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.)

RACHEL FERGUSON, Evenfield (1942)

The same old photo of Rachel Ferguson; surely
others must exist? My next quest...

I've posted a couple of times before about Rachel Ferguson novels, as some of you might recall. I first came to her, before I was a blogger, the same way I came to a good many other favorite authors—via a Virago Modern Classic little green paperback. In this case, a copy of Ferguson's delightful second novel, The Brontës Went to Woolworth's (1931), a wacky novel of a family of sisters who seem to have some difficulty distinguishing reality from fiction (or is it merely that their fictions have an alarming tendency to become reality?). Not long after that discovery (many years after Virago had discovered it), Persephone reprinted one of Ferguson's later novels, Alas, Poor Lady (1937), which is less wacky but just as enjoyable for other reasons, not least because of Ferguson's passionate advocacy on behalf of disadvantaged gentlewomen.

From there, the fact that none of her other novels had ever been reprinted predictably made me determined to read more, and a reference to the wartime novel A Footman for the Peacock (1940) led me to my favorite of all of Ferguson's fiction, which I still love so much that it's practically unnatural. And a while after that I wrote about one of her final novels, A Stroll Before Sunset (1946), which I also quite like.

Now, all of that, in my typical snail-like fashion, took at least three years to unfold. But lately, I seem to be getting a bit more obsessed with reading more or less everything that certain authors have ever written. This is partly the result of a New Year's resolution that I wanted to finally get around to reading some of the high priority books that had been languishing on my TBR list for far too long, prioritizing especially those authors I already knew were something special.

This has led me, in the past few weeks, to read a whole slew of other Rachel Ferguson titles. (Can four books be a slew? Well, considering how rare and hard to find most of these are, I think they can.) And Evenfield (1942), Ferguson's follow-up to Footman, is the belle of the ball as far as this recent reading goes.

Jacket blurb pasted in the front
of my library copy of Evenfield

To say that Evenfield is an odd novel is completely redundant, because, hello? It's by Rachel Ferguson, so the oddness should go without saying. But it's also highly readable and enjoyable, as well as being a thoroughly fascinating psychoanalytic comedy (though you don't have to realize this or care about psychoanalysis in order to enjoy it).

Barbara Morant spends a crucial part of her early childhood in the unremarkable suburban house which gives its name to the novel. For her older siblings, the house is merely a place to live; for her mother, it's a symbol of the provincial drudgery of suburban living. But for Barbara, the house and the routines of those years are invested with a sacred halo of happiness, and she yearns for them long after the family returns to London.

Her nostalgic obsession leads her to attempt to recall every detail of the way things were—some of which she was, at the time, too young to register, and some of which she either missed or misunderstood. Her nostalgia, her pursuit of her ideal childhood, lead her in adulthood—following her unexpected success writing witty song lyrics for the stage—to lease the house, undo the changes that have been made in the meantime, and attempt to recreate, down to the last detail, her childhood home.

Ferguson uses an unusual structure to convey this combination of actual experience, remembered experience, and what might be called supplemented experience (what she can't recall herself but learns about later). Barbara begins her first-person narrative by admitting herself to be a victim of nostalgia, and then the novel descends into the purest nostalgic recollection for the rest of its first half, before we finally get—halfway or more through the novel—to the point where a grown Barbara begins yearning for her old home.

Admittedly, this structure could frustrate some readers, and if you're looking for action-packed plotting, look elsewhere. But on the other hand that first half is so lushly packed with digressive domestic detail, namedropping of popular celebrities of the time, household products, advertisements, songs, décor, pastimes, and more that anyone with an interest in domestic life in the late Victorian years will likely be too intrigued (and, if you're like me, too busy Googling what the heck many of the terms or names refer to) to quibble very much. And Ferguson uses all of these things effectively as part of her master theme, as here in a recollection of the family gardener and his cleaning supplies:

On arrival in the morning, Stiles's first house of call and job was to the glory-hole, a window'd dug-out also facing the front gates, where he cleaned knives on a cocoa-coloured board with Goddard's plate-powder and (I believe) polished boots and shoes. The place stank comfortably of knife-powder, and it is a fact that the face of Mr. Goddard on the tin is far more vivid to me to-day than is that of anyone of my family, including mother.

In fact, Barbara's mother, and Barbara's attempts to understand her better by focusing on her every behavior and motivation, seems to be one of the root causes of her obsession. Even before she reclaims Evenfield for herself, she imagines approaching the house and its current residents to try to recapture some memories:

In those years I never dreamed of ringing the bell, declaring myself, adducing the Fields as reference or asking for an imaginary person in order to get a good look at the hall. It was enough that Evenfield was there and looking exactly the same—even the knocker had been allowed to remain. Just to knock and run away would have given me much material, for the timbre of that horseshoe of brass would awake its own set of associations, and I should see more clearly that cauliflower fur cape of mother's (had it one button or two?), re-smell the veil of dotted net which covered incredibly her face, re-feel the coldness of her cheek chilled by the fog of London, and remember more of the fairings without which she seldom returned.

