God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam (Europa, 2010; originally published by Hamish Hamilton in 1978)
This short novel has the typical Gardam eccentric and poignant flavor, but it seems somewhat under-baked and carelessly wrought. It is amusing and lively and bright; it’s just not particularly moving or coherent. But as its subject is the effect of other people’s past on our present–particularly a parent’s past on their children–perhaps that ramshackleness is appropriate.
The novel takes place in small English seaside town during a warm summer in the 1930s, when Margaret Marsh is eight years old. Her father, a bank manager and fundamentalist Christian, and her mother, a spirited and independent woman whose real love was thwarted by class differences, are not at all well-matched and fall dramatically apart. Their disunion is aided and abetted by two people: Lydia, Margaret’s sensual and morally unfettered nanny, and Charles, the decent, but inconsequential upper-class man that Elinor, Margaret’s mother, loves but was forbidden to marry (by Charles’ mother).
Gardam moves freely in time and space, and sometimes skips abruptly from character to character, in glancing takes. I think the problem may be Margaret herself, whose preternatural wiseness and maturity are somewhat difficult to believe. She is an interesting and engaging, but not an entirely believable character. Gardam leaves a lot out of her story, expecting the reader to make connections and fill in the blanks. This gives the book a pleasant airiness and softness, but one perhaps wishes the entire thing was a bit more digested. But this book’s fresh crispness may satisfy–and delight–less expectant readers. I can image a better, more potent and devastating version of this book.
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch (Viking 1974)
A typically engaging and well-written novel by Murdoch, but not among her best. Like all her novels, this one deals with a tangled web of many characters: Blaise and Harriet Gavender; their sixteen-year-old son David; Emily McHugh, Blaise’s mistress; Luca, Blaise’s and Emily’s eight-year-old son; Montague Small, the Gavender’s neighbor (they live in a suburb of London), who is a best-selling and famous writer of detective novels; Edgar Demarnay, Montague’s childhood friend; Constance Pinn, a sort of mysterious go-between amongst all parties; and Kiki LaFoy, a 17-year-old student who is loved by David, loves Blaise, and is deflowered by Montague. After Blaise leaves Harriet to set up house with Emily, Harriet alternately throws herself at Montague and Edgar.
None of these people are remotely likable, with the exception of Harriet and Edgar, who are both so selfless they become annoying and pathetic. All the remaining adults are monsters. The children are all much-abused innocents. Murdoch is generous with children and dogs–they have not been corrupted and damaged and made toxic like the adults.
Murdoch does a good job establishing all these characters, and their various complicated relationships; she’s a master at combing exposition, description, dialogue, and internal monologue to create a rich, sensual, and engaging brew. She’s not concerned with plot and despite some clever machinations in the first two-thirds of the book, the ending is seriously marred by an overabundance of coincidence and not one but two violent deaths (one death by terrorist attack, one near-death by dog attack). So one finishes the book feeling a bit drained, exhausted and disappointed, like a ride on a scary but not thrilling rollercoaster.
All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, translated by Anthea Bell (NYRB, 2018; originally published Germany in 2006)
Sigrid Nunez recommended this book to me at one of our lunches last fall and I immediately went to 3 Lives bookshop and bought it. Soon thereafter Afterwords, the book club I belong to, decided to read it, and we were scheduled to discuss it on March 17, but had to postpone our meeting due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
All for Nothing is set in a large manor house outside a small village in East Prussia. The year is 1945. The Russians are advancing from the east and a large part of the population is fleeing westward, but the von Globigs, the family in the Manor House, seem unable to to make a decision about whether to flee or stay.
