The Persephone Forum

 

Next month’s Forum is about  Persephone Book No 12:  It’s Hard To Be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst. All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books

 

The title is Julian Grenfell, His life and the times of his death, 1888-1915, but Nicholas Mosley, in his preface to the Persephone edition, readily admits that his book is as much, if not more, about his mother than it is about Julian. ‘We did have fun didn’t we?’, perhaps the saddest words in Nicholas Mosley’s moving and complex biography of Julian Grenfell, come from his mother’s obituary. Ettie Grenfell, Lady Desborough, had lived her whole life by her ‘stubborn gospel of joy’ (as Cynthia Asquith, the daughter of her great friend, Mary Elcho, called it) . Those close to her had been required to live by it too, or, if they could not live by it, to pay full lip service to it.

Julian’s personal tragedy was not so much his early death, one, after all, among millions, but his life, and that was, for the most part, determined by his mother. When her son rebelled, she chose to ‘back her ideals’. Mosley argues that this was not inevitable, but the fact is that her life depended on those ideals. That was her tragedy. It was those ideals, social attitudes of her times, honed in her own exceptional way, that enabled her to pass through life without looking back into the darkness behind, or down into the abyss.

In matters of grief Ettie’s lessons started early. When she was only a year old she lost her mother, at two her father and at eight her brother. At thirteen she lost the grandmother she loved best. Recording these losses seventy years later, she wrote of ‘the wretched embarrassment of a child in grief; the shame of tears’.  Life was terrifyingly unpredictable but she had learned that while it might not be possible to control events – although in that regard she would do her damnedest –  it should be possible to control the show of emotion, and the events themselves could always be rewritten, ‘everything, regardless of appearances, must be for the best, because to suppose otherwise would be unbearable.’

Ettie may have been self taught in cheerfulness, but the doctrine was one which she made sure was instilled into her own children at a young age. Julian was 2 ½ when his Nanny wrote to his parents, in India for several months, ‘Julian is really a changed child, he never cries about anything.’ Later, his letters from his preparatory school would be ‘consistent in their assurances of happiness.’ In his first letters from Eton he writes, ‘I am very well’, ‘I like it awfully’. ‘It would have been difficult to write anything different,’ notes Mosley, (from the heart, one senses), ‘and to be approved.’ His letters to his mother from Eton record marks gained, runs scored, goals won.

As he nears the end of his schooldays, Julian has become so adept at cheerfulness that he is teaching it. Writing to Ettie on the death of their old Nanny, he urges ‘surely the great maxim is to take everything and especially death, in the most natural and cheerful way that we possibly can, without letting ourselves be absorbed for one instant in the little petty things or forgetting the great mysterious background that there is to everything.’ Even on his own death-bed, he was able to appear cheerful, so much so that the doctors did not at first realise how ill he was. His mother, in her account of his last days, affirms: ‘The thought that he was dying seemed to go and come but he always seemed radiantly happy…’ .  Ettie’s words bizarrely echo Julian’s own, in a letter to his sister six years earlier, about the death of their mother’s young lover, ‘she is happy about it all, radiantly happy.’

That Julian should write to his sister about their mother’s grief at the death of Archie Gordon, is no less surprising than the fact, unseemly to modern readers,  that both his sister, the fifteen year old Monica, and his brother Billy should have written her letters of condolence.  Julian also wrote, apologising for not being able to help her. The reason he could not even begin to help was that he was in the middle of what was clearly a nervous breakdown. ‘I feel as if I had been smashed up into little bits and put together again very badly with half the bits missing’, was how he described it to Marjorie Manners, with whom he was in love at the time. He had risked writing to his mother about his mental state, ‘I’ve tried your system of playing up, but miserably badly.’ For Ettie, it was another problem to be swept under the carpet. When Archie Gordon’s successor, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Julian’s friend and Oxford contemporary, wrote asking after him, Ettie replied, ‘Juju isn’t a bit better, but we won’t go into that.’

And yet by the standards of the times, Ettie Grenfell was not a bad mother, any more than she was a bad wife. Married in 1887 at the age of 19 to Willy Grenfell, twelve years her senior, MP, outstanding sportsman and committee member, she had

produced the required ‘heir and a spare’ by 1890. For a young woman, rich and beautiful, marriage in the 1890s meant freedom, not constraint. She was known as a model wife, a reputation that she guarded fiercely, he as a model Englishman, but ‘Willy was a conventional man, and lovers were conventionally acceptable if not too much about them was known.’ In 1891 it was fashionable for a young married woman to have lovers and Ettie followed the fashion. The ‘rules of engagement’ were pretty clearly demarcated – ‘romance and passion, if they were to co-exist with ideas of fidelity and duty, had to remain largely in the mind’ – and Ettie’s rules were, predictably, exacting. There was a pattern to her ‘affairs’ :  ecstasy, dependence, loss, anguish, repentance, reassurance, ecstasy. It was cyclical and predictable.

The circle in which these fantasies were played out was a small and exclusive one whose members came from a few, extended and interlinked aristocratic families.   Charteris, Wyndham, Asquith, Grenfell, Horner, Tennant – husbands, wives, lovers, friends were chosen and exchanged largely within a group of like-minded men and women, who came to be known as the Souls, a name coined for them by Lord Charles Beresford in 1888, because ‘you all sit and talk about each other’s souls’. The name is misleading in suggesting both personal intimacy and lofty intellectualism. The women may have enjoyed intimate friendships, but the men were happier on a horse, or with a gun in their hands. Together their delight was in games, word games, charades, guessing games, games in which wit was valued as highly as erudition. Dinners, balls, weekends, hunting, shooting, and for the men politics, for they had their serious sides, made for a hectic round which left no time for boredom, nor for close inspection of the vacuity of their lives.

Children found what space they could in the dizzy social and sporting whirl of their parents. Often away for weeks, or months at a time, Ettie, sometimes with Willy, would descend, from time to time, like a goddess, on the nursery. For a few precious weeks she would be the perfect mother, spending more time with her children than was usual among her contemporaries. Together they climbed tress, played hide and seek, clambered over rocks. In the summer she would take them away, enjoying playing at the simple life with them.  In her own way, and perhaps as far as she was able, she minded about them. When it was time for Julian to go away to school, she took him to look at three schools before deciding on Summerfields. She wanted him to be happy. She wanted it so much that she was blind, deliberately blind, to his unhappiness even at this young age. With heartless pride she described his first journey to school, ‘His fighting spirit leapt to the adventure, and he did not shed one tear, but he was sick several times on the journey from Taplow to Oxford.’

The messages were always confusing. Love was given, then inexplicably and abruptly withdrawn. The same cycle of adoration followed by guilt, humiliation and ecstasy, that we saw in Ettie’s relationship with her lovers, who by the time Julian reached his last years at Eton were closer in age to him than they were to her, was repeated with her son. It is not surprising to find Julian writing ‘I can’t understand love’, ‘…this faculty of affectionateness has been left altogether out of my composition. I really believe this; things people say and do, and things in books, often seem incomprehensible to me’.

Pleasing his mother became even more difficult after Eton, when the weekly offerings of good marks, and runs scored inevitably ceased. ‘You implore me not to live the solitary life, and die of mortification directly I like anybody’, ‘You implore me to work, and cry if I don’t dance nightly’. Finally, and with great courage, he rebelled. In 1909, while still at Oxford, Julian wrote a short book of essays, which were nothing less than an attack on everything that his mother lived by and for.  In it he exposed the contradictory ideals with which he had been brought up, and which he was convinced would lead to a collective schizophrenia. He believed that society was beginning to search for a ‘competitive self-sacrifice just to prove itself not ludicrous’. But Ettie hated the book, and it marked the start of a long period of (intermittent – for nothing in Ettie’s life was ever consistent) conflict between them.

Four years later Europe would be at war and everything could fall into place, just as Julian had predicted.  The upper classes knew what they had to do.  The men had been steeped in classical literature throughout their years at school, and university. They had been brought up believing that war was a way by which a man could ‘prove’ himself. War offered the chance of achieving glory, alive or dead.  The women could prove themselves, like the women of Sparta, by giving up their sons ‘with anguish unrevealed/By eyes o’erbright and lips to laughter lent’, in the words of Arthur Jenkins.  And Ettie could write to her daughter Monica when Julian left for France, ‘the anguish of this, and yet the uplift’.