I already suspected, but am now completely convinced, that Ferguson is an experimental writer, every bit as much as Virginia Woolf or James Joyce—though she is also, happily, more readable and laugh-out-loud funny. Evenfield is—at least based on the other works by her that I've read so far—her version of a Proustian novel. If you recall—or have heard about it, if Proust himself is not your chosen bedtime reading—Proust made much (a few hundred pages, if I recall correctly) of the memories of childhood which flooded back with a single taste of a madeleine. Ferguson's equivalent is much more amusing:

If it comes to that, I was to discover, on first becoming a Londoner, that a box-room at Evenfield smelt of the Albert Hall, with the result that, when I returned, grown-up, to the box-room I was irresistibly impelled to hum airs from The Messiah all the time I remained in it, while at the Albert Hall I missed whole tracts of the Oratorio through a sharp sensation of old trunks, and mentally tallying up their contents.

There is a serious exploration here of childhood and the way it is remembered and misremembered by adults, of the ways in which its memories can be destroyed by pursuing them too hard, and of how we sometimes cause the very ravages of time that we seek to defeat. Here (in a scene from late in the novel that hilariously links up with the early passage just quoted) is Barbara bemoaning the fact that her memories of Evenfield in childhood can never again be uncontaminated with the events (including the hit song, Everybody Kept on Laughing, which financed her return, and her lukewarm beau, Clifford) of her adult life:

If it comes to that, I wasn't able entirely to lose even myself in the past, as fragmentary thoughts of our cook, Clifford, my Old Contemptibles, the face of The Guv'nor and the orchestra in full blast with Everybody Kept on Laughing briefly possessed my brain in turn and were chased away. I didn't want them there, and went upstairs to the box-room floor (it was there that I realized that what had been Cuss's room smelt of the Albert Hall, and that meant a tiresome two minutes with The Messiah).

Some novels make me obsess about them, wanting to read them over and over, to try to get a handle on their layers of meaning. This can be maddening (how I recall, rather hauntedly, a year or so in grad school pouring over Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and its virtually limitless layers of meaning—I haven't been brave enough to approach James again since, for fear that I'll be sucked back into the vortex). But I have a feeling I could become much more pleasantly obsessed with Evenfield.

Author's note about the avoidance of war in the novel

But lest I've given too much of an impression that this is "serious literature" in the sense of books that one must labor intensely and profoundly to fully "appreciate," here's one more quote that doesn't mean anything profound but is merely hilarious, especially for those of us who think wedding madness might justifiably be a treatable mental illness:

And in any case the house was beginning to be upside down with preparations for Mell's wedding, a convivial, exhausting and essentially ridiculous bustle, for the displaying of wedding presents is, if you come to think of it, an amazing piece of vulgarity, for who cares or should care if you've been given a fish-slice or not! And if you admit the principle of this ostentatious materialism, why not exhibit lengths of all the wall-papers you propose to use, or a section of the lead piping that has been selected for the drains!

Now, perhaps because of its wartime themes and its complex satire of class and general all-around loathsomeness, A Footman for the Peacock probably remains my favorite Rachel Ferguson novel (there's an introductory note at the beginning of Evenfield that declares that it's for readers who are tired of thinking of the war, and that it takes place in a completely war-free alternate universe). But I have to admit that Evenfield now comes in only a millimeter or so behind.

And what were the other three Rachel Ferguson books I read in my recent Ferguson binge, you ask? Since I've apparently just written a review, despite my best intentions not to, you'll have to wait a bit to hear about those…

KATE HORN, Edward and I and Mrs. Honeybun (1910)

When Edward came in and told me that we were ruined, I was sitting in the peacock boudoir in Estcourt House, Park Lane, wondering whether life could possibly hold anything more monotonous than the existence of a woman of fashion.

  

You have to admit that it's an opening that's loaded with potential, and so after reading that line I happily settled in for what would surely be an enjoyable light-hearted weekend read. And for the most part, I was not disappointed. This tale of a fashionable aristocratic couple, Edward and Gabrielle, who are relegated to a country cottage, with only (gasp!) Mrs. Honeybun, a boozy charwoman, for an indoor servant and her equally challenging sometime beau, Cattermole, for a gardener/farm help, reminded me by turns of Denis Mackail's Greenery Street and E. M. Delafield's Provincial Lady novels.

For all the towering piles of novels which end in joyful teary-eyed weddings, it's surprisingly rare to find novels about couples that are already happily married and remain happily married throughout, so Horn's novel is a pleasant change of pace right from the start. And if at first it reads like a rather too-light romance of a rich couple facing adversity (but never too much adversity, of course), it is advanced somewhat beyond that level by the biting humor that occasionally surfaces and its mockery of upper crust assumptions and superficiality.

Often the humor is just in passing. I got a morbid chuckle from Gabrielle's sadness at the renting of their London house:

Estcourt House had been snapped up as soon as it was known that it was to be let, but to my disgust its new owners were some very rich people who had made their fortunes by driving pigs up into a machine and out again as sausages.

And of course some of the laughs are on the couple, who are not at all well-suited for country living:

"Well, well, darling, you know that you could not have killed that hen yourself," I said soothingly. "You remember how you tried once, and—and—"

The memory was such a painful one that silence fell between us for the moment. It had perhaps been more painful for the hen, but Edward looked in more kindly fashion at the recumbent Cattermole.

Much of the humor is at the expense of their pretentious nouveau-riche neighbor, Mrs. Spink, who married well and has adopted the approach of being more royal than the king in the niceties and poshness of everyday life:

"Thank you, Mrs. Spink," I said, measuring out the sugar slowly. "It is very kind of you to trouble about us; but the present arrangements suit us perfectly, so far. We cannot afford to keep any servants."