The family consists of Katherina; the beautiful, introverted, and depressed mother; her twelve-year-old son, Peter; Auntie, a distant relative, a spinster who runs the estate in exchange for room and board, some pocket money, and grudging affection. Two resentful Ukranian maids and a Polish manservant complete the household. The father, Eberhard, is serving as an officer in the German army in Italy. During the final weeks the family remains in their beloved homestead various refugees are quartered, officially or secretly, in the house. The presence of these strangers force familial secrets and strains into the open, resulting in inevitable flight and tragedy. The concluding chapters harrowingly describe the plight of the family as they join the mass doomed exodus west. By focussing on the family’s intimate lives during a time of tremendous public upheaval, Kempowski succeeds in telling a riveting story about the personal effects of war. He writes with brutal and unsentimental honesty, and reading the book is painful and upsetting. It was especially difficult to read this book during this period, for its constant sense of menace and imminent doom seem too close for comfort.
Owls Do Cry by Janet Frame (George Brazilier, 1996; originally published by Brazilier in 1960)
Pegasus Press, New Zealand, 1957; cover illustration by Dennis Beytagh
It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book as brilliant and creative and disturbing as Owls Do Cry. I have known about Janet Frame for a very long time, but never had a good sense of her work and never read anything by her until now. I wonder why that is? It seems odd that no one has recommended this extraordinary writer to me and urged me to read her work.
Owls Do Cry is Frame’s first novel (her first book, a collection of short stories, was awarded a prize days before she was scheduled to undergo a lobotomy, which was cancelled because of the news). It is the story of the gradual but inexorable deterioration of the Withers family. They live (in New Zealand) in dirt and poverty and there seems to be no way for any of them to advance in the world. One one daughter manages to escape destruction by marrying a successful man and heartlessly distancing herself, emotionally and geographically, from her siblings and parents.
The novel follows the children from early childhood to middle age. Their lives are terrible and they seem helpless to change anything. There is only violence and madness and family, all held together with a heartbreaking ineffectual love.
Frame is a brilliant and exciting stylist: her prose is inventive and unbound by convention; even the placement of the words on the page is often surprising and poetic. She writes with the freedom and passion of Joyce but with less ego and ambition, and her prose subsequently outreaches itself, so that one reads with, rather than against, the current.
Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton (Persephone, 2017; originally published by Chatto & Windus in 1953)
Guard Your Daughters is an interesting and engaging book. In many ways, it’s familiar: an eccentric British family, the Harveys, have too many daughter — 5 in this case: Pandora, Thisbe, Morgan, Cressida, and Teresa (the mother lost interest in naming after the fourth daughter so poor Teresa was named by her less romantic father). The Harveys life in self-elected poverty in a huge house outside of a small village. Mr. Harvey is a very successful writer of mysteries, and his wife is a beautiful but extremely fragile woman who must be constantly catered to, cosseted, and comforted, for she has a great fear of losing any of her daughters to husbands or even to friends. There is something monstrous in the way she allows her infirmity to control the family, and something mysterious about the way they allow her to thwart their lives. Any show of independence or interest or engagement with the outside world on the part of the daughters results in Mother taking to her bed with debilitating and dramatic hysterics. So the girls are haphazardly and eccentrically educated at home and made to cook and clean and basically devote their lives to maintaining the domestic status quo.
But when the oldest daughter, Pandora, meets a nice young man while teaching Sunday School and manages to quickly get herself married to him and removed to London, the mother’s iron grip is weakened, and the remaining daughters begin to rebel, and seek out men for their own. The novel centers around their collective pursuit of two candidates and the disastrous effect this has on the family’s and the mother’s stability.
The novel is narrated by the middle sister, Morgan, and she does a good job revealing her family and their queer world to the reader, which often reminds us of two other famous British literary families: the Bennetts and the Mitfords. But beneath the idiosyncratic comic veneer lurks disturbing and dark shadows concerning Mrs Harvey’s health — unlike the Bennett or Mitford parents, her eccentricity is not benign, and the book shades darker as it concludes.
Tutton is a deft and vivid writer, and knows how to keep her work breezy but also textured and somewhat complex. Her other two novels deal with incest and a woman’s affair with her son-in-law, and I’d be interested in reading both of them, as I feel that she tackles difficult issues with a funny, rosy (yet thorny) touch.
