twentieth century novels

“Domestic life in the past was smelly, cold, dirty and uncomfortable, but we have much to learn from it.” (Lucy Worsley)

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I’ve really enjoyed the three EH Young novels I’ve read but it’s been ages since I picked her up. I’m thankful to the 1937 Club, running all week and hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book for prompting me to get back to her!

 

Like the other novels by Young that I’ve read, Celia is set in the fictional Upper Radstowe (based on lovely Clifton in Bristol) amongst middle-class domestic life. Celia is forty-five, living in genteel shabbiness with her husband Gerald and their son Jimmy and daughter Catherine. She is quietly despairing.

Gerald is an architect who designs unimaginative houses that Celia despises: “here was the same puzzle of gain and loss, more money for the family and a little less beauty in the world.”

Young portrays with frankness that Celia and Gerald have a sexless marriage, because Celia cannot bear the thought of physical intimacy with her husband:

“by neglecting some of the duties of a good housewife, she stored the energy necessary for avoiding friction; by avoiding as much as possible, Gerald’s demonstrations of affection, and she had almost perfected her technique, she could give him the friendship and the kindness which vanished when more was asked of her.”

But in all honesty, she also neglects those other housewife duties too because they hold no real interest for her. She is an indifferent housekeeper (I can definitely relate) and cook, and spends a lot of her time at step removed from her surroundings. She dreams of a lost love – Richard, the brother of schoolfriend Pauline – and talks to herself.

“She had always a secret pride in its intangible persistence, its difference from a love nourished by the senses, and a more secret fear that what gave it life was its dreamlike quality.”

Those around her are used to vagueness and detachment. Living nearby is her “very stupid” sister May, her solicitor husband Stephen and their daughters including Susan. Celia’s brother John inherited the family drapery business and also lives close by, with his wife Julia and their various offspring. Another sister Hester is living a scandalously single life in London.

May and Julia form a pair, keeping each other company with their distracting daily small rivalries.

“She was congratulating herself on a superior wit because these two had supplied her with so much unintentional amusement, but she knew she had supplied them with something they valued more than laughter, an opportunity for criticism and disapproval.”

As the above quote shows, Celia can be judgemental of others. There are times when she is really quite cruel to her relatives, telling them what to do and not being entirely kind about it. But she is also fond, loving, intelligent, silly and funny. She’s a wonderful, fully-rounded, very believable creation.

The least likable character is her brother John: “John’s sense of duty towards his family was chiefly confined to criticism.” Even loving wife Julia loses patience with him at one point:

“She was enraged by John’s masculine belief in the sufficiency of his lasting passion for her, his primitive conviction that she was honoured by it and for its sake must gladly endure his faults of character and his intolerance of her own. In this rarely candid moment, she searched her mind for any other reason why she should like him and could not find one, but he was a habit and she would have been lost without him.”

We follow the extended family through various dramas, some larger than others. Stephen takes himself off for a few days, leaving May wondering if she’s been abandoned. John has to face his eldest son not wanting to follow him into the business. Celia’s son Jimmy has a crush on May’s daughter Susan (first cousins – eek). Celia has to wrestle with her mother-in-law, and there various intrigues which amount to very little. As Celia observes:

“I live in a teacup and forget it isn’t the whole world.”

However, Celia isn’t a comfort read. It is concerned with the realities of married life at a time when divorce was very rare and opportunities for women generally were very limited. Young portrays the frustrations, sadnesses, tedium, and even fear her characters experience alongside the small joys, affection and love in their lives.  It feels very real, and while it is not depressing it also doesn’t offer any false hope or sentiment either.

“The art of living, the only one Celia tried to practise, was as exacting as any other.”

By end of the novel the characters know themselves and each other slightly better, and have gained some wisdom and insight through small incremental steps. There are no major epiphanies and no huge outward changes. It is a finely written and closely observed tale of interwar middle-class lives that above everything else, carry on.

While it was an involving and affecting novel, I didn’t feel Celia was the strongest of Young’s work that I’ve read – there were too many superfluous characters and the light plotting couldn’t quite sustain the length. For me, it would have benefitted from cutting one branch of the family and around 100 pages. But EH Young not at her tip-top best is still so very good and there is a great deal to enjoy in Celia.

“She had a calm indifference to what anyone might think of her, not because she herself was indifferent people, but because while she was interested in herself, as any intelligent person must be, she did not expect or wish to arouse interest in others, she had no apologies to make for what she was not, or explanations of what she was.”