"Dear me," said Mrs. Spink, "how truly terrible! Now I cannot imagine an existence without a powdered footman."

I imagined that in the days when she weighed the butter and lard behind the counter she must have contented herself with the flour on her own head; but I merely said very softly that I thought her intelligence must be a limited one, and she looked sharply at me, evidently trying to reconcile the rings upon my fingers with my penurious condition.

I have to admit, though, the class satire of Horn's novel is a bit muted by her main characters' own class pretensions (which already come through a bit in the quotations above). For example, it's rather ironic, as Gabrielle mocks Mrs. Spink's absurdities, that Gabrielle herself has, just a few pages earlier, made this statement in all apparent seriousness:

It was much easier to tell the first footman, since all he said was: "Very good, my lord:" in the same tone in which he might have taken Edward's order for the motor brougham. But then footmen are always inferior beings, and how they ever fledge into butlers is a sheer matter of surprise to me.

Ultimately, the book's satirical slant struck me as a gentle poking of fun at the upper classes with whom it is clearly in sympathy, rather than any real attempt to deflate them. Uppity social climbers may not be viewed sympathetically, but those who are already at the airy heights of society are viewed sympathetically, even in their eccentricities.

This may or may not be a problem for most readers, depending on how comfortably one can slip into a rather superior mindset. I had little trouble enjoying Gabrielle's narrative, even when her viewpoint had little in common with my own. On the other hand, another element of Horn's novel was considerably more distressing for me. This passage between husband and wife, taken from the earliest pages of the novel when the two are still coping with their newfound poverty, might give a clue as to my critique:

"Little Souris, sweetheart Gabrielle, I thank God for you every day of my life-for your pure, innocent heart, and your loving, transparent soul, and, believe me, if I could spare you one pang of privation in all this, I would do it by taking every trouble on my own shoulders…"

" And nice broad ones they are," I said, with a little sob, as I patted them. "Only remember, Edward, that a wife's greatest happiness is to help her husband and to share everything with him, poverty as well as wealth; and really, considering what people can manage to live on in the country, we must have been very extravagant."

A tiny bit of such sentimentality is likely to go a long way with most modern readers, and I'm happy to say that for most of the book it is regularly diluted with good humor. However, the last third or so of the novel, when a tragedy (of sorts) occurs, descends far too much into melodrama for my taste, with Gabrielle in the role of downtrodden wide-eyed waif from just about any early Charlie Chaplin movie. (This is why I gravitate to the mid-20th century rather than its earliest years, as there seems to have been almost a requirement for authors to force their characters into such hand-wringing and teary-eyed convulsions.) And the novel's rather ridiculous deus ex machina ending also left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

However, these are really only quibbles, which I mention as much because I was frustrated that they weakened what was till then a very sweet, funny, and highly entertaining romp as because they are so terribly bad. For the most part, one can breeze right over these passages, and ultimately the novel remains a high-spirited, fun, and enjoyable comedy of married life. If it's never entirely plausible, and if its sympathies are always clearly with the upper classes it purports to mock, well, that didn't stop me from enjoying it quite a lot.

DORITA FAIRLIE BRUCE, The "modern" Colmskirk novels (1945-1955)

One of my favorite subgenres of middlebrow fiction is that dedicated to stories about young women finding careers. It's either a surprisingly small genre or I'm just missing out on a lot of the works that fit the genre, but it's always nice to come across one. [Hmmmm, one wonders if a list of such titles would be a possible goal?]

I wrote very briefly about Dorita Fairlie Bruce's The Serendipity Shop (1947) after I read it on our trip to Italy last year. It got me through my jetlag, for which I was very grateful, and I enjoyed it a lot and immediately bought two more of Bruce's Colmskirk novels for my TBR shelves.

The Colmskirk novels, for those who don't already know, and according to the Girls Gone By intros, were a series of nine novels Bruce wrote in the 1930s to 1950s, all set in or around the same Scottish village of Colmskirk. Four of the novels are truly historical in nature, set well before the 20th century, one more—Wild Goose Quest (1945)—is classed as historical by Girls Gone By because it seems to have been written and be set in the 1930s, and four were "modern" (i.e. set in the late 1940s and early 1950s when they were written). The novels all stand on their own and feature different main characters, though there are both some "guest appearances" by characters from one novel in others of the series and occasional loose connections between modern characters and those from the earlier historical volumes. It's a charming concept, and Colmskirk itself (apparently fictional though based on Largs in North Ayrshire) makes one yearn to visit and perhaps even take up residence. (Admittedly, though, I would take up residence just about anywhere in the U.K. at the drop of a hat—if only immigrating were easier…)

The first of my Colmskirk acquisitions after The Serendipity Shop was Wild Goose Quest, which I confess I was a bit luke-warm on. It had such a promising plot—a sort of treasure hunt involving, among other things, a girl who has lost her memory due to a completely far-fetched personal trauma—but just never really took flight for me (no pun intended, should you be familiar with the plot…). It's entertaining enough, however, and if you find yourself interested in the Colmskirk series, then you'll certainly want to check it out.

