twentieth century fiction

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.13

/ madamebibilophile / 9 Comments

Last year for this project I read The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate, and enjoyed it enough to pick up her debut novel, The Blackmailer (1958), this year.

I must admit my expectations were moderate – I liked The Shooting Party but thought it had far too many characters, and I expected a first novel written 22 years earlier to be less skilled. The author’s Foreword says “I look back on The Blackmailer with a certain affection” which to me hints at an unconditional fondness for something you know is flawed. But in fact found it tightly focussed and complex.

It has a distinctly unlikable titular protagonist in Baldwin Reeves. He is a barrister, resentful of those he feels were born with social and financial advantages, and determined to do whatever it takes to be a QC (as it was in the 1950s) and a politician.

“His ‘rivals’ were of course everyone else in the world.”

One of those he resents most severely is Anthony Lane: landed gentry, charming and charmed, war hero, seemingly universally adored. But Baldwin served with Anthony in Korea, and he knows he was dangerously inept, cowardly, and despised by his comrades.

Baldwin needs money, and so he decides to blackmail Anthony’s widow Judith to preserve the dead man’s posthumous reputation. She knows her husband wasn’t the same as the revered memory:

“Later she had come to believe what had at first seemed to her odd and rather degrading, that love was not always based on a similarity of principles, and that it was possible genuinely to love and even at times to admire someone whom one could seldom, if ever, respect.”

The degradation alongside love is important. Although initially Baldwin and Judith see each other as agonists, they quite quickly develop a warped rapport, feeling drawn to one another. For Baldwin, this is wrapped up in his feelings for Anthony:

“As if anything he might have thought about her late husband was a matter of indifference to her. This was not quite what he had expected, but after all there was a sort of familiarity about it: with Anthony too one’s opinions had not mattered because he had been so sure of his own.”

More than once it is mentioned that Baldwin loved Anthony, although it is not stated whether this included sexual attraction. So two people who both despised and were drawn to Anthony find he is bound up in their relationship after his death.

It’s not entirely clear why Judith should care if her dead husband’s name is tarnished, but it is partly due to loyalty towards her spiky, snobbish mother-in-law who adored her flawed son, and also Anthony’s sweet grandfather who saw Anthony as he was.

The story follows Baldwin and Judith’s odd kinship/courtship of sorts, as two somewhat unhappy people struggle against their circumstances in various ways.

‘I completely fail to understand how you can write anything so appalling,’ she said.

‘Yes, it’s nasty isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I shall try to keep my own name out of it if possible, but I may not be able to.’

Those of you who enjoy the writing of Diana Athill may enjoy the scenes of Julia at work in a publishing house. One publisher was utterly convinced that Colegate knew Andre Deutsch, so close was the portrait of Judith’s boss Felix Hanescu to the great man:

“That was what he had wanted to be, a genius: having just missed it, he had become a personality instead.”

The Blackmailer is almost a comedy of manners, but a bit too spiky. It could be very dark, but steps back from being so, such as when Baldwin insists Judith fire her beloved housekeeper (a man of shorter height who is consistently referred to by what is an offensive term now, although not necessarily intended to be so in the book). This piece of attempted psychological warfare is comedically undermined in a scene of absolute farce, rendering Baldwin ridiculous.

Similarly, The Blackmailer is a psychological study of a distorted relationship and the effects of fantasy, jealousy and lies, but it also doesn’t seek to explain the psychology of anyone. Rather it presents the relationships and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions.

I can imagine this could be a frustrating read for some, but I enjoyed it and the lack of explanations, the wavering between genres. While this kept me at a bit of a distance for much of the novel, Colegate creates two scenes that pack a punch towards the end – one dramatically, one quietly, both devastating in their different ways.

“Lately, for the first time, the points system on which he conducted his relations with other people had been beginning to show its failings.“

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.12

/ madamebibilophile / 15 Comments

The British Women Writer’s Series is doing such a wonderful job rediscovering lost gems, and Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts (1945) is no exception. I really enjoyed this witty, tense novel from a new-to-me writer, and it was in a typically lovely series cover too:

Set in the 1930s, the wonderfully-named Penelope Shadow is three years older than the century and living with her widowed sister-in-law, her nephew and niece. She fails at every job she attempts, until she hits on the idea of writing. Her historical novels featuring bold heroines are moderately successful, until one of them becomes hugely successful.

