper floor of the school and decorate it brightly and cheerfully. The difficulty is that the rooms currently hold the accumulations of Miss Dinwiddie's many years of teaching, and Miss Dinwiddie takes a deep personal affront at the enthusiastic new headmistress's plan.

A full scale pitched battle ensues, with the pettiest of details taking on trembling, hyperventilating-with-rage importance (as they so easily tend to do in almost any workplace). Although there are numerous smaller sub-plots—Miss Shillen's tendency to be overly intimate with the other women, Miss Boax's recurring and probably psychosomatic illnesses, school officials and inspectors who are charmed by Elizabeth and disconcertingly increase their visits as a result, and occasional letters from Elizabeth's friend Anne, who is having adventures serving as secretary to a woman lecturer touring the U.S., among other things—the staffroom wars are at center stage throughout. Quite often, the conflicts are amusing and entertaining, especially the ways in which Miss Dinwiddie's barely suppressed lividity reveals itself in her seething glares:

"[A]nd where, may I ask, has the stuff to go out of my storerooms?"

"What about your Sewing Room, Miss Dinwiddie?" suggested Elizabeth blandly. "So much of it seems to be needlework apparatus and so on that I'm sure you would find it much more convenient to have it near you in your own room. Of course, it's all only a temporary arrangement until the present Staffroom is available. The Scripture illustrations and other books could be distributed among the various Form Rooms perhaps."

For a full moment Miss Dinwiddie was perfectly speechless. Out of the corner of her eye Elizabeth could see her extract a long hairpin from her bun and examine it from end to end in a half-ruminating, half-frenzied sort of way as if she were calculating exactly how far it could be run into the body of her Head.

Some of these scenes are hilarious, despite the fact that neither the terrible Miss Dinwiddie nor the idealized Elizabeth are particularly convincing characters. However, as this plotline must sustain a 300+ page novel, I have to admit that it did start to wear just a little thin by the time that a white flag was finally waved (by one character or the other—I won't tell). This was Hassett's debut novel, and she already had great charm as a writer, but her development over the next several years until Sallypark's appearance in 1945 must have been rather extraordinary. There is nothing here to compare with Sallypark's eloquent, subtle humor and charming characters. But nevertheless, if you're as entertained by school stories as I am, you may want to check it out for the charm and humor it does offer. Just don't expect too much. (Have I made my mixed feelings clear enough in this rather schizophrenic paragraph?)

But having made the disclaimers I felt I had to make about a novel that has its ups and downs, I have to share a couple of rather wonderful examples of Hassett at her best. These are both digressions from the main plotline (and, honestly, all the stronger for that). First are Elizabeth's musings (slightly exaggerated), upon reading some old school reports, on the ideals of education:

Searching for some light on the Bulloch correspondence, she had come across in a locked cupboard containing dog-eared registers and faded memoranda, a pile of old school reports, and had been speedily fascinated by the romantic richness of their style. They all bore the signature of one Charles Kinnear Minto, H.M.C.I., and they all began or ended with a grand disquisition on Education of which the writer spoke in the very highest terms of figurative language and with a wealth of synonyms. Thus, Education was possessed of an essence and a being, not to mention an entity, a nature, a substance, a spirit and a fabric, each of which had its appropriate adjective; it had an aim as well as an object, an objective, an end, a purpose and a goal; it had a direction, a tendency, an orientation and a course. It was, moreover, burdened with a something that was variously called a task, a work, a charge, a business, a mission, a function, a duty, an office, which nobody from Aristotle downwards could exactly define, but which, as far as Elizabeth could make out, seemed to involve much painful though noble exertion on one side of the transaction and an almost equal amount of spirited but futile resistance on the other. Somebody whom Charles K. Minto had horridly christened the Educand filled those dusty pages with his mute sufferings. Elizabeth's heart went out to him. He was being perpetually dragged blinking out of dark caverns into the light, or hauled along lordly avenues to temples or fanes or sanctuaries or edifices of that sort which by some coincidence always stood at the end of wondrous vistas and always had doors of gold. Or he was hoisted up to towering mountain-peaks for views and prospects, or plunged down into the depths of the sea and compelled to build like the coral insect on the work of the hapless Educands who had gone before him. When he was not thus engaged, he was either handing on a blazing torch to somebody or other, or waving a banner, or playing a game (by preference in the dust), or fighting the good fight to the end. There was no limit to the things he had to do and suffer.

Happily, Hassett would learn a bit more restraint in her humor over the years, but I still got some chuckles from this passage. I think education—as well as other similarly abstract social issues—are often still treated with similar sentimentality and idealization.