After that, I was my usual slow self about getting round to the other book I'd picked up, but when I finally did, any reservations that Wild Goose Quest had inspired were promptly dissipated. Triffeny (1950) is about a spoiled girl yearning for an artistic career in London, who finds herself instead discovering a possible future in the family's pottery studio. I've long known (and you've surely figured out by now) that I'm more likely to get excited about novels with women as main characters than I am about stories featuring men. Go figure. But that might have something to do both with my luke-warm response to Goose, which focused more on male characters, and on my eager enjoyment of Triffeny, which has not only a female lead but several important supporting actresses as well. Plus a "finding a career" plot.

The introduction to the Girls Gone By edition of Triffeny notes that the heroine "must be one of the most quickly reformed teenagers in fiction," and it's true that Bruce's portrayal of Triffeny's recovery from being spoiled is rather blithely unconcerned with realism. But then, I wasn't exactly seeking realism when I picked up the book, and you shouldn't be either, but it was a hugely enjoyable read from beginning to end.

After which, naturally, I had to pick up the remaining two modern Colmskirk novels, The Debatable Mound (1953) and The Bartle Bequest (1955). And The Debatable Mound instantly became my favorite of the series so far. (By the way, GGB hasn't reprinted any of the historical volumes from the series yet, though there was a hint that they might be thinking of it. Fingers crossed that they do.)

The Debatable Mound is all about the arrival of an eccentric archaeologist, his children, and their wonderful middle-aged cousin, Miss Pennycuick, to take possession of a house located next to a mysterious ancient mound. He has purchased the house with the specific intent of digging on the mound and determining its history and purpose, but it emerges that the owner of an adjacent house, the crotchety Admiral Majendie, believes that the mound is his property. The subsequent conflicts and the ways in which family members and other characters both complicate and help resolve the issue are the structure on which the plot rests.

But undoubtedly the principal pleasure of the novel for me is Miss Pennycuick herself, who, although she certainly helps to maintain and watch over the family in the absence of the children's dead mother, also has her fair share of spunk, independent thought, and a tell-it-like-it-is sensibility, setting her apart from the standard "maiden aunt/housekeeper" stock character she at first seems to represent. Her personality and spirit inform the entire plot, even if she is not a constant presence. Here, for example, is Miss Pennycuick telling one of the girls about the car she purchased for herself for the move, and her experiences in learning to drive it:

'I believe,' replied Miss Pennycuick, with modest pride, 'I must have a natural flair for driving; it was no trouble to learn—no trouble at all. Only once did I make a really serious mistake, and that was a week ago, when I put my foot on the exhilarator going into the garage, just as my instructor was opening the door.'

'And was he very much exhilarated?' asked Lalage wickedly.

Miss Pennycuick eyed her with severity.

'Nobody was hurt,' she answered coldly, 'and the door was only slightly damaged.

And here, in a scene at the mound excavation site, is her no-nonsense reaction to the unpleasant use to which the site may have been put:

"I have found undeniable traces of their activities to-day. That stone on which you are sitting, Miss Pennycuick, has undoubtedly flowed over with the blood from human sacrifices.'

Cousin Pen settled herself more comfortably on her seat.

'Very disagreeable, indeed,' she assented, 'but it happened a very long time ago and has been well washed by the rains of several thousand years, so I'll just stay where I am.'

Added to such exchanges, her ongoing conflict with the Admiral about his complete inability to recall her name— and his substitution of such alternates as "Pennyfeather" or "Pennyfarthing"—adds humor to each development of the plot. In fact, of the Dorita Fairlie Bruce novels I've read so far, The Debatable Mound is undoubtedly the funniest and the one most obviously infused with high spirits and energy.

Although Bruce is clearly most famous for her school stories, and although even the Colmskirk novels were likely aimed at (or at least marketed to) a readership of teenagers or young adults, in the case of The Debatable Mound I feel like any fan of humorous village stories would get quite a lot of enjoyment from it. This might also be true of The Serendipity Shop and maybe even Triffeny, but The Debatable Mound in particular reminded me just a bit of Miss Buncle's Book or The Stone of Chastity and other village tales that are among my favorites.

All the more disappointing, then, to proceed eagerly to the final modern Colmskirk novel, The Bartle Bequest. Although this novel again features young working women as central characters, as well as some prominent cameos by characters from the earlier novels, and although it certainly has an entertaining enough plot—involving the establishment of a local museum, the young woman who becomes its first curator, the 16-year-old orphan girl she adopts as her companion and household help, and the sleazy young man who nefariously profits from the new curator's misguided trust—I also found it irritating in a couple of ways.

After I mentioned The Serendipity Shop last year, a reader emailed me and mentioned that she had enjoyed the whole series except for the sexism of The Bartle Bequest, and I think I know what she meant. Without giving too much away, let's just say that these novels, which are otherwise so intriguingly concerned with young women finding career fulfillment, mostly end with them giving up those careers in favor of being wives and mothers. Now, I can take that with a grain of salt, since that was indeed the way things often unfolded for many women in the middle decades of the 20th century, and it may even have been an improvement on their grandmothers' lives, where even a year or two of career fulfillment might have been impossible. But somehow, in The Bartle Bequest, it all just seems a bit more condescending and insulting than in other books in the series.