“Miss Shadow herself was one of those women who is never described without the diminutive: the sweet little thing, a funny little thing, poor little thing, and, of course, after ‘Mexican Flower’, a clever little thing.”

Penelope’s inability to manage day-to-day routines means she is consistently under-estimated. But when her sister-in-law plans to remarry and emigrate, Penelope realises she needs help. I wondered if this wry observation was a piece of self-satire by Lofts:

“For behind Penelope Shadow stretched a long, long line of scribes and daubers, adults in their own peculiar world, but children in this one, vague, feckless, thoughtless creatures always sheltering, consciously or unconsciously, behind some sensible, practical person.”

Penelope has a phobia of being in a house alone after dark, and so she wants a live-in housekeeper. After a series of failures in this regard and following a Gothic interlude in a guesthouse, she leaves with a young, good-looking waiter:

“For Penelope had secured a treasure. There was no other word for it. She had won not only a housekeeper who could cook, and a cook who could housekeep, she had, all in one person, a nurse, a mentor, a chauffeur, a chambermaid, butler and steward.”

But there is an underlying sense that all is not as it seems with Terry Munce. This is compounded when she is visited by her more worldly, pragmatic writer friend, who genuinely sees Penelope as she is, and yet has not taken to Terry at all:

“Miss Fletcher was enchanted, not with the pretty young prodigy whom she had at first taken Penelope to be, but with the odd, contradictory, unpredictable person that she really was.”

As the story progresses, Lofts shifts Lady Living Alone from a domestic comedy of manners with an endearingly eccentric heroine, into a tense domestic noir, with an eccentrically vulnerable heroine.

She also uses Penelope’s situation to make some pointed observations about the legal position of women at this time.

“She knew, even as she settled down to her own job, in her own house, that she was not her own woman in the same way that she had been”

(The supporting material in the BLWW series is always helpful and the timeline; Preface from Alison Bailey as Lead Curator; and Afterword from Simon Thomas, Series Consultant, provide useful context on this issue.)

Such is Lofts skill that the shift in tone and wider political points never jar. I found Lady Living Alone immediately engaging, and then absolutely compulsive as I whizzed through it without any sense of how events might play out. I’m trying to avoid spoilers so that anyone who hasn’t read it might have the same experience, and so I’ll end the post here!

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.10

/ madamebibilophile / 21 Comments

I can’t remember where I first heard about the 2022 reissue of Rosemary Tonks’ The Bloater (1968) but I remember thinking it sounded appealing. Just four short years later and here we are!

The narrator is Min, who works at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (apparently Tonks recorded a poem with this forerunner of experimental, electronic music).

“Obviously it’s no good being slightly vulgar; you must be absolutely vulgar. Taste in the arts and theatre should never be confused with good taste, which is static and middle class.”

She is married to George, who barely gets a mention throughout the entire book. The titular Bloater is Carlos, her opera-singer tenant who is trying to seduce her, which Min seems to find in equal measure repulsive and captivating.

“And until the moment he enters it, the bedroom is only a very ordinary room with a bed in it. Then suddenly—snap pool! It’s a boudoir, it’s a dangerous liaison, it’s the fourth floor of a Lisbon brothel, it’s Madame de Pompadour and Louis XV all over again in some unaired voluptuary’s den.”

Meanwhile there is also Claudi, an older male friend caught up in the shenanigans, Fritz the cleaner, Billy her colleague and potential lover, and Jenny her colleague who is thrall to her lover ‘the guitar’. Min is jealous and adversarial towards Jenny, as she is towards so many in her life:

“She’s sitting there as though she’s just laid an egg.”