Julian had joined the army after Oxford, partly to escape his mother’s wrath and certainly to get away from England. He had no illusions about war, but seems genuinely to have loved it. After India and South Africa, France was the real thing. ‘I’ve never been so fit or nearly so happy in my life before. I adore the fighting … I adore war’, he wrote to his mother.

Julian died from a head wound on 27^th May 1915, with his parents and Monica at his side. No-one wore black at his funeral. His brother Billy had arrived in France a week before. ‘I’m glad there was no gap’, said Julian. Billy would be killed on 30^th July. The Souls had met less and less after 1900, but they would come together, not so much to grieve but to delight in their losses. In 1918 Ettie wrote to Mary Wemyss (Charteris) who had lost two sons, ‘As these agonising days go on, one can feel almost glad that Ego and Ivo and Julian and Billy are safe in the dream of peace.’

In 1926 Ettie offered up her third and last son, not for her country this time, but to a motor accident. ‘We did have fun didn’t we?’: no wonder that plaintive question mark hangs there.

 

 

Questions and quotes

 Questions

Could Ettie have been a better mother?

 What part did Willy play in Julian’s tragedy?

 Is it fair, or even possible, to judge them from our own viewpoint, informed by twentieth century psychoanalytical theories and notions of child rearing?

 If there was a collective death-wish driving Europe towards war, can it be explained? Is it conceivable that it could happen again?

 Why is it so hard to accept Julian’s enthusiasm for war? Do we think less of him?

 Quotes

‘Women were expected to exercise their domineering energies in the home: they had no entry into business or politics. And men, with their quiet sides, were often glad at home to be treated like babies; they reserved their masculinity for the world outside. Everyone, with these transpositions, suffered or enjoyed some torture; and women’s femininity went into fantasy, or on to their sons.’

‘The pattern for men was not to ask questions, not to think, but to make jokes and to do one’s duty: if this was not too difficult, it was perhaps because it was part of men’s duty to fight and kill. It was like this in law, in politics, in business; with thought discouraged, furious instincts were satisfied by ritual. And the pattern for women was to dissimulate, to come and go, to be worshipped by seeming to be first one thing and then another. And this was held to be the real world, the world of gods and goddesses; while those who cooked, sewed, dug the garden, cleaned stables, were smiled on but were thought to be insubstantial.’

‘After the holidays Ettie and Willy would go off on their round of visits again: the women to their friendships; the men to their slaughter of birds.’

‘The worst of Eton is that it is its very sophistication that makes growing away from it difficult. What has been inculcated is charm; and charm is a way of manipulating society. But charm lacks substance; to it is to society that a charming person is tethered, however much he dislikes society. He is beholden to others, because there is not much inside himself.’

‘People shouldn’t be allowed to say goodbye: they ought to fade away silently without these soul-harrowing seconds, and to leave one to put the past in a frame of gold.’ [Billy to Ettie as Julian leaves for India in 1910)

If you enjoyed this book, you may also enjoy:

William and Englishman by Cicely Hamilton (Persephone Book No 1)

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

The Shuttle by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Persephone Book No 71)

A footnote

Julian Grenfell was born on 30th March 1888 at 4 St James’s Square, near Picadilly. The house belonged to his great aunt, Katie Cowper, who shared in Ettie’s upbringing after the death of her parents.

From 1912 to 1942 the house was owned and occupied by the second Viscount Astor. Nancy Astor was the first woman to sit as a Member of Parliament in 1919. In 1942 it was requisitioned by the government and was used as the London headquarters of the Free French Forces. In September 1947 it became the home of the Arts Council of Great Britain.  Subsequently, the building was used as a Court House for several years, first as a division of the High Court, then as a Criminal Court, then as the Employment Appeals Tribunal. Finally in 1996, the house was purchased and became the property and new home of the Naval & Military Club otherwise known as the “In and Out”.

To find out more go to http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=40548

 

 

 Next month’s Forum is about  Persephone Book No 11:  Julian Grenfell by Nicholas Mosley. All the books discussed can be found at Persephone Books

In Vere Hodgson’s own words, Few Eggs and No Oranges is ‘the diary of an ordinary commonplace Londoner during the war years’.  As a diary it is honest but not revealingly introspective. It is, as the title page states, about unimportant people. And yet it draws the reader in, slowly at first, then gradually increasing its grip. The characterisation is sketchy, we learn little of the inner life of the diarist, the action does not vary much from day to day and we know what the end will be. What is it about The Diaries that holds our attention, and touches our emotions?  

Vere Hodgson provides the answer in her introduction to the first published edition: ‘it records fairly accurately the hopes and fears and daily drudgery of an ordinary person during many weary springs, summers, autumns and winters.’   She edited the diaries herself for publication in 1976, savagely cutting the original, which had been started to keep her cousin in Northern Rhodesia informed about the war, and later distributed to other family and friends.  Impossible to know what was cut, but it seems safe to assume that she resisted the temptation to flesh out the people, that she did not take advantage of the benefit of hindsight to correct the various inaccurate predictions concerning the course of the war, and that she understood the power of repetition in building up a picture of the ‘daily drudgery’

For the first hundred pages the published diary hardly misses a day. These entries cover the first months of the Blitz, during which London was bombed for seventy-five consecutive nights. It is true that they do not vary greatly from one day to the next. Hard to get into perhaps, but it is the record of the unchanging nightly routine that brings home the relentlessness of the bombing. Vere Hodgson writes about the casualties, and the destruction, that we know about from historians, but she tells us something else: what is was like to be woken by the Air Raid Siren night after night, time after time, to drag oneself, and a mattress down the stairs, to sleep fitfully tight up against people who were at best acquaintances, then drag the mattress back upstairs at the All Clear, only to repeat the process again an hour or so later. She tells what is was like to be tired all the time, to feel sick from exhaustion and ‘speechless with fatigue’ to make one’s way to work, to go on doing this day after day.

Almost imperceptibly the mood changes: by August the siren which in June had sounded so alarming, has been nicknamed Wailing Winny. By October she can write of a night which is ‘very gunny’, another which is ‘very blitzy’.

She, like others, is adapting to the war.  In January 1941 a plane flies low as she lunches in a café, ‘I never thought I should get used to having my lunch on a battlefield’.  By May a routine is well established at the Sanctuary: in case of an air raid, get everyone downstairs, turn off the gas and fill the bath (to put out stray fires). ‘It is amazing … how well our nerves keep on the whole. If we are bombed then they go a bit; but if we survive the night, we come up bright and smiling the next morning, very keen to exchange notes on the adventures of the night’. If the aim of the Blitz had been to break the spirit of the British people, it was not going to be allowed to succeed.

Vere was 39 at the start of the war, unmarried, a graduate of Birmingham university, an  ex teacher, working for The Greater World Association,  a welfare charity in Notting Hill Gate, living first in a bedsitter and then a flatlet close to her work. If she has a private life, we learn nothing of it. From time to time she entertains the dashing Barishnikov, who spends his points at Fortnum and Mason, or the German exile Dr Rémy, whose family is in Frankfurt, or Retsi, the Swiss accountant, for tea, and one occasion she is given two tickets for the Albert Hall. The diary does not reveal to whom she gave the second ticket.

We know that she reads widely, listens regularly to the News, French and English and to the Brains Trust, takes the Daily Telegraph during the week and the Observer on Sunday, and is a keen cinema goer (brave given the number of bombs that fell on cinemas). Her admiration for Churchill knows no bounds, De Gaulle runs a close second. For the rest of the French nation she has little time. She admires the Russians.  Unexpectedly for one so spirited, she complains frequently about her health, but is fit enough to jump from a 10ft wall during fire fighting practice, and tough enough to volunteer to be the ‘body’ dragged down the stairs during the same practice.  She is an energetic walker, taking regular Sunday walks, sometimes in pouring rain, through the West End and the City to look at bomb damage. Local damage is inspected on the instant: ‘I was told that bombs had fallen again in St Charles’ Square, so I took a bus there’, ‘… heard there had been a landmine last night in St Helen’s Gardens. Immediately took a bus.’

