Albert Spears by Millen Brand (Simon and Schuster, 1947)
Another interesting and unusual novel by Millen Brand, written with his customary clarity and empathy. I discovered Brand’s first novel, The Outward Room (1937), in a second-hand bookstore and convinced New York Review Books to republish it, with an afterword written by me, in 2010. (I also admire his second novel, The Heroes, published in 1939.)
The eponymous Albert Spears is 66 in 1915, and lives with his invalid and house-bond wife in Jersey City. (I wonder why Brand gave his hero the same name as the Nazi war criminal.) Albert has a son with his long-time mistress, a younger woman in the neighborhood, who he would like to adopt (the son not the mistress). He runs a carpentry mill and speculates in residential real estate and becomes involved in a local conflagration when a Black family moves into the all-white neighborhood. Albert befriends the family and attempts to make them feel welcome and safe, but his neighbors are united in their hateful prejudice and do everything they can to force the family to leave (break all their windows, sabotage their heat and water, send the father to jail). Albert’s son also befriends the family, and fights along with the other Black boys when their gangs clash.
Brand writes from the point of view of both families, from the perspective of the young and elderly of both races, and his creation of many complex and very different characters is admirable. An interesting and engaging look at race relations, and the power of individuals, in early 20th-century America.
Bear by Marian Engel (McClelland and Stewart, 1976)
A strange and disturbing novel about a young Canadian woman who leaves her solitary academic life working for a historical society in Toronto to catalog the contents of a house located on an island in a river in the Canadian wilderness. She lives alone in the house for the summer, and has an affair with a bear who had been kept in captivity there. The bear is an excellent lover, and the woman enjoys her solitary life and the bear’s good company, but must leave this idyll life behind when autumn arrives and she is forced to return to her passionless urban life.
Engel writes about the woman’s relationship with the bear in a wonderfully matter-of-fact fashion, and the inter-species amour is believable and poignant (and quite erotic, as well).
The Early Life of Stephen Hind by Storm Jameson (Harper & Row, 1966)
The Early Life of Stephen Hind is a novel about a beautiful, charming, intelligent, and ambitious young man rising in society, set in London in 1963.
Stephen Hind’s mother is a whorish clairvoyant and all he wants is to escape her tawdry and dirty world and become part of the upper class. A job as a secretary to Lord Chatteney, who is writing his memoirs, allows Stephen to enter this world, and his rise is swift: he becomes the boy toy of the elegant and accomplished Collette Hyde, who is married to the best publisher in London, enters a cordial marriage of convenience with a beautiful and wealthy women who is pregnant with a bastard, and sets his sights on a leggy Philadelphia steel heiress.
The main plot revolves around the completion and publication of Lord Chatteney’s memoir — he is considered a great man and his memoirs are heralded as a great work of literature. Both of these claims seem inflated to raise the stakes, but the novel is an entertaining and interesting look at a transitional time in England, when class distinctions were becoming more fluid and the old world was giving way to a more youthful culture.
Company Parade by Storm Jameson (Virago Modern Classics, 1982, originally published by Cassell in 1934)
This novel, which was intended to be the first of a five- or six-book series that turned out to be a trilogy, is an ambitious and impressive achievement. I was engrossed by it and impressed by its scope and intelligence and the high quality of the writing and thinking that sustains it.
It’s the story mainly of Hervey Russell, a young woman who comes to London soon after Armistice Day in 1918 to pursue fame and fortune as a novelist. She is disastrously married to a selfish, immature, and incompetent man named Penn who is still serving in thte army as the book begins. They have a son, Richard, who Hervey has left behind in another woman’s (paid) care in her Yorkshire coastal hometown, so that Hervey is alone and independent in the city, qualities that make her an unusual female character from this period.
She’s a unique and interesting character: kind, thoughtful, but socially-awkward and hampered by her wasted love for her husband and her estrangement from her son. She gets a job working for an advertising agency and later as an assistant editor at a radical newspaper, and moves about London’s literary and publishing circles, which gives Jameson the opportunity to introduce and develop many interesting characters, which the narrative flexibly — and sometimes messily — embraces. I look forward to reading the next book in the trilogy, Love in Winter, which is followed by None Turn Back.
Good Behavior by Molly Keane (New York Review Books, 2021, originally published in by Andre Deutsch in 1981)
A dark, weird and disturbingly funny book with a gimmick that I felt reduces it to something smaller than its brilliant parts. Aroon, the narrator, is an ungainly, very large, and rather obtuse girl growing up in an aristocratic but financially challenged Anglo-Irish family. Her mother is a heartless and abusive bitch, her father is benign but ineffectual, and her brother uses Aroon to unwittingly disguise his homosexual relationships.
Aroon sees and feels none of this ill-treatment and considers herself happy, well-loved, and fulfilled. Whether this is a result of repression and self-deception or merely stupidity is hard to know, but it begins to seem contrived and manipulative, and the book’s effect is correspondingly diminished.
Treasure Hunt by Molly Keane (Virago Modern Classics, 1990; originally published in 1952)
This novel (originally published under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell), is about three generations of an Anglo-Irish family who inherit a magnificent family house, full of beautiful and valuable things, but have no money to maintain it, so must resort to hosting “paying guests,” an idea the younger generation, who are most responsible, propose, but that the careless and selfish middle generation reject and attempt to sabotage. The paying guests are three wealthy Londoners eager to escape the deprivations of post-WWII England, and imagine that at an Irish castle they will be warm, well-fed, and cosseted. They are immediately and severely disappointed, but stay on nevertheless, and eventually things work themselves out, much helped by the discovery of precious rubies hidden in a stuffed bird.
