Harriet Devine's Blog

Craven House

  As I said a few days ago I have been suffering from an annoying case of reader's block and, as I also said, I put it down to withdrawal symptoms after I finished Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude. The review of that book is going to appear in a few days as I did it as a read-along with Simon and others, but meanwhile I headed off to my local library and there I was pleased and surprised to find this, which is Hamilton's second novel, written when he was all of twenty-two. 

I wasn't sure, at first, if I was going to take to it. It's set, as is the later novel, in a seedy boarding house, though in this case one that disguises itself as a private house that just happens to taking 'paying guests'. But the mood and tone are much lighter, or rather the comedy and seriousness are blended in a different way, and that took a bit of getting used to. Once I did, though, I was well and truly hooked, and raced through the novel in joy and delight, longing to see how it would all end.

Craven House, in a shabbily genteel part of London, is owned by a shabbily genteel spinster by the name of Miss Hatt who, as the novel begins, has taken on some new 'guests', the retired Major Wildman and his small son. Master Wildman -- for so he is referred to throughout the novel -- is eight years old, and is to become the book's central character. The story begins in 1911, but takes a leap forward about halfway through and ends up in the early 1920s. So we follow Master Wildman through his schooldays, the death of his father, his first job in the City, his ambitions to become a playwright, his passion for the cold but beautiful Miss Cotterall, and his friendship with little Elsie, who also lives at Craven House. Elsie, indeed, is almost as central to the story. Shy and quiet, she is kept that way by her mother Mrs Nixon who frequently attacks her with a stick in the privacy of their rooms. But, as Elsie grows up, she begins to develop a little more courage, and this will have far-reaching results.

The story is a delight and its twists and turns never predictable. The characters are wonderfully funny and diverse -- dreadful Mr Spicer, who goes out for long 'walks' which take him into pubs and into the company of prostitutes, both of which habits he naturally conceals from his foolish, dull wife -- the servants, Ethel and Audrey, who giggle in the basement but are in danger of 'getting out of hand' -- elderly Mrs Hoare, who is too discreet even to speak whole words, preferring instead to use initials ('"Perhaps a little A", says Mrs Hoare, "about the Aitch" (Angry about the Hair)').

Patrick Hamilton's prose is wonderful -- witty at times, always brilliantly observed. I want to quote huge chunks of it but I'll try to restrain myself with an example or two:

It was a grey, roaring day in July, with the wind as high as though the gods had come to earth, and it was, perhaps, the most beautiful day in all the year. For anything more beautiful than that besieging wind, brushing up the leaves to unearthly silvers and dead bight greys, and swirling every tree into a maddened and suffering tangle, with a whisper and hiss and toss -- or anything more lovely than those strange, short calms, when one dead leaf against a dead sky would flutter to the ground, and an invisible rain would start patting on the ivy, and pitting the dust hurriedly against the distant but fast-returning roar -- would have to be found in a stranger and more bewailing earth than this.

Craven House was published almost exactly twenty years before The Slaves of Solitude, and it was fascinating to compare the two, both of which certainly have some elements of autobiography. More Patrick Hamilton is winging its way to me and I am really looking forward to exploring his work further. But meanwhile I can't resist another quotation, which actually made me laugh out loud this morning as I was reading it in bed:

Whereas the first signs of a failing brain in the average human are believed to manifest themselves in the form of odd straws, or irrelevant flowers sticking out from their persons; and whereas this is in fact a mainly false belief, there is no doubt that, when suspicions of this sort come to centre round an old lady, the trouble first sets in around the Hat. A cherry too much, a rose too dangling, an apple too great, a bunch of grapes to the bad, and before you know where you are, you have a thick-veiled, white-booted, painted, muttering old nodder, charging along the streets, mixing with the crowd, and waiting with eternal nods at street corners, to the bewildered horror of the public at large.

Wonderful stuff and I am tempted to read the whole thing again, not something I do very often.

Case Histories

Hands up who'd like to see Jackson Brodie on TV! If you have enjoyed Kate Atkinson's wonderful series of literary crime novels, I imagine you will be glued to the small screen on Sunday week when the BBC starts a six part adaptation of some, though not all, of these. Meanwhile here is a picture of Jason Isaacs, who I must say does not disappoint as far as his physical appearance is concerned. If you'd like to hear what he says about the series you can read an interview ith him here on the BBC website. I can't wait.

One of those weeks

Do you ever have them? I mean weeks where nothing you start to read seems quite right. I realised this morning that I have five books by my bed and, as you can see from the bookmarks, I've made some inroads into them all, but somehow nothing has me rushing upstairs longing to get back to it. Two are books I won in draws -- Cold Comfort Farm and Mr Chartwell. I started them both before I went to France and I shall certainly finish them but since I came back a couple of days ago they haven't called out to me. The Gielgud biography is a review book and it's great, but I can only read it in fairly small chunks. As for EH Young's Celia, I've been saving it for months and really looking forward to it because I had so much loved three of hers that I'd already read -- Miss Mole, William, and Chatterton Square. I think the problem with this one was that I picked it up when I'd just finished Patrick Hamilton's The Slaves of Solitude, which I had enjoyed so much that Celia somehow didn't feel like the right thing to move on to. So last night in slight desperation I picked up the Ngaio Marsh, one I haven't read before -- obviously a relaxing classic crime novel but so far just about OK.

I think the problem is partly that I'm tired after a day of travelling back from France and two days of rushing around like a headless chicken. But also, Patrick Hamilton's prose seduced me so much that I just want more of it. I'll be reviewing the Slaves in the next few days, but this morning I'm off to the Central Library to see if they have any of his other novels. What a writer! Watch this space.

 

Save Your Library Posters

 

Thanks to Vulpes Libris for a link to this wonderful set of edited posters -- if you click the picture it should take you to the full set.

 

Femme Lisant

A little known painting by the great French Impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir -- "Femme Lisant"", or Woman Reading. 

Moules Frites

I'm at my house in France this week. Most people, when I tell them this, think I'm having a lovely restful holiday, but generally this is very far from the case. There are always a hundred jobs to be done in the house and the garden and, though of course I really love being here, it's often quite exhausting. The other thing people always say is, Ooh, plenty of wine -- but as I hardly drink, that's not on the agenda either. Add to that the fact that I don't eat meat, and those great French dinners are off the menu too. But I love France for many other reasons than the food and drink. The house is in a gloriously peaceful rural area, surrounded by green fields, and all you hear as you sit outside on the terrace is the sound of the wind rustling in the poplars and the church bells drifting across the meadows from the nearby village. And right now, the roses...well you can see. 

   

Yesterday, though, I had a lovely day out. After the usual trips to the bank, the car insurance company and the Bricomarche (DIY store), we drove out to Cancale, on the north Brittany coast, and had lunch in a little cafe where they made the most delicious moules frites (yes, I do eat fish from time to time).

Then it was off to the beach. The day had started grey and cold, with rain forecast which didn't materialise. But by early afternoon the sky was blue and the sun very bright. There was still a cold wind but you could avoid it by lying down, which we did, and promptly went to sleep. 

There's an amazing old chapel at the top of the cliffs, so when we woke up we walked up the cliff path between the hedgerows which are full of wild roses and honeysuckle. When we got there the place was full of French youth smoking fags, but they dispersed fairly soon and we peered about, looked out of the window

and finally climbed down again, admiring the view from the top of the cliffs. Almost nobody on the beach, which was amazing. 

I've been reading less than usual but I have just finished the most astonishingly good book called The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton, kindly lent me by Simon. You'll be hearing about this soon.

Bye! or rather aurevoir.

 

Four Meals for Fourpence

Well! This plopped unexpectedly through the door a few days ago and by rights it should have taken its place on the TBR pile, but I just opened it for a quick look and was instantly seduced.  I suppose I had a vague idea of what the kind of life described here was like, but had never experienced it told with such extraordinary vividness.

Grace Foakes was born in the East End of London, 'in the year Queen Victoria died' -- for those of you not absolutely up in English history, that's 1901, so 110 years ago. She was the second eldest child of a family of five, though those were just the ones that survived. Her mother had a new baby every year,

and this was always a great surprise to us. We would wake up one morning and my father would say, "You have a new brother", or "You have another sister", as the case might be. I think she had fourteen children altogether, but I am not quite sure of this, for some died at birth and some lived just a few weeks.