She is quite shameless about what might seem to us a rather ghoulish curiosity, so shameless that I think we can assume that bombsite viewing was not a minority interest. The picture of Miss Moyes  being pushed in a wobbly wheel chair on ‘a tour of the bombs she had not seen’ is, almost, funny, the brief description so vivid: the sides of the chair coming unscrewed with the vibration, Miss M having to dismount every time they crossed the road (in spite of everything, ‘she enjoyed the outing’).  When Vere hears that The Rowley Galleries in Church Street have been burnt out, she runs to see it, ‘Remains of beautiful furniture and pictures all in the street’.  The bizarre aftermath of bombing never loses its fascination for her.  As late as July 1944 she records ‘A spot of excitement. No sooner had I reached my little flat than a Doodle came close in our direction. Roar grew louder … We took breath – heard the engine stop – and then the explosion.’ Hearing that the bomb had fallen in nearby Earl’s Court Road, devastating a crowded restaurant, barely pausing for lunch, she’s off to survey the damage. There is an urgency in her telling, such that we can almost hear her voice, giving us ‘the latest’.

Vere Hodgson notes down not what is, or might be, of historical importance, although those events are included, but what excites her, a bombsite, an extra ration of cheese, a trip to the Zoo with a party of children, the discovery of a hoard of Renaissance treasures from the Uffizi hidden behind mattresses in a villa outside Florence, de Gaulle’s extraordinary courage under fire as he walked the length of the nave of Notre Dame while German snipers took aim from the galleries.

As the diaries unfold her darting style become familiar and strangely endearing. The big picture and the small sit side by side. In the bitter winter of 1942 she buys a spare hot water bottle, ‘They say there will be no more for years; so I am keeping one in reserve until we get Malaya back…’  The entry for 8^th September 1942 records the loss of 80,000 men in the desert and in the next line, ‘Plenty of blackberries – so we wallow in fruit’. In March 1943, from buying curtain material in Liberty’s, she moves seamlessly to the horribly wounded from Dunkirk, and in the written equivalent of the same breath, to the scarcity of biscuits, and her delight at finding soused herrings at 8d each – ‘no fish for months’.

In September 1940 she had written to Lucy, ‘food is the least of our worries’. Not for long. By November she is thankful for two eggs, the following February there are ‘No oranges at all, at all’, and cheese is unobtainable. In May she admits to disregarding the News, which ‘shows no sign of improvement, concentrating instead ‘on procuring food to eat.’ Food and the price of food becomes a leitmotif of the diaries, despondency about shortages, surprise and delight at unexpected availability. Prunes, spurned before the war, acquire rarity value and are eaten with pleasure. Macaroni is unavailable but figs make a surprise appearance. Stays in the countryside provide an opportunity to gorge on plums and cherries and fresh vegetables. The Hodgson family manage a goose for Christmas lunch in 1940, and again in 1941, but by 1942 ‘no turkey, no fowl, no rabbit, only the usual joint’ – Auntie Nell in London had acquired a hare, which ‘required a special license’.

 

Christmas in Birmingham and the Sanctuary Christmas Fair are two fixed points in these years. The flowering of the cherry in the street, the laburnum and the lime in the park mark the turning of the seasons and lift the spirits. But little could be taken for granted, and certainly not waking up alive, unhurt and in one’s own bed.  The cityscape changed almost from day to day during the bombing, good news was followed by bad, invasions do not go according to plan, but nor do train journeys. The Diaries remind us that adversity can take many forms.  The lack of a colander is preoccupying, finding a small double saucepan or a rolling pin at a reasonable price makes for a good day. An onion from the greengrocer, when all had been ‘booked’, is ‘a victory indeed’. The gift of sheets is worth more than rubies, when on the old ones even the patches had been patched, and new ones are unobtainable. Feast and famine were as unpredictable as the course of the war. In the final months, during the ‘little blitz’, there were fewer shortages, more food, more coal, more books in the library:  death and departures had made a dent in London’s population, there was more to go round.

By September 1944 the end is in sight.  The sirens have fallen silent. Soon there will no more bombs, the black-out will end, it will be possible to move around at night without a torch.  The nights on the stairs have come to an end. A hint of regret creeps in.  ‘We have all got friendly in my Flat residence due to the Fly Bombs. The Old Dears have lost their pernickety ways, and as we sat on the stairs, not knowing whether the bomb was going to drop on us, we became very much a band of brothers.’  Mollie Panter-Downes in Good Evening Mrs Craven put almost the same words into the lonely spinster’s mouth, ‘Those nights, terrible as they had been, certainly had had their compensations. It seemed to Miss Birch, looking back, that the inhabitants of Floor K had been one jolly happy family…’. There will be eggs and oranges in the shops once again, but something will have been lost.

 

A few pointers for discussion:

 

First of all: two quotes (taken from Austerity Britain by David Kynaston) to provide a starting point for discussion of  Few Eggs and Two Oranges:

‘Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of its phenomena as they are forced upon us by chance and change.’ Thomas Hardy (Preface to Poems of the Past and Present)

‘The writer Denton Welch … then [on VE day, 8 May 1945] felt – as surely so many did – the discomfort of imminent change from a condition that, for all its inconveniences, had become familiar: “There were awful thoughts and anxieties in the air – the breaking of something – the splitting apart of an atmosphere that had surrounded us for six years.” ‘

Questions

Most of those who thought Few Eggs ‘hard to get into’ have returned to it and found it a compelling read. What is it that make one want to keep turning the pages?

 ‘Wartime Spirit’.  What does it mean?

There are so many questions that one would like to have asked of Vere Hodgson. Asking a friend in her nineties about her experience of wartime London, I was struck in particular by two replies: the first was: ‘I am not a brave person, but I was never scared. We had a routine, we were young’.  Might Vere have replied in similar fashion? The second, which I also find wholly believable, was:  ‘Everything changed when my first child was born in 1942. Then I had to get out of London.’  Is it possible to imagine how we ourselves might have reacted?

 

If you enjoyed this book, you may also enjoy:

 

Good Evening Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes (Persephone Book No 8 )

They Can’t Ration These by Vicomte de Mauduit (Persephone Book No 54)

On the Other Side: Letters to my Children from Germnay 1940-46 by Mathilde Wolff-Mönckberg (Persephone Book No 75)

To Bed with Grand Music by Marghanita Laski (Persephone Book No 86)

The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

 

What other bloggers have said about this book:

 

Vere Hodgson’s Diary was amongst the first bunch of  Persephones that I purchased  8 or 9 years ago. When it arrived, I was surprised by its size though happily so. But then something happened. And my bookmark (beautifully coordinated of course: all bookmarks should be coordinated, no?) got stuck.

I think it was somewhere in 1941, but I don’t remember exactly because I became renewedly interested in my collection when a friend of mine added some new titles to my Persephone shelves last year and I plucked that bookmark out once more and started to read again from the beginning. I read the preface and got stuck in the process of making the decision about whether to read on. (So apparently it’s possible to get stuck in a book when you’re not even really reading it.)

But I still wanted to get un-stuck, so when I started thinking seriously about Persephone Week, Few Eggs and No Oranges was at the top of my list. And I am so glad that I persevered.  buried in print

 On first starting the book, I remarked to a friend that it seemed all the author ever did was wander about various bombed out streets inspecting the damage. But I’m glad I stuck with it, because I ended by finding the diaries absorbing, and Hodgson’s attempts to keep track of the changing face of London to be extremely moving…… I so wish I had known of these diaries when studying the war in school and college. These, and other diaries collected, should be required reading alongside textbooks. While they do present only one version of the home front, and one of fairly comfortable circumstances at that, what they show is the daily challenges and delights, something textbooks can’t do. … The diaries are remarkable for the fact that Hodgson, while clearly aware about the very real danger she faced every day, managed to create a full  and interesting life for herself in wartime, and one brimming with adventure and friendship. make do and read

 

Next month’s Forum is about Persephone Book No 9 Few Eggs and No Oranges by Vere Hodgson. 