Molly Keane writes with eccentric brio and originality. Her thoughts, and sentences, are odd and interesting, and one feels fortunate to experience the world from her unique point of view.
The Foxglove Saga by Auberon Waugh (Chapman & Hall, 1960)
This rather slap-dash, silly novel is amusing — it follows three English boys from their days at a Catholic prep school through their early adulthood, detailing their misadventures in both civilian and military life. The most amusing character is Lady Julia Foxglove, one of the boys’ mother, a beautiful and ostensibly pious and charitable woman who is actually a selfish and interfering monster. Her ability to manipulate others under the guise of helping them is quite entertaining, but the satire and humor here is gentler and less trenchant then Eveyln Waugh’s (the author’s father), and the book seems correspondingly negligible.
A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (Knopf, 1986)
Peter Taylor is a gentle, accomplished writer, but this book bemused and often irritated me. I think part of the problem may be that Taylor is not a natural or adroit novelist; this book is very oddly (and ineptly) paced and structured. It moves slowly, if at all, like those traveling sprinklers that never seem to be moving yet eventually traverse a lawn.
A Summons to Memphis is narrated in first person by Philip Carver, a bland middle-aged man who lives in New York City and works as a rare book dealer and editor, but we never hear much about his life’s work and he expresses very little interest in or passion for books. He expresses very little interest in or passion for anything, perhaps because when he was 13 his father, due to a cataclysmic business failure caused by his partner, uprooted his family from their idyllic life in Nashville and moved them to Memphis, which had mysteriously disastrous effects on all the family members: Philip’s mother lost her Nashville grace and poise and became a chronic invalid and recluse; his two sisters, Josephine and Betsy, were forced into spinsterhood when their father sabotaged both their engagements; Georgie, his brother, was killed in WWII; and Philip’s own great love with a young woman named Carla Price was also brutally (and inexplicably) terminated by his father, who was the only Carver to thrive in their new life in Memphis. (Philip escaped to New York City where he now lives with a younger woman in a static, unsatisfying relationship that seems tepid at best.)
The present action of the book, such as it is, revolves around the elder Mr. Carver’s attempt to marry after his wife dies and leaves him a widower in his 80s. The two sisters summon Philip to Memphis and enlist him in thwarting their father’s matrimonial plans, an ugly act that seems part revenge and part safeguarding their inheritance. But this potential conflict is resolved off-page with no drama, and the book’s denouement is equally bloodless and inscrutable.
All these seemingly genteel people act ruthlessly to destroy one another’s happiness, but it is never clear what motivates all this bad behavior or what satisfaction, if any, it affords. So a very puzzling book — somewhat Chekhovian in its minor-key uneventfulness, but lacking Chekhov’s resonance and mysterious, beautiful, and heartbreaking, depth. The reader is barely involved, let alone moved.
I Am Mary Dunne by Brian Moore (Viking Press, 1968)
An odd book, both brave and foolish, that begins promisingly and then slowly deteriorates into tedious melodrama.
Mary Dunne grew up in a small village in Nova Scotia and got away as quickly as she could by eloping with a high school friend who just happened to have a ticket out. She ends up, after two more marriages, living the high life in 1960s New York: married to a nice, sexy British playwright and man-about-town, living in a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, lunching with friends, drinking, and feeling hysterically depressed — perhaps because she’s about to have her period or perhaps because she’s crazy and suicidal. So during a long NYC day she reviews her entire life for her own (but mostly the reader’s) benefit: her attempts to be a writer and an actress, her mostly disastrous marriages. The frequent shifts between the past and the present are often unwelcome, and the reader feels tugged around. Moore is a skillful writer but despite his extensive examination of his character’s gynecological and sexual experiences, Mary Dunne remains rather fake: distant and unlikeable, and the microscopic attention that this book pays to her begins to seem unwarranted, and finally rather boring.
The Polyglots by William Gerhardie (Prion Books, 2011)
Another odd, beguiling book by this unique and interesting writer. The Polyglots (originally published in 1925) is set in the far east — mostly in Japan and China during the period of the Great War and the Russian Revolution.
Its narrator is a British military man of Belgian descent, born in Russia, who is posted rather autonomously, it seems, in the far east, where he reunites with his eccentric Aunt ? and lives with her very large, very eccentric family which includes many hanger-ons. All these people, whether French, Belgian, British, or Russian are outcasts, waifs, people once firmly ensconced in empires or regimes that have failed or are floundering. So they go on living as best they can on ever-diminishing resources and finances, unable, until the very last moment, to give it all up and head for home — a home that is theirs only geopolitically, not sentimentally.
The narrator falls in love with Aunt ?’s beautiful and decorative but pathetically vacant daughter. Their inert romance, and the family’s necessary removal from Tokyo to Harbin, China via Vladivlastock, is as much of a plot as Gerhardie can muster, but the real strength and charm of this book is its gallery of eccentrically poignant characters and its wonderfully strange atmospheres — a world that is vanishing so quickly that at times it seems already lost.
