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.”
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:
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.
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:
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:
It tells the story of Constance Smith and her childhood friend Caroline Cameron, who find themselves living together again in the early days of World War II. Caroline is urbane and worldly, leaving behind her life in London with her husband John. She is entirely self-focussed and amoral, but also quite caring regarding people. Despite her shortcomings, I really liked her.
Constance could not be more different. We are introduced to her early on through the thoughts of the billeting officer who is trying to persuade people in the quiet village of Chesterford to take evacuees:
“Mrs Latchford grimaced and lit a cigarette. A thoroughly unenviable job altogether, and she felt she deserved a few minutes respite with nice, schoolgirlish, foolish Constance Smith. Foolish? Well, of course, it always looked a little foolish to see a woman of over thirty behaving like an enthusiastic bride, even after two years of marriage. But apart from that and her volubility and her poppings out and her nippings in and all her silly mannerisms, was Constance at all foolish? Certainly she handled the relations-in-law-in-the-village situation well, or rather did not handle it at all, but accepted it so naturally and pleasantly that she might really be said to be on the best of terms with her sister-in-law, Mary Hodges, the local greengrocer’s wife.”
Her husband Alfred is an utterly self-centred snob, intent on social climbing and ashamed of his sister. He married well-to-do Constance for social advancement and he doesn’t love her. Caroline sees this clearly on arrival in the village with her daughter Margeurite.
The other evacuee is Mrs Gossage, who seems entirely disinterested in everyone, including her baby son Norman.
We follow this unlikely group of housemates as they adjust to their much-changed living arrangements. The story moves between the characters but is told primarily from Caroline’s point of view, which I thought worked well. She has good insights into other people and is entirely clear-sighted about herself too:
“There was a certain note in her voice that led Caroline to suspect that Lavinia belonged to that large class of people who find children sweet, but rather prefer they should go and be sweet upstairs in the nursery. It was an attitude she entirely sympathised with and absolutely hated people for.”
Constance as narrator would be far too guileless to carry the reader along. And of course, Caroline’s arrival in the village offers an outsider’s view on the characters and various intrigues. But what is lovely too, is Caroline’s changing attitude towards the village. Initially she is greatly amused by everyone, but as time moves on she starts to see them as real people, her “strange lapses into sincerity” possibly becoming longer lasting. This isn’t a trite city-girl-learns-the-true-value-of-Things-when-forced-into-small-town-life tale however. Orange is not at all sentimental about people:
“Caroline, looking at the expression on Mary’s face, marvelled at the extraordinary cruelty of the thoroughly respectable woman.”
“There was no doubt Constance, in her misery, was very pathetic. There was no doubt she was also rather irritating.”
But there’s not a bitter tone either. I found the characters recognisable and portrayed with human understanding. Caroline would be rather a controversial figure for the time, but Orange doesn’t judge her.
“It’s my red finger-nails that put the idea of asking me into her head, I’m sure.”
I liked the fact that Caroline didn’t overly judge herself, which would seem somehow hypocritical, but she does recognise that her actions hurt people, which she regrets.
There are serious concerns in Tom Tiddler’s Ground; adultery, bigamy, child neglect and lack of choices for women. Somehow Orange balances that with a knowing humour without belittling the issues at all.
My favourite character was George, Constance’s gentle, drifting brother:
“What could you do with a man who loved women, who loved domestic life, but who (according to Constance) had never seemed to want to marry anyone in particular? A man who obviously adored other people’s children, but who had none of his own? A man who had plenty of personality and probably (under all that indolence) considerable abilities, but who had never settled any profession or career? The only answer was – nothing, you could do nothing with him. And […] that was, of course, what George preferred. Caroline liked him enormously.”
We learn more about George’s background, who to my twenty-first century eyes had PTSD from World War I. Orange builds to a satisfying denouement, tying up many characters pasts with the present in a way that promises a better future, despite the war.
I really loved Tom Tiddler’s Ground, and got very excited about the thought of exploring Ursula Orange further, thinking the humour and characterisation made her another Margery Sharp. However, Stacy Marking’s excellent introduction to this edition explains the publishers took exception to Caroline as a character, and so she adjusted her style for later books, which also contained more snobbery (somewhat in evidence here but not overly stressed – Mrs Gossage is definitely treated with condescension, but also compassion). If anyone has read any other novels by Ursula Orange I’d love to know how you found them, especially as DSP publish some other titles.
“‘I suppose we ought to be thinking about Christmas,’ said Constance, a few days later. Everybody became conscious of a very strong disinclination to think about anything of the sort.”