The Nature of Passion by R. (Ruth) Prawer Jhabvala (Norton, 1957)
The Nature of Passion, Jhabvala’s second novel, is a thoroughly charming and very adroitly observed and written. I bought it because I had read somewhere that it was reminiscent of Jane Austen, and it is, although it takes place in a very different place (India) and time (mid-twentieth-century).
Lalaji runs a successful construction business in Delhi, and lives somewhat luxuriously with his (unnamed) wife, his tyrannical and tradition-bound widowed sister, his six children — 3 males and 3 females — and assorted servants. His children are all pretty much settled, happily or unhappily married, except for his youngest son and daughter, who both want something different than their older siblings. Nimi, Lalji’s beautiful and vivacious daughter, wants to get a college education and marry for love; Vidi, his son, wants to travel to Europe and then pursue a career in the arts. All of these desires run contrary to the family’s and their culture’s strong tradition, which require arranged marriages and for sons to follow their fathers into business.
The book has a large cast of very well-observed and entertaining characters and Jhabvala has an energetic and merry narrative sense. Her writing is first-rate — clear and sensual. A lovely and delightful book.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore (Atlantic, Little Brown, 1965)
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (originally titled Judith Hearne), like so many books that have a relentlessly downward-spiraling plot, hooks the readers and carries them forward with ever-growing narrative force. Once caught in its vortex, it is hard to put the book down, so compelling is the plight of its heroine.
Judith Hearne is a 40ish unmarried woman living in Belfast sometime in the 1950s. Her life seems to have run itself out far too quickly, leaving her poor, “plain,” lonely, frightened, and alcoholic. The book begins as she moves into yet another in a long series of depressing rooms in rooming houses in what seems to be perpetually raining Belfast. But this new attempt to begin again goes wrong right from the start when she meets her landlady’s brother, recently returned from New York City under dubious circumstances. Miss Hearne, due to her ever-mounting sense of anxiety and delusion, convinces herself that this man is a wealthy suitor–her last chance for marriage and happiness. In fact he is only interested in her as potential investor in his pipe-dream business plan to open an American-type hamburger joint in Dublin, and so the two court each other to tragic consequence.
Surrounding and interwoven with this central (non)romantic plot are flashbacks of Miss Hearne’s difficult past. She was orphaned at an early age and raised by a proud and snobbish aunt who instilled in her a sense of superiority and entitlement that only set her up for constant humiliation and disappointment. The book also explores her complicated and mostly pathetic “friendship” with the O’Neil family, all of whom bear her weekly visits with badly disguised contempt and cruelty.
Judy Hearne is a tragic and pathetic character, yet Brian Moore allows us to glimpse, through her unawareness and alcoholic destructiveness, a woman who is trying as hard as she can to lead a decent and dignified life. I found this book to be a tad mean spirited–about all the characters, not just the title character. Moira O’Neil is the only character who behaves with kindness and common decency. One feels the world and the circumstances that Judith Hearne faces are perhaps almost sadistically punishing.
Celibates by George Moore (Brentano’s 1915; originally published MacMillan 1895)
I became interested in George Moore after reading his novel Esther Waters (1894), which is a classic Victorian novel about a fallen woman: the heroine, a maid at a country estate, is seduced by a stablehand, becomes pregnant, is fired, and decides to move to London and raise the child by herself. It is an engaging book about an incredibly resilient and sympathetic woman who struggles her entire life against impossible and punishing odds.
Brentano’s republished many of Moore’s books in 1915 (he was prolific, publishing more than 40 novels during his life), Celibates among them, which was originally published a year after Esther Waters in 1895. Celibates is an odd book — it isn’t really a novel but a collection of a novel (250 pages) and two novellas (both 100 pages) that share only a theme: characters who have chosen to be celibate.