  

 I am delighted to have been asked to open this month’s Forum on Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. It is a particular favourite of mine and one which, at my suggestion, my book group read last summer. With one dissenting voice, the group loved it, swept along by the wit and acuity of the writing. Some brought their own war-time stories to the group. One, evacuated from London with her mother, compared her own childish pleasure in country things to her mother’s unease at living with strangers while her husband fought. The strangers were kind enough, but can have been of little help when a few months later he was killed. Another had evacuees billeted on her, and vividly described them arriving wearing white cotton caps over their shaved heads, victims of Reading’s war on head lice. Of those old enough to remember the war all remembered the shortages.

When Mollie Panter-Downes died in 1997 at the age of 90, the New York Times obituary writer concluded that, ‘For all her literary output, she was something close to a typical country housewife, one who did her own shopping, cooking and canning’. Canning?  What do they know at the New York Times about the typical English housewife , which, incidentally, she most certainly was not? Mollie Panter-Downes contributed an astonishing 852 pieces to the New Yorker between 1938 and 1986, poetry, reviews, a regular Letter from London, and thirty-six short stories. The New Yorker described her as ‘bred in the bone English’, ‘every American’s English cousin’, but one wonders if a little of the exquisitely fine detail of her descriptions of English middle and upper-middle class life was not occasionally lost in translation. Bottling not canning was the English way, before, during and for some time after the Second World War. A detail, but Mollie Panter-Downes had 20/20 vision for detail, just as her ear was perfectly tuned to the voices and turns of phrase of her milieu,

To read Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of  Mollie Panter-Downes is to look at domestic life in wartime England, or more precisely, wartime Home Counties, through a lens tightly focused, often, but not always, kindly, on the everyday.  Beginning on 14^th October 1939 and ending on 16^th December 1944, the twenty-one stories, vignettes of the ordinary, containing no heroics, little drama and few deaths, reflect in their deliberately small way, the course of the war. The titles say it all: the first,  ‘Date With Romance’, a doomed, but amusing, lunchtime meeting of old flames in the still unthreatening period of the ‘Phoney War’; the last, ‘The Waste of it All’, a marriage sadly tested far too early by wartime separation.  Reading these stories sixty years on, we know about the course of the war. We know that the Phoney War would come to a brutal end in May 1940, and we know too that hostilities would drag on for months after December 1944, and that many marriages would be among the unlisted casualties.

 There is a peculiar poignancy in reading these stories, knowing not only more than the characters, but more than the writer.  To those concerned that their unwelcome guests, be they evacuees, or one-time friends, will be with them for the uncertain period of the ‘duration’, we could offer some comfort: it will be over by 1945. We might warn those who know someone, who knows a man in the War Office who says the Germans are not going to send over many raids, not to be so sure. Mrs Peters, tells Mrs Ramsay’s sewing party that, according to Mr Peters, ‘if the Americans came over and fought, we’d have the Nasties beaten before the end of the year’. We know from the date, 8^th March 1941, that indeed it won’t be long before they come over, but it will be a long time before they get the Nasties beaten. 

 They cannot know what will happen in the future, and they have only the barest cognisance of what is happening beyond their own parish boundaries. Their war is on the home-front, and, if there is another front, it is a long way off, talked of on the wireless, and mentioned, but not dwelt on, in letters, which women read, or in newspapers which men read and keep to themselves. On the home front a few veterans of the First World War prepare eagerly to do their bit as air raid wardens, and some men, too old yet to be called up,  have ‘desk jobs’ in town, but most of the ‘Staff Officers’now are women, and apart from a few overage rheumatic gardeners, lame schoolmasters, or underage paperboys, so are most of the Other Ranks. It is a woman’s world, in which even the food has been adapted to female tastes and appetites, served in portions small enough to sit on trays.

 There are older widows in the ‘big houses’, young married women in pretty cottages, women who clean or cook for them, in humbler village dwellings, spinsters in small town flats or bedsitters.  Mollie Panter-Downes looks with wry amusement at the power struggles fought across these domestic battle fields. The big class battle that will result in major social change rumbles far below the surface but there are small regular skirmishes.The calm of a sewing bee, briefly threatened by a trivial quarrel, is restored when conversation turns to hens and gooseberry jam. The tottering balance of a lunch party is saved by the timely sounding of an air raid siren.

Far bigger struggles develop when the uninvited guests, or erstwhile friends, or, most problematic of all, evacuees, move in.This is enemy occupation in the home. Goodwill is tested to the limits.  Tiresome Mrs Parmenter unhelpfully picks flowers, but never makes a bed, while her reluctant hostess pictures life twenty years on, her baby a grown woman, and Mrs Parmenter running out between the showers to pick roses for her wedding bouquet. Young Mrs Fletcher is disappointed by her evacuees, ‘it was natural they should look dingy, but she had imagined a medium dinginess that would wear off after one or two good scrubbings and a generous handout of gingham pinafores’. We hear her inner voice wishing that their needs ‘might all simplify down to something which could be settled by the stroke of a pen on a cheque’. 

 

We can imagine ourselves in these situations, and know that our patience too would fail us, that our desire to do good would not be equal to the overwhelming desire to have our home back, tidy, clean and ours. We would do no better than Mrs Ramsay, or Mrs Fletcher, or even, perish the thought, than Mrs Parmenter. And so we can laugh at Mollie Panter-Downes’ descriptions. We are not mocking, it could be us.  Nor can we cannot forget that the dreadful Mrs Parmenter, and the friends who have outstayed their welcome, and the evacuees, and Miss Mildred Ewing who drags her long-suffering maid from hotel to hotel, and thin Rachel Craig, with no hat and ‘a very good baby’, had homes once, where they would far rather be, but which may not be there when their exile ends.

Don Merrill is a painter, his wife an interior designer: now that London is filled with the fine brick dust of bombed out houses, they are redundant. What use is a decorator when there is nothing to decorate? ‘Even if people had the money to spare, they didn’t want to spend it on things which, experience had shown, were subject to splintering and mangling.’The War Time Stories say little directly about the real and devastating splintering and mangling, taking place beyond the fiercely defended rural citadels. When the gunfire begins in earnest across the Channel, it is the shivering of the Palm Court windows, and the slopping of the China tea in the trembling saucer that make it real for Miss Ewing and the ladies in the San Remo hotel, Crumpington-on-Sea.

War makes people selfish. When food is short, you hide the chocolate. When fuel is short you hog the fire. Interrupted monologues replace conversation.  People talk ‘only of themselves, their jobs, their bombs…’ Mrs Bristowe’s concern is for her own children, ‘small and stranded and precious, in California’. How can she share her cook’s anxiety for her daughter in Singapore? When, like the Merrills, what you want is a party, the lack of available friends can make you angry and sad, and not always in equal measure. War generates a heartless practicality.

War can be absurd, and war can be fun.  It can relieve the tedium of a humdrum life, it can give purpose to an aimless existence, solace and companionship to the lonely.  Faced with the knotty problem of making sterile dressings in an unsterile drawing room, for as yet unwounded soldiers, the Pringle sisters are happy, ‘happier, as a matter of fact, than they had been for the last twenty-one years.’ Miss Birch will not find again the friendliness and warmth that she enjoyed with her neighbours during the terrible nights of the blitz. War can provide a square meal. The penniless painter, Don Merrill, enlists for the money. War is dangerously attractive. Reading of the death of his friend, Travers, Mark Goring is surprised to feel a pang of envy. The prospect of a posting to Delhi leaves him ‘hugging the thought that danger was as possible for him after all as it was for Nigel Travers or the next man.’

