The Persephone Forum

 Next month’s Forum will be about  Persephone Book No. 20:  A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam.  All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books

     Half way through They Knew Mr Knight Dorothy Whipple offers a description of what constitutes, to borrow Winnicot’s term, a ‘good-enough’ family. ‘The growing children were dependent on their parents; their parents were bound to each other by affection and  interests which were perhaps made mutual by lack of money.  Thomas could not afford a car, a club or golf; he therefore spent his spare time with his family.’  It is 1928 and, for almost a decade, ‘the Blakes had been, like a happy country without history.  They had lived in the Grove, holding together.’

The easy mutuality of the couple’s life finds outward expression in their garden:  ‘… Thomas liked to cut down, root out, dig and mend fences, while Celia liked to plan, plan, tend, tie up and tidy.’  A family excursion into the countryside was bliss, then Celia ‘walked in contentment. They were all together, all well all happy’. But there is a shadow over this little Garden of Eden in the Midlands, which will break up the family.

      The fine fault lines are evident from the start.  Thomas takes a warm pride in providing for his wife, Celia, and children, Freda, Douglas and Ruth, but providing for his extended family, his mother, sisters and feckless brother, Edward, is burdensome, and stretches his patience and finances to the limit. He dreams of retaking control of the family engineering business, lost by his father through incompetence, possibly compounded by a weakness for drink, but the harsh reality is that even his subordinate position there is not secure. Meanwhile, good as she is at ‘dusting, carrying shopping baskets, keeping accounts, sewing, soothing, smoothing for her family’, Celia nurses another self, not walled in by the preoccupations of house, husband and children, the self that, in another life, might have waved a Suffragette banner or written a novel, the self that might have made a home fit for the elegant furniture from her childhood. She admits to herself that loving Thomas and the children is ‘almost enough’, almost, but not quite. Seventeen-year-old Freda yearns to float free of her modest middle class family. There is little focus to her ambition other than to have her hair permanently waved and live out her fantasy of a life of luxury and glamour, and to avoid, at all costs, becoming a teacher.

Douglas, a budding scientist, and Ruth, the nascent novelist, observant and amused by life, are well-grounded survivors, whose plans for the future are in tune with their talents.  It is the dreamers, Thomas and Celia, who are the most vulnerable, the most susceptible to the dangerous charm of Mr Knight, the larger than life financier, whose chance entry into the life of the Blake family will first raise them up beyond their wildest fantasies, then dash them down, and come close to destroying them.

      In her Afterword Terence Handley MacMath likens Mr Knight to Satan; in the current Persephone Biannually (Autumn-Winter 2011-12), Adèle Geras states unequivocally that ‘Mr Knight is in fact the Devil’. Someone once described to me how it felt to be in s room with a well-known fraudster, who must remain nameless. ‘It was,’ he said ‘like being in the presence of pure evil.’ And, against the fiery background of the iron furnace, Laurence Knight appears to Thomas, in his dream, as the devil.  But the dream fades, fear gives way to amusement and Thomas begins to look for a way to capitalise on his fortuitous encounter. With his millions, Knight is not the devil, but the answer to a prayer.  The Blake fortunes are about to be changed. Like countless others Thomas falls for the Devil’s charm.

Merdle, Melmotte, Hatry, Madoff, and more – both literature and life provide no shortage of examples of seductive swindlers, and Knight can charm. Even Celia is not immune to this at first, admitting as she dances with him that his face though ‘coarse and strong was not without attraction’.  Only later when she has watched him stand by, amused, as her son Douglas has his heart broken, does she see him in his true colours, ‘he’s a gross, sensual grabber. I think he’s revolting.’

      Thomas dismisses Celia’s opinion. ‘Celia judged Knight by womanish standards, a man judged a man differently’. Knight makes Thomas feel special. He gives him back his self esteem. Above all, he takes him back into the world of men, a world of cigars, and clubs, and golf, and money.  Family outings and weekend gardening together become things of the past. The schism is marked, when the Blakes make their first significant move up the housing ladder, to the ironically named ‘Fairholme’, by the acquisition of newly-fashionable twin beds , condemned incidentally by Marie Stopes as ‘the invention of the devil’.

      Celia must make her life among the women. As Thomas is able to provide more and more for his family so Celia’s role is reduced. One by one the domestic tasks that gave meaning to her life are taken over by a growing body of servants, and the family scatters: thanks to Mr Knight, Douglas can go away to boarding school, and Ruth to a pensionnat in France, while Freda provides company for Mrs Knight, lonely, bored, and, thanks to the little trays that punctuate  her days and provide her principal comfort, overweight. When her modest kitchen was her own, Celia could offer warmth and a hot drink to visiting tradesman, and food to the needy; but the kitchen at Fairholme is Cook’s domain, and she must pursue another form of charity, so ‘she sat on committees and undertook to sell tickets for innumerable affairs.’ Thomas was emasculated by the loss of the family business: the family’s newly acquired wealth diminishes Celia. She falls ‘into the prosperous woman’s habit of “passing the time”‘.  Only her garden keeps her in touch with her self.

      If any woman is to be envied, it is Carrie, the barmaid.  Making her own living she can shape her own life, and in the process make a man of Thomas’s brother Edward.  She is capable and kind, and generously forgiving of her snobbish in-laws. In all the change and collapse and ultimate, partial, regeneration of the family, if not its fortunes, Carrie is the one whose path, thanks to commitment, hard work and love, moves steadily upwards.  If Knight is Evil,  Carrie repreents Good.

      They Knew Mr Knight  is a strongly moral, even Christian novel. When, at the end, Celia rejoices that her life, which has been so disturbed, is suddenly sorted out, and things ‘put into their right proportion’, it is God she thanks.

The religious message is perhaps, like the clear social and sexual demarcations, of its period, but the moral tale of the consequences of need, greed and the chance encounter is the stuff of folk tales, told by Dorothy Whipple with a light touch and sharp humour, aphoristic wit, and an eye at times almost cinematographic.

    While charting its break-up, Dorothy Whipple paints a rivetingly detailed picture of a 1930s household: the houses, the servants (even a modest semi had a live-in maid), the gardens, the food, the clothes, down to the undergarments that Freda sews for herself from the best crèpe-de-chine, a lost world where a second subscription at Boots’ lending library is a privilege of the rich.

 

Quotes ….. do share your favourites

‘She missed the simple, busy life she had lived in the Grove. She missed her kitchen and her cooking, and she was cut off from the back door, which opened, it had always seemed to her, on another aspect of life altogether.  She could no longer comfort the coal man with a hot drink on a cold day, or advise the window-cleaner about the placing of his children at work, or ask the vegetable woman in to get warm or rest a little.’

‘”Oh, these beautiful girls!’ she thought. ‘Why do they come into young men’s lives? They only go out again and the young men are spoiled for what’s left. The ordinary is what most of us have to put up with.  Poor women, we can’t all be beautiful, any more than all men can be beautiful.  Women put up with all sorts of men, but men run after beauty.”’

‘Poor mothers they are pretty helpless.  They dose the stomach for the heart and try to staunch the wounds of love with decoctions of egg.’

‘Mrs Knight did not move easily; her corsets would not let her. The physical endurance of stout, restricted women is not sufficiently realised or admired.’

‘… Gradually Mr Knight had undermined Thomas’s fundamental honesty by persuading him, casually, that the dishonesties of the financial world were as necessary and accepted as the Conventions of Contract Bridge.’

… and questions

Blogger ‘greenroadbook’ (see below) suggests that with more financial acumen Celia might have been able to warn Thomas against further entanglement in Knight’s schemes. But was it in her character to advise? At what point might she have intervened? Would he have listened?

Blogger  ’danitorres’ considers the characters to be well-defined. ‘greenroadbooks’ would disagree in the case of Mr Knight. My feeling is that such men, even in the flesh, do not seem quite real. Any thoughts?

If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:

Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No 3)

The Priory by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No 40)

The New House by Lettice Cooper (Persephone Book No 47)

Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan (Persephone Book No 63)

What other bloggers have said about this book:

Dorothy Whipple once again turns a shrewd eye on the foibles and shortcomings of her characters and once again they fall from grace, learn from their mistakes and find a sense of redemption by story’s end (well, some of them anyway–the ones you care most about).  Her cast of characters are always well defined and developed no matter what mistakes they may make.  With every new Whipple novel I read I seem to find a new favorite, so compulsively readable are her stories.  They are never mere entertainments, though entertaining they are, but show a surprising depth and weight. danitorres

The characters are all brilliantly drawn. With the exception of Mr Knight, there is no obviously good or evil character, everyone has their moments. Even Freda, the eldest daughter, comes across as flawed rather than unpleasant. I felt terribly sorry for her when she rushes into a less-than-satisfactory marriage. Whipple makes it clear that one of the reasons of the tragedy is Celia’s detachment from the outside world. She knows nothing of finance or office, “a man’s world”. Hence she can neither warn Thomas, nor realise when he’s falling in over his head. Nor can she financially support the family when their new world comes crashing around them. This is a lesson on why female empowerment is so important. greenroadbooks

for more blogs on this and other Persephone Books go to the link on the home page.

Next month’s Forum will be about  Persephone Book No. 19:  They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple. All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books

        My husband often laughs at the quantity of post-it slips that protrude from the pages of my ‘current reads’.  Persephone books seem to attract more than most.  I defend my use of them on the grounds that they are useful pointers to sentences, paragraphs that strike me as particularly significant: character, plot, style, wit, narrative themes – any of these can earn a sticker, as can a passage that is, quite simply, beautifully written. My copy of Every Eye, already bristling like a hedgehog with little yellow tags, attracts more at each re-read and I have to accept that my husband’s gentle mockery has some foundation. But then I would argue that Every Eye is so rich and so complex, that barely a sentence is wasted, some only revealing their full meaning at second or third reading, others, multi-faceted, suggesting a quite different meaning on re-reading.