You can perhaps see from that extract how simply Grace writes, but how extraordinarily delightful that is. She tells stories about her home, her parents, her neighbours, her school and London itself. She was fortunate in having parents who were Methodists and non-drinkers, so that at least the very small amount of money that her father managed to earn did not get consumed in the pub, forcing the family to pawn everything apart from the clothes they stood up in, apparently quite a common situation in the neighbourhood. Nevertheless the family, like all those in the area, lived in extreme poverty. They were lucky to have meat on a Sunday, but the rest of the week their mother made improvised meals such as 'Pepper and Salt Slosh' -- a slice of bread in a mug with boiling water poured over it, with a teaspoon of margarine, salt and pepper stirred into it -- 'and it was surprising how good it tasted'. Clothes were cast-off bought from the rag and bone man. Baths were once a week, and everybody used the same water. Education was primitive and uncaring. As for health care, really it's a miracle that anyone survived. There's a horrific story of Grace, aged about twelve, having to carry her younger sister to the London Hospital  -- a journey of well over an hour -- when the child was in terrible pain with a mastoid. After a long wait they saw the doctor who said she must be admitted, but as there were no beds, Grace had to carry her home again, wrapped in newspaper because it was pouring with rain. She was finally admitted to the local infirmary and did recover, but many people did not. Really you get the impression that the people of the East End of London were viewed as dispensable. 

If this all sounds depressing, I can assure you it's not. The most wonderful thing about Grace is her absolute optimism throughout it all, and her determination not to let her own children suffer the poverty and deprivation of her own childhood. She takes delight in the simplest things and finds ways of making the most of the little she has. Longing for a garden,  she manages to persuade a local park-keeper to give her some bags of earth, which she sprinkles between the cracks in the paving stones in the yard, adding some chaff gathered from the local horse feed, and soon some shoots of grass start to appear.

The satisfaction and joy I experienced when looking at my grass far outweighed any bouquet or flowers I have since been bought. The colour was there as a result of something I had thought of and grown by myself. It was a truly wonderful feeling of achievement in such a grey world.

I could go on, but really this is a book you should read for yourself. Grace actually wrote three books, which were published in the 1970s, and this is a compilation of all three, edited by Joanna Goldsworthy. I'm tempted to try to get hold of the originals, but meanwhile, as you can see, I was very happy to have read it.

 

Girl with Plaits

Plaits in English English is 'Braids' in US English, and that is the name of this painting by Jeremy Lipking, which showed up on a blog called Underpaintings. Jeremy Lipking is a living painter, and you can see more of his work on his website.

The Moving Toyshop

As I'm a sucker for classic crime and can't resist any novel set in Oxford, I simply had to buy this when I spotted it in Blackwell's secondhand department a while back. Published in 1946 and dedicated to the author's great friend Philip Larkin, it's one of a series of nine novels and two short story collections featuring the fictional Oxford don Gervase Fen, a Professor of English at the fictional St Christopher's College in Oxford. But although Fen and his college may be fictional, they inhabit an Oxford which is very real, so reading the novel is a bit like a retro Morse/Lewis experience. And when you learn that Bruce Montgomery adopted the pseudonym  Edmund Crispin from a novel the great Oxford crime writer Michael Innes (who was actually an Oxford don called J.I.M. Stewart), the whole thing becomes entirely irrestisible, to me at least. Montgomery was a celebrated musician and composer as well as a crime writer -- they don't make them like that these days, I'm afraid.

The plot of the novel is somewhat fantastic but just about  falls within the realm of credibility. A poet, Richard Cadogan, sets off for Oxford in the middle of the night but gets stranded in Didcot when his train breaks down. He gets a lift in a lorry which drops him off at Headington roundabout, and sets off to walk into town. But he gets lost and ends up in Iffley Road (not, in fact, a very likely thing to happen but I suppose a bit of dramatic license is allowable), where he stumbles into a toyshop and discovers a dead body. However when he tells the police next morning, the toyshop has vanished, together with the body, and a grocery shop has appeared in its place. Cadogan seeks out his friend Fen, and the two of them set out to solve this apparently non-existent crime. This involves a great deal of dashing around the countryside in Fen's sports car, sitting in seedy pubs, gathering a set of eccentric side-kicks, and uncovering a series of complex but just about plausible happenings, including the reappearance of the toyshop in the Woodstock Road.

This is a novel of great charm and tremendous high spirits. It's also very literary -- everybody in the novel is constantly quoting poetry and Jacobean drama, even the pretty shopgirl Sally who is surprisingly keen on Marvell. Larkin gets his own private joke, when Fen picks up a student essay called  "The Influence of Sir Gawain on Arnold's Empedocles on Etna", and comments: "Good heavens, that must be Larkin: the most indefatigable searcher out of pointless correspondences the world has ever known." And it's also rather ahead of its time in that the characters seem aware on occasion that they are taking part in a novel -- as for example when Cadogan alludes to the politics of the publisher: 

"Let's go left", Cadogan suggested. "After all,  Gollanz is publishing this book."

Everything speeds up and gets increasingly intense towards the conclusion, and the investigators end up in Botley, near Oxford Station. Here they first of all visit a flea-pit cinema (now alas long gone) where the film's dialogue is hilariously juxtaposed with the search for the murderer:

"Pa was a nice guy", said the film. "Who'd want to kill him?"

Fen got up and meandered down the gangway. An usherette, anxious to be helpful, approached and indicated to him the whereabouts of the gentleman's lavatory. He ignored her and continued peering about him.

"OK boys", said the film. "Take him to the morgue".

Finally everyone ends up in the Botley Fair (does this still take place? I never heard of it), the tawdriness of which reminds Cadogan of a scene from a Graham Greene novel: "somewhere there must be somebody saying a 'Hail Mary'...". In a terrific final tour de force, Fen and the murderer get trapped on the roundabout, which can't be stopped because the operator has been shot....

Altogether enormous fun. And the title? It's taken from the final lines of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, in which he says of women:

With varying vanities, from every part,
They shift the moving toyshop of their heart.

 

 

 

Katie Ward, Girl Reading

If you are a regular visitor here you'll know that I try to put up a painting every Saturday, and frequently these will on the theme of Girl (or Woman/Man/Boy) Reading. So this book, Katie Ward's first, seemed an obvious choice. But is it a novel or is it a collection of short stories? Well, if you can believe this, I think it is both.

The concept is very clever. Each chapter/story is based on an exisiting painting or photograph, and these are listed at the end, so you can google them (I've put a few together further down this page) -- but oh how I did wish the images could have been included in the book. And of course each is a portrait of a girl or woman with a book. So there's a breathtaking sweep through time here from the early middle ages to the present day -- and then there's the final chapter, of which more in a minute. So, to give just a few examples, the Elinga image tells the story of the girl in the painting, who turns out to be the painter's maid -- the woman in the Kauffman is a portrait of the dead lover of an impoverished female aristocrat in 18th century France -- the woman in the photo is a famous 19th-century medium -- and so on. These are not, though, the real stories behind the paintings -- they are what the novelist has imagined. Are you with me so far?

There are tiny links to be discerned between the first six chapters, but it's the seventh chapter that really pulls the whole thing together in rather a remarkable way. I don't want to give too much away, but this one is set in 2060, a somewhat dystopian, though only too plausible, future in which visual art has been locked away and can only be seen through the sophisticated virtual reality system called 'the mesh', in which most people spend most of their waking hours. The story is about a female artist who has created a mesh-based art work called The Sibyl. This is a figure of a woman which has somehow developed a life of its own, in that it can interpret works of art, but interprets them differently for each viewer. You'd have to read it to get the full implcations of this, but clearly it has something to say not only about the book itself but about art in general and about the roles of the artist, the critic and the viewer. Amazing stuff. The story ends with yet another image, but I must say I was not sure of the implications of the final paragraph and would love to talk to someone else who's read it. So if that's you please email me to tell me what you think it means.

The book comes with a strong endorsement from Hilary Mantel -- 'a debut of rare originality and distinction'. You can see why she liked it as it is beautifully written and wonderfully imagined and observed -- indeed sometimes the prose reminded me of Wolf Hall rather powerfully (present tense historical writing). But don't let that put you off, if it would, as Katie Ward is a pretty special new voice and deserves to be read.

Virago thought I'd like it and I did, so thanks to them.