Mollie Panter-Downes paints sadness but she doesn’t paint tragedy – death and destruction happen at a distance. She picks out the courage, the stalwartness and the weaknesses of women, and a few men, with a fine brush and a light touch, preferring laughter to tears.  Most of her characters are survivors, but they face an uncertain future. As the war and the ‘War Time Stories’ draw towards a close, it is clear that her premonition voiced in 1940 was correct:  things would never be the same again, ‘something of the Clarks [Mrs Fletcher’s troublesome evacuees] would be there forever’.  The old retainers will die and no young retainers will take their place.  Some like Janet Goring will fight against change, continuing to turn down the bed and lay out the pyjamas ‘as though another had done it’. When the elderly Mrs Walsingham welcomes a number of companionable, but not overly respectful,  Canadian soldiers into her house, her loyal maid continues to believe that ‘things were just as they used to be, that their world which had come to an end could still be saved’. But trees must be chopped down to make space for military equipment , and ‘To tell the truth’, says Mrs Walsingham, ‘I think it’s an improvement – lets in more light and air’. Change is coming, and, like Mollie Panter-Downes she recognises that the bright side is the one to look at.

  

Questions and quotes

 

See below for some of my favourite quotes, but first a few questions that occurred to me as I was reading.

 

Questions

Mollie Panter-Downes said of herself ‘I’m a reporter, I can’t invent’.  Do you think the ‘War Time Stories’ bear this out?

 

 At The New Yorker, Mollie Panter-Downes was thought of ‘as bred in the bone English’. Do you feel that she tailored her stories to an American idea of Englishness?

 

 Houses play a very important part in these stories.  In what ways are they more than ‘bricks and mortar’?

 

 Examples of Mollie Panter-Downes humour are too many to list and, like so much humour, hard to analyse.  What makes so much of her writing  comic?  Is it ever cruel, and, if it is, does that make it less funny?

 

and quotes

  

In ‘Good Evening, Mrs Craven’: ‘At her flat, standing in front of the mirror tying his tie, he would tell her proudly how clever eight-year-old Jennifer was …’. The intimacy implied in the tying of the tie is followed by Mr Craven’s heartless assumption that this might be the moment to boast to his devoted mistress about his children. No wonder ‘the little smile sometimes grew a trifle rigid on her lips’.  (‘Good Evening, Mrs Craven’)

 

‘Hired Daimlers stood at the door and the old ladies stepped in, followed by maids with rugs and jewel cases, and sped away, part of the tragic pattern of speeding cars, trudging people, laden farm carts, that was spreading out over the face of Europe…’: In a perfectly constructed sentence, heavy with irony, Mollie Panter-Downes pulls back and views Crumpington and shattered Europe together. The old ladies are damned.(‘This Flower, Safety’)

 

Sometimes war does not match up to expectations. Mark Goring knows he’s lucky to be safe in his desk job,  but ‘It was just that he hadn’t pictured himself sitting out Armageddon in an office chair, helping to keep the home fires burning with his sleeves rolled up and one of Janet’s aprons tied round his middle …’. M.P-D catches the frustration and the absurdity in that apron.  (‘Year of Decision’)

 

We weep with the mother of ‘Simon and Janet, small and stranded and precious, in California’.  In ten words Mollie Panter-Downes captures the pain, but a sympathetic smile breaks through the tears when we hear Mrs Bristowe, standing beside her children at the port, ‘making inane remarks to their escort, a jolly Girton girl who looked, thank God, as though she would be good at swimming’. (‘War Among Strangers’)

 

 Please share some your favourites with the Forum. 

  

If you enjoyed this book, you may also enjoy:

 

 Minnie’s Room: The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes (Persephone Book No 34)

One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes 

Few Eggs and No Oranges by Vere Hodgson (Persephone Book No 34)

What other bloggers have said about the book:

 

Good Evening, Mrs Craven documents the kind of civilian wartime experience that isn’t often acknowledged: the camaraderie that resulted from the war and how it was inevitably missed by some, the constant hunger and food-obsession that resulted from rationings, the relief that some women found in a life that allowed them more freedom than they ever had before. These emotional experiences were often silenced, and were likely the cause of much guilt. But they happened, and so they deserve to be written about. I’d urge anyone interested in books like The Night Watch, Henrietta’s War or Julie Summers’ Stranger in the House, just to name a few, to get their hands on this remarkable collection as soon as possible.  things mean alot

These stories are typically British to me, especially the stiff upper lip and the class conscience. A 21C British reader would maybe find them a little cliché, but that’s probably because they were intended for publication in The New Yorker during WW2, as atmosphere vignettes for Americans, and participating to the growing awareness by Americans of European hardships and the need for them to enter the war.  smithereens

Apparently she was one of the few writers whose copy that magazine’s fastidious style police never had to change. Her style is as easy to read as magazine fiction ought to be but manages to be haunting and picturesque at the same time.  whats he on about now 

 

There is the Englishness that we would expect: “Yesterday, people were saying that if there wasn’t a war today it would be a bloody shame … In the general opinion, Hitler has got it coming to him.” But there is also an understanding observation that doesn’t just accept that stereotyped stoicism at face value. It is an aspect of wartime England that she closely examines in the numerous short stories she wrote during the same period.  guardian books blog

This month the format of the Persephone Forum is a little different – Eva (thelibrarian’sdaughter) is unable to continue writing it  (very many thanks to her for all her hard work and insights over the last few months); so while we in the Persephone office regroup and re-assess, we have decided to use someone else’s words about The Home-Maker, in this case Elaine Showalter in A Jury of Her Peers (about American women writers). Here is what she writes (with a paragraph left out about the second half of the book because we do not want totally to ruin things for those who have not yet read it):

The twentieth-century project to redefine housework as homemaking, and to emphasise technology, training, and professionalism, continued in the 1920s, and became part of the American ‘comedy of emancipation’. The Institute for the Co-ordination of Women’s Interests at Smith College attempted to find ways for women to share and streamline domestic chores. Yet even this program perpetuated the assumption that women had full responsibility for housework and child care. In ‘Why Women Fail’ (1931), Lorine Pruette remarked sardonically that upon marrying, ‘men appear to lose a large part of their capacity as adults; they can no longer feed themselves, house themselves, look after their health, or attend to their social  responsibilities… most of them upon marriage lose the capacity even of writing to their own mother.’

Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) tackled this paradox head-on in her novel The Home-Maker (1924), which imagined a realist, rather than a utopian, role reversal in the family. The Home-Maker was Fisher’s finest novel, and the only one in which her interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, feminism, and the Montessori method of child-rearing united in a memorable whole. Although the content of the novel was contemporary and detailed, Fisher’s narrative method was influenced by modernist fiction; she told the story from a different point of view in each chapter, getting into the minds of each member of the family, including the children. She had experimented with the technique in an earlier novel, The Brimming Cup (1921): ‘Each chapter is meant to be a revelation of what lies under the surface of that particular character. I have tried to make a glass door through which the reader looks into the heart and mind of another…so that, once for all, he knows what sort of human being is there.’

The Home-Maker is the story of the Knapp family – Evangeline, Lester, and their three children Helen, Henry, and Stephen – whose lives are being destroyed by the pressures of proper male and female behaviour. Lester, by nature a poet and intellectual, detests his job as department store manager, feels like a slave to the clock, and misses spending time with his children. The energetic Evangeline has become a neurotic and hysterical housewife, endlessly cleaning, suffering from eczema, and scolding the children into fits of vomiting, rage and terror. ‘What was her life? A hateful round of housework, whih, hurry as she might, was never done. How she loathed housework. The sight of a dishpan full of dishes made her feel like screaming. And what else did she have? Loneliness; never-ending monotony; blank grey days, one after another full of drudgery.’

Named after Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Dorothy Canfield Fisher was the author of ten novels, more than a hundred short stories, several books for children, and many articles. She grew up in an academic and artistic family. Her mother was an artist who took her on tours to Paris and Madrid, her father James Hulme Canfield, became chancellor at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln when she was twelve. Later she confided to Pearl Buck that ‘the particular shadow which darkened my adolescent years was a complete lack of harmony between my father and mother.’ At Nebraska, she came to know Willa Cather, her brother’s classmate, who remained a lifelong friend. In 1893-4 they collaborated on a ghost story about a football game. When her father became the chief librarian at Columbia University, Canfield moved there and earned a Ph.D in French. Instead of teaching, she began to write short stories that she signed ‘Stanley Crenshawe’. But in 1907, she married M John Fisher, a former captain of the Columbia football team, and they settled in Arlington, Vermont. Dorothy Fisher saw the small town as the site of Ibsenesque and Chekhovian tragedy as well as New England regionalism, and began a series of stories about ‘Hillsboro people’ based on the Vermont villagers. In 1912, with profits from her first novel, The Squirrel Cage, she took a trip to Rome and was won over by the Montessori system of early childhood education. It became the basis for two more novels, The Bent Twig (1915), a sentimental story of a girl’s coming of age, and a popular children’s book, Understood Betsey (1917).