Apparently this novel took Tonks four weeks to write, with the plan of making ‘a lot of red-hot money’. While I didn’t think it was truly stream-of-consciousness as some reviews describe, I did think the somewhat plotless style wasn’t particularly suited to huge mainstream success.

For the length of a novella, I enjoyed Min’s relentless defensiveness which resulted in witty, barbed comments.  The observations are astute and the use of imagery surprising (Tonks was an experimental poet.)

Had it been longer than 142 pages, I suspect my enjoyment of The Bloater would begin to wane. Min’s immaturity means she takes out her immense fear of reflection and rejection on everyone else, which is hard to stay with over too long a period. The characterisation all-round is thin, no-one really leaps off the page as fully realised person, perhaps reflecting Min’s self-focus and fears. However, I also think if the characters were better drawn, the bitterness of the humour would be harder to take, so perhaps this was an astute comic choice overall.

There’s no doubt Tonks was a highly skilled writer, and she didn’t make The Bloater longer, she kept it short.  So claiming I wouldn’t like a novel she didn’t write really is entirely unfair! I would absolutely read more by her on the basis of this novella.

“Ah, parking! The graveyard of so many good evenings.”

To end, not the Tonks recording but a poem performance with the BBC radiophonic Workshop from around the same time:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.9

/ madamebibilophile / 16 Comments

I love The Thin Man films. Starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as married detective duo Nick and Nora Charles – not forgetting loyal Schnauzer Asta – they are an absolute wisecracking joy.

So I don’t really know why it has taken me so long to read Dashiell Hammet’s final novel, published in 1934 (the first of the films was released the same year), but I’m very glad to have finally got to it.

Nick Charles is a former New York private eye, now married to wealthy Nora and living in California, running his father-in-law’s business interests. He is back on the East Coast for Christmas when he runs into Dorothy in a bar (Nick is constantly drinking alcohol despite the story taking place in 1932, before the end of Prohibition) whom he knew as a child, and she now needs his help to find her missing scientist father.

Nick is reluctant, but his wife Nora is more open-minded:

“There’s nothing I can do to help her.”

“She thinks you can.”

“And so do you, which shows that no matter what you think, you can always get somebody else to go along with you.”

Nora sighed. “I wish you were sober enough to talk to.” She leaned over to take a sip of my drink. “I’ll give you your Christmas present now if you’ll give me mine.”

I shook my head. “At breakfast.”

“But it’s Christmas now.”

“Breakfast.”

“Whatever you’re giving me,” she said, “I hope I don’t like it.”

“You’ll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the aquarium said he positively wouldn’t take them back. He said they’d already bitten the tails off the -“

“It wouldn’t hurt you any to find out if you can help her, would it? She’s got so much confidence in you, Nicky.”

This captures so much of the comedic tone of the novel. Nick and Nora’s constantly teasing, fond relationship underpinned by respect, and the fact they do truly listen to one another is what gives the story heart. (Admittedly it also captures how their relationship is underpinned by relentless alcohol consumption!)

Despite Nick’s reluctance, it isn’t long before he’s drawn into the mystery and the various machinations of Dorothy’s family, which results in a murder of the scientist’s assistant/mistress, and gangsters with guns rapidly appearing:

“So far I had known just where I stood on the Wolf-Wynant-Jorgensen troubles and what I was doing – the answers were, respectively, nowhere and nothing – but when we stopped at Reuben’s for coffee on our way home at four the next morning, Nora opened a newspaper and found a line in one of the gossip columns: “Nick Charles, former Trans-American Detective Agency ace, on from Coast to sift the Julia Wolf murder mystery”; and when I opened my eyes and sat up in bed some six hours later Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.”

What follows is good fun, with speakeasys, red herrings, a genuinely terrifying mother, comedic turns from villains, and world-weary wisecracks from Nick.

The novel is over ninety years old and so attitudes have dated, not least towards women (the phrase “feminine brainstorms” was a particular favourite of mine) and towards mental illness; Nora makes several baffling references to Nick’s Greek heritage; and there is one use of a racial slur. But none of these instances are the focus of the story, or attempted to be validated.