The first of these, Mildred Lawson (all three books feature titular characters) is the longest and most dynamic and interesting. Mildred is a young lady of means in Victorian England. She lives with her kind but extremely dull brother Harold in a near-suburb of London. She is engaged to an equally dull man who is not as well off as the Lawsons and must work for his money. Mildred, realizing how dreary and unfulfilling married life can be (for a woman) decides to break off her engagement and use her moderate income (Harold controls the family fortune) to learn oil painting and become an artist. She begins by taking drawing lessons with Ralph, a talented but indigent painter at the National Gallery, who soon falls in love with her. Mildred likes him, but realizes that she does not want to be married to anyone, because she does not want to have sexual relations with any man. She likes men but has no physical desire or even attraction to them.
So she abandons Ralph and travels to Paris, where she begins two years of relentless study in a painting studio under the tutelage of M. Daveau, a successful French artist. She makes friends with two other English girls who are also studying at Daveau’s studio. Ralph follows her to Paris and proposes marriage, but Mildred rejects him and he returns to London, devastated.
With her English girl friends Mildred travels to Barbizon for the summer to paint en plein air. She enchants Morton, a young English painter, and steals him away from his drab and devoted girlfriend Rosa. But of course Mildred doesn’t want to marry him either, and decides that only two options are available to her: commit suicide or join a convent. Since neither of these options appeal to her, she enters into a strange menage a trois with an older French aristocratic couple, flirting with the husband and befriending the wife. She begins to write and publishes essays in a Socialist newspaper in which she invests most of her money, which she loses, and so she returns to England and resumes her dreary life in the suburbs, resigned at last to getting married, as there seems to be no other possible alternative for a woman in her position. She attempts to charm her spurned fiancee, who is now a successful businessman, but he has lost his motivation for marrying, now that he is rich and she is poor. Fortunately, Harold suddenly dies of early onset heart problems, and Mildred inherits the family fortune, making her independent at last — but alone and passionless.
The second book, John Norton, is about a young man of wealthy family who has converted to Roman Catholicism and flirts with the idea of becoming a monk, mostly because women disgust him in every conceivable way. He lives as a sort of benefactor/hanger-on in a Catholic men’s college, where he gets all the advantages of monastic life with none of the duties or obligations. But on a return visit to his widowed mother, he finds himself falling in something perhaps like love with a flat-chested young lady who he thinks has the appealing figure of a (male) Greek youth carved in marble. Despite knowing that he feels no sexual attraction to this lady and would much rather return to his pseudo-monastic life, he proposes, and is accepted, but his new fiancee is accosted by a tramp while walking home from the the scene of their engagement, goes mad, and conveniently and mortally flings herself out of her bedroom window. So John, who knew he could never “be her husband” or “fulfill their marriage” decides to convert his ancestral home into a monastery.
This third book is the story of Agnes Lahens, a 17-year-0ld girl who was sent to a convent at an early age to shield her from her scandalous mother, who spurns her deadbeat husband (she banishes him to a maid’s room in the attic) and begins a public affair with Lord Somebody. The girl loves the convent life and wants to take vows, but before she may do this her parents insist she spend one year in the “outside” world. The plan is for the scandalous mother to bring her out into society and marry her off to some old rich pedophile. Well, the poor girl is so shocked by her mother’s amorality and the cynical decadent crowd that hang around their home day and night that after a failed attempt to liberate her father from his abusive treatment hightails it back to the convent before the first month has ended.
All three of these character are not only celibate but virginal, although allusion is made to some naughty fun John Norton had with older boys at school. He tells himself that he has conquered his youthful struggles with himself and vows to never again let these thoughts enter his mind. Of the three, his celibacy is most clearly the result of homosexual suppression. Mildred seems to be asexual, and Agnes seems to be unaware of her sexual nature. The portrait of Mildred Lawson is particularly complex and interesting because her aversion to men is portrayed as a form of self-protection; she knows that if she marries she will become a less fulfilled and less happy person. She is the most spirited and admirable of the celibates, and is aware that she must act cruelly and ruthlessly to protect herself from the clutches of matrimony. John believes his only options are becoming a monk or becoming a husband, and knowing that he would fail at both, turns his home into his prison.
The illustration above is Geroge Moore as caricatured by Walter Sickert in Vanity Fair, January 1897
This is a beguiling, and unusual novel, so unusual that it doesn’t seem very much like a novel at all — it’s a long work of fiction with no plot, not even the semblance of one. The entire books takes place over three or four days in, or in the near vicinity of, Shelllmound, a large cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Shellmound is inhabited by three generations of the Fairchild family, with several other relatives living close by or visiting for the wedding that is at the novel’s center.
The Fairchilds are an impressively fertile clan, and so the cast of characters in this book seems to number in the thousands. The main family in the house — the Battle Fairchilds — have eight children (a ninth is on the way) and Battle is one of eight siblings, all of whom, if alive, are gathered round for the wedding of Danby, Battle and his wife Ellen’s second child. (Danby’s older sister Shelley is a bit overshadowed — or overshone — by her beautiful and vivacious younger sister.) There are also several great aunts hanging around the action, and the many “Negroes” that work on the plantation, both in the fields and in the house, are featured in the book to the extent that they interact with the family (which is often and and seemingly very happily).
Welty is an amazingly good descriptive writer, and brings this whole world vividly alive. And she’s as accomplished creating and describing people as she is with places. Every one of the many (many!) characters in this book is distinct and fully present. They complexly reveal themselves to the reader by their words, thoughts, and actions, not to mention their vivid physical presence.
The book begins with the arrival at Shellmound of Laura, a young cousin who lives in Jackson with her father. Her mother, Battle’s sister, has recently died and Laura and the Fairchilds are all still grieving. Laura’s exclusive point of view that opens the book, and leads the reader to believe that this will be her story, is a ruse, for very quickly it shatters and the rest of the book is told from myriad perspectives, in a somewhat chaotic fashion that matches the excitement and tension in the house as the wedding approaches.
If there is a central character in this book, it isn’t Dabney, the bride, but her mother, Ellen, who married Battle at a tender age and moved to the Delta from Virginia, which everyone agrees is a different, and lesser, world. In addition to preparing her daughter’s wedding, which is to be held in the house followed by a huge reception to which everyone in the Delta has (supposedly) been invited, Ellen must attend to the wants, needs, and fancies of her eight children and many (many!) houseguests. That she does all this with an unwavering good cheer and grace seems somewhat miraculous, and she becomes the book’s hero, although no one in the book realizes or acknowledges this, not even Ellen herself.
One very odd thing about this book is the fact that although it is set in 1923 (it was published in 1945) it seems as if the Civil lWar has effected virtually no change in the socio-economic culture. It is mentioned that there is a payroll for the plantation workers, the bills of which Great Aunt Mac laboriously irons every week, but otherwise it seems as if the plantation is functioning exactly as it did sixty years ago. If it weren’t for the mention of the payroll, one might think that all the people working for and serving the Fairchilds were slaves.
Colette’s novel tells the story of a young Parisian woman who is reduced to working as a “mime” in musical halls after her brief and disastrous marriage to a total cad ends, leaving her alone in the world. She enjoys the independence and autonomy her new working life affords her, so when the perfect suitor appears — he’s young, handsome, kind, devoted, and rich — she balks when he proposes marriage. Is it worth it to her to lose her freedom and become a wife? She decides that it is not, and promptly departs on a tour of South American.
The Vagabond is engaging and the characters and locations are wonderfully vivid. Colette delights and excels in sensually describing the natural world, and as a result the book seems almost fragrant and lush. The character of the suitor seems somewhat rigged to facilitate our heroine’s decision — it would be more fun if he were slightly more of a contender. A fresh and engaging exploration of the evolving relationship between men and women in the early 20th century.