To end, a Bristolian classic:

“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” (Albert Einstein)

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This is the fourth of my planned daily posts for the wonderful 1937 Club, running all week and hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book.

Today I’m looking at the fifth of Angela Thirkell’s Barchester novels, Summer Half. Although strictly speaking, Barchester only features now and again, most of the novel being set in Southbridge School and the master’s homes.

Reading Angela Thirkell can be a trepidatious experience. I really enjoy her comedy, but she can also be an unmitigated snob and racism can filter in too. Thankfully, although there were brief elements of both in this novel, they were always short-lived. There are also repeated references to hitting women thrown casually into conversation, although no suggestion it would actually occur.

Those elements aside, I was in the mood for a comic novel featuring events of no consequence, and that was exactly what I got. I really enjoyed it!

Summer Half begins with Colin Keith, the least interesting of the characters, deciding to take a job teaching the Mixed Fifth at the local public school, Southbridge. His father is keen for him to become a barrister, but Colin decides for wholly flimsy reasons to educate the young. He has no vocation for it and finds the prospect terrifying.

“He saw himself falling in love with the headmaster’s wife, nourishing unwholesome passions for fair-haired youths, carrying on feuds, intrigues, vendettas with other masters, being despised because he hated cricket, being equally despised because he didn’t know the names of birds, possibly being involved in a murder which he could never prove he hadn’t committed, certainly marrying the matron.”

None of the above happens and thankfully the Mixed Fifth decide they like him and don’t give him a hard time. The irrepressible Tony Morland from earlier Barchester novels features – now an adolescent – along with his friends Eric Swan and chameleon-loving Hacker.

“Hiding their eagerness under an air of ancient wisdom, critically kind, agreeably aloof, living private lives in the public eye, exploring every wilderness of the mind, yet concerned with a tie or scarf.”

The Masters live in school during term time, and so Colin befriends Everard Carter, a teacher of ability and dedication, who isn’t remotely sentimental about his charges but admits: “I’m wretched without them.” There is also grumpy, socially inept Philip Winter, (a communist!) engaged to Rose Birkett, the beautiful “sparrow-wit” daughter of the headmaster.

Rose is the nearest the novel has to a villain, and she isn’t really villainous. She’s just monumentally self-focussed and devoid of any capacity to comprehend anyone’s needs beyond her own. She enjoys male attention (presumably because admirers will want to please her) and continuously gets engaged:

“What significance, if any, she attached to the word engaged, no one had yet discovered, unless it meant being taken out in the cars of the successive young men to whom she became attached. Her parents very much hoped she would grow out of the habit in time, but for the present all they could do was tolerate young Mr Winter and hope for the best.”

Colin takes Everard Carter to his home over the holidays, where he promptly falls in loves with Kate Keith, Colin’s sister.  Her frankly pathological obsession with darning everyone’s clothes and sewing on buttons doesn’t stop Carter from falling in love at first sight: “he saw his journey’s end”.

Lydia, Colin’s youngest sister, is quite the contrast to Kate. She is boisterous and given to fits of passion over Horace and Shakespeare, while proclaiming a future for herself of staying unmarried and breeding golden cocker spaniels. She also has no qualms about ripping her clothes, stuffing her food, and starting arguments with people she has perceived as doing wrong by those she cares about.

Needless to say, Lydia and Tony become good friends. I thought they were perfectly suited, both being characters I like and enjoy immensely in books, yet would find irritating beyond belief in real life.

We follow this privileged set through a summer of school, picnics, punting on rivers, tennis, croquet, unfounded jealousies and rivalries which are resolved amicably, and the most English of love affairs:

“If he did touch her he thought he might go mad, and as he was right at the end of the pew farthest from the door, that would have been uncomfortable for everyone.”

Summer Half is an ensemble piece where everyone bumbles along together more or less agreeably. Spiky, rude Philip is quite the reformed character by the end, and Rose remains entirely unreformed but nor is she punished.

There are some great comic set pieces, including such dramas as an overflowing bath, and the cleaning of a pond to avoid church attendance. That’s about as high as the stakes get, which was entirely what I wanted.

Summer Half  is an enjoyable, escapist read with no aspirations towards being anything other than it is, as Thirkell’s disclaimer at the start would indicate: “It seems to me extremely improbable that any such school, masters, or boys could ever have existed.” Sometimes we need a break, and for me this was exactly the right novel at the right time.

