Harriet Devine's Blog

They Knew Mr Knight

 The Persephone book I meant to read this weekend was The Children Who Lived in a Barn, which I bought sometime last year. I was sure I knew where it was but when I looked it wasn't there, or anywhere else in the house as far as I could discover. So, determined not to be left out, I borrowed one from Simon, who kindly brought three along for me to choose from. I dithered a bit, but really there was no contest as I've been wanting to read another Dorothy Whipple since I so much enjoyed Someone at a Distance last summer. 

Dorothy Whipple is a writer who no-one really seems to know how to praise -- that is, they do praise her, but they tend to do so in terms which sound rather off-putting -- Persephone themselves say she is "not a great writer", and  describe her as "serviceable, perceptive and humane". Not the sort of terms that would make you rush to buy one of her books -- but nevertheless she is one of their best-selling authors. This seems a bit paradoxical, to say the least, and it raises interesting questions about quality which I'm not going to get into here. Suffice it to say that my second Whipple novel was a joy from start to finish and I whizzed through its 470 pages in no time.

They Knew Mr Knight is a novel about a family, the Blakes. Middle class, middle income, middle England. Thomas Blake works in a small engineering works, once owned by his family but now bought out by his late manager. Celia is his wife, and the centre of the novel -- I'll say more about her in a minute. Then there are the three teenage children, beautiful, discontented Freda, happy, bright Douglas, and dreamy, imaginative Ruth. Their house is small, though they have a maid (this is 1934, by the way, when that would have been the norm), and Celia, at forty-one, is generally contented, though she worries as all mothers do about her children and their futures, and regrets the slow but inexorable loss of her beauty:

She had flowered, borne fruit, and was now fading. The inexorability of time and life made Celia turn on her back, and stare at the ceiling. The sweep of life was sad, even tragic, but it was magnificent.

Thomas, though, is not contented. He's resentful of the fact that he has to work for a man who once worked for him. And so it is that when he attracts the attentions of  Mr Knight, a hugely wealthy local financier who has recently moved into the district, he falls for him like a ripe plum. And, at first, this seems all to the good, as Mr Knight puts Thomas in the way of making a great deal more money. His income quadruples, he's able to buy back the works, the family moves house twice, ending up in the glorious little stately home the Knights have vacated after their move back to London. But lacking Mr Knight's interest and attention, Thomas starts to make a mess of his investments and disaster follows swiftly.

That's the bare bones of the plot, and a good one it is. But so much more is going on here. Each of the children has their own story -- Freda, unable to be happy with her life, incapable of sharing her feelings with the rest of the family, falls in with a fast set of young people a great deal wealthier than she is and suffers dreadfully from unrequited love -- Douglas, a brilliant career as a scientist ahead of him, falls for a beautiful young woman who turns out to be dangerously involved with Mr Knight,  and who breaks Douglas's heart -- and Ruth, sent off to France for a year, whose great ambition is to be a writer. Then there's Edward, Thomas's brother, seemingly a lost cause, who is redeemed by love; Thomas's dreadful, angry old mother; and wonderful, tragic Mrs Knight, whose early incarnation as a music-hall singer has to be concealed but bursts through from time to time despite her efforts to suppress it.

Above all, though, this is Celia's story. Celia, though absolutely human, is, essentially, a good woman. Now as anyone who has studied literature will know, goodness is the hardest quality for a writer to do well. Famously, Milton is said to have failed to make God a sympathetic character in Paradise Lost -- everybody who reads the poem is much keener on Satan. But Whipple seems to have succeeded where Milton failed. Clearly she was interested in goodness, as Ellen in Someone at a Distance is also possessed of it. In the Afterword to They Knew Mr Knight, the Reverend Terence Handley McMath puts this down to her religious beliefs. He tell us that "Dorothy Whipple inhabits a Christian world where religious truth and social feeling overlap", finds Christian language and images throughout the novel, sees Mr Knight as Satan and reads the plot as one of sin, love and redemption. Far be it from me to disagree with Rev. McMath. But though Celia undoubtedly has a spiritual inner life, it is not one in which church-going figures -- in fact she has tried a number of churches of different denominations and not found one she really relates to. But as she gets older, she has found herself increasingly on a search for "something in me" that

stretches out, like one of those caterpillars that cling to the end of a twig and wave themselves about in the air, feeling for something to hold onto. It's my spirit, I suppose. 