What's more, there's the case of Miss Pennycuick, whose praises I've already sung above and who appears in a supporting role here. When she first appeared in The Bartle Bequest, I was delighted to encounter her again, but that delight dissipated quickly. By the time this novel begins, Miss Pennycuick is a married woman herself, but more importantly, she seems to have had some sort of psychotic break. We learn, for example, that she has developed a sort of superstitious phobia of Egyptian artifacts such as some of the ones in Professor Crawford's home. What? The woman who shrugs off sitting on a stone where human sacrifices have been performed is now so frightened of the headdress of a young Egyptian woman that she can't bear to have it in the house? This seems quite ridiculous, and one wonders if all the overlapping characters didn't just finally get the best of Bruce, so that she forgot how vividly independent and no-nonsense Miss Pennycuick had been in the earlier novel. Regardless, the affection I felt for Miss Pennycuick in TBM was nowhere to be found while reading TBB. And Professor Crawford himself—a kindly, absent-minded father and scholar in the earlier novel—here appears only once, flying into such a rage that the museum curator tries to lure him into the office so she can lock him in and call the police.

Despite my obvious annoyance at these (mis-)characterizations, I do hasten to mention that these two characters appear only briefly in The Bartle Bequest, so for many readers they may not weaken one's reading experience very much. (And of course if you haven't read The Debatable Mound, then you won't mind them at all.) The novel is quite entertaining otherwise, and certainly worth reading if you've enjoyed the other Colmskirk novels. But while I can imagine re-reading The Serendipity Shop and The Debatable Mound, and quite possibly Triffeny as well, I believe I've finished with The Bartle Bequest for good.

I should note, for fans of Bruce's school stories, that the young curator of the museum in this novel is none other that Primula Mary Beaton, who apparently appears briefly in Bruce's Springdale series. At one point, too, Primula mentions her wartime service as a Wren, during which she became friends with Dimsie, the main character of that series. Among the other guest appearances here are Julia Lendrum, who was introduced in The Serendipity Shop and who seems to be quite a mover and shaker in Colmskirk, as she figures prominently in all the subsequent books. Julia's sister Merran, along with her Serendipity Shop, appear briefly, as does Susan from The Debatable Mound, and Triffeny is mentioned but does not appear in person.

On the whole, I'm very happy to have been introduced to the modern Colmskirk novels, even if I have a few reservations about them. Now, of course, I'm curious about the four historical novels from the series—The King's Curate (1930), Mistress Mariner (1932), A Laverock Lilting (1945), and The Bees on Drumwhinnie (1952). As luck would have it, a random Abe Books search has resulted in an affordable copy of A Laverock Lilting setting forth on its merry way toward my overcrowded shelves even as I write this. The other volumes are either virtually nonexistent (the first two) or prohibitively expensive (the last), so here's hoping that Girls Gone By will come through with new editions of all of them.

Reading diary: HELEN ASHTON, WINIFRED DUKE

HELEN ASHTON, The Half-Crown House (1956)

Image courtesy of Jerri Chase

I've had this book lying around for a year or more, the remains of one of my earlier Big Book Sale excursions. I don't know why I hadn't picked it up before, as it clearly had loads of potential, but somehow I kept pushing it aside for something else.

I'm glad I finally got round to it, however, as I found it completely addictive. It takes place all in the course of one day, which happens to be the final Saturday of the year on which the house and gardens of a once-prestigious family, the Hornbeams, are open to the public. These visits have been a last-ditch effort to raise enough money to keep the crumbling house functioning for one more year. It's also the day on which an American military man steps up his efforts to win the heart of Henrietta Hornbeam, the only survivor of the family's current generation, and on which Henrietta has promised to entertain some family friends to tea. And, it's the day on which her nephew, son of her dead twin brother and the heir to the estate, is brought by her brother's widow to make his home with the family and be sent to a public school.

Quite an eventful day. But the contemporary action—such as it is—takes a definite backseat to the history and furnishings of the house itself. I don't even think of myself as particularly fascinated by home décor, but I found myself absolutely gobbling up the extended descriptions of the rooms and the ruins of the Hornbeams' once-lavish possessions. And the stories told by Henrietta and her cousin Charles—who lost an eye and one arm in the war but is still more useful than most of the family's remaining staff—along with the imperious and now bedridden Lady Hornbeam's class-conscious secretary, as they show visitors around the rooms, stories which include a queen's visit and numerous family tragedies, are great fun as well. The family is basically required to live submerged in the past, and the sense of decay and claustrophobia is palpable (but also entertaining).

Image courtesy of
Jerri Chase

I was pretty sure, by the time I got to the following description on page 17—about the elderly nanny perusing the nursery before the young heir's arrival—that I was going to quite enjoy The Half-Crown House:

Generations of Hornbeam children had used the room in the nursery tower. The faded roses and figures of a Kate Greenaway wallpaper scarcely showed any longer between the framed Christmas supplements which covered the walls, Bubbles, Cherry Ripe and Miss Muffet. The dappled tail-less rocking horse, which his father and grandfather had ridden upon, waited for Victor by the window; the intricate fantasies of the faded scrap-screen, which his great-aunt had made in the seventies, kept off the draught from an ill-fitting door. His great-grandmother's dolls' house stood by the wall, foursquare and Palladian, with pediment and portico, made by the estate carpenter in imitation of Wilchester Castle, demolished these ten years. All its bright windows glittered; Nanny had rubbed them up faithfully, because even a boy ought to be amused by this copy of an ancestral house. The mantelpiece held children's treasures, brought back from seaside holidays, fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago; the glass lighthouse striped with coloured sand from Alum Bay, the paper-weight with the view of the Brighton Pavilion underneath, the glass ball waiting for Victor to shake up the snowstorm inside, the ship-in-a-bottle made by Nanny's sailor brother, the cracked Staffordshire jug with the heads of Admiral Nelson and Captain Hardy on its bulging sides. In the big toy-cupboard the child would find his father's toy fort and boxes of soldiers, the model theatre, the red-and-white bricks, the maps and puzzles with the pieces missing, the boats, spades and buckets, the small bats and cricket-stumps, the toy tricycle with one pedal gone. Nanny did hope that some of this junk would please him.