     

        Every Eye charts two journeys, one moving in real time and covering perhaps two weeks, the other a journey already taken, and covering twenty-five years, the two converging at the last page, converging but not concluding. Thirty nine year old Hatty and her husband Stephen, younger by many years (his exact age is one of many things that we do not know about him) take a belated honeymoon to Ibiza, ‘the most savage of the Balearic islands’. The journey takes three or four days.

      As trains and taxis and ferries move them forward, Hatty looks back at episodes in her life, directly or indirectly connected to her relationship with her aunt by marriage, Cynthia, whose death ‘at the Ipswich County Hospital, just after a cup of tea’, opens the book. We will learn a lot about Cynthia, but not the cause of her death, her age, nor how she happened to spend her last hours in Ipswich County Hospital. And yet from the two wholly ordinary details, and perhaps because of their very ordinariness, we can summon up the scene, from the high ceilinged ward, down to the drab formica bedside locker, and the green ribbed, NHS issue, tea-cup.

       She has a sharp eye for surface detail, but Hatty was born with a squint, ‘her right eye turned … fatalistically towards the blind wall of a sharp nose’.   Cynthia’s friend Jasper, Hatty’s first, elderly, lover, pays for the operation that her mother cannot, or will not, afford, but while surgery can straighten her eyes, it cannot alter her vision. Stephen is right when he says, ‘I don’t believe you ever see anything dead on, only at a peculiar angle through the corner of your eye’.' To see the world as it is requires more than correctly aligned eyes and Hatty knows that her vision is flawed at a far deeper, moral level, ‘one is born with one’s infirmities … one must carry them always regardless of their visible absence.’ Sight is perhaps not in the gift of men.

       Stephen sees what Hatty cannot. She approaches Paris for the first time, anxiously looking not for what is new but, insecurely, for similarities to what she already knows, so that for her the suburbs seem as frayed and dingy as the approach to Euston or King’s Cross.  He, knowing Paris, meets it afresh with his eyes closed, thrilling at the smell of the gasworks, the stinking tunnel, the breeze over the reservoir. He can rely on his inner eye, just as he relies on his inner ear to hear Hatty’s unspoken words, ‘running them together like dropped stitches along a needle’. Looking to the future he can reassure her that one day she will see and be able to accept the past for what it was, and scanning that past with the clarity of one who did not live it, he is able to offer an interpretation not far removed from the truth.

       Of Hatty’s early years we learn only what she tells us: a thin, flat-chested child, sickly enough to have needed a lengthy dose of Breton sea air, sallow skinned, with dull brown hair, whose musical gift, which might have been her salvation, ‘had gradually shown itself to be uncoordinated and intermittent, like a small jewel that has always been hopelessly flawed’. About the rest of her family we know few facts.  Her mother impoverished, cool, and controlling, with thinly cut nostrils, disapproves of her sister-in-law, one of the people in this world ‘who do not know the ropes’. Handsome Uncle Otway is inappropriately, and unhelpfully attentive: over-affectionate, but dismissive of his niece’s musical ambitions. Her father, dead,  once, serving in the Indian Army, shot a tiger, the splayed skin on the sitting room floor being all that remains of either of them. Hatty recalls that he ‘had had a strong will and the brutality to lay waste any small efforts of survival that did not amount to complete independence’. There seems to have been little warmth even in her young life. Apart from Cynthia’s rabidly political and self-absorbed son, all those closest to Hatty show varying degrees of cruelty towards her.

     Little wonder that she reaches the age of twenty-five certain that she ‘could never successfully make a real contact with another being’, and falls, awkwardly, into the arms of Jasper, the enigmatic traveller, apparently an old family friend, but of whom she knows little and discovers not much more. Has he ever been married?  Does he even like women?  Why is Cynthia so unkind about him?  Always ready to conjecture about strangers, Hatty asks few questions of those closest to her, and offers few details.

       And there are no clues either as to what Cynthia, or for that matter Hatty herself, has been doing in the years between their estrangement and Hatty’s marriage to Stephen. We know more about the girl on the train to Barcelona, in her pink waterproof jacket,returning home from a year as an au pair in Preston.  Isobel English writes as a watercolourist might paint, paper left blank containing as much information as the small, brightly coloured incidental figures in the background.  And no-one has as much ‘white’ around him as Stephen. He rescues Hatty from herself, and proves a strong and perceptive companion at every stage of the journey, and yet we know next to nothing about him.   He is wise and he is pragmatic, but who is he?

       Isobel English is sparing with her details for at one level this complex novella is a mystery story, not resolved until the final page, when the past catches up with the present and the two journeys meet.  In ‘real time’, Hatty and Stephen will make the return journey and continue their marriage (or maybe not) altered by what they have seen; Hatty’s personal journey through her own past must begin again in the light of what she has learned. ‘Life is lived forwards but understood backwards’, writes Neville Braybrooke in his preface.

        But there is a third journey braided into the plait. In his preface, Neville Braybrooke makes it quite clear that there is a religious dimension to the novel. Before I opened the book and saw the epigraph, the two word phrase of the title had been echoing in my head. Why was it familiar? I found myself humming a hymn tune: was that the reference? ‘Lo He comes with clouds descending’ – the second verse starts Every eye shall now behold Him/Robed in dreadful majesty, based on words from the opening chapter of the Book of Revelation.

      Auden’s collection ‘Another Time’, from which the epigraph is taken, dates from the period of his re-christianisation: it is hard not to believe that he was unfamiliar with that verse.  With so many references to dark and light, English will surely have had in mind  the famous verses from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.

       On two occasions she makes direct reference to the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, which, Braybrooke confirms, held a profound resonance for her. Traditionally the last five sayings represent Relationship, Abandonment, Distress, Triumph and Reunion.  Is it too far-fetched to suggest that one of the many possible readings of Every Eye is one in which Hatty’s journey takes her past these mileposts, until she is able to say, in words that recall Saul’s experience on the Road to Damascus, ‘I feel a curious sensation, as if my eyes were peeled of scales; I feel receptive and calm, stronger than I have ever felt before.’

Quotes ….. do share your favourites

“To never have the exact knowledge of one’s position is the predicament of human frailty. Compassless, to see the beckoning lights, one advances to find that there is nothing there but a reflection in the deep-rooted blackness.”

“It must have been her peak period. People sometimes go through their whole lives without ever reaching the moment when they are exactly the person they want to be.”

“Nothing is ever lost that is begun, no word spoken that can ever be broken down to unco-ordinated syllables, no tear shed that will leave only a powdering of white salt.  Everything must go on, and on, and on, repeating itself and gathering force for the ever that is still only the bright whiteness of eternity meditated on by mystics and recluses.”

and questions

What are we to make of Jasper’s apparent appearance at Cynthia’s funeral?  What are we meant to understand by the final sentence of the novel?

Why did no-one tell Hatty about Jasper’s past? Is Stephen right when he says that ‘Cynthia at the time of the trouble was all for maintaining a family front’.

Stephen is a mysterious character. Who is he? Is there any significance in the fact that his mother sends a wreath to Cynthia’s funeral?

If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:

Consequences by E.M.Delafield (Persephone Book No 13)

Hetty Dorval by Ethel Wilson (Persephone Book No 58)

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No 56)

Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan (Persephone Book No 63)

What other bloggers have said about this book:

Every Eve has equally fine observations on place and character. Hatty finds a wry comfort in learning that an acquaintance with whom she has little in common will attend a family party. “At least we had the barren fields of our incompatibility between us, which made us better than strangers,” she reflects in a phrase that might have come from Elinor Dashwood. When she begins to date men at last, Hatty feels a slight thrill at “the almost human expression of the hard blocked toe-caps of their shoes” with their requisite perforations.

Critics have compared English to Muriel Spark and Anita Brookner – both of whom admired her work – but she is less austere than Spark and takes more risks than Brookner. English has a voice all her own, and it is more interesting than that of many better-known writers. oneminutebookreviews

I find that many novellas sneak up on me: I spend the first 50 or even 75 pages feeling underwhelmed, struggling against the compression of the form, and just when I’ve got into the rhythm of the language and begun to be truly invested in the characters…the thing is over. Such was certainly the case with Isobel English’s 1956 novella Every Eye. English writes with a careful precision that at first struck me as cold and unapproachable, but later came to seem like a perfect, unassuming vessel for the voice of her main character. She portrays an almost unbridgeable distance between humans, which at first appeared to be a lack of character development, but gradually revealed itself as a conscious philosophical—or at least psychological—stance, a portrait of the protagonist Hatty’s lived reality. As I turned the final page, I ended up feeling that somehow, while I wasn’t paying close enough attention, English’s narrative had grown and ripened into itself, filling completely the space it had made. eveningallafternoon

 Next month’s Forum will be about  Persephone Book No. 18:  Every Eye by Isobel English. All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books

     Talking with friends last week about significant books in our lives, we all agreed that Ballet Shoes had to be on the list. Three orphan foundlings are delivered by a mysterious and absent elderly professor, to be cared for by a large, practical, warm-hearted nanny, a good plain cook, two maids, and a sensible and resourceful guardian, in a house firmly sited in London’s Cromwell Road, and serendipitously filled with lodgers who in a variety of ways,  magically smooth the children’s paths in life. There is never any suggestion that a lack of parents might be a drawback. Quite the reverse. Parents have needs, and lives of their own.  In the world of Ballet Shoes, and this is what made it such a wonderful read, over and over again, children come first, always.

   The opening pages of Saplings seem momentarily to be taking us into that world, a world of shrimping nets and spades and sun and no lessons, with a sensible, but indulgent governess and a warm, bulging nanny to bring milk and buns to the beach in her bulging bag. Mum’s camp stool is waiting for her on the sand, and Dad has joined the holidaying family. Big sister, Laurel, turns cartwheels of joy, while brother, Tony, inwardly exclaims, ‘Whoopee! What a day it was going to be’, and adored, beautiful and gifted, but difficult, Kim rates the day as ‘scrumptious’.  Whatever the language might suggest, we have not strayed into the land of Ballet Shoes.