And finally, I have to confess to a rabid curiosity about whether Lady Espie, the lecturer with whom Elizabeth's friend Anne is travelling across North American, might be based on a real figure. Undoubtedly there were numerous such women who travelled the lecture circuit in the 1930s (E. M. Delafield having written hilariously about one such tour in The Provincial Lady in America), so perhaps Lady Espie is merely a fictional approximation of them. But she is given a fair amount of time in the sun, as Anne describes her at length in her letters, and her traumatic wartime experiences brought to mind Vera Brittain, though of course Brittain had already published her memoir several years before. Here's a choice passage:

"Goodness knows when we shall see England again, for apart from the lectures, some publishers have now got hold of Judy and actually started her on an autobiography. In fact, I may tell you in the strictest confidence that we're well away with our confessions; they simply pour out of Judy; opening the sluices isn't the word for it. My dear, the most gorgeous muck! I hate having to interfere with it, but I suppose I must do something about her blooming participles (Judy always was unstable on the participial question). It's a shame though. But we're getting along like a house on fire—you can figure out our rate of progress when I tell you that despite lectures and parties and travelling millions of miles we're already through with Judy's infantile repressions and indoctrinations (where the heck, as Stansfeldt has a most undeanlike habit of saying, does the woman get the words?) not to mention her suffocated Victorian maidenhood, and we're now nursing at the Front. I feel in my bones that the War bits are going to be stupendous: the revelations up to date are horrible. Didn't they say some of the men's War books were of the Latrine School? Well, Judy's is going to be the female equivalent—what you might call the Bedpan School-pure Bedpan in fact. Judy never lets you off a B.P.; there's one on every page…"

All quite amusing. If there were just a few more such digressions and a tiny bit less focus on the Staffroom War, the book could have been a favorite.

However, I have to admit that I must—quite shockingly to most people who know me well—be some kind of an optimist. Because I happen to have acquired a copy of Hassett's fourth (and final) novel, Beezer's End, which is apparently a sequel to Educating Elizabeth. Now, perhaps it's foolhardy to be excited about a sequel to a novel that has proven a bit disappointing. But the fact that Beezer's End didn't appear until 12 years after its predecessor, and until 4 years after the lovely Sallypark, makes me believe that it could have considerable pleasures in store for me.

Perhaps I'll save it for a rainy day?

MOLLY CLAVERING, Near Neighbours (1956)

I'm completely embarrassed by how long it's taken me to get around to discussing this book.  I actually read it and made notes on it at least three months ago, but somehow the process came to a screeching halt after that.  I plead a new job, trip planning, and general bewilderment as my excuses. 

It's even worse because I owe a huge thanks to Michael Stewart, who happens to be a cousin of Molly Clavering's, and who not only was the source of most of the information I was able to share in my "in detail" post on Clavering last year, but also made it possible for me to read this novel at all, which is nonexistent in libraries (in the U.S., at least, and pretty much so, apparently, in the U.K. as well) and vanishingly rare or prohibitively expensive to purchase.

After I had written about Clavering's best-known (and by far most readily available) novel Mrs. Lorimer's Family (1953, aka Mrs. Lorimer's Quiet Summer), several lucky readers who possessed copies of other Claverings suggested that I would also particularly enjoy Near Neighbours, published three years later and, they assured me, one of the most charming and entertaining of her works.  So I was thrilled to have a chance to finally read it, and I should certainly have gotten around to writing it about before now.  But, better late than never, right?

Raeburn Place, Edinburgh; Michael Stewart believes this is the Linden
Terrace of the novel: "Once or twice they met in the busy street at the
far end of Linden Terrace, where the trams clanged to and fro, and the
pavements were always thronged with people shopping."

Among the other information that Michael provided was the probable area in Edinburgh upon which Clavering based her fictional "Kirkaldy Crescent" and its surrounding streets.  Clavering evokes the neighborhood wonderfully in the opening pages of the novel:

As the nineteenth century progressed, town planning degenerated to a race to build enough houses for the ever‐increasing population. Behind Kirkaldy Crescent, especially on the north or original side, there sprang up street after street of high ugly dwellings, which backed on to their high‐walled strips of garden. Now the “other side“, saved by the stream from sharing this fate, could speak pityingly of “those dreadful slums” opposite, so close to their superior neighbours. Fortunately for them, none could look into the future. In their worst nightmares they never dreamed of the days to come, when almost every house on both sides of the Crescent would be convened into flats, and their roomy, beetle‐haunted basements, once occupied by kitchen premises, became the abode of separate tenants, taxi‐drivers who parked their cabs beside the garden railings in the centre of the oval, or bus conductors, and their noisy families.