Generally with these types of novels I’ve been conditioned by Raymond Chandler to forget the plot and enjoy the ride, but actually, The Thin Man does hold together, albeit reliant on a lot of exposition by Nick in the final few pages. If you fancy a hardboiled read but on the comedic rather than noirish side of things, with a witty heroine and a very appealing Schanuzer, then this is one for you.

Although… I must admit this is a rare instance where I think the film is better! The dialogue is snappier, the plot leaner and the chemistry and charisma of the two main stars (plus Asta) is just phenomenal. So even if you don’t fancy the book, I would urge you to see the film 😊

“She laughed. “All right, all right. Still want to leave for San Francisco tomorrow?”

“Not unless you’re in a hurry. Let’s stick around awhile. This excitement has put us behind in our drinking.””

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.7

/ madamebibilophile / 19 Comments

Last year for this project I read Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball, which made me keen to read more. Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953) was her debut novel and already demonstrates what an accomplished stylist and storyteller she was.

Professor Clement Darrelhyde is at London Zoo watching two Hackenfeller’s apes, Percy and Edwina. The apes are thought to be the closest to humans, and Brophy draws her parallels with a light comic touch.

“In captivity it moved on all fours; but in the jungle, as Hackenfeller had noted, it ran erect with its hands holding onto branches overhead. Children sometimes used a similar method when they learn to walk, but in the adult man it was forgotten until he had to relearn it in crowded buses and trains.”

Both the Professor and Edwina hope for a mating to occur, but Percy is not obliging, despite the Professor’s ritual of singing Mozart to them.

“Here was an animal discontent with his monkeydom, already exercising the first characteristic of Man, which Man had never satisfactorily explained, self-restraint.”

Very quickly we learn that the Professor is under time pressure. An arrogant young researcher named Kendrick wants to send Percy to space in a rocket. The Professor is outraged, disparagingly drawing parallels in his mind between Kendrick and Rossini! He has only a few days to try and rescue Percy (although, keeping him in a cage is an odd kind of rescue).

“He looked like a scholastic grasshopper, crossing Regent’s Park and shattering its pastoral calm.”

The Professor undertakes interviews of comic misunderstanding with a journalist, and the inappropriately named Colonel Hunter at the League for the Prevention of Unkind Practises to Animals. Brophy has great fun satirising the press bias and well-meaning inactivity of organisations.

Eventually the Professor is aided by Gloria, a young pickpocket and burglar who, having been in prison, is up for setting Percy free.

But what does Percy want? Brophy takes us inside his mind in a way that works perfectly. It never seems clunky or whimsical, and she never sentimentalises Percy. I particularly enjoyed this reflection of his:

“Physically, he was exhausted. The Professor had not let him have his sleep out; and that at first seemed typical of the Professor’s nattering officiousness.”

The Professor and Gloria seemed doomed to failure and I couldn’t work out how Brophy would end this tale, but it is surprising and sensational, and she carries it off with aplomb.

I should warn readers there are some upsetting moments with the animals, but these are sentences not scenes. Brophy was a leading campaigner for animal rights and she knows how to make her points without didacticism or horror.

This really is an astonishing novel, finely balancing serious issues with comedy, philosophy with outright silliness.

Hackenfeller’s Ape has been reissued by Faber as one of their wonderful Editions series. More than 70 years after it was written, I’m sure it will resonate with a new generation of readers.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.5

/ madamebibilophile / 18 Comments

Following on from yesterday’s post on Gentleman Prefer Blondes, today I read the sequel But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes by Anita Loos (1927).

(Please note – some spoilers for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes!)

I’ll start with the negatives: I don’t think this quite has the sparkle of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and it has less of the vignette style which suited Lorelei’s voice so well. I would hesitate to recommend it as a standalone novel, but as a short, diverting companion-piece to Blondes, there is still much to enjoy.

It opens with Lorelei expressing some quite modern views on marriage:

“I am full of ambitions and I think that practically every married girl ought to have a career if she is wealthy enough to have the home life carried on by the servants. Especially if a girl is married to a husband like Henry. Because Henry is quite a homebody and, if a girl was a homebody to, she would encounter him quite often.”