     There are clouds on the horizon. It is the troubled youngest, Tuesday, who has been the first of the children to sense the adults’ fears, ‘because she was only four, and people underrated her intelligence and spoke in front of her’. In a man to man chat on the beach Alex Wiltshire confides in Tony that he will shortly be returning to London on war work, stressing that he should say nothing of this in his mother’s hearing. A ten-year old boy can be entrusted with information that cannot be shared with his mother.  There is a war starting and the Wiltshire family is not as solidly functional as the opening page suggested.  The coming years will test it beyond its limits.

     Alex Wiltshire is without doubt the model Dad, solid as a rock, devoted to his children, but not afraid to show a bit of toughness when called for, straight-speaking and, apparently, fearless. Most unusually for the period, for any period, he has, discreetly and without show, taken charge of the children, clearly recognising from the start that his beautiful wife was not of the stuff mothers are made of. Or perhaps he didn’t give her a chance, assuming control of the nursery before she could take her first faltering steps as a mother.

     By the time we meet Lena, she is the thirty-three, mother of four, but quite clear about her role, ‘The children were darlings, but she was not a family woman’, ‘she never even pretended the children came first’. What she wants is to be a wife. Streatfeild does not underplay the importance of sex for Lena; later she will even find air-raids arousing, to the point that Alex worries about his own ability to ‘keep up the pace’ if the nightly bombing continues. She uses all her whiles to keep him up to the mark, knowing that ‘if he was once permitted not to answer smile for smile, and covert look for covert look, he would be one shade nearer that dreary he wanted to be, the perfect father, the family man.’ She wants him to be her lover, and as the saying goes, the children of lovers are orphans.

   Her own parenting had not given her much of a grounding: ‘Her mother had always been her ideal of all that was feminine and delicious. It had not hurt her as a child to be petted and exhibited one moment and to be shut away in her school room or nursery the next …’ Mum’s-mum, tellingly not Gran as ‘good’ granny Wiltshire is known, had taught Lena, her only child, that what mattered most in life was to look nice, to have fun, and to be ‘happy’.  The ‘drearies’ of child rearing are not for her: but she works hard at their appearance – well dressed children make good accessories for the chic mother; and she is good at orchestrating ‘fun’.  ‘Lena’s policy with her children had always been that they should be charmed by her. A mother to admire, who was a little apart from the humdrum side of life.’

     But even her mother-in-law concedes that ‘up to a point she’s a good mother’. Her interest in her children is intermittent, and self-centred; in many ways she is still a child herself, but she has a gift for home-making, which Alex appreciates, and the children, rightly, take for granted. With a steady father and the haven of a more than comfortable London house, Laurel and Tony, and Kim and Tuesday could have weathered the storms of growing up. But war, as Lena rightly perceives has ‘no use for delicate adjustments’. The carefully constructed continuity of their lives is first cracked and then broken into pieces. Home would be the first casualty of the war.

     Bit by bit the family unit is reduced.  Children, as Nannie later reflects, ‘are best where they belong. They miss having their rightful things.’ Sent away from London and the danger of bombs, as the war grinds on they find that they belong nowhere, and that few things are rightfully theirs. For Laurel and Tony things and space become all important. Laurel’s fragile equanimity is shattered when she finds herself moved out of ‘her’ room into her grandfather’s dressing-room, to make room for evacuees, while her brother’s is challenged when he is forced, unfairly he considers, by the influx of boys and the call-up of young masters, to share a desk at school. Neither of the older children is helped by their father’s well-intentioned lessons in keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of adversity.  They cannot handle their anxieties, but nor can they share them.

     The war has not finished with them. In one dreadful blow, temporary evacuation from their home, and temporary separation from their father are made permanent, when a bomb destroys their house and, crushed in the debris, Alex is killed.  Lena alone cannot hold the family together. Ruth Glover, the children’s governess  and the voice of reason (who would later have a ‘good war’ in the ATS), assesses the situation, with anxious clarity: ‘Take away Alex and had she anything to fall back on? Her life had been built like a game of spillikins with Alex as the bottom spillikin on which the whole structure stood. It was impossible that the structure would not collapse when you tore out the bottom spillikin.’

     Countless other women were and would be in the same situation. War was making absentee fathers the norm. Laurel’s headmistress reflects coolly, ‘It’s been my experience that if the mother makes a decent home not much harm’s done’.  Lena does her best to rebuild a home for the children, and comes close to succeeding, but missing the support and sex that she had from Alex, she falls easily into the arms of a visiting American serviceman. The children could have adapted to  that.  Walter is a good man; the children like him (always the acid test) and, in his way, he cares for them, but he too is called away.

   One blogger describes Lena as promiscuous, which strikes me as unfair. Had there been no war, Lena might have remained a more than devoted wife to Alex and an adequate mother to her children. She is quite undone by the war.  Her limited reserves of strength are quickly depleted, but she must keep up a good show. What could be easier, or more destructive, than to turn to the bottle?  (The graphic description of her slow, ugly and humiliating decline suggests that Streatfeild had observed the alcoholic at first hand.)  The fragile family unit, just managing to survive the ravages of war, is finally broken by alcohol.

     The children are to be divided up between the aunts. Three of them with husbands in the services are coping alone for the duration, and Sylvia, the youngest and closest to her brother, might as well be alone for all the help she gets with her five children from her unworldly vicar husband. They are four very different women, in their thirties and forties, none having much time for Lena – self-indulgent, flighty and over-dressed – and still settling childhood scores between themselves.  Lena may have proved herself worse than most, but no mother is perfect and each of the Wiltshire women represents a different kind of imperfection. Dot works too hard outside the home, Sylvia has more children than she can manage, Selina is overambitious and Lindsey, writer and self-styled child psychologist, for all her professional pretentions knows nothing of the practicalities of parenting, what Dot refers to as ‘the nappies, school bills, sick in the train knowledge’. Nevertheless, it is part of Dot’s scheme to ensure that she does her share. And so Laurel finds herself, in a cruel billeting arrangement, with the aunt least able to care for her.

 There is a fourth family, the Parkers. Albert and Ernie, evacuated, at the insistence of their father, are billeted on the Wiltshire grandparents. For all their rough edges the evacuees have learnt something that Lena’s children have missed: ‘the whole of their upbringing had taught them to put the welfare and happiness of small children before everything’. Cruelly, it is their mother’s love that kills them – missing her sons so much that she insists that they return to London. A bomb leaves Mr Parker a childless widower. Too much love, of the wrong sort, can kill. Not enough can leave a child weakened for life.

     The Wiltshire children are very different in appearance and character, a diversity contrived to demonstrate the underlying strengths and vulnerabilities that will determine the outcome for each of them. Laura, plain, anxious, at first eager to shine, and, failing that, to merge into the crowd, is mortified when wartime rationing  keeps her in a green school uniform, when all the other girls are in brown. Without the war, or rationing, or the loss of her father’s gentle encouragement, she might, as he hoped, have dare to blossom. But a combination of history, bad luck and an increasingly desperate  need for more TLC than was available for any child in such troubled times finally brings her down.

    Tony’s fierce sense of right and wrong, gently guided by his father, might have been an asset; without that guidance, it sets him against the world, and the brave little boy becomes a sullen, friendless teenager. Little Tuesday, dosed with powders when we first meet her, is still sleep walking four years later, but no-one has time to worry about her. Only Kim, who was always considered the problem child, and who, ironically is the most like his mother, ‘able to play himself like a Wurlitzer organ’, is by the end, in Ruth’s words, ‘doing nicely’. Is Kim naturally more resilient? Does his strength come from having received the lion’s share of his mother’s love?  Are some children, like Ruth herself, born survivors?

     Kim speaks for all children, when he explodes: ‘But we’re children. It’s us that people have to bother about. Children don’t have to bother about grown-up people.’  The tragedy of Saplings is that, because of the war, not enough of the grown-up people had enough strength or enough time to bother about the children.

Quotes ….. do share your favourites

“Lena could see herself, fair and slim, little Tuesday lolling against her and exquisite Kim playing around, and she knew what a picture they must look, and the thought amused rather than pleased her.  There was nothing she liked better than to be envied and admired, but this was not the picture she wanted exhibited.  That picture was of her and Alex.  Of course the children must be there too, but as charming decorations, not interfering with the original portrait of two people.’

“This passion for being the centre of the picture was dangerous.  What on earth would he [Kim] grow up like? It seemed unnatural that before he was eleven he should have found a way to adapt his failings to feed his egoism. If all went well Kim might do anything, but what if things did not go well?  He could never be poor.  He would always have to throw his weight about, be surrounded with friends, even if he had to rob a bank or forge cheques to do it.”

“Heaps of  children grew up without much attention and turned out alright in the end … Heaps did, but were they the Laurels, Tonys and Tuesdays?  She [Ruth] herself had grown up all right with very little attention, and little of it wise.  All right but bruised.  The Wiltshires were having a harder upbringing than she had. If only bruising was all they got out of it. What if they grew mis-shapen?”

and questions

Is it possible to speculate about would have happened to the children if there had been no war? If Alex had not been killed? If Elsa had not put Laurel in the Colonel’s dressing room? If Laurel had not moved schools? If she had had the right uniform?  Is it big events that alter things? Or does fate turn on smaller points?

Is Lena promiscuous, as one blogger calls her? Sex-obsessed, as Jeremy Holmes writes?

Which of all the mothers that Streatfeild presents to us in Saplings can be termed ‘good enough’?