It's possible that some readers who don't fetishize old houses with rich, odd histories might find that Ashton's novel is focused a bit too much on the house and a bit too little on the characters. Fair warning of that. But for fans of, for example, Ruby Ferguson's Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary, also about a house that's seen better days, then The Half-Crown House is likely not to be missed.

And one more element that I found wonderful about the book is the way it grounds itself solidly in the postwar world. Although published eleven years after the end of World War II, The Half-Crown House is permeated with the after-effects of the war—class shifts, food difficulties, taxation, and, most significant of all, the injuries and losses still felt by those left behind. For those interested in that postwar austerity mood in their novels, this is also a great choice.

Image courtesy of Jerri Chase

I have to give an enthusiastic thank you to Jerri Chase, who provided images of her copy of this book, complete with a lovely dustjacket, and granted her permission for me to use them here. (She may have nearly forgotten that she provided them now, as it's taken me nearly a year to use them, but my thanks is no less warm for that.) The dustjacket also includes a charming photo of Ashton and two paragraphs of author bio. Ashton joins the expanding group of women on my Overwhelming List who studied medicine, which one might have suspected from the fact that several of her books—including Doctor Serocold (1930), Hornets' Nest (1935), and Yeoman's Hospital (1944)—center around the medical profession. 

I also note that the author bio says only that the apartment she and her husband lived in was "destroyed by fire" in 1941. According to Persephone's Helen Ashton page, however, it was destroyed in the Blitz. Both statements may be true, of course, but it's interesting that the publishers of The Half-Crown House chose to mention the destruction but not its direct cause.

Now it's high time I get around to Ashton's one Persephone reprint, Bricks and Mortar, which undoubtedly many of you have already read. It just moved quite a bit further up my TBR list. And then there's her novel about the early years of World War II, Tadpole Hall... 

WINIFRED DUKE, Dirge for a Dead Witch (1949)

I wrote about my first encounter with Winifred Duke a little over a year and a half ago, after happening upon a copy of The Dancing of the Fox in a Victoria second-hand bookshop. It was one of my best and most intriguing unexpected book finds of recent years, and I vowed at the time to explore Duke's fiction a bit further. In view of the usual amount of time it takes me to get around to doing anything I say I'm going to do, for me to have read a second Duke title in just over a year and a half is not all that bad…

So little information about Duke or her books is available online that I wound up, a few months ago, just grabbing the most affordable book I could find on Abe Books with an intriguing title and an intact dustjacket. I had no idea what I was getting. While Dancing was a sort of crime novel—but not so much a who-done-it as a what-were-the-aftereffects-of-its-having-been-done—Dirge for a Dead Witch is historical drama, though certainly still with a crime element in the form of a witchhunt and its long-lingering repercussions.

The present day of the novel is the late 18th century, with a long middle section flashing back to more than a century before. In the present day, Mr. Raeburn, a new clergyman in the village of Drumbannock is writing a book on folklore, including witches, and takes an interest in the tale of Anne Chalmers, who was hounded by the villagers a century before and who then mysteriously vanished without a trace. The flashback tells Anne's story, though it is only when we return to the novel's present, that we discover its final ending.

As I would have expected from my earlier experience of Duke's work, Dirge is highly atmospheric and eminently readable. Here's a snippet from page 12, telling of Mr. Raeburn's mother's reactions to their new abode:

Mrs. Raeburn followed. Her teeth were chattering. Ridiculous! The evening was so close, so enervating, that she had felt compelled to loosen her cloak, and her bonnet pressed heavily on her moist temples. Yet here a chill, dank atmosphere enwrapped everything and seeped to her very bones. She trod past the kirk, towering, sinister and forbidding, amongst its neighbouring gravestones. It was not an agreeable reflection that she must look out upon it every day. Behind the bald solid block it made she discerned a house. There was no garden, no approach, except a little narrow path of earth, and beyond—Those great trees looked highly unwholesome. What a dark, awe-inspiring place! Hers was a comfortable, unimaginative mind happed in a healthy body, but the mere proximity of the den caused her to think of ghosts and bogles, of old, blood-curdling superstitions and eerie tales once heard and easily forgotten. Never, never, even in the daytime, she told herself wildly, could she summon up courage to enter the uncanny place. Would it be possible to have those rank, evil-looking trees cut down? If they proved to be on glebeland and under the jurisdiction of the minister this must be done. In their ugly closeness might breed fevers, dark, malignant things. Already she saw in this spot menace, fear, the unknown. Her heart yearned for Dumfries, its lights, its kindly folk, its security and certainty. Here she felt threatened by she knew not what.

Pretty effective stuff (unless you happen to live alone between a cemetery and a dark forest, I suppose). And there are also fascinating characters who have real depth and seem—even when they're completely unpleasant—to live and breathe. As would also be expected, the scenes portraying the villagers' growing suspicions of witchcraft and the eventual arrest and trial of Anne—who seems to have nothing against her except her beauty and her status as a stranger in the village—are harrowing and sad, and Duke dissects the villagers' suspicions and fears quite convincingly.

Ultimately, I might have to admit that the outcome of the novel felt a bit anti-climactic, but I think this is because it was all done so well that it seemed to be leading up to something bigger and more dramatic. Though the fact that it remains understated and suggestive rather than over-the-top and obvious seems to be in keeping with Duke's style, and there are so many ways in which over-the-top eerie stories can go awry and so many ways that merely suggested horror can be more effective, that some readers might see this as a strength in itself.

I also have to note that much of the dialogue—of which there is a lot—is in Scots dialect. This was interesting, and I have to admit I was surprised at the extent to which I got used to it after a while—rather like reading Shakespeare—but it did slow the flow of the novel a bit. But again, some readers might particularly enjoy this.

But those minor quibbles aside, Duke's writing and her perspective on these events made Dirge well worth reading, and I do recommend it for fans of historical fiction and of things that go bump in the night. I'm glad I've now sampled one of Duke's non-mysteries, and I'm hoping also to sample one or two more of her books in the near future, if the Interlibrary Loan team at the SF Public Library is able to manage it. She is simply too interesting to be as completely obscure as she is. Perhaps one should be The Needful Journey, described on the back flap of Dirge?

It's odd that virtually none of Duke's books seem to have ever been reprinted, despite the fact that, according to the cover of Dirge, her earlier novel Death and His Sweetheart had apparently been a veritable bestseller (being, at the time Dirge appeared, in its "38th thousand"), and despite the fact that crime fiction seems to be one of the most eagerly collected and reprinted genres of fiction from the early to mid 20th century.

I shall have to do what I can to rectify that. Hopefully in less than another year and a half…

[And of course, I couldn't resist sharing the dustjacket with you, especially since no one else ever talks about this author. You know, too, how much I enjoy publishers' book lists on the backs of books, and this one is no exception. Alas, I didn't find any new authors for my Overwhelming List, but there were new names for my phantom Overwhelming List US. Theda Kenyon (1894-1997) was an American novelist and poet who apparently once shared the stage at a speaking gig with Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robert Frost, though she appears to be primarily remembered now for a book called Witches Still Live: A Study of the Black Art Today (1929), which makes her a slightly ironic presence on the back of Duke's book. Lenore Glen Offord (1905-1991) was an Edgar Award-winning American mystery novelist who, incidentally, lived on Russian Hill in San Francisco, and Ann Chidester was also American, though information about her and her books is sparse. Ethel Mannin, Eileen Bigland, and Margaret Archer are all already represented on my list.]

An American Interlude: ROSE FRANKEN, The Claudia Novels (1939-1958)

Every once in a while, in a brief lull between my obsessive pursuits of obscure British women writers, I remind myself that, however surprisingly, Americans aren't all bad either.  Many of you are, of course, already aware of this, and if I weren't generally so singlemindedly obsessed with all that's Anglo, I might acknowledge it more often.  Why, a few of my very favorite obscure authors are actually American, and no doubt there's a whole world of obscure Americans I could unearth if I could only clone myself and create a Furrowed Middlebrow US. 

For starters, there's Mary Lasswell's boozy novels about three middle-aged, beer-loving women and their joyful exploits from wartime San Diego all the way into the 1960s.  There's Emily Kimbrough's humorous travel books, which give me a feeling of having been on a delightful vacation with a charming group of friends without ever having to leave the comforts of my apartment—or, on the down side, getting a chance to do some bookshopping in exotic locales, but nothing's perfect.  There's Gladys Workman's hilarious account of her family's relocation to the Oregon wilderness in Only When I Laugh.  And, much better known to American readers if perhaps not to readers across the pond, there are Shirley Jackson's two masterpieces of domestic memoir, Raising Demons and Life Among the Savages.

And now, as a result of an impulse purchase of two books by a hitherto unknown author at a library book sale at least two years ago (possibly three or four?) and, more immediately, as a result of finally unearthing said books—now even dustier than when I found them—from the very bottom of my to read bookshelves (to which they were relegated because they spoke with an American drawl), I can add Rose Franken's Claudia series to that list.

According to Tolstoy (not an author you're likely to see me quote very often here, though I did spend the better part of one long hot summer in college reading War and Peace and Anna Karenina—and much preferring the former, if anyone cares), " Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  But Rose Franken might have begged to differ.  For Franken spent a large portion of her very successful writing career documenting, in epic War and Peace-style, the joys and vicissitudes of one very charming, funny, quintessentially normal, and overall happy family.  It is undoubtedly an overstatement to call Franken a Tolstoy of the ordinary (though now that I think of it, that phrase might apply nicely to Dorothy Whipple).  Franken is perhaps more accurately described as a more in-depth Denis Mackail.  But at any rate, the fact that she is now largely forgotten and her bestselling novels are all out of print is surely more a testament to readers' fascination with unhappiness and misery than it is a verdict on her work.

Program from the Broadway version of Claudia

According to the Jewish Women's Archive, which has an interesting and informative page on Franken, she published eight Claudia novels in all, after having already published others novels and become a highly successful playwright.  Some of her non-Claudia work sounds quite intriguing as well, and rather edgy for its time, but unquestionably her main success was with the slightly dim young girl, barely of age in the first volume and gradually maturing into her 30s by the last, who meets her true love, a successful New York architect, marries him, and faces the vicissitudes of life—sometimes tragically, but most often with a sassy, flapperish, back-and-forth banter—staunchly by his side. 