As Lorelei settles into married life and motherhood, Dorothy is still on hand with cynical commentary:

“And even Dorothy says that “a kid that looks like any rich father is as good as money in the bank.” I mean sometimes Dorothy becomes Philosophical, and says something that really makes a girl wonder how anyone who can make such a Philosophical remark can waste her time like Dorothy does.”

When Lorelei decides to follow a career as a writer, she heads to the Algonquin Round Table. I don’t know what Loos’ relationship was with this group, but she’s pretty biting about these literary wits:

“So then they all started to tell about a famous trip they took to Europe. And they had a marvelous time, because everywhere they went, they would sit in the hotel, and play cute games and tell reminisences about the Algonquin. And I think it is wonderful to have so many internal resources that you never have to bother to go outside of yourself to see anything.”

Lorelei decides to write about her friend Dorothy’s life, from travelling carnival, to school:

“Well, the Principal went down to Dorothy’s class and told all the girls that Dorothy had not had the advantage of a pure home, so they must form themselves into a little Committee, and help her not to stray. And after that, Dorothy really became the center of attraction, until one of the girls took a false step with a visiting football team and Dorothy lost her novelty.”

To joining the Ziegfeld Follies:

“Because hardly any broker seems to have enough Psychology to realize that the real ideal of his dreams is some small town village bell that he used to weave a romance around when he was age sixteen. But Mr. Ziegfield knows all about Psychology so that is the kind he picks out. And Dorothy says that about all Mr. Ziegfield does to “glorify” them, is to get them to comb the hay out of their hair, and give up starch in lingeray.”

For a story about Dorothy, there’s quite a lack of her biting observations, which was a shame. However, there are still some good lines:

“Gloria warned Dorothy that it would be fatal to marry a saxaphone player, without giving yourself an opertunity to get sick of him first.”

(Very reminiscent of Some Like It Hot!) And one that had a slightly Wodehouse turn of phrase:

“I mean, he could not take to drink, because he had already done that for years.”

So all in all, Loos’ wit means there is enough to enjoy if you enjoyed Blondes, and at novella-length Brunettes doesn’t outstay its welcome.

To end, we’ve had blondes and brunettes, now an extremely famous redhead, who like Dorothy was part of the Ziegfeld Follies:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.4

/ madamebibilophile / 19 Comments

I knew of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) from the iconic 1952 filmed musical, but somehow I never got round to reading it. I found this Penguin edition of the novella plus the sequel with the original illustrations by Ralph Barton, and realised now was the time for me to spend with Lorelei Lee, gold-digging flapper.

Told in diary form, we follow Lorelei around New York and then Europe, as she dates a series of men, trying to get them to spend as much money on her as possible.

“So by the time Piggie pays for a few dozen orchids, the diamond tiara will really seem like quite a bargain. Because I always think that spending money is only just a habit and if you get a gentleman started on buying one dozen orchids at a time he really gets very good habits.”

Lorelei is also on a constant quest to improve her mind, aided by Mr Eisman who suggests she keep a diary, although it never quite works. Her attempt to host a literary salon ends thusly:

“So Sam asked if he could bring a gentleman who writes novels from England, so I said yes, so he brought him. And then we all got together and I called up Gloria and Dorothy and the gentleman brought their own liquor. So of course the place was a wreck this morning and Lulu and I worked like proverbial dogs to get it cleaned up, but Heaven knows how long it will take to get the chandelier fixed.”

She does, however, attract a novelist:

“As soon as he found out that I was literary. I mean he has called up every day and I went to tea twice with him. So he has sent me a whole complete set of books for my birthday by a gentleman called Mr. Conrad. They all seem to be about ocean travel although I have not had time to more than glance through them.”

Ultimately though, she asks her maid to read Lord Jim and then tell her what happens.

The diary forms a series of vignettes as Lorelei and her acerbic friend Dorothy ricochet from one party and one man to another, before they travel to Europe. Dorothy is quick-witted and incisive, but also much more romantic. While she falls in love on the ship to England, Lorelei bemoans the lack of spending opportunities.