To end, it’s a time of year when Nat King Cole is on heavy rotation, and quite right too. Here he is singing about orange (sort of 😉 )
Happy Birthday Beryl Bainbridge, who would have been 91 today! I thought I wouldn’t manage a post for Reading Beryl Week hosted by Annabookbel as I had a couple of false starts. I love Beryl but the two I had in the TBR didn’t work for me – probably the wrong time (I seem to be catching #AllTheWinterViruses).
Then I thought I’d let fate decide (admittedly I knew the odds were stacked in my favour, but I just like to pretend to myself that I’m not always going to buy a book 😀 ) and I went to the consistently wonderful charity bookshop across the road from me… of course they had plenty on their shelves, including one I keep meaning to read, An Awfully Big Adventure (1989).
I could just squeeze it in because Beryl generally wrote very short novels; this one comes in at 197 pages. So I’m counting it towards Novellas in November too, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and BookishBeck.
Set just after the war, young Stella is encouraged to pursue dramatic interests by her Uncle Vernon, who feels she needs an outlet for all her feelings:
“Emotions weren’t like washing. There was no call to peg them out for all the world to see.”
But despite Stella’s emotional reactivity, she is also strangely detached. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Lily raised her, but she is not intimate with them. She never talks to them about what is happening for her or how she feels.
This theme of the distances between people continues when Stella joins an acting troupe at the local theatre, helping backstage and playing small parts. There are complex histories, resentments and intrigues between the players, which Stella only partly grasps.
“Bunny agreed with Meredith that there was nothing wrong with Dawn Allenby apart from her love of beauty, an affliction she was ill-equipped to fight. He put it in a nutshell when he said she was the sort of girl who, if there had been a meadow handy, would have been out there in a flash picking cowslips.”
Stella is naïve and self-focussed, which means the reader sees much more than she does. She can make sharp observations but lacks the sophistication to fully comprehend their meaning. She falls for Meredith, the nicotine-stained, spiky director:
“She suspected it was education and breeding that enabled him to keep his face and his feelings separate.”
But she is so wrapped up in her own feelings she barely registers how little she knows of him, or his lack of any interest in her:
“Endeavouring to be what she imagined was his ideal, she altered her demeanour several times a day.”
The reader knows Stella will never, ever be Meredith’s ideal. But Stella remains wilfully ignorant and intent on very shaky self-reinvention. I would say this seems to be a recurrent theme in Bainbridge – the psychological warfare people can wage on one another, though self-involved disregard of others, rather than outright mendacity.
Also typical of Bainbridge is the witty, pithy turn of phrase and humour threaded throughout the darkness.
“She plumped out my vowels. I tend to have flat ones. It’s to do with catarrh as much as region.”
Apparently An Awfully Big Adventure was partly biographical with Bainbridge drawing on her time working at the Liverpool Playhouse. It certainly felt very authentic, with lots of detail about the daily drudge of postwar life, such as when Stella wants a bath:
“It meant paraffin had to be fetched from Cairo Joe’s chandlers shop next door to the Greek Orthodox Church, and then the stove lugged two flights of up the stairs and the blanket nailed to the window with tacks. In the alleyway beyond the back wall stood a row of disused stables and a bombed house with the wallpaper hanging in shreds from the chimney breast, and sometimes women, no better than they ought to be, lured men into the ruined shadows.”
An Awfully Big Adventure is ultimately very dark. Stella’s seduction by seasoned actor PL O’Hara is treated by Stella with the same detachment with which she views nearly all her relationships. But the consequences will be tragic, and again, the reader is left to realise far more than Stella.
For newcomers to Bainbridge, this would be a good place to start. It covers many of the themes she returns to and is so tonally distinctive, in the way her novels are. For those who are already fans, she is at the height of her powers here. An Awfully Big Adventure was one of the five books that gained her a Booker nomination, which she never won.
“In the end everyone expected a return on love, demanded a rebate of gratitude or respect. It was no different from collecting the deposit on lemonade bottles.”
To end, An Awfully Big Adventure was adapted to film in 1995. I have a vague memory of seeing it in the cinema at the time. This trailer has reminded me how perfectly cast it was, and how much I miss Alan Rickman’s performances:
This is my final post for the 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, which has been running all week. It’s been a great event as always, and I’m really pleased it prompted me to pick the three I’ve read off the TBR pile at long last!
(Please note, despite the subject matter I’ve made a deliberate choice not to draw contemporary parallels. I think Lisa explained this decision really well in her blog post here.)
I adored Giorgio Bassani’s The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1958) when I read it last year, so I had high expectations when I approached The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (transl. Jamie McKendrick, 2007), the third book in his Romanzo di Ferrara cycle. It fully lived up to those expectations.
The unnamed narrator tells us in the Prologue that he is looking back from 1957 to a time before World War II. However the tone is more elegiac than nostalgic, as he also tells us that those he recalls perished in concentration camps.
Before the war the Finzi-Continis were a prosperous family, but the conflict destroyed them and all they owned. The large house is now squatted in, and the titular space:
“All the broad-canopied trees, limes, elms, beeches, poplars, plane trees, horse chestnuts, pines, firs, larches, cedars of Lebanon, cypresses, oaks, holm oaks, and even the palm trees and eucalyptuses planted in their hundreds by Josette Artom during the last two years of the first world war, were cut down for firewood, and for some time the land had returned to the state it was in when Moisè Finzi-Contini acquired it”
So it is with this knowledge that we then meet the younger, somewhat callow narrator, and follow his developing friendship with the younger Finzi-Contini’s, Alberto and Micòl, son and daughter of Professor Ermanno and Signor Olga.
Racial laws are coming into effect in Italy in the late 1930s, and this sees the narrator invited into the walled estate, as Jewish people are banned from places such as the local tennis club.
“They entirely left aside the existence of a far greater intimacy, a secret one, to be valued only by those who shared it, which derived from the fact that our two families, not by choice, but by virtue of a tradition more ancient than any possible memory, belonged to the same religious observance, or more accurately to the same ’School’”
Despite the growing pressures of the outside world, within the Finzi-Continis walls the narrator remembers a time where:
“The weather remained perfect, held in that state of magical suspension, of glassy, luminous, soft immobility which is the special gift of some of our autumns. In the garden it was hot, just slightly less than if it was summer.”
In this enchanted space the narrator falls for Micòl, but their relationship never develops, characterised by misunderstandings and ambiguity that they are too young to resolve. Being too young for what life throws at you is also shown through the political conversations with Giampi Malnate, an older Christian friend of Alberto, as well as an experience of terminal illness.
What I thought was so subtle and clever from Bassani is that nothing overly dramatic happens. Rather, things fade out. The huge events that we know are looming take place outside of the novel, and instead we are shown how we can take for granted the moments that seemingly have no wider ramifications. Except of course, they do. This is a formative time for the narrator.
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is not a plot-driven novel. It is a beautifully written evocation of a time before unimagined horrors. It is reflective and elegiac in tone without ever letting sentimentality lessen the portrait of a family obliterated by the Holocaust. It’s a truly devastating read.
The novel was adapted into a film in 1970, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar that year. Has anyone seen it? It looks pretty faithful to the book so I’m interested to watch it:
This is my second contribution to the 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, which is running all week. Do check out all the wonderful posts!
I picked up Life at the Top by John Braine because it is the sequel to Room at the Top (1957) which I really rated, with its depiction of the postwar north of England and Joe Lampton’s determination to leave his working -class life behind, whilst juggling complex sexual relationships. Life at the Top I didn’t find as compelling, but there was still a lot to enjoy.
Set ten years after Room at the Top, the novel follows Joe as he lives the life he thought he always wanted. Even if you’ve not read the first novel, take a guess as to how that’s working out for him 😀
“The truth was that I actually wanted a drink now, I wanted something to blur things slightly, to put a haze between me and the pink wallpaper and the pink cupboards and the white refrigerator and the electric oven and the mixing machine and the pink wall table and the pink covered stool; it was too bright and shiny and hygienic at eight o’clock on a March morning with Harling Crescent quiet under the weight of Sunday, it reminded me rather too coldly that I was thirty-five and a father of two children and at least ten pounds overweight.”
Joe adores his young daughter Barbara but feels alienated from his son Harry, who has been sent away to a school of his grandfather’s choosing. He and his wife Susan still sexually desire one another, but there seems to be little intimacy. Working at the family firm (Susan’s family), Joe is frustrated:
“I had stopped wanting things. I wanted power, power to put through my own ideas; I wanted to be taken seriously, I wanted to be something more than the boss’s son-in-law.”
He is going to become a local councillor, but that doesn’t suggest fulfilment to him (nor should it, bloomin’ Tory! 😀 )
“The prosperous middle-aged grumblers, the solid sensible citizens; I would sit here or in the committee room listening to them; taking great care not to offend them, and without my realising it, I would become exactly like them. Waiting my turn to grumble, waiting my turn for thrombosis, waiting my turn for death.”
So what does Joe do? Talk honestly with his nearest and dearest? Seek out a life of authenticity? Reflect honestly on the deep-rooted cause of his dissatisfaction and what he can do to make his life more fulfilling? No, of course not. He starts an affair with an attractive young journalist named Norah Hauxley and runs away to London. The shadow of his former lover (from Room at the Top) still looms large, and I felt Alice was really the only woman Joe had loved:
“She was grown up. I hadn’t met a grown up woman in ten years, and for ten years I hadn’t felt the need to be with one. And Alice, even Alice, had been broken somewhere, she had lost the habit of happiness.”
Joe is not likable. He takes decisions that hurt others. He behaves selfishly. He’s a bit of a misogynist.But still I found myself staying alongside him as narrator, because he’s so honest. He doesn’t ask the reader to like him, because he doesn’t much like himself. I thought Braine did a brilliant job of presenting a man so of his time, and so completely believable.
Life at the Top doesn’t have a huge amount of plot, but I found it a compelling read in its honesty, particularly around flawed human relationships.
“I looked at her in surprise; I had not felt so close to her since we were first married. But I made no move to comfort her.”
Life at the Top is a short read, and I may not have stuck with it had it been longer. But as it was it was well-judged, and there are some developments in Joe’s familial relationships toward the end that I found truly moving. I’m glad the 1962 Club prompted me to finally pick this one up after it had been languishing in the TBR for many a year.
Life at the Top was adapted into a film in 1965, with the magnetic Laurence Harvey, who also starred in Room at the Top. Unfortunately the director changed from the first excellent film, and although I tried to watch the sequel, I found it so heavy-handed and unsubtle compared to the book that I gave up. But it did make me appreciate the book more!
So rather than a trailer for the film, here’s a 1962 song about rain, which the West Yorkshire town of Warley would be no stranger to:
The 1962 Club, hosted by Simon and Kaggsy, starts today and is running all week which I am very excited about 😊 The Club weeks are always great and I’m really looking forward to seeing the posts. This is the first of what I hope will be three contributions, but as I never blog as much as I mean to, failure is almost inevitable!
The Golden Spur was Dawn Powell’s last novel, and it’s a humorous look at the bohemian arts scene of late 1950s New York, specifically Greenwich Village. This was a world Powell was very much a part of and my edition features an effusive introduction from Gore Vidal who was one of her close friends.
We are introduced to the artists and writers – both up and coming, and those very much faded and failing – their hangers-on and their varied associates through the outsider view of Jonathan Jaimison. He is in his late twenties and recently discovered that his father isn’t the domineering tyrant he grew up with, but someone from this scene, back when his mother was hanging out with Prohibition-era flappers.
So Jonathan leaves his Ohio home and soon makes his way to the titular bar, at the start of his quest to find his biological father:
“Through a gap in the plum velvet cafe curtains he could see the bar … He breathed deep of the heady New York air, that delirious narcotic of ancient sewer dust, gasoline fumes, roasting coffee beans, and the harsh smell of the sea that intoxicates inland nostrils. Then he pushed open the door.”
He’s quickly adopted by Lize and Darcy, two frenemies who sleep with the same male artists, although it’s not entirely clear why, as they seem to have no great fondness for men or for art:
“The girls never asked questions about a man’s private interests or listened when he tried to tell them. For them it was enough that he was a man and that he was there. Who needs a talking man?”
“That his newest canvas was gone should have told her something, but she wasn’t sure which was the new one because all his pictures looked alike to Lize. Great lozenges of red and white (‘I love blood,’ he always said), black and grey squares (‘I love chess,’ he’d say), long green spikes (‘I love asparagus’). All Lize had learned about art from her life with painters was that the big pictures were for museums and the little ones for art.”
As Jonathan makes his way in New York, he moves between two generations: the young artists and the fading interwar generation. There is a nostalgia for the Prohibition period and what New York was then which is beautifully evoked, alongside a recognition that New York is a city that continually makes itself and its inhabitants anew:
“Jonathan recognised New York as home. His whole appearance changed overnight, shoulders broadened, apologetic skulk became swagger; he looked strangers in the eye and found friendship wherever he turned. With the blight of Jaimison heritage removed, his future became marvellously incalculable, the city seemed born fresh for his delight. He took for granted that his mother’s little world, into which he had dropped, was the city’s very heart.”
Although The Golden Spur is described as a comic novel, I didn’t find it laugh-out-loud funny. Rather I’d describe it as affectionately satirical. It ribs the 1950s arts scene and the vacuous people drawn to it, but it never has a bitter or nasty tone:
“Anybody with a tube of paint and a board was an artist. But writers were not writers unless decently unpublished or forever muffled by a Foundation placebo.”
“‘I just want to be overestimated,’ Earl shouted, ‘like everybody else, goddammit.’”
Despite the overarching plot being Jonathan’s search, this really isn’t a plot-driven novel. Rather, the question of his paternity is a device to introduce the various characters and their world. It’s a novel to read for the evocation of the city, of a particular society found within it, and for the characterisation and the wit. In the way that Tales of the City was serialised in the San Franciso Chronicle, I felt The Golden Spur could have worked similarly in The Village Voice. It’s almost a series of sketches, albeit well realised ones.
I can’t say I loved this quite as much as Gore Vidal clearly did, but then he probably recognised a lot of the characters and situations within the novel. I still found a great deal to enjoy, and Powell certainly has a way with words:
“She was making more and more passes at the wrong men, then trying to recoup with stately cultural pronouncements in her refined Carolina accent, which she kept polished up like her grandfather’s shotgun, ready to bring recalcitrant suitors into line.”
To end, I was going to go with the song Little Lize because that’s the only other time I’ve come across the name. I thought it would be easy to get a good quality version as the massively successful Fisherman’s Friends have recorded it. But I couldn’t find a decent one so here they are instead singing about never leaving home. New York isn’t for everyone…
Daunt Books are such an interesting publisher and I was keen to read Natalia Ginzburg having heard wonderful things in the blogosphere, so I swooped on All Our Yesterdays (1952, transl. Angus Davidson 1956) when it turned up in my local charity bookshop. I think I’d read somewhere that this wasn’t the best place to start with this author, but I absolutely loved it.
The novel follows two families living in a northern Italian town from the 1930s, through the war years to peacetime. Although the blurb on the French flaps of my edition suggests Anna, the daughter of the poorer family, is the protagonist, really Ginzburg follows them all to a greater or lesser extent, with no overarching plot other than the sequence of years.
Although this approach sounds like a shortcoming, it works so well. It’s not a documentary novel but it gestures towards this with an omniscient neutral(ish) viewpoint and only reported speech. This felt unusual to read, but is so clever in capturing the everyday experiences of those living through extraordinary circumstances.
Anna’s siblings are Concettina, Ippolito, and Giustino. Concettina is popular with boys but struggles to find a purpose in life; Ippolito channels his energies into anti-Fascist activities with his friend from the richer family across the road:
“Emanuele and Ippolito did not even know Italy, they had never seen anything except their own little town, and they imagined the whole of Italy to be like their own little town, an Italy of teachers and accountants with a few workmen thrown in, but even the workmen and the accountants became rather like teachers in their imagination.”
Their lives are equally dictated by world events and by commonplace ones. Anna falls pregnant by her boyfriend and marries an eccentric older man, Cenzo Rena, moving with him to the southern village of Borgo San Costanzo. Her affair with her self-involved, callow boyfriend was no great passion, and while her marriage to Cenzo Rena attracts approbation, he is a warmer, more generous man than the one her own age.
“She was alone with Giuma’s face that gave her a stab of pain in her heart, and every day she would be going back with Giuma amongst the bushes on the river bank, every day she would see again that face with the rumpled forelock and the tightly closed eyelids, that face that had lost all trace both of words and of thoughts of her.”
These are people destined to be on the outskirts of war. Cenzo Rena holds a lot of sway in his local area and does help Jewish people fleeing the Nazi occupation, but on the whole the story of All Our Yesterdays is not one involving soldiers or revolutionaries. It is about ordinary people and for them the conflicts of war are reported facts not lived experience. The latter for them includes a lot of mundanity:
“And the bread in town was rationed and was a kind of soft, grey dough that you couldn’t ever digest, the bread was like the soap and the soap was like the bread, both washing and eating had become very difficult.”
Yet this doesn’t mean the story isn’t affecting, or that the characters avoid tragedy. There are some truly tragic events that are hugely affecting. Ginzburg manages to be even-handed in her treatment of her characters but not detached. Her writing is warm but unsentimental as she demonstrates that flawed people are as worthy of love and mourning as idealised ones.
In case I’ve made it sound unremittingly serious, I should mention that there humour in All Our Yesterdays too. There are romantic entanglements that are treated with a degree of levity, and eccentric housekeepers/family retainers with various foibles. All life is here.
I can’t think of another writer who approaches Ginzburg’s style, and looking back on it I can’t explain how she does what she does. This was a story that snuck up on me, the deceptively simple storytelling drawing me in more than I realised until I was totally immersed. An extraordinary novel.
“Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was away fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exultation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.”
To end, of course there’s a very famous song I could post on the theme of Yesterday, but instead, to continue the mix of despair alongside levity: have you seen a parrot singing Creep by Radiohead?
madame bibi lophile recommends 