To end, there are many songs about summer which I could choose, but I’ve opted for this completely bonkers video, set for reasons that are entirely unfathomable, in a boys boarding school. It’s no wonder our country’s in the state it is if this is what goes on at Eton:

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” (George Orwell)

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This is my second contribution to the 1937 Club, running all week and hosted by Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book.

I’ve really enjoyed the Molly Keane novels I’ve read, but I think The Rising Tide might be my favourite of them all. There’s lots here that is familiar to readers of Keane’s work: Irish upper classes, Gothic Big Houses, controlling matriarchs, a stomach-churning obsession with bloodsports… but the edges were softened a bit here. The matriarchs were horribly believable yet not skirting quite as close to Gothic caricature as some of her creations; the bloodsports were referenced frequently but from the point of view of two people who hated them; snobbery was less to the fore.  Keane’s astute characterisation and observational skills were as sharp as ever and the descriptive writing – especially regarding clothes and gardens – absolutely sumptuous.

The Rising Tide opens at the start of the last century. The big house is Garonlea, and Lady Charlotte French-McGrath rules over it in a constant display of her mean spirit. Her style has all the fuss and overdecoration of the Victorian period, but without any generosity:

“No lighting or heating. Tepid bathwater at best. All the wallpaper dark green or dark red. Festoons of red velvet curtains, tassels, fringes. In this room seventeen ‘occasional’ tables beside big ones and a vase of flowers on each one.”

Charlotte’s devoted husband Ambrose really just wants to be left to walk in his woods. They have four young daughters out in society: Muriel, Enid, Violet and Diana, as well as an heir in their son Desmond.

“Really, there was nothing else to be done except the things that Lady Charlotte did and she did them with wrath and speed and efficiency and throughout showed an unflinching social front.”

Things change when Desmond brings his glittering, selfish fiancée Cynthia to Garonlea:

“‘Muriel, my dear, you may take Cynthia up to her room.’

‘Yes, I’m rather a dirty girl, I think,’ said Cynthia, blinking like a cat, gold cat in the warm light room where white chrysanthemums smelt antiseptically and a majestic silver tea service glittered on an elaborately clothed table.”

Cynthia charms everyone, especially youngest daughter Diana. Cynthia likes to be charming and she likes to be adored by all. Hence, her and Lady Charlotte’s relationship is doomed from the start, and as awful as Lady Charlotte is, Cynthia is no better. She is only concerned with making people worship her and has no interest in them beyond that:

“She was always thrilled by it [the worship] and it called out at moments a dramatic feeling of goodness and humanity in her, rather an imitation sensation perhaps and one that never lasted long enough to cause her any serious personal inconvenience.”

Diana, the youngest and most rebellious of the sisters, dislikes men, enjoys it when the fashion changes so she can cut her hair, wears trousers and she adores Cynthia. But Keane is never condescending or stereotyping towards Diana and the portrait is subtle. I read Diana’s attachment as romantic, but it isn’t possessive and in fact this could easily be my twenty-first century reading of an intense chaste attachment. (There’s another character who is definitely gay, and again he is not judged for this.) Later, Keane points out that Diana, in being left to tend her gardens and live a useful life, becomes the happiest of all the sisters, rather than pitiable or bitter for remaining unmarried.

One reservation Diana has regarding her beloved Cynthia is the treatment of her children. Simon and Susan are very different to their mother and she is cruel to them, forcing them into pursuits they find terrifying and otherwise utterly unconcerned with their lives:

“Cynthia was rather impersonal about the children. If they had not had decorative value and if they had not excited Desmond so much, she would have had very little to do with them. Perhaps when they were older and started riding they would be more interesting.”

“Why could they not love hunting and dogs and ratting and badger digging and their ponies, as all right-minded children should, instead of having to be compelled and encouraged to take their parts in these sports and pleasures?”

Yet Keane demonstrates sympathy for Cynthia too. It’s a small SPOILER to say that Desmond dies in World War I, and Cynthia did truly love him. This isn’t apparent to the rest of her family in her behaviour, as she manages her grief by throwing herself into the role of society hostess. She is made for this, as are the 1920s. As she parties, drinks to excess and has affairs, very few recognise the deep pain she is running from:

“If she could fill the present moment so that she need not look before or behind it, she found that she had some ease and quietness of mind. Hunting she thought was best, but what really made her nearest to forgetting was her perpetual and indefeatable success with the men.”

“All the rest of her life was a dangerous shell of pretence, a thin shell against her ear full of screaming whispers.”

This makes Cynthia understandable, but not any more likable. She is entirely selfish and there is no kindness in her. After the death of Lady Charlotte, she is mistress of Garonlea and Diana lives with her. Cynthia knows the trauma experienced by Diana within the walls of the house but does not make any allowances for her, as this would not be convenient.

“It was a pity that all these changes at Garonlea altered it so little for Diana. To her Garonlea was more itself than it had been before Cynthia had tore down its red wallpapers and hurled the unwanted ancestors into attics with their faces to the wall […] The spirit and power of Garonlea still lived with a tenfold strength. It was as if it stored and reserved its power for a future day. Quite literally the breath of such places, the strong camphor-filled breath, on the still laden air of an outdoor place thick with old childish memories filled Diana with hatred and a tremendous consciousness of things as they had been at Garonlea all her life till now.”

As the above paragraph shows, Keane makes Garonlea its own character too. It is a looming, energy-sapping, Gothic presence: “The ruthless benignancy of Garonlea and all that Garonlea stood for. It would always be the same, it always had been.”

This is such a long post and there’s loads I haven’t mentioned! Not least the descriptive writing. Details of clothes are used to emphasise the differences between the generations: the multi-layered, highly scaffolded dresses of the sisters, in contrast to the looser styles of the Bright Young Things who follow them. Keane’s love of gardening is apparent too, in detailed descriptions of the grounds:

“Near the house sunlight poured on flat grass and on groups of blue hydrangeas and thickets of red-hot pokers. It lay the length of the opened bank of the valley as hotly as in July. Black cattle standing close together in a ring of chestnut trees looked as if they were all carved from the same block and not yet unjoined from it. There was a shaken air of blue where the half turned bracken and the woods sloped down and up.”

The Rising Tide is such a rich novel and there’s so much to enjoy. Keane’s characterisation is sharp but never cruel, and her understanding of the societal changes that occurred in the first third of the twentieth century is acute. To those of you who have made it this far, thank you for sticking with me 😀

To end, a 1930s-style party tune on a Gothic theme, hopefully Cynthia would approve:

“In the humble nutmeg, lies the power to change destinies” (Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg)

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When Kaggsy at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Simon at Stuck in a Book announced the 1937 Club reading event, I went scuttling off to the TBR and found seven lovely books to read:

So my plan is to post on one book a day as this wonderful event is running all week. However, various bloggers suggestions of what to read in the meantime made me realise I’d missed some, so my best laid plans may well change! The start of the week is sorted, but the end of week could well be subject to alteration 😀

Today I’m starting with Margery Sharp, whom I adore, so I’m delighted that the 1937 Club has prompted me to pick up The Nutmeg Tree.

Sharp’s insightful but gentle, humane comedic tone is perfectly realised in Julia, a woman we meet taking a bath for as long as it takes the bailiffs to leave. Once they do, she hurriedly heads off to France at the behest of her daughter Susan, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a toddler.

“Those nineteen months of being young Mrs Packett had exhausted her supply of maternal affection; and she was also aware that for a young child the life at Barton was far more suitable than the life she herself looked forward to, in Town. She hadn’t yet any definite plans about it, but she hoped and trusted that it would be very unsuitable indeed.”

Susan has been raised by her paternal grandparents after her father died in World War I. She is a Proper Young Lady, while Julia has led a ramshackle life, entirely of her choosing. Now Susan wants to get married, her grandmother doesn’t approve, and Susan has called in Julia for reinforcements.

She arrives in France having become semi-engaged to an attractive trapeze artist on the way there. Julia is completely delightful and while she doesn’t always behave honourably, she does behave warmly. She understands and enjoys people. Her daughter is almost the polar opposite:

“Julia, who could get intimate with a trapeze artist after five minutes conversation – who was intimate with the salesman after buying a pair of shoes – had talked for an hour to her own daughter, about the girl’s own father and lover, without the least intimacy at all.”

As with The Stone of Chastity, I was struck by Sharp’s liberal attitude towards sex. As far as I know she wasn’t a controversial author, so maybe attitudes like this were more prevalent in the 1930s than I’ve allowed for:

“If she took lovers more freely than most women it was largely because she could not bear to see men sad when it was so easy to make them happy. Her sensuousness was half compassion”

However, safe to say Susan would not share that view. She is, her mother realises, “a prig”. “Strong on logic, weak on human nature.” Susan is entirely inflexible. It becomes apparent that no-one particularly likes her, though she is loved and admired. Sharp is too subtle to demonise Susan though, or make her a villain. She is a not an unpleasant person, but just someone who is better suited to ideas and projects than to the realities of human society and all its complexities.

“‘It takes all sorts to make a world,’ thought Julia. But it was no use saying that to Susan.”

Meanwhile, Susan’s lover Bryan is, Julia realises, more like Julia herself. Convinced he will make Susan very unhappy, she wonders how on earth to maintain her fragile reconciliation with her daughter while not encouraging the match. As if this weren’t enough to contend with, another love interest arrives for Julia…

Sharp has all this play out with great comic pacing. I enjoyed the broader running jokes, whereby her mother-in-law Mrs Packett is convinced Julia owns a cake-shop despite absolutely no evidence of this, and proceeds with organising an entire business plan; and Julia’s continued attempts to impress people and pretend she is other than she is, by reading The Forsythe Saga – no-one is fooled and no-one cares.

The older Mrs Packett is only a secondary character, but I thought she was wonderful and wished Sharp had given her a novel to herself:

“It seemed to her more likely that her mother-in-law was of the type, not rare among Englishwomen, in whom full individuality blossoms only with age: one of those who, at sixty-one, suddenly startle their relatives by going up in aeroplanes or by marrying their chauffeurs.”

The Nutmeg Tree is not a fluffy read though. There’s a strong theme around choices – or lack thereof – for single women without money.  Julia has moments of real despair, Bryan reveals a really quite vicious side to himself, and I was very struck by this paragraph about dating soldiers home on leave from the war:

“You could be dining out with a man, having a perfectly lovely time, and suddenly across the room he would catch another man’s eye, or a man would pause by your table, and all at once they were somewhere else and you were left behind. It had seemed as if war were a sort of fourth dimension, into which they slipped back without even noticing, even out of your arms… so you never really knew them”

The Nutmeg Tree is a wonderful character study set within a well-paced comedy. In Julia, Sharp has created a well-rounded, wholly believable chancer, who the reader roots for because she is entirely without malice. Margery Sharp really is a joy.

To end, The Nutmeg Tree was adapted as Julia Misbehaves in 1948. Has anyone seen it? From the trailer it looks like it could be fun:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘I liked your first,’ said Quiggin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To end, in honour of Mrs Erdleigh:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Please note the quote above is one sentence!)

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

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

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

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

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

It all sounds a bit desperate and boring.

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

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

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

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

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

“Some things I cannot see until I write about them.” (Yuko Tsushima)

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I wasn’t planning on joining in Japanese Literature challenge 17 hosted by Meredith at Dolce Bellezza other than enjoying other bloggers wonderful posts. However this enthusiastic post by Marina Sofia on Tsushima Yūko’s Territory of Light meant I immediately started rooting through the TBR to find Child of Fortune (1978, transl. Geraldine Harcourt 1983), which I knew I had buried somewhere…

This is the first of her novels I’ve read and on the strength of this I definitely want to read more. Novella length, it tells the story of Kōko, a 36-year-old single mother to eleven-year-old Kayako. Told in the third person from Kōko’s perspective, it is a compelling examination of one woman’s inner world and her barely articulated resistance to the expectations placed on her.

Early in the novel, Kōko suspects she is pregnant. She is ambivalent about Osada, the father, as she is about most things. But gradually she realises that she wants to keep the child:

“Maybe she was reaching an age when it was senseless to want a fatherless child; but, precisely because of her age, she didn’t want to make a choice that she would regret till the day she died. Lately she was more convinced than ever that there was no point in worrying about what people thought. She would soon be thirty-seven. The only person watching Kōko at thirty-seven was Kōko. When this obvious fact finally came home to her it was still a surprise – what a very lonely fact it was!”

Geraldine Harcourt’s informative introduction explains that pregnancy at that age in Japan around this time could still be viewed as shameful even within marriage, so Kōko’s decision is doubly transgressive.

Kōko is an intriguing character, as she lives an unconventional life which places her in opposition to so many, by barely doing anything. Her lack of decision-making is an act of quiet but determined resistance.