“I mean I really hope I do not get any more large size imitations of a dog as I have three now and I do not see why the Captain does not ask Mr. Cartier to have a jewelry store on the ship as it is really not much fun to go shopping on a ship with gentlemen, and buy nothing but imitations of dogs.”

It is this humour and the guilessness of Lorelei’s tone that make this such an enjoyable read. She is relentlessly materialistic,  but there is nothing vicious about her.

Loos also has some serious points to make among the light comedy. Lorelei was sexually assaulted in the past, and shot her assailant. In court, she was subject to misogynistic destruction of character. As she observes:

“I mean a gentleman never pays for those things but a girl always pays.”

There is a sense that she feels that men are still getting the better deal, when all they lose is money.

“I mean I always seem to think that when a girl really enjoys being with a gentleman, it puts her to quite a disadvantage and no real good can come of it.”

The reader also questions who is using who. Lorelei wants money, but what do this succession of men really want – do any of them truly care for Lorelei and are they even taken in by her?

When she and Dorothy are in London, they are mistaken for rich and subsequently invited to a series of aristocratic homes because people want to flog them things:

“So we went to tea to a lady’s house called Lady Elmsworth and what she has to sell we Americans seems to be a picture of her father painted in oil paint who she said was a whistler. But I told her my own father was a whistler and used to whistle all of the time and I did not even have a picture of him but every time he used to go to Little Rock I asked him to go to the photographers but he did not go.”

This is a perfect example of how Loos captures Lorelei’s ignorance but she is not the butt of the joke. Not knowing who Whistler is stops her being ripped off. Similarly, I usually dislike non-standard spellings to demonstrate a character’s poor education as condescending, but with Lorelei it serves to remind the reader that she is young and naïve and not to judge her actions too harshly.

“The Eyefull Tower is devine and it is much more educational than the London Tower, because you cannot even see the London Tower if you happen to be two blocks away. But when a girl looks at the Eyefull Tower she really knows she is looking at something. And it would even be very difficult not to notice the Eyefull Tower.”

I mean, she’s not wrong…

The other way Loos achieves balance is through Dorothy’s reported comments, cutting through any suggestion of whimsy:

“Dorothy looked at me and looked at me and she really said she thought my brains were a miracle. I mean she said my brains reminded her of a radio because you listen to it for days and days and you get discouradged and just when you are getting ready to smash it, something comes out that is a masterpiece.”

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a clever, entertaining satire on early twentieth century materialism, relationships between the sexes, and the choices available to women. Lorelei is somehow charming, and Loos never loses sight of the comedy – a protracted farce with a diamond tiara is particularly entertaining!

I think I’ll try the sequel for tomorrow, but I understand its not quite as accomplished. Fingers crossed that it is still enjoyable…

“I mean champagne always makes me feel philosophical because it makes me realize that when a girl’s life is as full of fate as mine seems to be, there is nothing else to do about it.”

The tone of the film is frothier, but of course I’ll end with the trailer of Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei and Jane Russell as Dorothy:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.2

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

Stefan Zweig is a favourite writer of mine, I find him so insightful and compassionate. I also really like Pushkin Press Classics published in the smaller editions with the French flaps, so I was pleased to find just such a copy of his 1927 novella Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman (transl. Anthea Bell 2003).

It opens at a guesthouse on the French Riviera, “ten years before the war” with the unnamed first-person narrator remembering the arrival of an attractive single man who quickly absconds with Henriette, the wife of a manufacturer. Her absence causes quite a stir:

“Silently, one by one, as if put to shame by so shattering an emotional outburst, we crept back to our rooms, while that stricken specimen of mankind shook and sobbed alone with himself in the dark as the building slowly laid itself to rest, whispering, muttering, murmuring and sighing.”

The narrator takes a more liberal view of Henriette’s conduct, which puts him at odds with the other guests. I enjoyed Zweig’s gentle humour here:

“Well, it’s of no importance here to go back in every detail over the stormy course of an argument conducted between soup and dessert: only professionals of the table d’hôte are  witty, and points made in the heat of a chance dispute at table are usually banal, since the speakers resort to them clumsily and in haste.”