If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:

Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge (Persephone Book No 41)

The Children who lived in a Barn  by Eleanor Graham (Persephone Book No 27)

The Young Pretenders by Edith Henrietta Fowler (Persephone Book No 73)

Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan (Persephone Book No 63)

What other bloggers have said about this book:

This heart-wrenching and painful book really packed an emotional wallop for me. It is not what I would characterize as one of those “charming” books I love to read. In fact, at times it was downright difficult to read, but I still really came away loving this book. Sounding a bit contradictory arn’t I? I just found this book to be a powerful and moving story about the sad destruction of a family. jeannetesbooks

What a brilliant book Saplings is. I had never read Noel Streatfeild before (no, not even Ballet Shoes), so I had no idea what to expect. Well, it turns out that she is an excellent writer: subtle, perceptive, sensitive, occasionally ironic, everything that I love. Saplings reminded me a little of A.S. Byatt and (don’t laugh!) of D.H. Lawrence. It was something about the way she uses multiple points of view, jumping from one perspective to another quite frequently, and yet still managing to make it work. I always admire writers who can pull that off, as I imagine that it takes a lot of skill. But most of all, it was the way she wrote about her characters with such tenderness, such care. I loved them; I felt for each and every one of them, no matter how flawed they were. thingsmeanalot

Saplings is beautifully written. Streatfeild’s descriptions are wonderful – in the first few scenes at the beach, I felt that I could hear the sea, really see the children and the hazy glow, almost as if in my own memory. She paints such clear characters, that a few days after finishing the book they are all still vivid in my mind. Although the book has a central story, I did feel that it was more of a sketch and I do think you need to sort of settle into it rather than being in a rush. I will admit that at first didn’t find myself wanting to pick it up all the time but when I was reading it I became absorbed. I did feel that there were some slightly contrived parts in the novel but similarly I think that this reflects that the book was written for a purpose and to make the reader think novelinsights

Next month’s Forum will be about  Persephone Book No. 16:  Saplings by Noel Streatfeild. All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books

Good fortune, and printers’ timetabling, has meant that August’s Forum book was discussed at July’s Thursday afternoon Reading Group. I love reading comments on the Forum, but this provided an excellent opportunity to get some live input from other Persephone readers before starting to write about Tell it to a Stranger.

Interestingly, several members of the group confessed to being reluctant readers of short stories, or to be more accurate, reluctant buyers of collections of short stories, a reluctance which I have to admit to sharing. Was it because we preferred the total immersion of the novel? Because of the difficulty of holding more than one or two stories in one’s memory? Read at a sitting, the first is either obliterated by the second and then the third, or gets in the way. The solution, of course, is to read each individually and give it space. But then if we have enjoyed one, we want to taste the next. Perhaps short stories are best as the book in one’s bag, or on the bedside table – a short read before sleeping.  We did not arrive at a conclusion, but all agreed that while we might not buy them for ourselves, we loved receiving them.

Some of us, and again I include myself, had opened Tell it to a Stranger expecting, for no other reason apart from the wartime context, to find some of the sharp, wry humour of Mollie Panter- Downes.  The material of the opening story – a coach load of heavily pregnant women arriving at a country house nursing home, to await the births of their babies – could well have been the inspiration for one of Mollie’s Wartime Stories. How different it would have been.  Elizabeth Berridge’s stories are far darker. ‘Bleak’ was the adjective most used in the Reading Group, but while this catches the feel of the subject matter and many of the settings, it does not convey anything of the enigmatic quality of the characters, glimpsed at unexpected turning points in their lives, moments at which they are forced to reassess themselves, to confront change.  ‘Tiny, concentrated explosions,’ was Berridge’s phrase for the essential ingredient of the short story.

What the stories do have in common with Mollie Panter Downes’s is that they take place in a predominantly female world, in which men are either absent in the forces, on leave, invalided out, too old to fight, or simply ‘voices off’.  It is a woman’s world but one in which they have not found their place. Married women juggle the needs of children and husbands, the unmarried or widowed battle to get through the days.

Lady Hayley (‘Subject for a Sermon’) is not a sympathetic character, and one feels for her neglected son, home on leave, seeking maternal approbation, congratulation indeed, (where is his father?), but her speech to the assembled cake-bakers contains a germ of truth. War is testing for a woman who must ‘add to her usual roles of companion and mother, that of organizer … It was a struggle all the time, with no medals at the end.’  But her parting words, ‘I feel so much – so much at one with you all,’  ring hollow. Lady H’s ‘minder’, poor Miss Pollett, can never be her friend.  War destroyed many things but not the barriers of class.

Elizabeth Berridge and her husband, may have been able, as she writes in her illuminating afterword, like Alice, to step effortlessly from square to square in the chessboard of social divides in their Welsh wartime retreat. It was unusual and she recognises that it was due to their position as ‘outsiders’ and to being writers and therefore classless. Social class is a given in her stories, challenged in some, shaken a little, but not radically.  In ‘To Tea With the Colonel’ it is Miss Morton who is forced, by the Colonel’s perfect manners, to reassess her angry indignation at a system which permits such inequality. Her words go unheard.  The Colonel may be deaf and helpless, but the moral victory goes to him, as it does to Captain Banks, boldly challenged by his ‘Chance Callers’, a young couple in search of a somewhere to live. The Johnsons demands are met in a way that they did not expect and which will rattle their prejudices. Another tiny explosion.

Rank, like class, is jealously guarded. The doctor (nameless, and timeless – a figure not unfamiliar to mothers of the ’60s and ’70s), and her nurses, expect acquiescence from ‘their’ mothers-to-be. ‘Snowstorm’ looks at what happens when one arrives who shakes the doctor’s certainties, stirs unsuspected jealousy, contesting her ability to control other women’s destinies, and questioning her very vocation.

These clashing encounters take place during and largely because of the war, which shifts people out of familiar physical, emotional, psychological surroundings.  Relationships must be newly forged, or reassessed. A husband comes home on leave demanding a night out: time together is short, the baby will be fine alone, soothed by his mother’s recorded voice. ‘Lullaby’ is the most shocking example, but several other stories turn on the urgency imposed by the timetable of war. With unlimited time together Lady Hayley would not have had to choose between her son and her perceived duty.  The cracks in the relationship could have remained safely papered over. At home, with the father of her child, Theresa Jenkins (in ‘Snowstorm’) might have had a proper, even a loving conversation. Instead she must listen to a voice on the telephone and act alone, in a remote nursing home, among strangers.

War displaces people. Men go off to fight, women are rehoused. Miss Morton (‘Tea With the Colonel’), bombed out of her Bayswater room and still nursing the leg injury, has made a sort of home for herself in a tiny rural cottage. Mrs Hatfield, in the title story, has chosen to leave her lonely flat for the companionship of a seaside guest-house. And war sets up strange meetings. A German prisoner of war provides unexpected companionship for an elderly spinster, bringing back memories of youth and a loved brother.  But the tide of wartime manoeuvres removes him as suddenly as it delivered him.

Elizabeth Berridge, perhaps not yet a mistress of the short story – some at the book group felt that some were over long, while others could have benefited from a few more pages – shows extraordinary skill in taking a detail, a snippet of conversation, and allowing it to grow in her imagination. The new technique of recording a tender message onto plastic is taken to a chilling conclusion. Bombs, it seems, can reach even the quiet seaside boarding house. She plays narrative games of the ‘what if’ variety – what if a man set out from home to get a job and on a whim decided not to return to his miserable wife? She teases the reader: a man is holding a gun at the start of a story. Will it, by the end,  be fired, or put away in a cupboard? Perhaps because the atmosphere of one story infects others, an innocent visit by a museum curator looking for manuscripts, is oddly unsettling.

Characters are drawn in swift, defining strokes. Mrs Munday, ‘whose breathing even in sleep was mean and tearful’; Aunt Doris, whose ‘teeth flashed frantically in the sun as she shouted fresh abjurations’ after Ruby; Sister Matthew’s actions are ‘repellent – impersonal as a brothel keeper’s, partially undressing a girl for a client’s appraisal’.  Back-stories are told in a few words, ‘Miss Morton had often mentioned Miss Lumley in letters to her half-brother George, who had made it possible for her to go away when the ceiling came down on to the blue carpet of her Bayswater room’ – a sentence that speaks volumes. When Miss Everton asks her prisoner of war, Erich, about his family she ‘learnt that his father was dead, that he sent his mother parcels when he could, that on the whole he was disappointed with England, finding it dirty and unfriendly.’ The voice is perfect and not a word is wasted: the insertion of that little phrase ‘on the whole’ is bold and brilliant.  Her mastery of the throwaway phrase makes it too easy to miss a telling, witty or grim detail. Lady Hayley judges war-time recipes ‘cakes, puddings, biscuits, all containing some measure of soya flour’.  In her Afterword to this collection Elizabeth Berridge describes her cottage in Montgomeryshire: ‘We had three-quarters of an acre of land, an outside privy in which the previous owner had shot himself, no electricity, and a pump outside the front door.’ The cottage, its history, and the daily life of the young couple are all there.

Incidentally I have just received an alert from the Society of Authors warning that ‘the BBC has reduced the number of short stories it broadcasts from to five, to three, and now to one a week’, as part of the reorganisation of the BBC Radio 4 schedule.  Lovers of, or maybe even just occasional enthusiastic dippers into, short stories can sign an online petition on the National Short Story Week website.

Questions

 

A.N. Wilson considers these stories to be ‘much more than period pieces’. Do you agree? How do they compare in that respect to the stories of Mollie Panter-Downes?

Is it fair to describe these stories as ‘bleak’?

Do you agree with the Reading Group comments about the length of the stories – too short, too long?

Do you share, and if so can you explain, the ambivalent attitude towards short stories as a genre that so many of us feel? Love them when we read them, but rarely buy them.

Quotes – some of my favourites, do share yours.