During the war John Fisher volunteered to serve in the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuily, and Dorothy decided to accompany him to Paris with their two children. While working for the Red Cross, she sent back articles about French life to American magazines. Collected as Home Fires in France (1918), the book went through six printings and was praised by Yale professor William Lyon Phelps: ‘I have read many books from Europe during the great war,’ he wrote to her, ‘but nothing so good as yours.’ After the war, however, when they returned to Vermont, John could not find employment, and she became the family breadwinner.

The adjustment was not easy; he had a number of illnesses and accidents, ran unsuccessfully for the state legislature, and had to watch his best friend, Alfred Harcourt, establish a profitable New York publishing company, while he was a Vermont househusband. If John Fisher was the model for Lester Knapp, the Fishers never admitted it. But The Home-Maker was almost the only novel of the period to tackle the psychology and the stigma of role reversal, and the extremes by which it had to be justified.

The Home-Maker has been one of the most successful Persephone titles for discussion in bookgroups so we hope you, dear reader, will be prompted by Elaine’s piece to make comments. For now, here are a couple of leading questions; and in a week we shall put up two more.

To what extent would you agree with Dorothy Canfield Fisher when she said that The Home-Maker is a book not about women’s rights but about children’s rights?

To what extent would you agree with Rebecca West when she said that the scene when Lester teaches Stephen to use an egg-whisk (apologies for the spoiler) is one of the great scenes in literature?

Finally, have any of you seen the 1924 film of The Home-Maker which we sometimes show at Persephone events (here is a still)

and if you have seen it what did you think?

This month’s book is short – a mere 99 pages – yet it succeeds in creating a very definite atmosphere and throws up all sorts of questions about what it all might mean…

Here’s a quick re-cap of the plot (but skip straight down to the discussion if this its all still fresh in your mind). Melanie Langdon is a pampered young woman married to an up-and-coming young barrister called Guy. They live in a comfortable reclaimed Regency house in London in the early 1950s. Melanie has recently given birth to a son but is recovering from a bout of tuberculosis, carefully tended by Guy and her doctor, Dr Gregory. As she recovers, Dr Gregory allows her to move from her bedroom to lie on a chaise-longue in the neighbouring room. The chaise-longue is a Victorian piece, vast and ugly save for the Berlin cross-stitch embroidery on its cover. Melanie acquired it in an antiques shop just before her tuberculosis was diagnosed.

Falling asleep, Melanie awakes to find herself still lying on the chaise-longue but trapped in another time – 1864 – in the body of another tuberculosis sufferer, Milly Baines. Milly is tended by her sister, Adelaide, and a maid, Lizzie. Visitors drop by: the Clergyman, Mr Endworthy; the mysterious Gilbert Charters, also a member of the clergy; and Milly’s doctor, Philip Blundell.

It becomes apparent that there is secret hanging over Milly, that she has done something which is regarded by those around her as morally reprehensible. Meanwhile, Melanie tries to work out what has happened to her: maybe it’s a dream; or maybe she has been kidnapped; maybe Mr Entworthy’s prayers will help; maybe God or Fate are subjecting her to some sort of test; or maybe she just needs to convince Dr Blundell to take her somewhere where the air is better. As Melanie’s confusion grows, so does her fear. Is her mind inside Milly’s body or is Milly’s body also Melanie’s body? And if Milly dies, what will happen to Melanie?….

******

Some thoughts and questions

Do you think the novel is indeed frightening? Or is it something else? Claustrophobic maybe? Or mysterious? Or intriguing?

Marghanita Laski was alone in a remote house in Somerset when she wrote the novel, having decided that she needed to scare herself in order to write it. Melanie’s fear perhaps lies in her sense of being trapped and wanting so much to escape, not understanding how she came to be where she is and the feeling that her identity and memory are merging with Milly’s so that she is no longer sure who she is. 

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Do the parallels between Melanie’s and Milly’s worlds make the story more compelling? More mysterious? More dreamlike?  More real?

There seem to be at least some resemblances between Melanie and Milly and the characters in their worlds. Melanie seems to have some of Milly’s memories and to find some of the Milly’s world familiar. Sometimes she has the sensation of her thoughts coming out in words that she would not have chosen but which appear to perhaps be how Milly might have articulated the same thoughts. Milly’s secret seems to be connected to Melanie’s own experiences and yet it is clear that their actions have been judged differently in different times. Meanwhile, the trust that Melanie places in Dr Gregory’s medical prognosis seems to be echoed in the faith she places Mr Endworthy being able to provide some sort of help. Lizzie seems to bear some resemblance to Melanie’s nanny and Melanie immediately looks for resemblances between Gilbert Charters and Guy.

******

What role do antique – or junk – objects play in the novel? Do they simply set the scene, helping to give a Victorian-feel to the place were Melanie awakens? Do they change from been decorative to stifling, adding to the oppressive atmosphere of the room in which Melanie is trapped? What about the chaise longue itself?

Antique or junk objects are described at various points in the novel. Junk shops are Melanie and Guy’s ‘common hobby’. They spend Saturdays strolling around Chalk Farm Road and the Portobello, looking for ‘pretty sparkles’ to ‘embellish and cement their nest’. In the other world that Melanie enters, she notices all sorts of objects around her, brown photographs in plush frames, painted vases containing bullrushes, an urn plastered with postage stamps, ebony elephants, a brass bell… Melanie’s attempts to prove to Mr Endworthy that she is indeed from the future also involve her thinking about lists of objects: vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, airplanes…

******

What do you think the message of the story is? Is there a message? Does it matter if the message remains somewhat elusive?

‘What precisely she was trying to tell us is unclear’ says P.D. James in the Preface, suggesting that the lies of T.S. Elliot quoted at the beginning of the novel may provide a clue. The lines are from the poem ‘Song for Simeon’: ‘I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me’. Two-thirds of the way through the book, Melanie recalls a story about a monk who wandered into a garden to hear a lark sing and returned to find that a hundred years had gone by and then muses about experiences of ‘ecstasy’. But this just leaves us with a whole new web of interpretation to unravel!

******

What other bloggers have said about the book:

The Victorian Chaise-Longue’s greatest strength is that it brings the weight of history to life. Things mean a lot

I have to admit I’m not sure that I fully understood what was supposed to be happening in this book. After thinking about it though, maybe that was the point – the reader isn’t supposed to understand because Melanie herself doesn’t understand. She Reads Novels

It is a very clever exploration of the woman’s role in Victorian society, of her restrictions and reliance on the world of men, and how this role changed  so rapidly from the turn of the century onwards. Book Snob

Though by today’s standards this doesn’t seem a horror story its still very much a ‘little jewel’ and one I found really uneasy reading. The way Laski puts you in the brain of Melanie with the body of Milly is wonderfully written. Savidge Reads

You don’t need mass murderers and polterghiests to make a scary book; just a sparse plot that hints at what may have happened rather than lay it out in all its gory detail. The Book Whisperer

Little, odd, excellent Hannah Stoneham

The Victorian Chaise-Longue works on more than one level. It is a fine piece of storytelling and it is also a striking analysis of the changing position of women in society. And while many authors would make a lengthy novel out of this material, Marghanita Laski distils it perfectly into just 99 pages. The writing and the characterisation is as wonderful as my previous experiences with her writing had led me to expect. And, once again, Marghanita Laski has come up with a stunning final sentence. How does she do that?! Fleur Fisher

A strange, and remarkable book, it is not quite the horror tale it is often billed as, but rather a discomforting and disturbing tale of dislocation. A time travel, reincarnation story, it considers quite metaphysical concepts on time and identity, in much the same way that T.S. Eliot does in The Four Quartets. In fact the books begins with an epigraph from Eliot: ‘I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.’ The story reminded me very much of Eliot’s meditations on time and the circular nature of existence. The Genteel Arsenal

If you enjoyed this book, you may also enjoy:

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Little Boy Lost (Persephone Book No. 28)

The Village (Persephone Book No. 52)

To Bed with Grand Music (Persephone Book No. 86)

Warning: The review below may well give away quite a bit about the book so you may not want to read on too much further if you haven’t read the book yet…

‘In the years to come, children will be taught about ghettos and yellow stars and the terror at school and it will make their hair stand on end…. But parallel with that textbook history, there also runs another… It is probably worth quite a bit being personally involved in the writing of history. You can really tell then what the history books leave out.’ Thursday, six o’clock, April 1942

Etty wrote her diaries and letters in Amsterdam and in the transit camp at Westerbork in the east of the Netherlands over a two year period. She was 29 when she died at Auschwitz on 30 November 1943.  During the period she was writing, the lives of the Jewish inhabitants of Amsterdam were becoming ever more restricted and round-ups and deportations began. The later diary entries and the letters describe life at Westerbork, where Etty was interned before being deported to Poland.

Etty’s diaries are extraordinary because, though she remains engaged with what is happening around her, she is also finding her own path towards what Eva Hoffman in the Preface calls ‘a perfect inward pitch’, to a place where she feels ‘the hidden harmony of the world’. And so her writings – though they document the suffering and sorrow leading up to the tragic end of her own life and the lives of many, many others – also contain beauty, warmth and joy.

The early diary entries chronicle the beginnings of Etty’s relationship with Julius Spier, a charismatic figure with a Jungian psychoanalytical training who founded psychochirology (reading people’s lives and characters from their palms). Etty relates the questionable physical methods of instruction he used with his devoted followers – including herself – which were supposedly intended to demonstrate that the body and soul are one. She embarks on a relationship with him which is a catalyst for the development of her remarkable ‘inward pitch’ -  call it spirituality or religion if you will, though arguably it resists any definitive categorisation.

Other people feature in Etty’s diary entries: her co-habitants in a house overlooking the Museumplein in Amsterdam, including Han, the owner of the house, with whom she also has a relationship. Then there are other friends and figures from Amsterdam’s academic and artistic circles and her family: her mother, her scholarly Headmaster father and her two brothers, Mischa, a talented pianist and Jaap, a doctor.

Etty studied Law, Psychology and Russian at university. Her aspiration is to write but, to earn money, she teaches Russian to private pupils. Later she is given a job at the Jewish Council as typist, though at every opportunity she escapes to a quiet corner to read. She reads a great deal, particularly Rilke and Dostoyevsky. The Old Testament, Jung, Kropotkin, St Augustine’s letters and an number of other works are also mentioned in her diaries.

Etty kept a diary for a number of reasons. She wrote for herself. She wanted it to be a place from which she could create a continuous thread running through her days, a thread that ‘is really one’s life’. Reading sections of it over to herself gave her strength. At one point, she suggests that she would like to have something to remind her of who she had once been if she survived the camps.

She also aspires to be one of the ‘chroniclers’ of her age.  She records events and the suffering of people around her: the measures taken against Jews in Amsterdam; her work and her colleagues at the Jewish Council; life at Westerbork; the weekly transports. Two of her longer letters about Westerbork (the ones dated 18 December 1942 and 24 August 1943) were published by the Dutch Resistance in 1943.

But she is very clear that ‘little journalistic pieces’ that ‘simply record the bare facts’ will not suffice nor does she see herself as suited to ‘describing a specific place or events’. The appropriate form she suggests is poetry, or even fairy tales because the misery ‘is so beyond all bounds of reality that it has become completely unreal’. Even in her earlier diary entries, she is clear that her focus is not on events, on what happens and on what is said. Her writing is alive with vivid daily-life moments in which she experiences the beauty and meaningfulness of life.

She wrote ‘so that others don’t have to start from scratch’. In a letter dated 18 December 1942, she writes: ‘if we have nothing to offer a desolate post-war world but our bodies saved at any cost, if we fail to draw new meaning from the deep wells of our distress and despair, then it will not be enough. New thoughts will have to radiate outwards from the camps themselves, new insights, spreading lucidity, will have to cross the barbed wire enclosing us…’ She wanted to share what she had learned about living with others.

And she had learned a great deal. The book merits reading (and re-reading) by almost anyone for this reason alone. It is impossible to convey here the richness of her perspective on life as it develops through her writing and as she lived it. Towards the end, she recognises ways in which her approach might be misinterpreted. She writes of her dislike for the sort of ‘you must try to make the best of things’ or ‘seeing the good in everything’ type of attitude. She isn’t a precursor to the sort of faith in the transformative powers of positive thinking that abounds in contemporary popular psychology, self-help or (many but not all) spiritually-orientated works. Nor does she sit easily within any particular religious tradition, though she does pray and she alludes to God repeatedly and specifically mentions Christianity. But the power of her writing in part comes from the sense the reader has that the perspective she is forming is very much her own.

Her perspective is not only an internal attitude: it is also a lived reality. Increasingly, she is able to shift her focus from her current situation, and even from the suffering of her people, and to view it in the context of history, and indeed, of eternity. She is aware that her life has tended towards intellectual study and contemplation, and that she isn’t going to have an impact in the world by becoming ‘a social-worker or a political reformer’, but she feels that her life has nevertheless prepared her well for the camps where she seeks to be ‘a balm for all wounds’.

She remains vitally engaged with life whilst also letting go of ‘grasping attachments’ – to the material comforts of her Amsterdam life; to people she loves and even to trying to preserve her own life (hence her refusal to go into hiding).

She writes of compassion and love for ‘everyone with whom one happens to share one’s life’. Though she is horrified and sickened by what she sees at Westerbork and writes of her deep moral indignation, her compassion leaves no room for hatred, even hatred of her German persecutors.

She has an extraordinary ability to allow sorrow the space it demands and yet to perceive beauty and joy in the everyday world and to be thankful for this, even as that world becomes ever darker, ever more lacking in external sources of life and joy. In her Amsterdam entries she marvels at the beauty of the jasmine growing outside her bedroom window. At Westerbork, she describes fields of lupins, the reflections sunshine in muddy puddles. The camp itself, on a moonlit night, to her seems to be ‘made out of silver and eternity’.

Her writing is full of beauty and truth and resists categorisation in any conventional way, or any kind definitive analysis. Indeed it at times seems to resist words themselves. One Friday in May 1942, she writes: ‘Looked at Japanese prints with Glassner this afternoon. That’s how I want to write. With that much space surrounding the words. They would simply emphasise the silence. Just like that print with the sprig of blossom in the lower corner. A few delicate brush strokes – but with what attention to the smallest detail – and all around it space, not empty but inspired. The few great things that matter in life can be said in a few words. If I should ever write – but what? – I would like to brush in a few words against a wordless background. To describe the silence and stillness and to inspire them. What matters is the right relationship between words and wordlessness, the wordlessness in which much more happens that in all the words that one can string together….’

See the Persephone Authors page for more about Etty’s life.

Topics for discussion

This month I have collected together a few of Etty’s thoughts on a number of different topics as a starting point for discussion.

• On September 4 1941, Etty writes: ‘I want to get to know this century of ours inside out… I run my fingertips along the contours of our age.’ How does Etty’s writing compare with that of others who left a record of their lives and thought during these years (most obviously, Anne Frank but there are numerous others, for example, Charlotte Salomon, Edith Stein and Simone Weil).
• ‘Its not at all simple, the role of women’. What do Etty’s 1941 diary entries (particularly in June, August and October 1941) have to say on this subject? How is this reflected in her evolving relationship with Julius Spier?
• ‘I live here and now, this minute, this day, to the full, and life is worth living.’ Friday, 21 March 1941. Even as the circumstances of her life become ever darker and lacking in external sources of joy, Etty repeatedly endorses living in the moment and appreciating the small wonders of daily life. What other writings act as reminders of this? For me, the ones that immediately spring to mind are the poems of one of Etty’s own most treasured writers, Rilke, and also the C16th Indian poet Mirabai. But there are sure to be many others!
• ‘I no longer believe that we can change anything in the world until we have first changed ourselves.’ 19 February 1942. ‘I still have a need to prove the validity of my way of life… I am not cut out to be a social worker or a political reformer..’. 9 June 1942. What do readers think of Etty’s chosen path of resistance to what is happening in the world around her?

Warning: The review below may well give away quite a bit about the book so you may not want to read on too much further if you haven’t read the book yet…

Fidelity (1924) explores the fate of a young woman whose fidelity to herself makes her an outcast from the society in which she lives. Ruth, the central character, falls in love with Stuart Wilson, a married man. Stuart is trapped within a loveless marriage and his wife, Marion, refuses to divorce him. Stuart learns that he has tuberculosis and decides to leave Freeport, the Iowa town in which the novel is set, for health reasons. Ruth goes with him to Colorado. In doing so, she leaves her family, her childhood friend, Edith, and the close-knit community in which she lives. The only other person who knows about and supports Ruth in her decision to leave is Deane Franklin, another childhood friend, who is himself in love with Ruth. Eleven years later, Ruth returns. Her mother has died and her father is dying. Most of the community remains closed to her, only her younger brother Ted, her classmate Annie and Deane Franklin welcome her return. Deane has recently married an outsider, Amy, who is being introduced into the social circles in which Ruth once moved. The arrival of Ruth leads to conflict between Deane and Amy because Amy is unable to understand Deane’s empathy for Ruth’s situation. After her visit home, Ruth returns to Stuart but when her younger brother, Ted, persuades Stuart’s wife finally to divorce him, giving Ruth the opportunity to marry Stuart, she decides not to and instead leaves him to make her own way alone.

Ruth’s fidelity to herself is at odds with the demands of the society in which she lives. Freeport offers a ‘pleasant, characterless’ sort of living ‘on a limited part of the surface of life’ and Ruth can see its attractions: even in the midst of her all-encompassing affair with Stuart, she is very conscious of the painfulness of ‘hurting her relations with people’, particularly her family. This awareness of the value of the ties that bind people together is even more acute when she returns to Freeport after eleven hard and lonely years living in Colarado with Stuart. She realises more fully the pain that she caused her family.  And as she walks through the town and looks at the homes there: ‘she thinks of how those homes joined….there were so many meeting places for their lives … feelings which they as individuals knew reached out into common experiences..  It was love… that gave these people that common life. Love was the fabric of it. Love made new combinations of people…The very thing that had shut her out was the thing drawing them into that oneness, that many in one. Homes were closed to her because of that very impulse out of which homes were built.’

She knows too the ‘kindly impulses’ that are there for anyone who plays by Society’s rules. But she is also very aware that those ‘kindly impulses’ are ‘circumscribed’ by Society. Various characters in the novel articulate just why someone like Ruth has to be treated so ruthlessly after she has done what she has done. She is regarded as a ‘traitor’, as having infringed rules which are necessary for the continuance of life as it is arranged within Society. Because she has defied the rules, she must be ‘shut out’. This is Society’s way of protecting itself from a potentially disruptive force. Those within Society must act for the greater good of Society, not on the basis of their individual desires as Ruth has done.

But Ruth feels herself drawn away from Society by stronger currents than those that play on the surface of things. She feels these currents in her love for Stuart, which seems to her like an elemental force which she is powerless to hold back. She lives in a way that is open to the world, she feels vibrantly connected to it, caught up in the flow of life. This is a quality that is noted in her by Stuart and also by Deane Franklin, the ‘homely youngster’ with awkward movements and a wide generous mouth’ and an ‘abrupt, hearty manner’, who loves and supports Ruth throughout, despite his unrequited feelings for her. Unlike so many of her Freeport contemporaries (Stuart’s wife, Marion with her poised and cool beauty and her ‘atmosphere of high self-valuation’, Mrs Lawrence, Edith’s mother with her ‘metallic pleasantness’ and also, the outsider, Deane’s wife, Amy), Ruth is free from ‘those blurring artificialities that keep people apart….’. She lives with empathy and reaches out to the world around her in a very human way. Deane, in particular, comes to feel that Society tends to take away this humanity and replace it with a hard ‘crust’ of artificiality that is almost impossible to break through.

It is also Deane who most clearly articulates the opposition between ‘life’ and ‘Society’ that runs through the novel. On the one hand, there is life as it has been ‘arranged’ in society, all the things that bind people together in society together: trivial ties, stifling conventions and rules but also common experiences, love, and community and family life. And, then there is ‘the whole flow of life’, and love and fidelity to oneself that, for Ruth, seems entirely at odds with the society in which she lives. This is the main tension throughout the novel which Ruth grapples with and which propels her forward. And as she grows into her experiences, she experiences ‘a wonderful new feeling of there being as much for her in life as she herself had power to take’, as though the only limits on what she can do depend on her ability to collect and channel all the energies surging though life.

But she recognises within herself some of the instincts that help keep Society as closed and stifling as it is. On her return to Freeport, she encounters Mildred, a young woman who, like Ruth once did, is contemplating casting Society aside in favour of love for a married man. Ruth advises Mildred against following the course she has taken. She realises that her reaction is ‘just that thing which kept the world conservative. It was fear for others…. There was something in humankind – it was strongest in womankind – made them, no matter how daring for themselves, cautious for others. And perhaps that, all crusted round with things formal and lifeless, was the living thing at the heart of the world’s conservatism.’

Another female character in the novel, Annie, is freer than Ruth is from these instincts. Annie is an old classmate of Ruth, who Ruth once virtually ignored because she wasn’t part of the social set in which she and Edith, her closest girlhood friend, moved. When Ruth returns to Freeport, Annie is one of the very few people who welcomes her and spending time with her awakens in Ruth a stronger sense of how to move on from the situation she is in. Despite the narrow circumstances of her life – a marriage which offers no love or companionship, little in the way of material comforts or opportunities – Annie shows no signs of being ground down by her life. She suggests that it is the very fact that she has had so little of what she would liked to have from life itself that has given her such a strong sense of self, a sense that what counts is what she thinks and feels. Annie is also a loving mother to her children but her views of motherhood have a very modern ring. She feels that ‘much precious life has gone dead under the idea of children being enough – letting them be all…. Suppose they, in their turn, have that idea; then life’s never really lived, is it? – always just passed on, always put off’.

After her time with Annie, Ruth begins to face the fact that her love for Stuart, once such a bright, burning part of life, has been worn down by their life in Colorado, their ‘cramping little house full of petty questions’ and their ‘hard little routine’. She reflects that things might have been different ‘had the usual channels of living been opened to them…’.  Indeed, she comes to feel that love has to be ‘related to living’  in order to remain ‘the heart of life…’. A love like theirs is not sustainable unless they can live out their lives as a couple whilst remaining part of society, part of a wider community. And yet, despite this realisation, Ruth does not see their love as having ‘failed’. ‘Far from engulfing all the rest of life, it seemed now that love should open life to one. …it failed if it did not leave her bigger than it had found her… it should send one on.’

Questions

• Ruth’s (and presumably Susan Glaspell’s) attitude to Society in the novel is somewhat ambivalent. She seems to recognise what is valuable in it as well as experiencing its rigid, unforgiving stance towards those who do not do what Society expects of them. How successful do you think she is at capturing these contradictory feelings?
• How does Ruth compare with the central characters of other works of a similar era which deal with a female character struggling with the conventions of the society in which she lives, particularly Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Nora in Ibsen’s The Doll’s House?
• How do you feel about the other female characters in the novel?
• Ruth’s thoughts and impressions – particularly when she falls in love with Stuart and when she is contemplating her surroundings in Freeport and in Colorado – often give a sense of her feeling somehow vibrantly connected to and in tune with the natural world and the flow of life. How do readers feel about the way Susan Glaspell writes about these more abstract feelings?
• Society has changed a great deal since the time the novel was written, just before the First World War. What is there in the novel that has resonance with contemporary life?