The narrator’s assertion that “I’d rather understand others than condemn them.” attracts the attention of Mrs. C, who from the way she’s initially described sounded easily in her nineties, but as it turns out is sixty-seven! She deliberately builds an intimacy with the narrator in order to tell her story, and he becomes the silent interlocutor to her tale.

“It is intolerable to spend one’s whole life staring at a single point in it.”

She describes how, at the age of forty-two, grieving her husband and with her sons fully grown, she arrived at Monte Carlo.

“I came there out of tedium, out of the painful emptiness of the heart that wells up like nausea, and at least tries to nourish itself on small external stimulations.”

She is not a seasoned gambler, but her husband enjoyed the casinos so she visits, and there becomes consumed by the vision of a young man compulsively placing bets.

“His face spoke the same fantastically extravagant language of extremes as the hands”

[…]

“A fear of something dreadful, something I had felt invisibly enveloping the young man like a miasma from the first moment.”

What follows is a character study of Mrs C and a portrait of addiction which is entirely believable. With his characteristic humanity, discernment and understanding, Zweig considers the supressed tragedies of people’s lives and how we continue to live.

Twenty-four Hours in the Life of a Woman possibly felt more dramatic on initial publication – for twenty-first century readers nothing especially unpredictable takes place. But that is not to diminish it in any way. The evocation of strong feeling, and of trauma, is so sensitively realised that it remains a deeply affecting read.

This story has been filmed several times, including a made for television version with Ingrid Bergman. However, in its depiction of the glamour, seediness, seductions and betrayals of gambling, it also reminded me of a film I saw recently with lovely JacquiWIne, Bay of Angels:

“Who could be frightened in as wide and bright, as clean and quiet a house as this?” (Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road)

/ madamebibilophile / 32 Comments

One of the benefits of taking part in events like the 1961 Club, hosted by Kaggsy and Simon this week, is that it encourages me to finally get to novels languishing in the TBR, such as Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

I have enjoyed Richard Yates when I’ve read him previously but I also know that I kept putting off Revolutionary Road because he can be so bleak. And it is bleak, good grief. But Yates is such a great writer that reading this was never a slog, and I whizzed through his first novel.

The two protagonists, married couple April (“A tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty”) and Frank Wheeler (“the kind of unemphatic good looks that an advertising photographer might use to portray the discerning consumer of well-made but inexpensive merchandise”) are just shy of thirty and living in suburban Connecticut in 1955.

Frank would probably take issue with the authorial description above, as he sees himself as “an intense, nicotine stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man,”.

Frank and April are monumentally smug and pretentious, seeing themselves as living in suburbia with two children, a job in the city for him and role as a homemaker for her, but somehow above it all and different to their neighbours, all of whom are doing exactly the same:

“Intelligent, thinking people could take things like this in their stride, just as they took the larger absurdities of deadly dull jobs in the city and deadly dull homes in the suburbs. Economic circumstance might force you to live in this environment, but the important thing was to keep from being contaminated. The important thing, always, was to remember who you were.”

A crisis early on forces April to feel that she cannot continue. She feels their life needs enormous change and that she is to blame for holding Frank and his immense mind back.

“this idea that people have to resign from real life and ‘settle down’ when they have families. It’s the great sentimental lie of the suburbs, and I’ve been making you subscribe to it all this time. I’ve been making you live by it!”

What she fails to realise is that her husband is deeply ordinary, no great thinker, and with no discernible talent at anything so far. So her plan that they move to France and she work while he simply lives off her while he decides what to do, is fundamentally flawed.

Yates expertly portrays these two young people bound up in each other’s idea of who they are; feeding one another’s vanities and delusions. They become excited at the plan and for a while it rejuvenates their relationship:

“He felt tense and keyed up; the very act of sitting on a coffee table seemed an original and wonderful thing to do.”

However, the reader is more aware than April that her husband is not entirely convinced of the plan. Deep down, he knows his inadequacy, and his play-acting.