 

 ‘When you were old, you saw further than the spring of the year; in one pink opening of a bud there was fruitfulness and decay. Looking at the apple tree with its low unpruned branches, she saw the flowers fade and die, small apples form, grow big and lie in baskets; saw the solemn dropping of leaves, the bare tree.’

 ‘The cottages stood like buffeted heaps of stone and rubble and the church in the midst of them was just a larger heap strengthened with flint, still intact upon its Roman foundations, and bearing an elaborate gilt weathercock, given by a wealthy landowner in memory of his son.’

  ‘For a moment Miss Morton sat utterly still.  It was as if someone had lifted a weight of pain and degradation from her years of living nervously in rooms, of odd jobs that meant just enough food: hurrying, graceless crowds. Then, quite suddenly, she burst into tears.

   ‘The Colonel would have spoken, but he was no longer in contact with the world. And he had never known what it was to doubt or bitterly regret a cruelty, for he had never been cruel.  So he stood, concerned and helpless, while the sun flooded into the room, giving it the grace, polish and serenity of a discarded age.’

 

If you enjoyed this book you might also enjoy:

 

 Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes (Persephone Book No.8)

Tea with Mr Rochester  by Frances Towers (Persephone Book No.44)

A Woman Novelist and Other Stories by Diana Gardner  (Persephone Book No. 64)

The Closed Door and Other Stories by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No. 74)

Next month’s Forum will be about  Persephone Book No. 15:  Tell it to a Stranger by Elizabeth Berridge. All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books

At the end of Farewell Leicester Square, Alec Berman, a successful, established, and Jewish, film-maker, reflects on the breakdown of his marriage: ‘The personal failure of himself and Catherine to live up to an ideal in no way invalidated that ideal … The ideal world, he thought (in which such marriages were as valid and desirable as any others) did not, of course, exist; if, indeed, it ever would: but it was incumbent upon certain people to behave as if it did …’ . The ideal world of which Alec dreams, in which a ‘mixed’ marriage such as theirs would attract no comment, and in which race, and Jewishness, in particular, would no longer be an issue, was a long way off, and in 1930s Europe receding fast. Victor Gollancz, who had published Betty Miller’s first three books, was the son of a well-established Anglo-Jewish family, and may have been more acutely aware of the implications of the rise of Fascism in Britain, than the author. This could explain his reluctance to publish a book which the young novelist had announced to be about ‘the social and psychological conflicts of a Jew in the modern world.’

When Farewell Leicester Square was published in 1941 it was by Robert Hale, not by Gollancz. It had been completed in 1935. Betty Miller was born in 1910. I had to check these dates more than once. It is almost beyond belief that such a mature novel should have been written by such a young woman.  Not that she lacked what we would now call ‘life experience’: Ireland, Sweden, London by the time she was twelve, followed by a period at boarding school, a year in a French sanatorium, and then, having obtained a diploma in journalism at University College, marriage at 23 and motherhood at 24.  Born into a Jewish family, and acquainted with the tobacco trade (through her father), and the world of film (through her brother), she could be said to be writing about what she knew (cf last month’s Forum – E.M. Delafields’s advice from her mother). But only up to a point. She goes well beyond her own experience in taking us inside the mind of a teenage boy, and then, just as convincingly, into the same masculine mind twenty years on.  Betty Miller was the 25 year old Jewish wife of a Jewish husband, but could paint with understanding and sensitivity the excitement and the difficulties of a mixed marriage, and its final breakdown, seeing it from both sides of a couple more than ten years older than herself.

 Farewell Leicester Square has been compared to the picaresque novel in which the young hero journeys from innocence to wisdom, meeting and exposing the weaknesses and vices of society along the way – the young Jew faces the challenges of the modern world. But this is not a linear novel and we are shown only a limited number of stops along the journey and not all from the viewpoint of the hero. A central chapter describes in exquisitely evocative detail Catherine’s visit to her Harley Street gynaecologist, capturing both the daunting hauteur of the doctor, and her own nervous excitement, thrilling at the movement of the baby in her womb.

 In terms of worldly success, Alec has already arrived when we first meet him at the glittering London première of his latest film. Only later will we learn where his journey began: secure but uneasy in a Jewish family in Brighton. Throughout the novel, Betty Miller uses the techniques of film: long shots, close-ups, flashbacks, light and shade. Mr and Mrs Berman are almost straight out of central casting: the chicken soup mother, with her unquestioning devotion to her family, ‘she was very short-sighted: perhaps because the radius of her interests was utterly narrowed down to the confines of home’; the shop-keeper father, as a result of whose thrift the ‘home’ is bleak, cold, damp and ‘heterogeneously furnished’ with bargains secured from sale rooms for their cheapness alone, ‘from an exquisitely carved mahogany music stand (they none of them played any musical instrument) to a huge wine-cooler that partially blocked up, below in the basement, one of the entrances to this teetotal household.’  Betty Miller is mistress of the telling, humorous detail.

 It is not, initially, the Jewishness that makes the confines of his family unbearable to Alec, but his need to realise his passion for film. In a brilliant moment of dramatic irony, his racial sensibility is awakened at the same moment as the first seeds of his future film career are sown. Engineering an encounter with an admired film magnate, and having more or less stalked him out, he catches sight of his two children: ‘It was at that precise moment, for the first time, that something new, the sense of racial distinctness, awoke in him …. A sudden knowledge of the difference between these two, who could tread with careless assurance a land which in every sense was theirs; and himself, who was destined to live always on the fringe …’   Neither Catherine nor Basil is remarkably good looking: Basil fair with grey eyes, Catherine red haired with an attenuated face. No more is their father. But like his daughter Richard Nicolls has a lean face, and ‘no sensuousness, no mobility about those nostrils; they were correctly winged; narrow, firm. He was a man of a different race.’  Alec sees himself in Richard’s eyes – blunt head, prominent ears, black rough hair, features, which from that moment on, he will come to dislike in himself, and in other Jews.

 But the world of film did not discriminate. Alec’s career is launched. In the first of a number of significant journeys Alec leaves Brighton station with a single ticket to London, and a virtual camera in his hand, recording the glass-ribbed spine of the station roof, the light suddenly flooding the carriage. The rhythm of the wheels, the shadow of the engine, the flying smoke – the film sequence is familiar: Betty Miller closes it with a still image, ‘upon a hoarding for Beecham’s Pills, a sign said ‘London 50 miles.’

She sees through Alec’s eyes, he through hers. From the first ‘shots’ of the arrivals at the film showing where ‘ shiny patent-leather feet, narrow feminine feet alternately sought the running board’, the reader’s inner eye is made to work. Sometimes the visual detail is purely incidental. As Alec waits outside the Nicolls’ house, ‘two small boys sat on the edge of the grass beside a perambulator; over gaunt upraised knees they swapped cigarette cards and argued; while the baby sat upright, sucking its thumb, hair glinting like a nimbus of thistledown in the sunlight’. At others the picture tells the story. ‘The cuff of a grimy striped shirt protruded from a sleeve that with increasing plumpness had become too short for his arm’: this is what Alec sees when he meets his older brother Sydney after an absence of seventeen years. It is enough. Minor characters, for which Betty Miller has an almost Dickensian talent, are drawn with a minimum of lines, and a cool objectivity. A maid is ‘smart in her uniform, but wearing cheap broken-down shoes’, and later ‘baggily aproned; her fingers chapped and seamed with black’; a waiter is ‘sallow, incredibly concave within his toil-worn dress-suit’; the colonel bends forward with ‘a civilised crackle of starched linen’; while Alec’s friend, Lew, wears ‘a suit, as it were, subdued, trodden down by the routine of his own personality.’

 Clothes speak. They set people apart. Even looking at his own son, Alec sees the clothes: ‘… cream silk shirt; brief knickers; and his slender bony ankles were encased in white socks’, a fashion which he and his brother had viewed with incredulity, derision mixed with envy, ‘immeasurable distance separating such children and themselves’. Alec’s success has paid for the silk shirt, but the distance remains. This frail little boy, whose conception Catherine believed, and maybe Alec hoped, ‘had inextricably and finally mingled temperament and personality and race and family’, cannot sustain or resolve the diverse and contradictory dreams of his parents. The marriage founders finally on little Dave’s predicament, called ‘a Jew’ at school, in spite of his Aryan features, so troubling to his father, but the union was fragile from the start. Society offered no support, Catherine was not strong enough, and Alec too unyielding.

 Betty Miller tightens her focus on the ‘social and psychological problems of the Jew in society’.  The Berman marriage is the close-up shot.  Catherine, who, with her increasingly sinister brother, had first made Alec aware of his Jewishness, is the ‘trophy wife’.  She attracts him, not because she is beautiful:  he is drawn to ‘her plainness, her freckles, her faded jumper’; to her ‘flat, nervous frame’, to her boniness and lack of make-up. He does not admire her art, which he dismisses as ‘school of Truby-King’; he hopes that her piano playing will not be too good (his hopes are fulfilled). He sees through her unconventionality. The studio is part of the pose. He calculates that, lacking roots, her meagre artistic impulse ‘might in time be gently extracted from her system’.  He knows that she will be more at home in a double fronted house, with a large garden and two uniformed maids.  And he knows that he can provide that. ‘The girl out of his own past, the girl from Rottingdean, a symbol, unforgotten’, is there for the taking.  For that he loves her.

 For Catherine, Alec, in his way, is the ‘trophy husband’. Not because of his money, nor because of his success, but because of his Jewishness. He is different and, because of that he is exciting. He has ‘a certain mystery, a concealed power, lacking in the men of her own kind’.  She is fascinated by his ‘dark screened eyes: the matt, foreign skin’, ‘his beautiful mouth, firm and suave’. Does she love him? She is tender towards him, because she is ‘able to bring him happiness. He had given her that: rehabilitated her: in a few months, all the unhappy sterile years were forgotten …. She often found herself thinking “It is as though I were at home again” ‘.