The changes wrought by two world wars brought this to pass, and of the whole stately Crescent only two houses remained unaltered. These were Number Six and its next‐door neighbour Number Four, at the lower end of what the owners of Number Four still called “the good side of the Crescent”.

Thus is the stage set, and I was pretty sure that with such a stage I couldn't help but enjoy the show.

The novel centers around 68-year-old Dorothea Balfour, who has led the rather bleak life of a brow-beatee, first at the hands of her father and then, after his death, at the hands of her domestic dominatrix of a sister, Belle—who, though briefly married years before, soon returned home to stay, surly and thoroughly miserable-making.  When the story begins, Belle has been dead only a few weeks, having collapsed over dinner and died of a stroke.  Her death is recent enough that Dorothea is still half-cowering, even alone in Number Four with the kindly family housekeeper, Edna.  She is only now beginning to sense her new freedom:

[S]he realized, with a guilty pang, that she found her recent meals, eaten in solitude with a book propped against the waterjug, infinitely preferable to those partaken of when Belle had sat munching at the head of the table, and nothing had broken the silence except the sound of chewing, or an occasional diatribe from Belle on Edna’s general unsatisfactoriness. It was dreadfully sad to remember one’s sister only as a fault‐finder, and it made Dorothea feel wicked, yet all her memories of Belle were like that.

She now takes to surrepticiously observing the doings of the widowed Mrs. Lenox and her children next door in Number Six.  Belle had always forbidden contact with the neighbours, whom she considered low class, and the Lenox children's games humorously reveal their awareness of the truth of Belle and Dorothea's relationship:

Number Four was the giant’s castle, the witch’s cave, the dragon’s lair, and Mrs. Milner, Miss Balfour’s sister, was in each case the giant, the witch, or the dragon, Miss Balfour herself the victim to be rescued from her wicked clutches.

In the end, of course, these games do, to some extent, become reality.  The children—comprised of one son, Murray, and four daughters, Willow, Hazel, Rowan, and Holly—eventually notice the benign gaze looking down on them, and Rowan boldly decides to pay Miss Balfour a call for the first time.  From there, of course, Dorothea's life really begins to open up, and Clavering is skillful at showing this gradual process. 

Molly Clavering's gravestone in Moffat, Scotland
(where D. E. Stevenson, Clavering's neighbor, is also buried);
photo courtesy of Michael Stewart

Soon after Rowan's visit, for example, she decides she will ask her housekeeper to call her Miss Dorothea rather than the far less dignified Miss Dottie to which she's become accustomed.  Then she thinks of redecorating the house, which is completely dominated by her father's and Belle's taste.  She gets involved with the family's mild difficulties and dramas, which include Rowan's troubled relationship with her highly irritating partner on a dance team, Willow's loneliness in the absence of her soldier husband, the overcrowdedness of the Lenox household, and Rowan's concern for the wife and children of an irresponsible painter who has abandoned them all because he feels that family life is bad for his art.  And Miss Dorothea has some dramas herself, from her spontaneous rescue of an endangered child to her encounter with Belle's long-lost husband, Montague, from whom she learns some surprising secrets about Belle.  Poor Montague, who's a bit down on his luck, winds up staying with Miss Dorothea indefinitely, and her thoughts about him are rather hilarious (and perhaps intentionally play off the stereotype of spinsters and their cats?):

He looked pleased enough to purr, thought Miss Balfour, looking at him with mild affection, and with his round face and neat features he was not unlike a cat. A large contented cosy cat.

Miss Balfour was not a real cat‐lover, but she had sometimes thought that a nice strokable cat would have been agreeable to have about the house. Belle, however, would not hear of it, even on the grounds that the cat would catch mice in the wine cellar.

Of course, there was nothing to prevent Miss Balfour from having a cat now, only she no longer seemed to want one. She had Montagu instead.

Miss Dorothea's calm, intelligent presence and eagerness to help works wonders on the Lenoxes' woes, and it will surprise no one that the woes are systematically and satisfyingly resolved.  She also finds her own problems gradually dissipating in the process.  It's all completely charming and readable, and it's a perfect way to spend a relaxing rainy day or a day in bed with a bad cold.  In fact, after I had written about Clavering previously, some of the members of the D. E. Stevenson discussion list discussed how perfect Clavering's work—and this novel, in particular—might be for Greyladies.  As light and carefree as the Susan Scarlett (i.e. Noel Streatfeild) novels they've had such success with, and as cheerful and life-affirming as the early D. E. Stevenson work they've published in the last few years, Near Neighbours certainly has "possibly Greyladies" written all over it.

2008 photo of Clover Cottage, Molly Clavering's home in Moffat;
photo courtesy of Michael Stewart