Life Magazine photos from the Broadway play

As the luck of library book sales would have it, I started with volume 2, Claudia and David (1940) and have now been drawn inexorably into volume 3, Another Claudia (1943).  These books were preceded by Claudia: The Story of a Marriage (1939), in which the couple met and married, and the series was rounded out with Young Claudia (1946), The Marriage of Claudia (1948), From Claudia to David (1948), The Fragile Years (1952), and The Antic Years (1958).  A smash Broadway play, a radio show, two movies, and a short-lived television series followed from the books' tremendous success (see TCM's discussion of the books' screen iterations).

Nothing like a little beefcake to sell a reprint!

The early volumes seem to be the lightest, and Claudia and David begins on an almost slapstick note, as Claudia makes a crucial mistake about where the decimal point falls in the price of a dress in a Hollywood boutique during a business trip with David.  Then things get a bit more serious, as Claudia has a flirtation with a married man and cheerfully wends her way through a confrontation with the man's wife:

Claudia led the way into the living room. Mrs. Dexter wasted no time. "My husband is in love with you," she began immediately.

Claudia's first reaction was one of extreme gratification. She almost said, "How wonderful, what makes you think so?" but Mrs. Dexter's bitter agitation held her silent and waiting. "I want you to know that you're breaking up a home," Mrs. Dexter went on hoarsely. "I want you to let him alone. You're young and you're selfish and you don't know what you're doing. You've got a husband and you've got children, but you're the kind of woman to whom ties don't mean anything, all you want is conquest and more conquest. You live for flattery and adulation. You dress your body in expensive clothes and dangle it before men's eyes like a banner."

Mrs. Dexter stopped for breath. Claudia couldn't help feeling flattered. Her impulse was to assure Mrs. Dexter that, except for the pink net, she'd never had a dress that had cost more than forty-nine fifty at a sale, but the picture of an abandoned Messalina was infinitely more alluring.

Later, David seems to be having a flirtation of his own with a wealthy widow for whom he's designing a house—though the overall seriousness of both of their flirtations can be demonstrated by the fact that both the unhappy wife and the widow become close friends of Claudia's in the end.  They face near tragedy when son Bobby has a run-in with an automobile while learning to skate, and have a chapterful of more or less homophobic anxieties about Bobby's masculinity (irritating for me, and something to be aware of—like the brief flareup of racism in another scene—but it didn't spoil the whole for me).  Claudia falls under the influence of a medium who may be channeling her recently-dead mother, and then starts feeling restless with her life:

"Look at Julia, how full her life is. Besides being in a lot of movements, she's in business."

"Don't make me laugh," David rudely interjected.

"The shop has her name on it, anyway," Claudia argued. "And look at Helen Drew. She's had two divorces, and half a dozen affairs, and she's no older than I am."

It's all charming and frivolous and gay (in the old-fashioned sense, of course), and yet quite vivid and surprisingly true-to-life.  Claudia and David have their realistic problems—fights, temptations, financial worries, and serious illness—and yet they come through it with humor and remain, ultimately, a deeply loving couple.  Imagine Greenery Street continued through more than a dozen years, or the Provincial Lady with a bit more sentiment and melodrama.  Profound?  No.  But about as cozy an escape as can be imagined—at least outside of British fiction.  Plus, I defy you to pick up Claudia and David and not want to keep reading just a few more pages.

In Another Claudia, the war which is quietly in the background in Claudia & David takes center stage, as news of Pearl Harbor leads David to join up.  And in later volumes—particularly, it seems, From Claudia to David and The Fragile Years, the couple faces very serious tragedies.  If—as I suspect will happen—I am compelled to work my merry way eventually through all eight of the Claudias, I'll have to report back on whether the more serious volumes are as entertaining and satisfying.  When the going gets tough, Franken does have a tendency to get sappy, but so far that has only heightened the pleasure of seeing the characters' bolster each other with humor and affection and get on with things again.

Contemporary reviews of all of the volumes tended to be condescendingly dismissive, or else tended to damn the novels with faint praise.  Franken's bestsellerdom, combined with her unapologetically domestic, middlebrow, and sometimes sentimental concerns, makes her quite a perfect case study for the mid-century's Battle of the Brows. 

And perhaps that battle is still raging.  The only blog post I could find about Franken's work was in 2007 by Blue-Hearted Bookworm, who classified the Claudia novels as her "guilty pleasure reading" and, despite admitting to the joy they gave her, spent most of her post assuring readers of how awful they were.

Reprint edition with photo from the movie
starring Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire

Among all the other joys that blogging has brought me—not least of which are all you wonderful folks who comment and email and support me in my obsessions and quirks—has been a liberation from fretting about what books and authors I "should" or "shouldn't" like.  In the past several years, I have cheerfully tossed James Joyce and J. D. Salinger into my piles to sell at the local second-hand bookshop and have gleefully filled the regained shelf space with girls' school stories and romance novels and humorous tales of village life on my most centrally-visible, pride-of-place bookcases, where they rub shoulders with Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Shakespeare.  They may make an odd mix, but they all provide pleasure and inspiration.

No more literary guilty pleasures for me.  Just pleasures, thank you, in widely-varying flavors.  And Franken's novels are simply delicious.