“he found he had made all his molars ache by holding them clamped too long for an effect of  grim-jawed determination by candlelight”

When April finds herself pregnant again, Frank sees a way out. They will have to stay in suburbia to raise their third child. April disagrees, and the strain and tension in their marriage gradually tightens to breaking point…

Revolutionary Road is an absolute masterpiece and it is astonishing that it was Yates first novel. The characterisation is unblinking; the post-war American Dream with all its materialistic conformity is minutely dissected.

What I found so clever was that having found April and Frank vain, shallow, and condescending for almost all the novel, by the end I felt desperately sad and sorry for both of them. Yates has written a tragedy, and suggested it is occurring daily behind the manicured lawns and bright smiles of middle-class, mid-century America.

“It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. Proud floodlights were trained on some of the lawns, on some of the neat front doors and on the hips of some of the berthed, ice-cream colored automobiles.”

To end, a trailer for the 2008 adaptation, which I know I’ve seen but don’t really remember. Time for a rewatch:

“Every woman who writes is a survivor.” (Tillie Olsen)

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

Simon and Kaggsy are running one of their marvellous Club events all week, this time it is the 1961 Club. I’m hoping to do a few posts, and I’m starting with a short story.

Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen is a collection of four stories, with the titular tale published in 1961, so that is the one I will concentrate on. But all four are expertly realised with distinct narrative voices and I really recommend the whole collection.

Tell Me a Riddle looks at the last year or so together of a couple who emigrated from Russia (as the author’s parents had done). It opens:

“For forty-seven years they had been married. How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could say – but only now, when tending to the needs of others no longer shackled them together, the roots swelled up visible, split the earth between them, and the tearing shook even to the children, long since grown.”

This antagonistic couple are not mellowing with age. He wants to move to supported accommodation, the Haven, she is determined to stay put. The fury of the sacrifices she has made throughout married life spill out, as he tries to entice her:

“A reading circle. Chekhov they read that you like, and Peretz. Cultured people at the Haven that you would enjoy.”

“Enjoy!” She tasted the word. “Now, when it pleases you, you find a reading circle for me. And forty years ago, when children were morsels and there was a Circle, did you stay home with them once so I could go? Even once? You trained me well. I do not need others to enjoy. Others!” Her voice trembled. “Because you want to be there with others. Already it makes me sick to think of you always around others. Clown, grimacer, floormat, yesman, entertainer, whatever they want of you.”

Having not spoken her resentments previously, she now digs her heels in:

“Enough. Now they had no children. Let him wrack his head for how they would live. She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.”

The impasse escalates, with neither seeming to be anywhere close to winning, until events overtake them and her health begins to deteriorate:

“A bellyful of bitterness and every day the same quarrel in a new way and a different old grievance the old quarrel forced her to enter and relive. And the new torment: I am not really sick, the doctor said it, then why do I feel so sick?”

They move around the USA, visiting children and grandchildren, both reflecting on what they left behind and what lives they have enabled their children to create. Olsen analyses the promises and shortfalls of the American Dream through ordinary lives.

At the start of the story the husband has called his wife “Mrs Word Miser”, among other epithets. But by the end, as she lays dying in bed:

“The week Lennie and Helen came, the fever returned. With it the excited laugh, and incessant words. She, who in her life had spoken but seldom and then only when necessary (never having learned the easy, social uses of words), now in dying, spoke incessantly.”

The deathbed scenes are vivid and affecting. In a short space of around 50 pages Olsen brings her characters into noisy, awkward being and achieves what takes some writers ten times the space. She has absolute command of the short story and uses it expertly.

I realise I’ve made the story sound quite depressing, but while it is sad, I didn’t find it bleak. The characters are so strong and determined, and the voices so true and clear, that Tell Me Riddle conveys an energy which isn’t depleting.

I have Olsen’s novella Yonnonido in the TBR which I keep putting off – I’m really looking forward to picking it up now.

To end, a song from 1961 that I thought was much later in the decade, probably because it is such a timeless classic: