twentieth century fiction

“I record these speculations…to emphasise the difficulty in understanding, even remotely, why people behave as they do.” (Anthony Powell)

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I’ve just managed to keep up my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence this April! It’s been a bit of a month and May looks equally challenging so I won’t be doing my Novella a Day in May this year, though I will focus on novellas for the month as I had some lined up that I’m really keen to read.

Back to A Dance to the Music of Time! Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

The fourth volume, At Lady Molly’s, was published in 1957 and is set in the 1930s before the start of World War Two. Politics is only mentioned very occasionally though, and the focus remains on the relationships between an insular set of people.

This is the volume where I started to get a sense of the dance. With marriages a strong theme, the characters circle around, encountering one another for periods before spinning off again. Others weave in and out.

 Nick is now working as a script writer and his affair has ended. At the start of the novel he is taken by a colleague to a party at Lady Molly Jeavons. Once again he runs into acquaintance/talisman Widmerpool:

“Yet, for some reason, I was quite glad to see him again. His reappearance, especially in that place, helped to prove somehow rather consolingly, that life continued its mysterious, patterned way. Widmerpool was a recurring milestone on the road”

Widmerpool is engaged to Mildred Haycock, who is quite a few years older than him and has a colourfully described past. Later we learn that Widmerpool’s political aspirations are growing, and there is a chilling speech he gives Nick over lunch at his club, in favour of appeasement of Hitler.

Once again I was struck by Powells astute, clear-sighted assessment of people. Surrounded as it is by a satirical comedy of manners, he can really pack a punch when he chooses.

“Sentiment and power, each in their way, supply something to feed the mind, if not the heart. They are therefore elements operated often to excess by persons in temperament unable to love at all, yet at the same time unwilling to be left out of the fun, or to bear the social stigma of living emotionally uninteresting lives.”

There are lighter portraits too of course. My favourite in At Lady Molly’s was retired General Alymer Conyers. In his eighties, he spends his retirement reading Virginia Woolf, practising the cello, and learning about psychoanalysis:

“‘Been reading a lot about it lately,’ said the General. ‘Freud – Jung – haven’t much use for Adler. Something in it, you know. Tells you why you do things. All the same, I didn’t find it much help in understanding Orlando.’

Once more he fell into a state of coma.”

Quiggin and Mona Templar reappear (“She was like a strapping statue of Venus conceived at a period when more than a touch of vulgarity had found its way into classical sculpture.” Ouch.) living in a cottage owned by Erridge, who is now Lord Warminster. The lord of the manor dresses in scrappy clothes, has a big beard and gives a lot of his money away to good causes. I work near Shoreditch so none of this sounds like remotely remarkable manhood to me, but to his 1930s aristocratic family he seems mad. I’ve read somewhere he may have been based on George Orwell!

Nick meets two of Erridge’s sisters when he visits, including Isabel, “a bit of a highbrow when she isn’t going to night clubs”. He falls in love at first sight but their courtship happens entirely away from the eyes of the reader. Powell’s interest isn’t romance, but rather the dynamics of relationships and how these play out in the wider world.

“Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.”

There are so many ways A Dance… is of its time (which I think is exactly as intended) but it also doesn’t age, through Powell’s astute characterisation. I was very struck by this comment early on in At Lady Molly’s:

“One of those men oddly prevalent in Victorian times who sought personal power through buffoonery”

You don’t have to look very far back through our Prime Ministers to find a much more recent example…

I absolutely whizzed through At Lady Molly’s and I’m really looking forward the next volume, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.

To end, a beautifully simple rendition of a song about Molly:

“Life was not an art-form, or rather, it was an extremely mixed genre.” (Antal Szerb)

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Back in February, I read a collection of Antal Szerb’s short stories for the #ReadIndies event: Love in a Bottle published by Pushkin Press. I really enjoyed his writing and had his novel Journey by Moonlight (transl. Len Rix 2000) in the TBR too, which I decided to save for this week’s 1937 Club hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book.

When I think of farce, I tend to think of very broad-strokes comedy. Yet Journey by Moonlight manages to portray farcical circumstances with light humour and characterisation of great subtlety.

It begins with Mihály and Erzsi on honeymoon, having decided to formalise their relationship after an affair behind the back of Erzsi’s husband Zoltan.

“It was not exactly new or surprising to her that Mihály could say and do things she failed to understand. For a time she had successfully concealed her lack of comprehension, wisely asking no questions and acting as if eternally familiar with everything to do with him. She knew that this wordless assumption of authority, which he thought of as her ancestral, intuitive woman’s wisdom, was her strongest means of holding on to him.

[..]

And yet they had married because he had decided they understood each other perfectly, and that, for both, the marriage rested on purely rational foundations and not fleeting passion. For just how long could that fiction be sustained?”

Well, in answer to that question, not very long at all. Mihály loses Erzsi on a train in Italy and makes very little effort to reunite with her. Hardly surprising, given that even when they were physically together she was an abstract concept to him more than an actual living, breathing woman, his wife.

“[Erzsi] had become for him a sort of beautiful memory. He drank heavily to sustain this mood, to make himself believe that he wasn’t with Erzsi but with the memory of Erzsi. With Erzsi as history.”

Mihály is a drifter. To all appearances he has lived a life of bourgeois predictability, but inwardly he has drifted into it. Now he creates an outward life which reflects his inner life.

“At home and abroad he had been schooled in mastery. Not self-mastery, but the mastery of his family, his father, the profession which did not interest him. Then he had taken his place in the firm.

[…]

He had forced himself to become something other than what he was, to live never after his own inclination but as he was expected to. The latest and not least heroic of these exertions had been his marriage.”

The difficulty for Mihály seems to be recognising what his own inclinations are. He hasn’t supressed any great yearning or talent to take the path he has.

His overwhelming preoccupation is with the past. Acknowledging “there’s no cure for nostalgia”, he finds it impossible to live in the now or to take meaningful action in the present. As Erzsi’s ex-husband observes, Mihály is a man “so utterly withdrawn and abstracted that you have no real relationship with anybody or anything”.

At the start of his honeymoon he runs into a childhood friend, conman and thief, János Szepetneki. This sends Mihály into a protracted reverie, thinking about his other friends from that time, the elusive and compelling siblings Éva and Tamás Ulpius, and the religiously-minded Ervin. They will recur throughout the narrative, both absent and present as memories, symbols and occasionally like János, actual people. 

What stops this being completely tedious and self-indulgent is the strong vein of humour running through Journey by Moonlight. It is not overtly comic but it is consistently ironic. Mihály is both serious and faintly ridiculous and his most dramatic moments are consistently undermined.

There are entertaining interludes with the various people he encounters. My favourite occurs when the one decisive act he plans for himself is halted by an almost stranger insisting he become a godfather to a child he has never met. This request for lifelong duty occurs for no apparent reason and is one which Mihály greets with extreme reluctance. And yet, he is drawn in and distracted from his course:

“How distressing that the most sublime moments and stages of our lives can be approached only with the most banal expressions; and that, probably, these are indeed our most banal moments. At such times we are no different from anyone else.”

Yet Szerb doesn’t let the humour undermine the message of Journey by Moonlight. He is exploring how, as human beings, we recognise and live a meaningful, worthwhile life for ourselves. It’s a fine balance which he achieves expertly (the only clunky part for me was a long exposition by an academic friend of Mihály’s on dying as erotic act).

“And again he had the feeling that the really important things were happening elsewhere, where he was not; that he had missed the secret signal. His road led absolutely nowhere and his nostalgia now would gnaw him eternally, remain eternally unquenched, until he too departed.”

Szerb portrays the despair of human beings alongside our ridiculousness, and he does it all with great compassion.

“And sublime and terrible things always happened to him when life was stupid and precious.”

Marina Sofia also reviewed Journey by Moonlight this week, and you can read her wonderful post here.

To end, of the many songs about the moon, I chose this one from björk, because I thought it fitted the tone of Journey by Moonlight well. She takes her art seriously but she’s not afraid to be silly too:

“Now that I’m over sixty I’m veering toward respectability.” (Shelley Winters)

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The 1937 Club is running all week, hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book. Often these Club years are a good opportunity to indulge in some golden age crime, and today I’m looking at one from the British Library Crime Classics series, which has been doing great work bringing many of them back.

I’ve read three other from the series by John Bude, all of which I enjoyed, so I was looking forward to The Cheltenham Square Murder.

Bude takes the trope of a closed circle of suspects and places them in a respectable square of Regency houses in the titular spa town.

“A quiet, residential backwater in which old people can grow becomingly older, undisturbed by the rush and clatter of a generation which has left them nothing but the memories of a past epoch.”

I always like a map or room plan in a novel and here we have a plan of the square and inhabitants, which wasn’t really needed but pleased me nonetheless.

The square couldn’t be more genteel. There is a man of the cloth and his sister; a doctor; a formidable spinster and her pack of dogs; two elderly sweet sisters; and a couple who look down on everyone but as they are titled no-one seems bothered.

The exceptions are Mr Buller, who seems a right wrong ‘un, and Captain Cotton who is a cad and a bounder. When the latter is shot in the head with an arrow through an open window while visiting the former, it sends everyone into a spiral.

“Rumour again stepped in. The Rev. Matthews was suspected of having connived with the murderer. Sir Wilfred and Lady Eleanor had fled from justice. Fitzgerald was the murderer. Dr. Pratt was the murderer. Poor Mr West had been arrested for the murder stepping onto the boat at Dover. Miss Boone had shot all her dogs and then attempted to take her own life. Currents and crosscurrents of suggestion and counter-suggestions crept into their shrinking ears and left the Misses Watt bewildered. They felt that at any moment, due to some horrible miscarriage of justice, they themselves might be warned that anything they had to say would be taken down in writing and (possibly) used in evidence.”

Thankfully, Superintendent Meredith, who has been such an effective sleuth in Budes other novels, is visiting his friend Aldous Barnet (from The Sussex Downs Murder) on the square, one of the few residents who doesn’t practice archery.  It’s agreed Meredith can consult on the case.

Well, I can only think that taking the waters at Cheltenham has a stultifying effect on Meredith’s powers, because there is something so completely, blindingly obvious about the crime, that he somehow fails to consider until page 161. His second in command is local police Inspector Long who, despite his clumsily evoked regional accent and general attitude of misogyny, is portrayed as quite capable. He doesn’t notice this either.

This made for a slightly frustrating read, as who the murderer was became clear quite quickly too. I don’t mind it when I guess the outcomes with golden age mysteries as they are my comfort read, and I like a police procedural, but this felt a bit plodding. 

There was still a lot to enjoy though. The exposure of rivalries, betrayals and tensions behind a respectable façade is always fun. The characterisation of the various neighbours is very well realised, and I also liked the setting and the use of the square as a way of expanding the country house murder story to a wider environment.

The humour is gentle, such as the Misses Watts panicking that they will be arrested, or the interrogation of a faded Bright Young Thing given to inappropriate chumminess:

“So you flatly deny it was you?

Absolutely flatly, old boy.”

The Cheltenham Square Murder ran to 285 pages in this edition and I think had it been 200 pages it would have been absolutely cracking. But as it was, still an enjoyable and diverting escapist read.

To end, of all the 80s pop videos I’ve posted on this blog, this might be the most 80s of all 😀

“All human beings, driven as they are at different speeds by the same Furies, are at close range equally extraordinary.” (Anthony Powell)

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It’s month three in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

Either I’m getting used to Powell’s syntax, or as he developed as a writer he found a fondness for full stops, because I found The Acceptance World (1955) had a much more comprehensible prose style than its two predecessors.

As usual Powell doesn’t explicitly state when the story is set, but a reference early on to “the country’s abandonment of the Gold Standard at about this time” means it starts around 1931. Economics feature heavily in The Acceptance World and the privileged circles Nick moves in are not entirely immune. There are frequent references to “the slump” taking a toll. Unfortunately political satire never seems to date;

“’Intelligence isn’t everything,’ I said, trying to pass the matter off lightly. ‘Look at the people in the Cabinet.’”

Schoolfriends and university friends reappear: Templer, Widmerpool, Stringham and Manners. The title is taken from recurring talisman/character Widmerpool’s new job. Templer tells Nick “’Widmerpool is joining the Acceptance World. […] he is going to become a bill-broker.’” This work, like most City work, makes absolutely no logical sense and reaps large financial rewards. Essentially Widmerpool accepts the transitory debts of companies and takes them on based on their reputation. Later in the novel Nick sees this principal applying more widely:

“The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element – happiness, for example – is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions are discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that.”

The tone felt more sombre in this volume. Having spent time with Nick through his schooldays and at debutante parties in the first two volumes, he is now nearing thirty. Europe’s economic and political situation, while not given lengthy consideration, is creeping into everyday life. On a smaller scale, there are divorces, disillusionment and alcoholism amongst his peer group. If this sounds too depressing, Powell’s satire keeps a sharp, humorous eye on proceedings, such as Stringham’s divorce:

“Soon after the decree had been made absolute, Peggy married a cousin, rather older than herself, and went to live in Yorkshire, where her husband possessed a large house, noted in books of authentically recorded ghost stories for being rather badly haunted.”

He also sets a humorous tone from the beginning, detailing a meeting with his Uncle Giles in an unprepossessing Bayswater hotel:

 “He spoke slowly, as if, after much thought, he had chosen me from an immense number of other nephews to show her at least one good example of what he was forced to endure in the way of relatives.”

The ‘her’ in quote above is Mrs Erdleigh, a dreamy woman who reads cards: “She seemed hardly to take in these trivialities, though she smiled all the while, quietly, almost rapturously, rather as if she were enjoying a warm bath after a trying day shopping.”

The novel expands on Nick’s circumstances of work a bit further, although it remains all a bit vague. He has published a novel but he says very little about it:

“‘I liked your first,’ said Quiggin.

 He conveyed by these words a note of warning that, in spite of his modified approval, things must not go too far where books were concerned.”

There is also consideration of women, as Nick begins an affair with an old friend. His observations are callow generalisations, but I don’t think the reader is supposed to find Nick particularly insightful or wise in this regard. In contrast, his observations about men are astute, from the comic summation:

“Like most men of his temperament, he held, on the whole, rather strict views regarding other people’s morals. […] In any case he was not greatly interested in such things unless himself involved.”

To a thoughtful consideration of those slightly older than him affected by the previous war:

“He seemed still young, a person like oneself; and yet at the same time his appearance and manner proclaimed that he had had time to live at least a few years of his grown-up life before the outbreak of war in 1914. Once I had thought of those who had known the epoch of my own childhood as ‘older people’. Then I found there existed people like Umfraville who seemed somehow to span the gap. They partook of both eras, specially forming the tone of the post war years; much more so, indeed, than the younger people. Most of them, like Umfraville, were melancholy; perhaps from the strain of living simultaneously in two different historical periods.”

I really enjoyed The Acceptance World and there’s so much I haven’t covered here. I’m starting to find returning to the sequence like sinking into a big squashy chair. Although it’s not a comfort read, Powell’s writing, his comedy and insights, and the (now) familiar world he creates are a joy to return to.

I’m also beginning to really understand the complexity and subtlety of what Powell is doing in A Dance to the Music of Time. His style is so deceptive; he seems to be writing about nothing while in fact he’s writing about everything:

“I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed.”

To end, in honour of Mrs Erdleigh:

“Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.” (D. H. Lawrence)

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For this final week of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s brilliant #ReadIndies event, I’m focusing on three books from Boiler House Press, and their Recovered Books series edited by Brad Bigelow, founder of www.neglectedbooks.com, which brings “forgotten and often difficult to find books back into print for a new generation to enjoy.”

Five years ago, I read Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar and it’s a novel that really stayed with me. The portrait of an isolated woman’s descent into serious mental illness, told from her own perspective, was deeply unsettling. I was put very much in mind of it when reading William’s Wife by Gertrude Trevelyan (1938).

At the start of the novel Jane is in her twenties and marrying the older, widowed Mr William Chirp, a local business owner.

“Jane had worked for her money, she knew the value of it. Knew how to save, and knew how to spend, too. All good quality, all of the very best. Mr Chirp might have done worse for a manager.”

But this is near the turn of the last century, and women are not managers of shops, they are managers of homes which are not as easy to leave. Jane is not a pleasant manager; she is quick to judge her maids and condescending, such as this early interaction over a fire:

“‘Why isn’t it laid,’ she asked haughtily, ‘this time of year?’ All alike.

‘The master wouldn’t never have it laid, not unless someone come. Will I lay it now, mum?’

Jane turned round sharply. ‘And quite right too. Wasting coal. No, certainly not.’”

Jane soon learns that it doesn’t matter if she knows how to spend on quality items, her husband will not have her spending at all. He is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. His want of generosity is spiritual as well as financial: he has no hobbies, no interests and no friends. His inability to value anything beyond material wealth accumulation for its own sake is brought into shocking focus during World War I:

“What the war was costing, that was what upset him. All those millions they wrote down in the papers. Though what was that to the government? The same as a few shillings to people like them. His face getting longer and longer, while he read about it. You’d think he was paying for it himself.”

Told in the third person from Jane’s perspective, the novel brilliantly builds the oppression of her marriage to this appalling person. Having Jane as not likable but still very sympathetic is a masterstroke by Trevelyan. It stops the tale becoming sentimental or easily dismissed as unrealistic. Instead, it is horribly believable.

The portrait of William is comical at times too, and this is finely judged. It doesn’t detract from the horror of Jane’s life with him at all. His reported speech is so minimal and trite as to be almost nonsensical. But his ridiculousness adds to the oppression: she is stuck with this man whose ignorance is so extensive as to make him absurd.

“At the end of April they stopped having the fire laid; the grate was filled in with crinkly blue paper in a fan. William sat with his feet in the fender and his hands, when he forgot, cupped over the paper fan.”

We see Jane scrabble to accumulate her own wealth through various small deceptions, necessary as her husband controls all her money and monitors it minutely. After he retires, William extends his miserliness to the time Jane spends away, commenting on the time whenever she returns from town. There is no physical violence in the marriage and no suggestion of what he will do if she takes longer than he thinks appropriate, but the control is absolute.

SPOILERS ahead: But further horrors await Jane when William dies. Her feelings of oppression do not dissipate, nor does her tight hold of money.

“It wasn’t until she found her money in the bag at the bottom of the basket and tipped it out carefully, with a cushion under, on the table, so that it shouldn’t chink, that she remembered William wasn’t about to hear it. It did seem queer, not having to be careful. Though it was all for the best, taking care; you never knew who might be about outside, listening to what was going on.”

She has taken on William’s prejudice, paranoia, and inability to spend. This escalates steadily, resulting in Jane moving several times and living in more and more straightened circumstances:

“She was so happy, having got away to herself, away from all that peeking and tittle-tattling, you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t likely she was going to give away where she was, and have them all coming round again, like flies around a honeypot.”

This is heartbreaking – there is no ‘all’. She has no friends, has alienated her step-daughter, and is entirely alone. As she stops washing herself and her clothes, she is far from a honeypot for anyone. We are kept inside Jane’s unhappy mind, recognising far more than she does about her behaviour and how she is viewed by others.

William’s Wife is a novel that really gets under your skin. The oppression that Jane suffers, firstly through her marriage and then through a mind traumatised by all the years she has endured within that institution, is subtly evoked but relentless. It is a novel of great compassion written with such clear-sightedness that its power – eighty-six years later when women in the UK have far greater financial rights – remains undeniable.

“Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.” (Albert Einstein)

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For the final week of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s brilliant #ReadIndies event, I’m focusing on three books from Boiler House Press. Specifically their Recovered Books series edited by Brad Bigelow, founder of www.neglectedbooks.com, which brings “forgotten and often difficult to find books back into print for a new generation to enjoy.”

My second read from the series is Two-Thousand Million Man-Power by Gertrude Trevelyan (1937). The title is the only part of this novel that feels cumbersome; Trevelyan writes with fluency and deftness that is so readable.

She follows Katherine and Robert from 1919 to 1936, from their meeting as young idealists through the strains of their marriage and the economic pressures exerted by forces beyond their control.

They belong to “The half-generation between the war and the post war. They had been brought up in one world and jerked out into another” and the novel explores this notion of them being somewhat lost, even from each other. They both struggle to know what to cling to in a time of rapid change.

When they meet, Robert is working as a cosmetic scientist during the day, and on his own formula for the nature of time from his dingy lodgings in the evening:

“He ate quickly, with appetite, undiscriminating. Turning his back on the meal he lit the gas over a small table near the window and felt in his pocket for the scrap of paper with the dotted figures. As the gas came up, the roofs outside the window turned dark grey. The drawer of the table stuck, half open. He banged it back and wrenched at it and found a wad of notes and pulled in his chair. The roofs outside turn black against the sky and then the sky blacked out.”

Katherine believes in lots of things that need capital letters:

“Katherine believed in progress. She believed in the League of Nations and International Goodwill, in Gilbert Murray and Lord Robert Cecil and H.A.L. Fisher, and in the wonders of Science.”

And so she gifts Robert these capital letters, deciding he is “Working Something Out.”

But gradually the societal forces they both wish to resist make themselves felt. They decide to marry, despite Katherine’s disdain:

“She had, besides, a contempt for married women – content with homes and babies and indifferent to the things that mattered: happy, she thought with a slight sneer, in an emotional and humiliating bondage – which made her, illogically, despise even their efforts to escape.”

She is monumentally judgemental of people. Katherine is an intellectual snob, but her love of ideas doesn’t involve any examining of her own life. This means she can stay secure in her absolute belief that she is somehow better and different to those she looks down on, despite appearing remarkably similar to them externally:

“‘We didn’t marry for bourgeois conventional reasons. Our marriage isn’t bourgeois. We married because we wanted to, that’s quite different, not because we were afraid.’”

Katherine loses her teaching job because married women weren’t allowed to continue in posts. Robert then loses his job due to the world economic crisis. This puts immense strain on them both. Katherine takes a private teaching job she despises; Robert very nearly breaks down entirely.

Throughout, Trevelyan weaves in summaries of world events before returning to the tight focus on Robert and Katherine. I’m not entirely sure how she managed it, but somehow this never felt gimmicky or jarring.

“Agricultural machines in France were grading and marking eggs at the rate of a hundred and twenty a minute. Escalators were speeding up, the biggest building in the Empire was in course of construction at Olympia, Katherine and Robert were in their white-enamelled kitchen one Sunday afternoon, washing the tea things in instantaneous hot water and hanging them to dry in an electrically heated rack.”

The fault lines in Robert and Katherine’s marriage, exposed by the economic strain, only widen. Hilariously, Katherine believes herself to be a communist, when she is in fact a relentless materialist. Trevelyan doesn’t judge her too harshly for this:

“She wanted security and comfort and a Life Worth Living. She wanted Robert to get a sound, decent, progressive job.”

Nothing wrong with any of that, except it does also involve Katherine thinking the world owes them some sort of moral obligation – that they “ought to have” things, and sustaining a consumerism that she entirely fails to see as such. Unable to see how her ideals of progress and modernity have become warped, she continues to position herself as intellectually and morally superior, when really it is only tastes in furnishings that separate her from those she is so condescending towards.

Robert meanwhile finds a way to survive in his work while his big idea amounts to very little, as the reader always knew it would. He has insight but no energy, Katherine the opposite. Two-Thousand Million Man-Power isn’t depressing, but I did find it sad. Ultimately Robert and Katherine seemed so isolated and stymied in very different ways.

I came away from this perceptive, clever and compassionate novel keen to read more by Trevelyan, so I was pleased I’d also ordered William’s Wife (1938). Of which more tomorrow!

“A gentleman is simply a patient wolf.” (Lana Turner)

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During this final week of Kaggsy and Lizzy’s brilliant #ReadIndies event, I’m going to focus on three books from Boiler House Press, and their Recovered Books series, which brings “forgotten and often difficult to find books back into print for a new generation to enjoy.”

I bought these books last year after Brad Bigelow, founder of www.neglectedbooks.com and inspiration for the series, tweeted about how precarious things were. This is why #ReadIndies is such a great event for encouraging support and celebration of indie publishers, whose survival is never guaranteed.

 In this first post, I’m looking at a tragi-comic novella, Gentleman Overboard by Herbert Clyde Lewis (1937).

Henry Preston Standish, “one of the world’s most boring men”, is aboard the SS Arabella steamship en route from Hawaii to Panama. When he slips on some grease he finds himself plunged into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, with hopes of rescue looking pretty slim.

When he first falls overboard, he finds it hard to raise his voice to shout for help, so deeply ingrained is his social conditioning.

“Men of Henry Preston Standish’s class did not go around falling off ships in the middle of the ocean; it just was not done, that was all.”

As he treads water waiting for the Arabella to notice his absence, he reflects on a life where “He did all the proper things, but without enthusiasm.” It’s a real masterstroke that Lewis makes Standish so ordinary, and places him in a situation that is both extreme but also unchanging – a vast expanse of calm ocean. Rather than making the novella dull, it enables a tightly-focussed narrative with a protagonist that inspires sympathy precisely because he is an everyman.

“The whole world was so quiet that Standish felt mystified. The lone ship ploughing through the broad sea, the myriad of stars fading out of the wide heavens – these were all elemental things that both soothed and troubled Standish. It was as if he were learning for the first time that all the vexatious problems of his life were meaningless and unimportant; and yet he felt ashamed at having had them in the same world that could create such a scene as this.”

Poor Standish takes time to realise the hopelessness of his situation, veering from imagined conversations with his family – still framing his experience within his social milieu even when the nearest person is miles away –  to considering drowning as an abstract notion rather than an impending reality:  

“It would not be so terrible to drown if a man went about it sensibly, without losing his head.”

Back on the Arabella, the remaining eight passengers take time to realise Standish is missing. Once they do, they invent a trauma for him – his loyal wife has, in their minds, run off with a “gigolo” – and start rewriting their experience of him in this light.

The humour in Gentleman Overboard is finely balanced. Standish’s desperate holding onto behavioural norms which are gradually shed as the enormity of his situation dawns on him, and the entirely fictional life story the other passengers invent for him, poke fun at the ridiculousness of human behaviour. But Lewis never suggests it is funny that Standish is in mortal danger, or that his dullness should mean it’s any easier for the reader to bear witness to his imminent death.

Brad Bigelow’s Afterword explains reviewers thought Gentleman Overboard both too short (The Saturday Review) and too long (Evelyn Waugh). I agree with those who felt the length was just right. It was long enough to create a moving portrait of a man, but short enough that the tight narrative’s commentary on human existence was made with the lightest touch. Truly memorable.

“But now he saw clearly that life was precious; that everything else, love, money, fame, was a sham when compared with the simple goodness of just not dying.”

“The business of her life was to get her daughters married.” (Jane Austen)

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It’s month two in my 2024 resolution to read a book per month from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. It was published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s. The sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

After reading A Question of Upbringing in January, I think I’ve adapted to Powell’s unusual prose style with long, meandering sentences. I had to remind myself in A Buyer’s Market (1952) that it was likely that very little was going to happen. Once I’d readjusted to the lack of plot, the style made more sense. It has the feel of extended reminiscences, with the reader listening in.

In A Buyer’s Market, Nick has left university and is working for a publishing house focussed on art books. That is about as much as we hear of his career, as the novel is concerned with the social life of the upper classes and the parties that form part of the season for debutantes. The time isn’t specified but it seems to be around the late 1920s.

Sometimes I joke with my mother that she gave birth 77 years too late. That, had I been born in 1900, it would have worked perfectly for me in terms of an adulthood in the era of my tastes in books, films, fashion, decor and architecture. But, as I don’t fancy being poor before the invention of the NHS, I’d have to be born into much richer circumstances and become a flapper. Well, A Buyer’s Market thoroughly disabused me of that notion. Goodness me, the round of parties seemed unutterably tedious. It says something for Powell’s writing that the novel wasn’t tedious at all.

The novel begins, after a brief flashback scene, with Nick attending a dinner party at Lady Walpole-Wilson’s:

“her comparative incapacity to control her own dinner parties, at which she was almost always especially discomposed, seemed to me a kind of mute personal protest against circumstances – in the shape of her husband’s retirement – having deprived her of the splendours, such as they were, of that position in life owed to her statuesque presence; for in those days I took a highly romantic view, not only of love, but also of such things as politics and government: supposing, for example, that eccentricity and ineptitude were unknown in circles where they might, in fact, be regarded – at least insofar as the official entertaining of all countries is concerned – almost as the rule rather than the exception.”

(Please note the quote above is one sentence!)

At this point Nick believes he is in love with Barbara Goring, but it is when she plays a prank on Nick’s old Eton associate Widmerpool, that he rapidly changes his mind. This is not through sympathy for Widmerpool to whom he still has ambivalent feelings, but there remain hints at the greater role he will play in Nick’s life:

“I did not, however, as yet see him as one of those symbolic figures, of whom most people possess at least one example, if not more, round whom the past and the future have a way of assembling.”

Nick and Widmerpool are having coffee at a street stand when they bump into Mr Deacon, an old artist friend of Nick’s parents, who is touting  disarmament pamphlets with a young woman, Gypsy Jones. Nick’s old schoolfriend Stringham arrives, and this unlikely quintet go to a second party at Mrs Andriadis’ – a more bohemian affair than the dinner, but one where Nick identifies  “almost exactly the same chilly undercurrent of conflict”.

If the cynicism wasn’t apparent enough in this volume’s title, Powell makes his feelings abundantly clear. The parties of this circuit are not joyful affairs, they are occasions where everyone wants something: spouses, social advancement, career advancement, money.

“Everyone used to say that dances bored them; especially those young men – with the honourable exception of Archie Gilbert – who never failed to respond to an invitation, and stayed, night after night, to the bitter end. Such complaints were made rather in the spirit of people who grumble at the inconvenience they suffer from others falling in love with them.”

It all sounds a bit desperate and boring.

Later in the novel Nick attends a party at Sir Magnus Donner’s castle, where many of the characters from the party appear again. It is a small social set but not an intimate one. Sir Magnus seems particularly unlikable and even sinister. One of my favourite passages was Nick’s spiky assessment of his host:

“Sir Magnus himself did not talk much, save intermittently to express some general opinion. His words, wafted during a comparative silence to the father end of the table, would have suggested on the lips of a lesser man processes of thought of a banality so painful – of such profound and arid depths, in which neither humour, nor imagination, nor indeed, any form of human understanding could be thought to play the smallest part – that I almost supposed him to be speaking ironically, or teasing his guests by acting the part of a bore in a drawing room comedy. I was far from understanding that the capacity of men interested in power is not necessarily expressed in the brilliance of their conversation.”

I mentioned when reading A Question of Upbringing that it was the satire that saved the novel for me and it is the same here. I doubt Anthony Powell saw himself as a subversive but he definitely has an assessing gaze regarding the privileged upper classes. I also thought it was notable what he doesn’t comment on. The need for an abortion is detailed but not judged, gay male characters have their sexuality mentioned in passing but again not judged. Both these were still illegal in the UK when this novel was published.

Although the theme of the novel is about commodification and how “Human life is lived largely at surface level”, I did feel the reader had a growing intimacy with Nick. Barely present in his own story in the first volume, in A Buyer’s Market Nick reported more of his own speech, motivations and feelings. This strengthened the storytelling and I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.

To end, after reading this novel, not even Liza can persuade me to come to the debutante’s ball:

“January, month of empty pockets! Let us endure this evil month.” (Colette)

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Happy Colette’s birthday! Regular readers will know how much I love Colette, and today I thought I’d look at two of her novellas which I had languishing in the TBR, La Vagabonde (The Vagabond) and L’Entrave (The Captive). Both follow periods in the life of Renée Néré, based on Colette’s experiences after her marriage to Willy ended.

In The Vagabond (1911, transl. © Martin Secker and Warburg 1954), Colette evokes beautifully her setting of Belle Époque music halls, and expertly weaves in her themes of aging, love and female freedom.

Renée has left her philandering husband Adolphe Taillandy and has no regrets about doing so. However, this has left her with no money, and so she has turned from her beloved writing to earn money on the stage.

“I had savoured the voluptuous pleasure of writing, the patient struggling with the phrase until it becomes supple and finally settles down, curled up like a tamed animal, the motionless lying in wait for a word by which in the end one ensnares it.”

She is in her early thirties, and painfully aware of aging in an industry that depends on appearance and artifice. Renée has a “face which is losing the habit of being looked at in daylight” and which poverty will not help. She enjoys the stage though, and the people in it.

“They swagger, tightly buttoned in a full-skirted overcoat of the fashion of two seasons ago; for the essential, the indispensable thing, is the possession not of a clean suit but of a ‘really classy’ overcoat which covers everything: threadbare waistcoat, shapeless jacket, trousers yellowed at the knees; a dashing, flashy overcoat, which makes an impression on the director or the agent, and which in the last resort enables one to throw off that ‘things aren’t shaping well’ in the jaunty tone of a man of means.”

Colette is not sentimental about the poverty or hardships of such a life. Early on she writes of the gradual but inevitable degradation of young chanteuse Jadin, in a way that is clear-sighted but heartbreaking.

Into Renée’s world comes Maxime Dufferein-Chautel, a rich feckless admirer. What follows is a love affair of sorts, one in which Renée never quite resolves her ambivalence.

“He does not want my well-being, this man, he merely wants me.”

“There are days when solitude, for someone of my age, is a heady wine which intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison which makes you beat your head against the wall.”

Maxime is not unpleasant or abusive, but he is pretty dull:

“I forgive him all this ordinariness for the sake of a simplicity which has nothing humble about it, and because he finds nothing to say about himself.”

And Renée is painfully aware that getting into a relationship with him may require more than she is willing to give. As her friend Hamond points out:

“Be frank, Renée, be clear sighted, and tell me whether all your sacrifices [within marriage] haven’t only lost their value in your eyes since you recovered your free will? You assess them at their true worth now that you no longer love.”

Renée is offered a tour and vacillates about whether to go. Ultimately she does and her letters to Maxime form the latter part of the novella, although we never see Maxime’s replies. The Vagabond is determinedly Renée’s story and her voice.

“This evening I should not feel sleepy, and the spell of a book – even a brand new book with that smell of printers ink and paper fresh from the press that makes you think of coal and trains and departures! – even that spell will not be able to distract me from myself.”

Despite The Vagabond’s various urban settings, there is still plenty for fans of Colette’s depictions of the natural world to enjoy, such as this description of early Spring in Paris:  

“Towards the end of the afternoon, a mauve mist veils the avenues so that you do not know where they end, and the unexpected discovery of a wild hyacinth, with its three slender bells of artless blue swaying in the wind, has all the charm of a stolen joy.”

The Vagabond is slightly plotted with very little happening. It is not a slight tale though, but rather a distinctive plea for female independence alongside a consideration of how to reconcile this with romantic love and material necessity.

“Are you not he who, thinking he is giving, takes for himself? You came to share my life. To share, yes: to take your share!”

The Captive (1913, transl. Antonia White 1964) is set three years later. Renée is now financially solvent due to a legacy and whiling away her time in the south of France. She is still living the itinerant hotel-based life, unable to fully adjust to her new circumstances: “when a dog has been kept a long time on a lead, it does not go prancing off the moment you undo the catch of its chain”.

She finds herself with an unlikely trio of friends. There is young May, self-mythologising and fragile:

“Nature has drawn all the features of laughter itself in her round childish face; a Cupid’s bow mouth that tilts up at the corners like her mischievous eyes, a short little nose with quivering nostrils. But gaiety is not a perpetual fidgeting that betrays a lack of security, it is not chatter full of recriminations, nor is it a craving for everything that intoxicates. Gaiety, it seems to me, is something calmer, something healthier, something more serious.”

There is also May’s brutish lover Jean, and their friend, the opium-addicted Masseau.

“Yes, I’ve had enough of those people, it’s true. But, besides beginning to know myself, I’m also beginning to know the advantages and disadvantages of this extraordinary part of the world where mornings are enchanting and the nights, however starry, make one shiver in the discomfort of a double climate. Here cold nights are not invigorating and warm nights throb with fever rather than with passion.”

At the beginning of the novel Renée is determined to remain celibate. However, for reasons that entirely escaped this reader, she is attracted to Jean.

“A kiss, and everything becomes simple and enjoyable and superficial – and also a trifle coarse.”

She leaves Nice for Geneva to try and resist him, but they are eventually reunited. Their affair is wholly unsatisfactory for both of them. Colette explores the experience of a relationship based on sexual attraction without emotional intimacy, when the latter is also desired by both but remains elusive.

“I have insulted this lover, out there alone in the soft spring night, restoring his own identity; I have insulted him by giving him my body and supposing that this was enough. He has returned the insult.”

Like The Vagabond, it is Renée’s thoughts and experiences that the reader is privy to. We know very little about Jean and even less about what he thinks and feels. While he is not likeable, the portrayal of the affair is quite even-handed, as Renée acknowledges how little she is able to give of herself. What she does give may be as much a performance as any she made on the stage:

“You pretend to love me, you do love me. Every minute your love creates a woman better and more beautiful than myself whom you forced me to resemble.”

Somehow I didn’t find The Captive too depressing, although I’m not entirely sure why. There is something resilient about Renée even when she seems to be taking such sad decisions. Although she is adrift at this point in her life, I felt there was some hope she’d start to feel more anchored within herself soon.

“The darkness is ebbing. A faint wind stirs the trees, bringing a green smell of trampled grass. Behind the plane trees, the mound of the fortifications is emerging from the dusk and the sky is taking on the colour of a field of blue flax the subdued, slightly grey, slightly melancholy tint over summer dawn over Paris.”

To end, I was looking for archive footage from Folies Bergère to reflect Renée’s career, which led me to loads of cabaret footage, which led me to loads of Cabaret footage, which led me to this performance by Liza Minelli. Basically all roads lead to Liza 😀 I’ll never not be astonished by how the chair doesn’t move until she wants it to – the woman must have abs of steel:

“Books do furnish a room.” (Anthony Powell)

/ madamebibilophile / 39 Comments

I’ve decided that 2024 will be the year of a reading project I’ve been considering for a while – a book per month throughout the year from Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence. Published between 1951 and 1975, and set from the early 1920s to the early 1970s, the sequence is narrated by Nicholas Jenkins, a man born into privilege and based on Powell himself.

What’s that you say? I have half-completed reading projects still languishing? I have a spiralling TBR that doesn’t need 12 more books added to it? Be gone! You are clearly a pragmatist and such attitudes have no place in my reading life 😀

In the first novel, A Question of Upbringing (1951), we follow Nick Jenkins from his school days at a thinly-disguised Eton to his university days at a thinly-disguised Balliol College, Oxford. Starting at School, we meet Jenkins’ friends Stringham and Templer, and hear of their frustrations with housemaster Le Bas.

“’He started life as a poet,’ Stringham said. ‘Did you know that? Years ago, after coming back from a holiday in Greece, he wrote some things he thought were frightfully good. He showed them to someone or other who pointed out that, as a matter of fact, they were frightfully bad. Le Bas never got over it.’

‘I can’t imagine anything more appalling than a poem by Le Bas,’ said Templer, ‘though I’m surprised he doesn’t make his pupils learn them.’

‘Who did he show them to?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Stringham. ‘Henry James, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or someone like that.’”

The boys are varying degrees of privileged, from uber-wealthy to moderately wealthy, from landed gentry to new money. The societal hierarchies are complex and imperfectly understood, even by those in their midst:

“Clearly some complicated process of sorting out was in progress among those who surrounded me: though only years later did I become aware of how early such voluntary segregations begin to develop; and of how they continue throughout life.”

In theory I have limited patience for such stories, after the enormous damage Eton-educated men and their cronies have done in UK politics. Yet I found myself enjoying A Question of Upbringing. I think because Powell doesn’t suggest the superiority of anyone he’s writing about or the systems in place, casting a satirical eye over it all.

For example, when Nick begins his travels, he finds himself hopelessly ill-equipped to comprehend any culture beyond his own:

“I had seen a provincial company perform The Doll’s House not many months before, and felt, with what I now see to have been quite inadmissible complacency, that I knew all about Ibsen’s countrymen.”

It is during these travels that he meets Widmerpool again, a boy somewhat disregarded as figure of fun at school, who shows himself to be more astute than Nick and the other pupils allowed for.

“Later in life, I learned that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction.”

Nothing of huge significance seemingly happens in A Question of Upbringing, but it wouldn’t surprise me if events somehow cast a long shadow in later volumes. As a standalone novel, Powell keeps the narrative compelling by picking out certain moments and impressions, rather than plodding through years with equal weighting. It’s a short novel, only 223 pages in my edition and this length worked well – satisfying but also with a sense of setting the scene for later novels.

It took me a while to adjust to Powell’s dense writing style; he likes long sentences of several clauses. Once I had got used to this though, I found myself swept along.

“The evening was decidedly cool, and rain was half-heartedly falling. I knew now that this parting was one of those final things that happen, recurrently, as time passes: until at last they may be recognised fairly easily as the close of a period. This was the last I should see of Stringham for a long time. The path had suddenly forked. With regret, I accepted the inevitability of circumstance. Human relationships flourish and decay, quickly and silently, so that those concerned scarcely know how brittle, or how inflexible, the ties that bind them have become.”

Nick is an enigmatic narrator. In this first volume he describes many people and events, observes whole scenes, without appearing to have spoken or acted himself at all. We learn very little about him. I found myself wondering why Powell had opted for an omnipresent narrator over an omniscient one, when Nick barely seems present. But that’s not a criticism, just what seemed a curious choice. Maybe Nick will emerge from his own story in the subsequent volumes. I’m looking forward to finding out.

To end, a dance from the 1950s, looking back to the 1920s: