twentieth century novels

“As a psychologist she began to suspect she was a very good teacher of French.” (Josephine Tey, Miss Pym Disposes)

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I dithered a bit about posting on Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey (1946) as although I enjoyed it, I wasn’t really sure if I could recommend it onwards. It’s an unusual novel written by an established author of the era of golden age detectives, where the murder doesn’t take place until page 157 of 208. There’s also a lot of dated stereotyping and language so do bear that in mind if you decide to pick it up.

My edition is from what I think of as the golden age of soft-focus cheese from the Penguin art department, circa mid 1970s-1980s.

But it’s perfect for #SpinsterSeptember hosted by @pearjelly, set as it is in Leys Physical Training College for young ladies, where the teachers are single women, and with a titular character who is also a spinster. Lucy Pym initially works as a French teacher:

“But after four years of that her remaining parent had died, leaving her two hundred and fifty pounds a year, and Lucy had dried her eyes with one hand and given in her resignation with the other.

[…]

She read her first book on psychology out of curiosity, because it seemed to her an interesting sort of thing; and she read all the rest to see if they were just as silly. By the time she had read thirty-seven books on the subject, she had evolved ideas of her own on psychology; at variance, of course, with all thirty-seven volumes read to date. In fact, the thirty-seven volumes seemed to her so idiotic and made her so angry that she sat down there and then and wrote reams of refutal. Since one cannot talk about psychology in anything but jargon, there being no English for most of it, the reams of refutal read very learnedly indeed.”

I did enjoy Tey’s humour around Lucy leaving her job! Clearly she was highly sceptical of psychology though, which is quite surprising given that in many ways this is a psychological study. Much of the novel is spent building her cast of characters and the insular environment of the college.

“College was a bright gateway to the future for deserving youth; and if one or two found the gateway a hazard rather than an opening, then it was unfortunate but no reflection on the builders of the gateway.

“Like a convent,” Nash had said yesterday morning. “No time to think of an outside world.” That was true. She had watched a day’s routine go by. She had also seen the students’ two daily papers lying unopened in the common-room last night as they went in to supper. But a nunnery, if it was a narrow world, was also a placid one. Uncompetitive. Assured. There was nothing of the nunnery about this over-anxious, wildly strenuous life. Only the self-absorption was the same; the narrowness.”

Lucy is there because she was asked by old schoolfriend Henrietta to give a talk, and at first the 5.30am bell ringing and horrific institutional food means she plans to leave as soon as possible. But gradually she begins to enjoy herself, and decides to stay for the end of term gymnastic demo. She enjoys the company of the senior girls, including charismatic head girl Pamela ‘Beau’ Nash; her best friend, the accomplished but self-effacing Mary Innes; and Teresa Desterro who is there to study dance only and hone her considerable talent. There is also Barbara Rouse, who people are wary of although it’s not clear why, and is the favourite of the headmistress, also for reasons unclear.

“In the last few years [Lucy] had been ignored, envied, admired, kow-towed to, and cultivated; but warm, personal liking was something she had not had since the Lower Fourth said goodbye to her, with a home-made pen-wiper and a speech by Gladys Someone-or-other, shortly after her legacy. To stay in this atmosphere of youth, of liking, of warmth, she was willing to overlook for a space the bells, the beans, and the bathrooms.”

The girls are waiting to find out which jobs have been found for them by their headmistress, and there’s a shock when the plum job at “Arlinghurst. The school for girls, of course. A sort of female Eton.” goes to an unexpected candidate.

So, someone gets killed, and Lucy uses, I would say, one and a half pieces of flimsy evidence to work out who did it. But actually, I don’t think the puzzle element is of particular interest to Tey. There’s a great Backlisted podcast episode on this novel from back in 2021, with Val McDermid who is really enthusiastic about Miss Pym Disposes. She argues Tey is more interested in morality; the motivations of it and the conundrums around it, and I think she’s right. The reasons I find golden age detective novels a comfort read – a puzzle worked out neatly, justice and order restored – are not present here. The ending is really quite stark, and readers are unlikely to find the outcome reassuring although it is believable.

I do recommend Miss Pym Disposes, but surprisingly, not as one to be read when you’re in the mood for a golden age mystery!

To end, initially nothing sprung to mind for a suitable song, before I realised that because Teresa is Brazilian, I could include a legendary musician from that country, Caetano Veloso:

“Being unmarried has its own status.” (Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died)

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I’ve been meaning to get back to reading Barbara Pym, and what better time than #SpinsterSeptember, hosted by @pear-jelly. Pym fills her novels with ‘excellent women’ spinsters, although the character of Leonora Eyre in The Sweet Dove Died (1978) is a bit of a departure. Pym observed in a letter to Phillip Larkin “I didn’t try to make it so, but tended to leave out boring cosiness and concentrate on the darker side.”

The novel opens with Humphrey Boyce, a middle-aged antique dealer and his young nephew James, helping Leonora Eyre from a Bond Street salesroom and taking her to lunch. Leonora has been overcome placing the winning bid for a Victorian flower book (!)

Everything about Leonora is performatively Victorian, summed up brilliantly in this description of her bedside table:

“Browning and Matthew Arnold—her favourite poets—took their place with her Guerlain cologne, a bottle of smelling salts, soft aquamarine paper tissues, a phial of brightly coloured pills to relieve stress and strain, and presiding over all these the faded photographs of a handsome man and a sweet faced woman in late-Victorian dress. Leonora had long ago decided that her grandparents were much more distinguished looking than her father and mother whose photographs had been hidden away in a drawer.”

Her romanticising of the bygone era doesn’t ever acknowledge that during that time, she would not have been allowed to inherit her parents estate or own property, two things which allow her to live out her entirely self-focussed twentieth-century life.

There is absolutely no generosity to Leonora, everything and everyone is about meeting her own needs. Thus as a love triangle of sorts emerges between the three, her motives are not inspired by who Humphrey or James are, but what they can do for her.

In fairness, James has no idea who he is either. He is in his twenties but remains curiously unformed, even allowing for his young age.

“James was not yet sure what he wanted from life, and had so far tended to avoid violent extremes of any kind.”

He has sexual dalliances with Phoebe, a young woman who he cares for very little, and Ned, a visiting American academic who is entirely uncommitted to him despite James wanting more. There is a lack of intimacy in James’ closest relationships, which is perhaps why he and Leonora are well-suited. She likes the flattery of an attentive younger man, but really wants very little else. Proud of her history of male suitors, none of them seem to actually have amounted to a relationship.

Aware she is losing her looks, Leonora still has admirers:

“One day, Humphrey flattered himself, she would become bored with the novelty of James’s youth and realise the more lasting qualities—virtues, almost—of a man nearer her own age who was tall and kept his figure and was bald only in the most distinguished kind of way.”

But even Humphrey is beginning to lose interest towards the end of the novel.

As we follow these curious three for a while, there is all of Pym’s brilliant social observation around English niceties and the exposure of character in the smallest of details. Yet there is more cruelty portrayed in this novel than I expect with Pym. Leonora behaves appallingly at times, and is truly unpleasant. Ned is in many ways her match, a young man at ease with hurting others to get what he wants. However, the author’s eye remains compassionate to them all, and so there is never a bitter taste left by what the reader witnesses. Rather it is all the foibles and follies Pym usually turns her attention to, but with a darker edge.

Although less humorous than some of her earlier novels, there is still humour to enjoy here, such as Humphrey’s vanity over his baldness, or the check he places on one flight of fancy:

“But he soon dismissed the picture from his mind as impossible and ludicrous. A woodland seduction scene between two middle-aged protagonists could only end in disaster.”

Towards the end, there is a real sense of impending, true sadness for Leonora, unless she mends her ways:

“She had always cared as much for inanimate objects as for people and now spent hours looking after her possessions, washing the china and cleaning the silver obsessively and rearranging them in her rooms.”

But Pym’s light touch remains, and so situations and people remain unresolved but not without hope.

This would be a great choice for a book group, as the characters remain somewhat enigmatic. No great insights or changes occur, their motivations and feelings oblique and unknown even to themselves. It would be interesting to hear a group discussion of how they each interpreted them…

I really enjoyed returning to Pym’s world, masterfully drawn, sharply observed, sympathetically portrayed without sentimentality. I’m hoping to get to Less Than Angels before the month is out!

“Without a watch, there’s just a spinning on through alcohol and human entanglements.” (Irmgard Keun, Ferdinand)

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I really enjoyed my first experience of Irmgard Keun when I read Child of All Nations last year, and so I was looking forward to picking her up again. Women in Translation Month provided the perfect opportunity. Ferdinand, The Man With the Kind Heart (1950, transl. Michael Hoffman 2020) was her final novel, written not long after the end of World War Two, and just a year after the division of Germany. (There is some dated language in the novel).

The story is told from the point of view of titular Ferdinand as he somewhat listlessly makes his way around war-torn Köln (Cologne). The privations continue and the illicit economy thrives. Keun is so witty and gives her narrator an inventive turn of phrase:

“The Moselle tastes as flaccid and murky as the decayed philanthropy of an unhappily married vintner. The Belgian cigarettes taste of rancid hay.”

His landlady Frau Stabhorn is thriving in her own way, renting her hallway to him as a room, making jam to sell and caring for her grandchildren.  Ferdinand’s experience of this brood is expressed with a degree of tolerant irony:

“Children are the bonny little blossoms in the mouldering garden of life. As I write, a couple of the bonny little blossoms are trying to spread a mixture of jam and plaster of paris all over my arms and legs.”

The book is really a series of portraits, with the plot mainly existing as the passage of time. We meet fellow lodgers:

“Lily is the victim of her beautiful feet. She studies chemistry and earns money on the side from knitting sweaters and writing.”

And poverty-stricken Ferdinand is later employed by a snake-oil salesman:

“Liebezhl draws horoscopes, reads palms, swings crystals, lays cards, sells amulets, and does a little podiatry.”  

Who offers him work as a sort of agony uncle:

“Waiting for me outside my office I had, among others, a man with broken fingernails, a wine grower who wanted to get married for the fourth time … five deserted wives, and a sixth who wished to be deserted because her husband snored. I had my work cut out for me.”

Meanwhile, Ferdinand is trying to work out how to get out of his engagement, again observed with a certain ironic detachment:

“There are three items that Luise managed to hang onto throughout the war: a stove, an electric iron, and me. All three of us are a little impaired, and not quite good as new. But Luise is hanging tenaciously, not to say grimly, on to all of us. Her favourite is the stove, and next, even ahead of the iron, is me.”

So, there is a lot of humour in Ferdinand, but there are some very serious points that Keun makes too. And in fact I found the listless, plotless, artless quality to the character and the story to be a serious point too. Ferdinand was a solder and a prisoner of war. To me, his narrative style, his detachment, numbness, ironical distancing, lack of real interest in anything, was a portrait of trauma.

He doesn’t dwell on his past, but when mentioned it is striking:

“My only feeling was fear. I was swimming in an ocean of fear… I was afraid of the NCOs, headquarters, uniforms, barracks, corporals, the officers’ voices—the whole massive machinery of it.

I no longer saw human beings, all I saw were the mechanical manifestations of a force that hypnotised me to the point of crippling despair.”

There is also disgust and cynicism regarding former Nazis living their daily lives, such as Luise’s father:

“He settled down among the spoils of his wife and pouted. His wife and daughter waited on him, the household was his to command, and gradually he clambered back up to the temporarily vacant throne of the family dictator, and everyone tried to be as satisfied and dissatisfied as they’d been previously, in the good old days.”

And sadly of course, his observations have not dated, although specifics change:

“Dictatorships are always very strict about what they understand as morals and public ethics. Our former unlimited German dictatorship has, in the way of lower life forms, procreated by simple fission, and is now called democracy.”

All in all, I found Ferdinand an intriguing read. There was a sense at the end that despite being the titular character and first-person narrator, he had slipped through my fingers. But as I thought about how this was the point, I found this very affecting. Cologne and its citizens were in a process of recovery, trying to understand what remained and how to live after devastation (60% of the city was bombed). As an exploration of the aftermath of war on individuals and on society, it was skilled, subtle and truly moving.

“There are people to whom the whole world is a toy, and who love it and take it as seriously and carefully as they take their toys.”

“Here they were, wrecked together on the edge of Europe as on an island and she was learning to keep her thoughts to herself.” (The Spoilt City, Olivia Manning)

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It was a conversation with Marcie in the comments of Jacqui’s Levant Trilogy post which led to us doing a buddy read for all three volumes of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy this year. We started with The Great Fortune (1960) in June, and now onto the second instalment, The Spoilt City (1962).

It took me a while to get into The Great Fortune, but by the end I was whizzing through and couldn’t wait to start The Spoilt City. I’m clearly in the rhythm of Manning’s writing now because I sank right in and absolutely loved this second volume.

(What I decided I didn’t love was the omnibus edition I started with, so I’ve bought these Windmill Editions now and I’m much happier).

The city is Bucharest in 1940, and we follow still-fairly-recently married Guy and Harriet Pringle as the physical and social environment they are used to disintegrates around them.

“On the pavement the Guardist youths with their banners and pamphlets, were still trying to rouse revolt. Although a sense of revolt agitated the nerves like an electric storm that would not break, the city was lethargic, the palace dormant, its white blinds drawn down against the tedium of the afternoon.”

This volume is increasingly tense, the Nazi threat growing ever-closer. Guy is still teaching English at the university, but both students and the staff group are rapidly dwindling.

“With uncomplaining enthusiasm, Guy did much more than was expected of him; but he was not imposed upon. He did what he wanted to do and did it, Harriet believed, to keep reality at bay.”

Guy’s boss Inchcape is also determined to keep the Department open, even as dangers grow. This volume is more emotionally affecting than the first, I found this particularly true in a scene with the older single women of the department being forced to leave for their own safety, as well as Inchcape having to face his vulnerabilities to a shocking extent.

This forms the shifting and stressful background to the Pringles’ early marriage. Both Harriet and Guy have to acknowledge their profound differences in how they approach life and see things:

“It was probably significant that he was physically short-sighted. He could not recognise people until almost upon them. Their faces were like so many buns. good-natured buns, he would have said, but Harriet did not agree. She saw them in detail and did not like them any the better for it.”

“He saw her muddled and lost in anarchy and a childish mysticism.”

Guy’s belief in communism gives him more certainty, a grounding as the ground constantly shifts beneath them. Still, their marriage seems underpinned by a great deal of love for each other, although the reader is not privy to any declarations.

My favourite character Yakimov is still racketing around, trying to sell his beloved Hispano-Suiza car even as no-one has money for fuel. He is still living with the Pringles and Harriet despairs.

“If she wanted to get rid of him, she would have to pack his bags herself and lock him out. And if she did that, he would probably sit on the doorstep until Guy brought him back in again.”

Yaki behaves appallingly in the first part of the novel, before redeeming himself beautifully at the end, making his portrayal one of the most comedic, disturbing and complex in The Spoilt City. Apparently based on Julian Maclaren-Ross, I really should learn more about this Fitzrovian dandy poet. Anthony Powell based X Trapnel on him in A Dance to the Music of Time, and he certainly seems a character…

What struck me most in this volume, apart from the evocation of physically crumbling environs, was the ambivalence, or perhaps resignation, of most of the people Harriet interacts with. As long as they are safe and their lives continue in a way that works for them, they don’t seem to particularly care who is in charge. This made me realise the oppositional Second World War narratives I’ve taken for granted until now; I am used to films and books where people are firmly on the side of the Allies or the Axis powers, not indifferent between the two.

This is brought into sharp focus by Harriet’s English friend, Bella:

“Her skin apricot, her hair bleached by the sun, Bella was looking extremely handsome and seemed almost intoxicated by the night’s happenings.

‘How wonderful to have a strong man in power!’ she said. ‘Everyone is saying that Romania will regain her territory.’

‘What makes them think that?’

‘Because Antonescu is a real dictator. He knows how to deal with Hitler and Musso. He’s one of them. I don’t mind betting, within three months, this country will be on its feet again.’”

Later they meet again, Bella delighting in all she can buy as prices tumble, when they run into each other under a newly erected swastika flag:

“Elated by her rising fortune, she looked up and smiled at the flag and the clear pale sky beyond it. ‘I love this time of year,’ she said. ‘so delicious after the fug of summer. It makes one feel so alive.’

She seemed aglitter with life, almost dancing in her new green lizard skin shoes.”

Astonishingly, it is only Guy who overtly acknowledges what is behind the flag, the only one who says “I couldn’t stand it. I kept thinking of the concentration camps.”

Manning leaves spaces in her narrative so we assume Harriet is of a similar mind, although her primary worry is for the safety of Guy, vulnerable under the new regime because of his communist beliefs and willingness to teach Jewish students.

The Pringles are also at risk as they still have sweet Sacha Drucker in their flat, and early on we know they have been betrayed and are likely to be raided…

“Truth is a luxury. We can only afford it now and then.”

The Spoilt City is a novel which conveys the physical and human devastation wreaked by war for those not directly caught in conflict. It is deeply moving without being remotely sentimental, and feels entirely believable. I found myself completely caught up in the Pringles’ lives and even (shock horror!) warming to Guy. I’m impatient to read volume three, Friends and Heroes.

I wound up googling Hispano-Suiza cars as Yaki describes his so lovingly. I can’t drive and I’m entirely uninterested in cars, but even I can see this is a lovely machine:

“It occurred to her that they were not, in fact, grown-up enough for the life they were living.” (Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune)

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It was JacquiWine’s enthusiasm for Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy which caused me to add it to the TBR, and a conversation with Marcie in the comments of Jacqui’s Levant Trilogy post which led to me finally getting the first instalment read! I’m delighted that Marcie and I are doing a buddy read for all three volumes this year, starting with The Great Fortune (1960) in June.

I’d originally planned to get this read by good time starting in April, but life took over, then novellas, and I’ve ended up finishing it on 29 June – one day spare! It says something for Manning’s writing that even my terrible memory and total inability with names kept her pretty large cast of characters straight despite a gap of about 8 weeks or so…

Guy and Harriet Pringle are newly married. The book opens with their arrival in Bucharest, a new experience for Harriet, but Guy has been there a year, working for the British Council at the university. It is 1939 and the new war across Europe looms large.

“‘Who is that?’ Harriet whispered. ‘Does he know us?’

‘Everyone knows us. We are the English. We are at war.’

‘But who is he?’

‘lonescu, the Minister of Information. He’s always here.’

‘How odd to live in such a small capital!’

‘There are advantages. Whatever happens here, one is in the midst of it.’”

It’s a time of adjustment to a new life and each other, against a rapidly changing, unstable background. Harriet begins to realise they are not easily compatible, with Guy’s relentless sociability at odds with her need for intimacy:

“They had slipped into marriage as though there could be no other possibly resolution of such an encounter. Yet — supposing she had known him better? Supposing she had known him for a year and during that time observed him in all his other relationships? She would have hesitated, thinking the net of his affections too widespread to hold the weighty accompaniment of marriage.”

The characterisation of these two young people is complex. Although Guy is constantly in company, this is motivated by his communist beliefs and a general generosity of spirit, rather than any particular interest or warmth regarding individuals.

“Guy said: ‘He leads his life, as we all do. What do you care what he does?’

‘Naturally I’m interested.’

‘Why be interested in people’s private lives? What they are pleased to let us know should be enough for us.’

‘Well, I just am. You’re interested in ideas; I in people. If you were more interested in people, you might not like them so much.’

Guy did not reply. Harriet supposed he was reflecting on the logic of her statement, but when he spoke she realised he had not given it a thought.”

My experience of Guy was that he was one of the most irritating, infuriating characters I’ve ever come across. His generosity paradoxically made him entirely selfish, as he seemed to have no real consideration for Harriet at all. She isn’t particularly likeable either, often xenophobic and begrudging with people. But as their relationship matures, she is more forgiving than me, recognising “a husband made unreliable only by his abysmal kindness”.

Manning makes them both so real (apparently based on her and her husband) that it became of little consequence that I didn’t like them – I wanted to hear about their lives at this time. Guy does live by his ideals, so he is not a deliberately unkind person, just utterly oblivious. He has enough redeeming qualities for Harriet’s love to be understandable:

“We must help him, not because he’s a good person but because he needs help. You understand that.”

Through Guy, we meet a range of characters who have ended up in Bucharest at this particular moment. These include but are not limited to:

Sophie, a student Guy considering marrying in order for her to have a passport – in his usual way he is unconcerned regarding her being in love with him; Sacha is another of his students, part of an immensely rich family called the Druckers; Harriet makes friends with Bella, an English woman married to a Romanian, Nikko Niculescu; we meet staff at the university, and journalists at the English Bar. Manning handles her large cast deftly, and even the less prominent characters are sketched distinctly.

There is also my favourite character – in many ways equally irritating as Guy – Prince Yakimov, an Irish/Russian prince. Yakimov is perpetually sponging off his friends, promising an always due to arrive remittance, pleading with them to pity “poor Yaki”. He is preoccupied by fine food, and starving most of the time. His English is peppered with phrases that sound almost Wodehouseian. He is utterly ill-equipped to deal with life in any way whatsoever, and yet somehow he endures on his own terms:

“Had Yakimov been content to eat modestly, he could have existed from one remittance to the next, but he was not content. When his allowance arrived, he ate himself into a stupor, then, penniless again, returned, a beggar, to the English Bar. It was not that he despised simple food. He despised no food of any kind. When he could afford nothing more, he would go to the Dâmbovița and eat the peasant’s staple food, a mess of maize. But food, rich food, was an obsessive longing. He needed it as other men need drink, tobacco or drugs.”

The progress of the war is documented, but never heavy-handed. The characters stop by a publicly displayed map of Europe which shows the fall of Poland and the invasion of Denmark, Norway, and the Low Countries. Through the journalists in the English bar, the Battle of Dunkirk is relayed.

As the risk to Harriet and Guy grows, he responds surprisingly by becoming entirely wrapped up in producing a performance of Troilus and Cressida. I found this an intriguing choice by Manning. One of Shakespeare’s less well-known plays, it is tonally deeply odd. A tragedy but filled with unpleasant characters, a comedy but in bad taste a lot of the time. Harriet observes that everyone seems to be playing themselves. Yaki is commended for his portrayal of Pandarus, but Pandarus is a pimp. The play ends with that character wishing venereal disease on the audience – yuck. I love Shakespeare but Troilus and Cressida tests that assertion more than any other of his works.

It is a play about the Trojan war, so in a way it shows again how young and naïve so many of the characters are, play-acting while a very real war grows ever-more threatening. It also adds to the general sense of uncertainty, with very little to secure your knowledge or hope upon.

“Guy came hurrying in behind them. […] His size gave her an illusion of security — for it was, she was coming to believe, no more than an illusion. He was one of those harbours that prove to be too shallow: there was no getting into it. For him, personal relationships were incidental. His fulfilment came from the outside world.”

This volume ends in June 1940, and so as readers we know that these characters still have so much conflict to live through.

I’ve only scratched the surface of The Great Fortune, but this post is already far too long! It took me a while to get back into this novel, before something clicked and I whizzed through the remainder. I’m really looking forward to carrying on the story with The Spoilt City.  

In 1987, the BBC made both trilogies into a seven-part series, which seems a lot to squeeze in. I think I might give it a try, once I’ve finished reading them all…

If anyone would like to join us for this buddy read, please do! We’ll be posting in The Spoilt City in August and Friends and Heroes in October.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To joining the Ziegfeld Follies:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.4

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

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

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

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

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

She does, however, attract a novelist:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, she’s not wrong…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.3

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I hadn’t heard of Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter (1945, transl. Elizabeth Mayer, Marianne Moore 1945) before, despite the fact that according to the back cover, Thomas Mann called Stifter “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature”.  I picked it up because NYRB Classics always prove interesting, and this was no exception.

It opens with beautiful descriptions of its alpine setting:

“Among the high mountains of our country there is a little village with a small but needle-fine church-spire. Conspicuous above the green of abundant fruit trees, this spire—because the slates are painted vermilion—can be seen far and wide against the faint blue of the mountains.”

Rock Crystal is a Christmas story, and so the weather is very different:

“On the mountain, in winter, the two pinnacles called ‘horns’ are snow white and on clear days stand out in the dusky atmosphere with blinding brilliance; all the alpine meadows at the base of the summits are white then, as well as their sloping shoulders; even the precipitous rock faces or walls as the people call them, are coated with a white velvet nap of hoar-frost and glazed with ice tissue.”

And so the scene is exquisitely set for a fable, almost a fairytale. Certainly Rock Crystal’s central premise is a fairytale trope: two young children Conrad and Sanna, live in a village high in the Alps and walk through the forest to visit their grandparents in the valley.

They visit, collect their presents, and their grandmother warns them not to dawdle as they head back home. On the way home, the clear bright day changes rapidly with snow fall.

“There had descended upon everything a pervading sense of peace. Not the sound of a bird, although a few birds usually flit about in the woods even in winter, and the children on their way to Millsdorf that morning had heard them twitter.”

I thought the detail of the birds was so clever, horribly foreboding even as the children enjoy the snow.

Gradually the snow obliterates everything, so they lose their markers and without realising it walk onto a glacier.

“It was entirely dry, and they had smooth ice to walk on. But the whole cavern was blue, bluer than anything on earth, a blue deeper and finer than the vault of heaven itself, blue as azure glass with a faint light inside. There were massive ribs overhead, and more delicate ones, with pendant icicles, point lace, and tassels, the way leading further still—they knew not how far but they did not go on.”

Stifter places the reader alongside the children as they find some shelter as night falls and struggle not to fall asleep, knowing the dangers of doing so. I really couldn’t determine how this would work out.  

And so the story, beautifully told, becomes unbearably tense. The complete disorientation is vividly conveyed, and these two small children against the immensity of the environment seem utterly lost.

In the introduction, WH Auden amusingly observes that Stifter takes “breathtaking risks of appalling banalities” yet somehow avoids them all. Who am I to disagree?

Rock Crystal quietly evokes the power of love of family, of community, and of place. A truly memorable read.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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