 Both in their way yearn for home and family. When he first visits her studio, Alec for the first time in more than ten years experiences an agonising sense of regret for his mother, for the old life, ‘for the sense of being in a community again; for that protection, that solidarity, that oneness’.  But their marriage can never recreate that. Alec can never be the source of ‘the harmony that existed between father and daughter’, a harmony which excluded even the sinister, divisive Basil. Catherine can never give of herself as selflessly as Mrs Berman.  They chose a ‘mixed marriage’ for what they thought it could offer: social respectability for him, the thrill of the unconventional for her. But they were looking for the wrong things.  Alec’s dream of an ideal world is laudable, and he is right to say that it was ‘incumbent upon certain people to behave as if it did [exist]‘.  They were not the right people.

 Betty Miller places the conflicts of the Jew in the modern world within the confines of a marriage. Can we surmise that, in England in 1935, had the story continued, Catherine, would opt now for a more conventional path, taking the Aryan featured David with her?  Alec, driven by ambition, will set out again on a new professional journey, this time with the backing of his family. The conflicts have been confronted but not resolved.

With what, reluctantly, one must call the ‘benefit’ of hindsight, the twenty first century reader knows, as Betty Miller knew, when the novel was published in 1941, that the conflicts were about to develop catastrophically on a scale beyond the scope of the widest angled lens. It is impossible to imagine what paths Alec’s life and Catherine’s might have followed six years later.

Questions

Betty Miller makes very little reference to the wider issue of Jewishness in 1930s Britain: a man with a badge reading ‘Clear out the Jews’ selling newspapers in Piccadilly Circus, but no mention of Black Shirts, or the rise of fascism in the rest of Europe. Do you find that a fault in the novel?

When Farewell Leicester Square was discussed at the Persephone reading group in February, the relationship between Catherine and her brother Basil was discussed. Incestuous or not?

Some found Catherine somewhat under-defined as a character. Do you agree?

 

Quotes – some of my favourites, do share yours.

 ‘His [Alec’s] young impressionable senses devoured this English scene, its tones, its nuances, made it all a part of himself, of his deepest emotions: so that, later on, years later, even if this culture by which he had been seduced should ultimately reject him, he would yet be incapable, like a man fixated upon the charms of the one woman he has loved, of turning elsewhere for spiritual life, or even consolation.’

‘As though disturbed by her thoughts, the child moved in her: gave a plunge, a convulsive wriggle, like a fish caught in a net. When it moved like that, if she quickly put her hand to her side, she could feel distinctly the point of an elbow, a knee; she had the intimation of something that seemed, already, blindly to battle with life …She remembered the first time she had felt the child. Walking across a room, she had stopped dead. Arrested by something never before experienced, out of another dimension. It was as if, at the core of her, a harp string had been tentatively plucked … She would never forget that, she thought.’

‘After all, he thought, the consciousness that a marriage is not what might be called a successful one, is actually quite intermittent. Even then the sun does not shine less bright, nor food taste less well. The ordinary things of life, in fact, go on precisely as before: the small joys, the small interests which go to make up the major part of living get woven in and about the circumstances of marriage, so that, in time, the whole thing comes to constitute the fabric of the normal, the accepted … Only occasionally there came the restless consciousness of some light, some quality gone from things: and even then, one was always ready to attribute that to the impersonal factor: the passage of time; the slow inevitable loss of youth …’

If you enjoyed this book you might also enjoy:

 Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy (Persephone Book No. 23)

Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski (Persephone Book No.28)

Hetty Dorval by Ethel Wilson (Persephone Book No. 58)

 What other bloggers have said about this book:

Betty Miller’s novel about being Jewish in London in the 1930s is far, far better than I expected. I set out to read a book of considerable historical interest, a worthy book. I found, instead, a really expert novel, written by a very young Betty Miller (in her mid-twenties) centering on Alec Berman, a Jewish man from Brighton who longs to work in film, becomes a celebrated director and marries the daughter of his mentor.

….. Miller’s writing is wonderful and she is at home with all kinds of scenes: she gets the mood of a boy smoking and staring off to sea right and then, pages later, she gets right the feeling of a new mother getting up from a dinner party to nurse her baby. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book that moved among classes, cultures, genders with such grace.

As I guess you can hear, I’m a little gobsmacked by this book: so much better than I had any reason to guess.    fernham

I knew little about it before selecting it for a prize; Lydia from the Persephone shop helped me choose it and gave it such a positive endorsement that I was sold, on both the book and Betty Miller herself.  The novel was controversial and, in fact, Victor Gollancz, Miller’s publisher, refused to publish it in 1935; The Guardian called it, “A thought-provoking insight into anti-semitism between the wars,’ when it was finally published in 1941.  Such an important social-historical novel has me intrigued, as does Miller herself; Lydia told me that Betty Miller was quoted as saying that her favourite things were metaphysics, mass-observation (the series published by Faber) and milk chocolate – isn’t that a fabulous answer (I can’t remember what or whom it was in response to but it is fantastic nonetheless). paperback-reader

Next month’s Forum is about  Persephone Book No. 14:  Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller. All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books

 

 

       

 Some time ago my book group read The Provincial Lady. Everyone loved it. Who couldn’t? Who could not enjoy Delafield’s self-deprecating humour and lightly satirical tone. It was hugely successful when it was published in 1930, and remains her best known book.  But her own favourite was Consequences.  Asked by one of the group whether, Consequences was as good a read as PL, I found it hard to answer. There are a few brilliant examples of  Delafield’s cutting wit, but it is a terribly sad  book. If I were to  summarise it, I would have to say ‘girl broken on the wheel of late Victorian upper class, patriarchal, pre Freudian society’.  I might add that the main character is hard to like, but that that is her problem, but not her fault, and, surprisingly, makes the novel more, not less readable. For fans of E.M. Delafield’s best known novel, The Provincial Lady, I would suggest thinking of that as the last of a quartet, covering roughly forty years,  Consequences, Thank Heaven Fasting , The Way Things Were, The Provincial Lady. The heroines (or perhaps anti-heroines), to take them in order, Alex, Monica, Laura and the PL are all caught in a system which favours men and in which women must find their place. Alex is broken by the system, Monica survives, not unhappily, by adapting to it, Laura forces herself to adapt, unhappily, and the PL survives thanks to a sense of humour and a good circle of women friends.

 

         Consequences is an extraordinarily rich novel tightly focused on its main character, and trapped in its period, and its social milieu, yet touching perceptively on a wide number of themes, very occasionally with a certain wry humour, society, men and women, family, friendship, expectations and disappointments, fate. E.M.Delafield shows in agonising detail how cruel life could (and can) prove for the misfit, and the rules and customs of late Victorian society were as tight and constraining as the corsets into which its women were laced.

 

        Idly googling ‘consequences Victorian game rules’ before writing this piece, I discovered, at the end, a rule of which I was unaware: ‘Note that the person who began the story by writing a man’s name gets to keep the story’.  A footnote, but one that sheds a chilly light on the patterns ingrained in the Victorian nursery. The story belonged to the men.  A woman alone was socially, and economically marginalized.

 

         But few young girls in the upper echelons of Victorian society needed a game to remind them of that.  Their upbringing, education and social life were meticulously managed to ensure a good marriage. The window of opportunity for achieving this was small. A girl would ‘come out’ at seventeen or eighteen, and would have one, two or, in the most desperate cases, three ‘seasons’ in which to meet not Mr Right, that would be a bonus, but Mr Socially Acceptable and Financially Secure. An attractive girl, blessed with self-confidence might dance her way swiftly to the altar. Her more awkward, plain, shy, or simply immature sisters could find themselves, not just alone, but destroyed by the system. 

 

         To her mother’s chagrin, E.M.D had been one of the ‘failures’, and knew the pain from her own experience. Harsh as the system was in 1908 when she came out, it was a little gentler than in the 1890s when she sets her novel, in no small measure thanks to Freud, and advances in understanding the influence of childhood on the development of personality.

 

         We meet the Clare children, Alex, Barbara, Cedric, Archie and Baby Pamela in the nursery of their Bayswater house. Barbara is angry and sharp faced, but nevertheless favoured by Nurse; Cedric is judicious and dignified, and doesn’t give a fig for Nurse’s opinion. Alex is proud and dictatorial, and disliked by Nurse, who considers her violent and overbearing. As the eldest, she is sometimes allowed to join her mother’s friends in the drawing-room, a privilege which she mistakenly believes to be a sign that she is her mother’s favourite. The sad truth about Alex is that she is nobody’s favourite. Indeed nobody seems to like her much, not her mother, nor her siblings, not Nurse, not the nursery maid, who refers to her as the ‘drawing-room child’. Even E.M.D. seems not to like her. She implicitly acknowledges, and understands her pain, but allows her few redeeming features. Alex is disagreeable, and mean-spirited. The novel is largely written in her voice, exposing her self-centredness, her neediness coupled with limited awareness of the needs of others, her lack of moral compass, her lack of energy, her impulsiveness and her immaturity.  Alex is not loveable. But poor Alex has never been loved.

 

         Asked the secret of a successful marriage, Judith Viorst (see the May Forum) replied ‘dumb luck plus a huge amount of hard work and a willingness to laugh’, a good formula for life itself. Alex at first does not accept the necessity for hard work, then later lacks the strength for it. Her sister when they are both grown up suggests that she might be happier if she would only cultivate a sense of humour. Indeed she would. But, like many self-centred people she is unable to laugh, and as time goes on has precious little to laugh about. Worse still, she has no luck. 

 

 

       Her first misfortune is to have been born a girl. Like all Victorian upper class parents Sir Francis Clare and Lady Isabel would have wanted their first-born to be a boy.  Even after the longed for sons arrive, her father finds his daughters unsatisfactory – Barbara shows plenty of verve but is plain, while Alex is pretty but lacks all gaiety. ‘It was only in his two sons – Cedric, with his sort of steady brilliance, and idle happy-go-lucky Archie, by far the best-looking of the Clare children – that Sir Francis found unalloyed satisfaction.’ Unalloyed love is what every child needs.  Her mother is dazzling and hard as the rings Alex is allowed to watch her put on, in a pathetic little moment of intimacy, before she hurries off to dinner. Her father is a distant figure who abhors all show of emotion. With increasing desperation, Alex will look elsewhere for the love she lacked as a child.

 

         A moment of bad luck sets in train a chain of events which alters the course of her life. A childish prank goes horribly wrong. Impulsive, dictatorial Alex, forces her sister to walk an improvised tightrope. Barbara falls and injures her back. She must be cared for. No-one thinks that Alex might need a little reassurance. Her punishment is to be sent away to a convent school in Belgium. ‘And that’, writes Delafield, ‘was her first practical experience of the game of consequences, as played by the freakish hand of fate’. From the age of twelve, Alex feels herself dogged by destiny, ‘eternally different from her companions, eternally destined to lose her way’.  Much later, as she struggles through her second season, she wonders ‘drearily [what a sad, lowering, and brilliantly chosen adverb] if she was always destined to find herself out of all harmony with her surroundings.  She never questioned but that the fault lay entirely in herself, and a sort of fatalism made her accept it all with apathetic matter-of-factness’. The voice here, unusually, is Delafield’s: can one detect a hint of irritation?

 

         ‘Friendly with all, familiar with none’, is Sir Francis’ parting advice to his twelve-year-old daughter as she leaves for Liège. How, with so little experience of friendship, or familiarity, could she be expected to understand?  E.M.D., aware of the burgeoning study of human psychology, explains what Sir Francis, left emotionally illiterate by his own Victorian upbringing cannot (Alex later recalls ‘the frozen rigidity of her father’s anguish’ after Lady Isobel’s death). ‘Nothing but the most exclusive and inordinate of attachments lay within the scope of Alex’s emotional capacities. She was incapable alike of asking or bestowing in moderation’.  Arriving at the convent, she is drawn to a young schoolmistress. E.M.D.’s assessment is expressed in clear Freudian language ‘one of those violent attractions for one of her own sex, that are apt to avail feminine adolescence’. The tall Belgian postulante who polishes the floors, then Marie-Angèle, an older French girl, and most powerful the magnetic, precociously self-confident, calculating   Queenie – Alex throws herself into a series of pashes, to use the now outdated school girl parlance.

 

         Mutual friendship, on equal terms, is not within Alex’s emotional range. Her relationships are overwhelmingly one-sided. Indeed she shows little interest or curiosity about those from whom she expects so much. E.M.D. seems to be saying, perhaps reflecting her own unhappy childhood, that having been denied a mother’s love, always seeking for a substitute, she is unable to move on to a mature relationship.

 

        Having failed to form friendships at school, Alex pins her hopes on her first season. ‘Everything she had longed for, and utterly missed throughout her schooldays would now be hers’. She never doubts that in a long dress and with piled-up hair, she will attract the same admiration that she enjoyed as a child in her mother’s drawing room. Nor does she doubt that marriage will follow. Blind confidence, lack of self-awareness and a disastrous anxiety to be liked form a cruel combination. With an irony, rare in Consequences, but so characteristic of her later novels. E.M.D. pricks the bubble of her expectations: cautioned by Lady Isabel ‘never more than three dances, ‘Alex bore the warning carefully in mind, and was naïvely surprised that no occasion for making practical application of it should occur’. Alex fails to attract.

 

         Desperate not to disappoint her mother, Alex allows herself to become engaged to the good-looking, socially acceptable, self-obsessed Noël Cardew, and the only good thing to come out of it is a rare moment of warmth from her mother. Could the marriage have worked? Noël is a bore, who finds women shallow and deplores sentimentality, but he has a philanthropic vision for the estate that he will inherit, which he had hoped to share with her. But Alex needs more (Noël has a point when he describes her as ‘exacting’). She breaks off the engagement.  In a rare moment of insight, she is conscious that this ‘sudden impulse’ is likely to have far-reaching and disastrous consequences. Quite far-reaching and how disastrous she does not realise. ‘Like all weak people, she had an irrational belief in sudden and improbable accessions of luck’. Chance but not luck determines the rest of her life.

 

        Noël, in all likelihood, will be fine.  He will find a less exacting wife, who will be ready, eager, even, to put up with his egoism, his coldness, his lack of interest in sex, for life as a married woman. Noel will not need to change or adapt. While Alex is warned that as a spinster she can look forward to a life of semi-penury, her good-looking, feckless brother, Archie, will have his debts paid by his rich sister-in-law and look forward to a successful career as a guardsman. It was a man’s world. Alex’s prospects were grim.

 

    

    An unplanned visit to a Bayswater convent, a rest from the heat and exhaustion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee parade,  proves to be the defining moment. Alex has little real interest in religion. Her father is Catholic, but we do not see him at his devotions. Her mother knows ‘lots of people who go to Farm Street’ (still the most fashionable of London Catholic churches), and accepts church going ‘if it is at a reasonable hour’.  But the Church is able to provide, for a while, what she so desperately needs: a refuge, where social skills are not a requisite, and which can accommodate misfits. The vexing question of marriage can be forgotten.

 

         The regime is a harsh one, but, for some, like Alex, easier to adapt to than the unforgiving Victorian society of the 1890s. Most importantly of all, in the figure of Mother Gertrude, convent life offered the maternal love for which Alex remained so desperate. Or something like it. Alex mistakenly thinks that, in becoming a nun, she can revert to childhood and remain there. But Mother Gertrude moves on. Alex is not her child. In another impulsive move, she decides to leave the convent community, which, like everyone she has ever known, has disappointed her.

 

        Alex was not in any useful sense grown-up when she entered the convent. For ten years she lived there in a state of arrested development.  She is no more fit for the world outside than when she went in. Travel, money, the need to telegraph ahead to others, even the necessity for sandwiches for the train – all such practicalities are beyond her.

 

        People are kind to her, as far as they are able, but she gives little in return, not even a polite interest in their lives. Delafield, who has not always had sympathy for her (anti) heroine acknowledges with pity ‘that terrible isolation of those who have definitely, and for long past, lost all self-confidence, and which can never be realised or penetrated by those outside.’ It is impossible not to be drawn into the last months of Alex’s dreadful downward spiral. I am not sure that pity is the word, more a sort of grim realisation, with her, that there is no other way, and a sad salute to her final moment of pride, ‘because she knew that for this once she was not going to fail’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Questions

At times Alex seems to feel that she is destined to fail, to be a misfit, blaming  fate, the Creator, the Devil,and most of all she herself. It never occurs to blame her parents, or the system. Is there a point at which you think she might have been able to change things for the better?

Many people have assumed that at the heart of Alex’s story is her sexuality. That this was just one more issue swept under the Victorian carpet. I am not completely convinced. Your comments please.

Nicola Beauman  (see from the Prefaces) calls this ‘a deeply feminist book’. Do you agree? Is it caught in its period, or can we see something of ourselves in the restricted lives of late Victorian women?

Quotes

‘Alex wished vaguely that it was possible for them to talk it all out quite frankly and dispassionately with one another, but the hard, crystalline detachment of the generation that was to follow theirs, had as yet no place in the scheme of things known to Noël and Alex.’

‘It was characteristic of her that when the occasion for excelling had actually come, she should passionately desire to excel, whereas during the previous week of  supine indifference, it had never seemed to her worthwhile to exert herself in the attainment of proficiency … like all weak people, she had an irrational belief in sudden and improbable accessions of luck.’

‘She started and coloured, having retained all the childish uneasy belief that her father lived in an atmosphere far above that into which the sound and sight of her children’s daily doings could penetrate to his knowledge without the special intervention of some accredited emissary such as her mother.’

 If you enjoyed this book you might also enjoy:

Alas, Poor Lady  by Rachel Ferguson (Persephone Book No.65)

A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 by Ruth Adam (Persephone Book No. 20)

Fidelity by Susan Glaspell (Persephone Book No.4)

The Victorian Chaise -longue by Marghanita Laski (Persephone Book No.6)

 

 

 What other bloggers have said about this book:

Another interesting thing about Consequences is the fact that it’s possible to read quite a lot of lesbian subtext into Alex’s repeated infatuations with girls and women. I’m not sure how confident I can be about this reading, because the truth is that the social life of a Victorian girl like Alex would rarely have put her in contact with members of the opposite sex in any way conductive to the development of real intimacy. It’s possible that these same-sex passions were the result of her hunger for connections; it’s also possible that they were much more. The text is silent about whether or not there was any element of sexual attraction to them, but this is not something a 1919 novel would likely have been open about. In any case, I don’t want to stubbornly insist on this or that requirement for reading her attachments as romantic passions to be considered “valid”. It’s interesting to consider that there might have been yet another layer buried under the countless feelings Alex could never have voiced. If so, this is simply one more tragedy to add to the many that formed her life.  Thingsmeanalot 

Maybe she fails because she is Alex, a mixed up, confused, and ungrateful person. Maybe if the convent, in which she sought the ultimate love, had been more open to personal relations, maybe if Alex’s family had been able to be closer to her instead of “hard and self-contained” they may have been able to redirect her. Maybe it is because of their failure to attempt to understand her distress that she fails. This we see clearly in the epitaph where her family sits puzzled. This of course is another artifact of the time. leaningtowardthesun

… knowing how widely differing her style can be (for example, Consequences is practically unrecognisable as a Delafield when compared to The Diary of a Provincial Lady),  booksnob  

 

Next month’s Forum is about  Persephone Book No 13:  Consequences by E.M. Delafield. All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books

Judith Viorst was born in 1931 in New Jersey. She is eighty now and in a very brief resumé of her life showing on her publisher’s website, she charts her writing career from the age of 7, when she wrote her ‘Ode to my Dead Parents’, to her early thirties when she got married and decided to write ‘ short funny poems, instead of long miserable ones’.

I first read the poems in It’s Hard to be Hip Over Thirty in Nova, a cruelly short-lived publication, 1965-1975, described by Kate Muir in The Times in 2006 as ‘the magazine of our dreams … a politically radical, beautifully designed, intellectual women’s magazine’.  Then ‘over thirty’, weddings, motherhood, Perspex chairs of my own, belonged to the distant future, but the poems were funny then.  Now those are all in the distant past, and the poems are still funny.

They are funny and touching because, although they are very American, quite Jewish, and very much of the sixties, the situations, the relationships and the emotions that they describe are unchanging.  I had to ask an American friend to translate Saran wrap, Sanka, Pablum, Welcome Wagon and Lucite, among others (Clingfilm, cheap instant coffee,

baby rice, and a sort of welcome pack of food and neighbourhood information for new neighbours) and to expand a few acronyms: CORE, IRT and CPA (Congress for Racial Equality, New York City Inter-borough Rapid Transport and Certified Public Accountant). She was able to remind me that lox is thinly sliced smoked salmon, and to fill me in on some figures from the past, Craig Claiborne, a food writer, James Beard, TV chef, Jacob Javits, New York senator. Petula Clark, Herb Alpert and The Supremes, I had no problem with.

The names are from the sixties, the food is date stamped 1965, the clothes are vintage: how long since anyone wore a chiffon peignoir, or a green Dacron dry-mopping outfit, or rollers in bed? The setting may be half a century ago and an ocean away, but the poems delight because the subject matter remains central to women’s lives: family, love, marriage, children, aging, envy, other women and the ‘other woman’, anxieties about fitting in, about who we want to be, about who we might have been. Any young mother, any newly-wed (or newly cohabiting in 21^st century parlance), any woman in her thirties, will surely recognise aspects of themselves in It’s Hard.  And any woman no longer in her thirties will recognise that as the decade, when she was forced to realise that the first flush of youth had past, that middle age was closer than teen age.

Viorst herself said ‘I probably have cried over everything that I wound up writing funny poems about.’ What makes the poems work for the reader is that we too have cried over the things that she writes about, and, if we are lucky, we may have been able, later, quite a lot later, to laugh about them. ‘…after crying, whining, moaning ‘Why me!’ and, whenever possible, blaming my husband’, she writes, ‘I have managed to find some humour in the ‘tragedies’ and ‘aggravation’ of life.’ If we haven’t yet found the humour in our own disappointments and failures, she invites us nonetheless to see the funny side of hers.

Viorst has a brilliant ear for dialogue, catching the voices (and the clichés) of a whole cast of family and friends: the aunts and uncles who were grateful that her prospective husband

…came from a nice family in New Jersey even though he

    wore sunglasses in the living room which is usually a sign

    of depravity.

His aunts and his uncles were grateful

I came from a nice family in New Jersey even though I lived

   in Greenwich Village which is usually a sign of depravity

   also.

her mother, who wistfully talks of Freddie, the New Jersey bachelor, with waves in his hair, who

… has cashmere sweaters,

A Danish-modern apartment,

A retirement plan,

And what is known in New Jersey as

Sound investments….

 

And whenever my husband is showing

What is known in New Jersey as no respect

For my mother,

She tells about Freddie the bachelor,

Who never talks back and is such

A good catch.

her mother in law, who ‘Comes to visit with her own apron’ and whose son

She think she should mention,

  Looks thin as a rail …

‘The First Full-fledged Family Reunion’, is an audible group portrait, including;

1 cousin you wouldn’t believe it to look at him only likes

     fellows

1 nephew involved with a person of a different racial

     persuasion which his parents are taking very well

…..

1 cousin who has made such a name for himself he was

     almost Barbara Streisand’s obstetrician

…..

2 aunts who go to the same butcher as Philip Roth’s mother

And me wanting approval from all of them.

We smile because we recognise those flawed characters and we recognise in ourselves that irrational but all too real need for the approval of people we don’t even admire.

Social approval is just as elusive. Fitting in is hard to do, whether it be in ‘swinging London’

… standing on the King’s Road

With wet feet,

Indigestion,

The wrong hemline

in sophisticated Deauville where

… even if we had arrived

With an Alfa Romeo,

A yacht,

His and her dinner clothes by Pierre Cardin,

And a handwritten introduction from Françoise Sagan,

They would still know

We did not belong

In Deauville

or at home in Washington DC, where surrounded by ‘the fun couples/Who own works of art’, ‘the boycott-the-supermarket people’, ‘the social leaders’ and ‘the self improvers’,

…we can’t decide

Who we want them to think

We are.

When she does feel herself fitting in at ‘The cocktail party’, where

The hostess is passing the eggs with the mayonnaise-curry

   and

The husband is being risqué with a blonde in the foyer, and

The mothers are finishing ear aches and starting on day

   Camps …

she ruefully admits

I’m not as out of place

As I wish I were.

Some of her best poems are about marriage, its pains and pleasures. You can’t live the dream, she seems to be saying, and the sooner you learn that lesson the better for you. No-one says it will be easy. When expectation meets reality, it is expectation that must give way, and it is painful.  But in retrospect it can be funny, especially if you can share the joke.

Asked about the key to a long-lasting marriage (Judith Viorst has been married for 50 years) she replies: ‘dumb luck plus a huge amount of hard work and a willingness to laugh’.  The hard work begins right after the honeymoon, when he leaves for work, ‘whistling something obvious from La Bohème’ and she finds herself dry-mopping the floor, wondering why she’s not dancing in the dark or rejecting princes. Already the two of them ‘find that dining by candlelight makes us squint’.  . The truth is she never knew a prince (fantasising about the past is just as dangerous as fantasising about the future) and it’s time to get on with living the reality. ‘… they call this getting to know each other’

How accurately she pinpoints the niggling details, the unreasonable expectations, the irritating habits that have to be addressed or accepted if marriage is to survive the honeymoon

If I quite hoping he’ll show up with flowers, and

He quits hoping I’ll squeeze him an orange, and

I quit shaving my legs with his razor, and

He quits wiping his feet with my face towel, and

We avoid discussions like

Is he really smarter than I am, or simply more glib,

Maybe we’ll make it.

There are times when it seems that ‘The Other Woman’ has the better deal. She ‘spends her money on fine furs’ and is a ‘good sport’ when it comes to ‘things like flat tires and no hot water’, ‘Because it easier to be a good sport/ When you’re not married’. How well we recognise that other woman who, unlike us, ‘never smells of Ajax or Spaghetti O’, and don’t we just hate her. But tallying up the losses and the gains, it was worth giving up the promising career ‘as assistant to the editorial assistant to the editor’, or ‘sitting on a blanket in Nantucket’, or‘

 …an affair with a marvellous man

Who would leave his wife immediately except that she would

    slash her wrists and the children would cry.

It was worth it

Because, as someone once put it,

Married is better.

And then there are the children.  It’s hard to be hip over thirty, because ‘everyone else is nineteen’, and

The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,

Which we learned line by line long ago,/

Doesn’t swing we are told, on East Tenth Street,

Where all the perfect girls are switched-on or tuned-in or miscegenated…

But what really gets in the way of being hip is ‘Serving Crispy Critters to grouchy three-year olds’ and having ‘to show up for the car pool.’  From the moment of their arrival children make their mark, literally: baby food on the smart Spanish rug, strained banana in our hair, baby dribble on the antique satin spread. The beautiful life and parenting don’t belong together. Another dream bubble bursts. ‘It is often said/ That motherhood is very maturing’.  Those who have ‘enjoyed’ motherhood would agree wryly. And no sooner has the rug been dry-cleaned than the harassed mother pictures the children growing up, sniffing glue, smoking pot and ‘Slipping LSD into their cream of wheat’.  It’s never too early to start worrying.

It’s Hard to be Hip Over Thirty – the title says it all, almost all. What is missing from the title, and from the title poem, is the stoicism, the fortitude, the acceptance of life as it is, or rather as it turns out to be.

Judith Viorst’s most successful children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, ends, not happily, but realistically:  bad days don’t turn out to be good days after all.  The lesson is that those days happen, (even in Australia – Alexander had dreamt that it might be possible to escape them in Australia).  Small boys learn that no good days happen to other small boys, which is a comfort. And they learn that good days can follow bad days, and that there is something funny about the bad day, although not at the time.  Their mothers, and grandmothers, learn from her poetry that their no good very bad days are not unique to them, that the perfect life, like the perfect husband or the perfect child (or being the perfect wife and mother) is a chimera, and the best we can do is to laugh about it.

Questions

Can we learn life-lessons from poetry?

How easy is it for a British reader to identify with Judith Viorst’s poetry?

It’s Hard to be Hip was first published in 1968. Forty years on, how much has changed?

 

If you enjoyed this book you might also enjoy:

Consider the Years  by Virginia Graham (Persephone Book No.22)

Mariana by Monica Dickens (Persephone Book No. 2)

Fidelity by Susan Glaspell (Persephone Book No.4)

Princes in the Land by Joanna Casman (Persephone Book No.63)

 

 

 

 

 

 

What other bloggers have said about this book:

I had to give It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst a go and I’m so glad I did.  The edition I was able to obtain from the library was not a lovely Persephone one but an ultra-retro, orange and black one from 1970 (for ‘retro’, read ‘hideous’).  Even that was not able to mar my enjoyment!

It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty is a short book of deeply domestic poems, dealing with very personal struggles to adjust to life as a wife and mother.  They are hilarious.  Dated at times, yes (oh tranquilizers, your days are long gone), but the essentials, the things that make the poems so touching and recognizable, do not change.  the captive reader