Christmas Holiday by W. Somerset Maugham (Doubleday Doran & Company, 1939)

I bought this book because Glenway Wescott somewhere claimed that it was the best novel of  his time.  It isn’t a very good a novel at all, but one can understand what about it may have impressed and interested Wescott (beside the fact that Maugham was a generous and admiring mentor of Wescott’s).

A young Englishman, of a good family with lower-class origins who have risen to the upper class and have artistic affectations, spends his Christmas holiday alone in Paris, visiting a friend of his youth who works there as a foreign correspondent.  This friend takes him to a disreputable nightclub where he meets Lydia, a Russian emigre, who is fending for herself as an exotic dancer/prostitute after her French husband was convicted for murder and sent to prison in South America.  They chastely spend the entire holiday together mostly holed up in the Englishman’s hotel room (of course I’ve forgotten his name), and Lydia’s scandalous history is related by herself and the journalist friend, who just happened to have covered the sensational trial of Lydia’s husband. 

Our hero returns to London a changed man, aware of the safety and shallowness of his experience, and his resulting complacency and smugness.  Unfortunately, none of this is very dramatic or interesting; all the drama is contained in Lydia’s past, and the relating of it after the fact flattens and enervates the dramatic action.  And Charlie (I remembered!), our hero, is a  rather insipid and limited character, so the effect of his experience with Lydia (he also has a falling out with his friend) doesn’t really move or engage the reader.

Perhaps Wescott saw the book more as a symbolic portrait of Europe on the eve of WWII, and this added urgency and meaning to what now appears to be rather thin and over-elaborated stuff.

William by E. H. Young (Readers Club, 1941)

 William Nesbitt and his wife Kate live in a provincial sea-side town in England near the Channel where William owns a successful shipping company (he was formerly a sea captain).  They are comfortably upper-middle class and their five children are all grown and married except for the youngest, Janet, who still lives in her parents’ beautiful home in Upper Radstrowe.  Mabel, Walter, and Dora also live in Radstrowe; only Lydia, William’s favorite daughter, has ventured to London where she leads a cosmopolitan life with her husband Oliver.  As the book begins everything seems fine with the family, despite some domestic tensions, but midway through Lydia causes a scandal by leaving Oliver and going to live with her lover, Henry, in his ancestral family home not far from Radstrowe.  This development upsets everyone: Mrs. Nesbitt cannot forgive her daughter, who she has never particularly liked, considering her spoiled and selfish; Lydia’s siblings and in-laws think that her actions will reflect poorly on them and their children; and Janet, on the verge of marriage herself, begins to wonder if it’s an institution she cares to join.  Only William is sympathetic and understanding, and wants Lydia to be happy.  He is deeply disappointed by his wife’s stubborn and ungenerous response to their daughter’s plight, and refuses to moderate his beliefs and actions to please her.

Because this situation now seems rather inconsequential and quaint, much of the drama and tension in the book falls a little flat.  This is also because Young is not very adept in creating complex characters or finessing plot.  She has a heavy, rather broad hand when dealing with both these things, and the book on the whole feels somewhat artificial, and unsubtle.

William, however, is an interesting and unique and vital character, seeing through and gently manipulating all those around him.  He’s a very wise and loving — and funny — father, and a charming character.  Lydia also rises above the commonplace: she sees herself clearly and suffers accordingly, and there is something unexpectedly poignant about her plight.

Carl Van Doren, in his introduction to this edition (reprinted by Readers Club in 1941, fifteen years after its original 1926 publication), makes a case for the book being republished during WWII based upon the Nesbitts’ decency and stalwartness — in other words, their Britishness.  What allows the Nesbitt family to make their way through the crisis of Lydia’s scandal is exactly the same qualities that will enable the British to survive and win the War.

In an interesting but undeveloped subplot, Janet, the unmarried daughter, goes on a walking holiday with a “mannish” young woman.  Janet appears to be a lesbian — she is private, removed from the family, and seems totally uninterested in men.  But then towards the end of the book she puts on her dancing slippers and marries a doctor who William finds to be “dry as dust,” but doesn’t go and live with him.  It’s all very curious, and one wonders what Young’s conception of the character was.  She seems to be unaware of her own character’s sexuality, but that doesn’t stop her from revealing it, if only between the lines, to the contemporary reader.

Boston Adventure by Jean Stafford (Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1944)

A curious book — ambitious and cumbersome and somewhat impenetrable.  Its density and dullness make it difficult to believe that it was a bestseller when it was published in 1944, although there is something very appealing about the main character and her story.

Sonie (Sonia) Marburgh lives just outside of Boston, in Chichester, with her immigrant parents, who met on their voyage to the United States.  They are tragically mismatched: her father is an educated and cultured German who works desultorily as a shoemaker, and her mother is a beautiful Russian woman who is initially temperamental and later insane.  Her parents constantly fight, and Sonie grows up coping with their childish behavior by becoming precociously adult, competent, and wise.  Her mother works as a chambermaid at the nearby Hotel Barstow, where wealthy Bostonian widows and spinsters spend their summers by the sea.  Sonie often fills in for her lackadaisical mother, and one of the hotel’s most genteel guests, Miss Lucy Pride, takes an interest in the hardworking, observant, intelligent child.

After Sonie’s father deserts the family and her mother’s insanity necessitates her being institutionalized, Miss Pride takes the 18-year-old Sonie back to Boston with her, and sends her to secretarial school, so that she can serve as Miss Pride’s secretary as she writes her memoirs.  And so a new life begins for Sonie, and the second half of the book chronicles her (mis)adventures in and around Boston society.  She falls in love with a doctor who also seems to love her, but is out of her (social) league (and also engaged to Miss Pride’s bad-girl niece, the ridiculously named Hopestill) and is taken under the wing of “the Countess,” a displaced wealthy European woman with discreet Sapphic tendencies.

Sonie is a difficult character and the book’s complex and murky narrative does not afford easy pleasure or satisfaction for the common reader.  Yet Stafford is an ambitious and accomplished writer: the worlds of Chichester and Boston, so close together but so far apart, are both vividly and sensuously evoked, and the book is full of wonderful portraits of secondary characters (Sonie’s mother, Miss Pride, the Countess).   But this book doesn’t have the clean brilliant gleam of The Mountain Lion; it’s messy and overstuffed and a bit dull.  Nevertheless, I admired it and enjoyed reading it.

Ronald Firbank: A Memoir by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher (Duckworth, 1930)

While reading Carl Van Vechten’s The Blind Bow Boy which alludes to Ronald Firbank several times, I realized it had been a while — perhaps 20 years — since I had read Firbank, and then I came across this book, published in 1930, four years after Firbank’s death, for sale on Ebay.  The fact that it was inscribed by a distant relative of Firbank added to its allure, and I decided to buy it, and read it immediately after it arrived.

The book is comprised of a long biographical essay on Firbank written by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, and four shorter reminiscences of him written by Augustus John, Vyvyan Holland, Osbert Sitwell, and Lord Berners.  Fletcher’s biography is sympathetic and covers most details of Firbank’s short life (he died in 1926 at the age of 40), but it is not very illuminating, and neither are the affectionate memoirs by his friends, who were all in fact more of acquaintances.  Firbank was by all accounts a man as solitary as he was eccentric, and the reader does get a sense of how, despite his charm and wit, he was a difficult person to spend time with, or to know in any real personal way.  So he comes across as being mysterious and essentially unknowable, and it is difficult to discern how much of his eccentric behavior was natural and how much was affected.  The one thing that does become clear, however, is Firbank’s commitment and faith in his art, and the uniqueness of what he created.  He traveled far and wide, not only in Europe, but in Egypt and Haiti as well, and his life seems to have been as peculiar and singular as his work.

This book succeeds admirably in memorializing and celebrating Ronald Firbank, and I enjoyed reading it.  With several illustrations — all paintings of Ronald Firbank — by Augustus John and others.