Her sister Shoko is much more conventional and doesn’t approve; Kōko’s daughter Kayako much prefers to spend time with her more affluent, conformist aunt. Kōko tries to explain to Shoko:

“No, that’s not it – don’t think I’ve liked using choosing a different world from other people. I know I’ve been stubborn – but not about Kayako alone. All my life, though I often haven’t known which way to turn, I have managed to make choices of my own. I don’t know if they were right or wrong. I don’t think anyone can say that.”

But really she hasn’t made that many choices. She married because of pregnancy; husband Hatanaka organised the divorce years later, unsurprisingly as Kōko didn’t love him, still holding a candle for her lover Doi. She doesn’t enjoy her job teaching piano, but she also takes no steps to do anything else. She doesn’t take great care of herself and she doesn’t have many friends or interests.

Two driving forces in her life are her love for her brother, who died many years earlier, and sexual desire. The latter has led to her current predicament, the former suggests one reason that may be contributing to her lack of attachments.

“A little over a year ago, Kōko had understood something for the first time: the in the end she had let everything slip away from her, that in reality she hadn’t a single resource. It was an alarming discovery.”

Her lack of attachment includes reality – we are taken into Kōko’s dreams and daydreams, woven in seamlessly but disconcertingly.  As we move back and forth in time, learning about Kōko’s childhood, marriage, griefs and pains, Tsushima builds a picture of a woman who may not be completely likable but who is recognisably human and flawed, and muddling through the best way she knows how.

I was really rooting for Kōko to find a more articulate agency, and the penultimate scene was unbearably tense in this regard. Child of Fortune is never didactic yet absolutely achieves a compelling portrait of a woman fighting for her life, against immense societal pressure.   

“Kōko was shaken by the realisation that even now, more than twenty years later, she still lacked any compelling reason to go on living. And by the fact that the will to live was still there.”

To end, Kōko has fond memories of a visit to Karuizawa, which does look lovely:

PS When I was looking for a title quote for this post, I found this great conversation between Tsushima and Annie Ernaux.

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

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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:

“Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.” (Wassily Kandinsky)

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This is my contribution to Dean Street December hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running, and Working From Home. Tom Tiddler’s Ground by the delightfully named Ursula Orange (1941) is part of their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint and I thought it was an absolute joy.

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 😉 )

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.” (Georges Simenon)

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November is the month of many reading events, and I definitely won’t manage them all, but I’m starting with Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and BookishBeck.

I’m taking this as a good opportunity to carry on with my much-neglected Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century reading challenge, reading Pietr the Latvian by Georges Simenon (1930, transl. David Bellos 2013) which is No.84 in the list.

This was Maigret’s first outing and Simenon clearly had a very thorough understanding of his policeman from the start. Like many Maigret stories it is novella length, coming in at 162 pages in my English translation.

“Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn’t have a moustache and he didn’t wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands.

But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man. Iron muscle shaped his jacket sleeves and quickly wore through knew trousers. He had a way of imposing himself just by standing there. His assertive presence had often irked many of his own colleagues.”

In this first story, Maigret is in pursuit of a thief and conman, Pietr the Latvian, who may not even be from Latvia. (I was anticipating some xenophobia, which there wasn’t in the novel, but be warned there is Antisemitism at points.)

There is intelligence that Pietr has travelled to Paris from the Netherlands and Maigret is tasked with apprehending him. At the Gare du Nord he thinks he spots Pietr, but is then called to a train to identify the body of a man who also matches the description.

Following the first man takes Maigret into the world of well-heeled Parisian hotels:

“Maigret persisted in being a big black unmoving stain amidst the gilding, the chandeliers, the comings and goings of silk evening gowns, fur coats and perfumed, sparkling silhouettes.”

Things become more complex as Maigret follows various leads around the first man. His unshowy, procedural approach is evident from the start as he doggedly pursues evidence throughout Paris and to Fécamp at the coast. The conman knows Maigret is closing in and the danger grows.

I’ve not read all the Maigrets as there are at least eleventy million of them, but I would say from my limited knowledge that this isn’t the strongest. For such a short novel, it is repetitive at times and I wonder if this is because it was published firstly as a serial. In that format the repetitions would work well, but in the novel they weakened the story and it could have done with an edit with the new format in mind.

However, there is still so much to enjoy. The evocation of Paris, the character of Maigret and the novella length make this a quick, entertaining read. Simenon’s affection for his creation is evident and this makes his Detective Chief Inspector so appealing.

“The Latvian was on a tightrope and still putting on a show of balance. In response to Maigret’s pipe he lit a cigar.”