This search, "profoundly isolated" and unremitting, occasionally results in brief flashes of apprehension of what she takes to be God, until, near the end of the novel, when she is at her lowest imaginable ebb, she has a full-blown epiphany in which she is caught up in a state of ecstacy:

It was God. She was sure. She was drawn into love, warmed, reassured, made happy like a child by a father. Grief was wiped out. The light that she had seen in flashes now shone full upon her. She was amazed by its spendour. She sank to the floor and knelt there, flooded in radiance. She saw. She knew. For a little space of time, she lived at the height of perception; for one moment, which would illuminate a lifetime, she was able, in spite of her thick self, to apprehend God.

Well. I think that's all very interesting. But don't let it make you think this is a preachy novel, because it really isn't. It's witty, perceptive, and brilliant in its depiction of people and their complex relationships. Sorry, Persephone, but I think it does Whipple a great disservice to describe her as "serviceable'. 

Thanks so much, Verity and Claire, for this brilliant weekend. 

 

Woman Reading

I found this portrait on that lovely blog called  Art Inconnu. It is by the Peruvian artist Teodoro Nunez Ureta, and was painted in about 1930.

South Riding -- a small but interesting fact

I haven't read South Riding, though I wish I had, but last night I watched the first episode of the new BBC adaptation on iplayer. No idea how it compares to the book, which I'll obviously have to get around to soon.  I enjoyed it a lot -- Anna Maxwell Martin is brilliant and it's great to see her playing such a different character from her superb Esther in Bleak House a few years ago.

Anyway -- there was a moment last night when a chap was blackmailed by a girl he'd been having an illicit affair with. The amount she asked him for was £500, and he was pretty shocked. Doesn't sound like a lot, really, does it? But this was 1934, remember. So this morning I looked it up on a website called Measuring Worth and it turns out that £500 in 1934 is equal to £99,100 using average earnings. No wonder the poor chap looked upset.

 

 

New Design

As you will notice I've been playing around with a new look for the blog. It's been an infuriating process and I'm not sure I've got it right yet. I wanted a picture on the banner and this is the one I chose, but then I had to try to get it to the right size and shape and I couldn't do anything about the black stripe across the middle... aaarrrrgggghhhh. And then it totally rearranged the sidebar modules...

Anyway, I'll see whether I like it over the next few days -- might change it again if I decide I don't.

Here's the original painting which is by Augustus John:

Persephone Reading Weekend

Yes folks, no sooner have we got through Virago Reading Week than we are confronted with Persephone Reading Weekend. You can read more about it on cardigangirlverity. I do happen to have an unread Persephone languishing on the shelf so I will do my best to participate. 

Prize Draw Result...

...and first out of the hat was Dark Puss!!! I can't imagine what he will think of it, but if he'd like to send me his mailing address I will post his copy forthwith -- as long as he promises to review it on his blog. 

This draw, by the way, was for Sleeping with Mozart.

The Wedding Dress

This sad scene was painted by Frederick Ewell (1870-1958), a little-known artist from Beverley in Yorkshire. She might have been jilted, but I think he died, as she is in black. 

The Last Resort

I'm not a great reader of travel books, though there have been some I've enjoyed over the years -- any of Bill Bryson's come to mind, and I remember loving Old Glory, the story of Jonathan Raban's extraordinary trip down the Mississippi in the 1990s. This one, however, which is set in Zimbabwe, happened to arrive at my house more or less at the same time as an old friend who was brought up there, and who has been staying with me while his broken leg starts to mend. So -- if you can understand that rambling sentence --I thought it would be interesting to try it, not least because the book won the British Guild of Travel Writers' Best Travel Book Award last year.

But is it a travel book? I suppose it must be, as the writer does travel back and forth to Zimbabwe a number of times. But though he lives in London and then moves to New York, when he journeys to Africa he's returning to the country of his birth and visiting his parents rather than breaking new ground as I suppose travel writers traditionally do. However, that being said, of course he is breaking new ground in another sense, as Zimbabwe is no longer the country that he remembers from his childhood.  Zimbabwe, as any fule kno, used to be called Southern Rhodesia, and was a British colony before it became independent, and under the rule of President Robert Mugabe, in 1980. When Douglas Rogers' book begins, it is April 2000, and the media is full of the news that Mugabe has started to seize land from the many thousands of remaining white settlers. Suddenly Rogers' parents are no longer assured of the comfortable middle-class retirement they'd been anticipating on their large country estate. Of course they could have moved to England, as my broken-legged friend's father did -- but he'd come from there in the first place, while Rogers' father and mother could trace their roots in Zimbabwe back for many generations. 

Over the coming years Rogers visits his old home a number of times, and each time great changes have taken place. At first he is shocked by the deterioration of the house and grounds -- it seems his parents have ceased to care about keeping out the insects and frogs, and the vegetation is running wild. But on his next visit he finds everything looking much smarter again and it soon transpires that this is because his parents have leased out their collection of holiday cabins, once popular with backtrackers and tourists, to a shady operation which is running it as a brothel. On another visit he is invited to inspect his father's large and healthy crop of marijuana, while the bar which once serviced the holiday cabins is now frequented by dodgy politicians, soldiers, spies and diamond dealers.

Truly, then, though you might want to read this as a book about the political situation in Zimbabwe as seen from the inside, really it is a book about the survival of the human spirit -- or that's how I saw it, anyway. As the book ends, Rogers' parents, by now in their seventies, are still living at home and running a successful coffee roasting business. Long may they continue.

Sleeping with Mozart + Prize Draw

I said the other day that several new Viragos had come through my letterbox in the last few weeks, and this is one of them. Virago Press is of course now under the umbrella of a larger company, Little Brown, but still proclaims itself to be a publisher of books by, for and about women. Loving as I do the old Virago classics, especially if they are in their original green covers, I was curious to see what I'd think of some of their newer publications which set out, as they say on their website, to capture "the new, edgy and provocative spirit of the young".

Sleeping with Mozart is subtitled 'A love story after a fashion'. Yes, indeed. Actually it's a story of unrequited love, or rather of love which has been cut down in its prime. For Dorcas Trevelyan is suffering from a broken heart. Jamie, her older, married, lover has ended their affair and she is trying to come to terms with the pain. Still in love, she deliberately keeps a sense of connection with the man she thought was her friend as well as her lover by telling him, in diary form, all about the events of her life and her attempts to make some kind of recovery. Of course he never sees what she writes, but at least it makes her feel they are still in some way communicating. So, through her unsent letters, we slowly learn about the history of their affair, about the disastrous dates she goes on after she joins a dating agency in the hope of finding a replacement, and about the trials and tensions at the school where she teaches, which is in the throes of preparing for an inspection.

I once had the idea of writing a book called 50 Ways to Mend a Broken Heart. It's a great idea and I'm sure it would be a best seller, but the problem is that I couldn't think of 50 ways. In fact I suspect there are basically only two ways -- 1) time, and/or 2) finding somebody else. Dorcas is trying the second one, but I can't help thinking she'd probably have had more success if she cut herself off completely from Jamie and stopped all the writing. But maybe that's a bit harsh -- of course if you're used to sharing all your thoughts with someone it's hard to just stop in midstream. In any case, Anthea Church has certainly captured the essence of what that extremely painful state of being is like, and many people will be able to empathise with Dorcas as she struggles to put her life back together again. You might end up thinking, as I certainly did, that Jamie was not worth all the agony, but that's a fairly normal reaction for anyone except of course the broken-hearted lover. Dorcas's voice is lively and witty, and some of her adventures very entertaining -- though I was a little worried by her willingness to share stories of her adulterous affair with her class of teenage girls. 

So -- basically chick lit but of quite a classy kind. If you think you'd like to read it, Virago kindly sent me two copies so I've got one up for grabs. Names in comments and I'll draw a winner soon.

 

 

 

Something for Valentine's Day