Harriet Devine's Blog

Apple Gathering

I don't usually put pictures up here on Mondays but I enjoyed Saturday's Larsson, and here is another of his which is so apt for this time of year that I had to show it to you. I'm in rural France and apples are everywhere -- you can't go out visiting without coming home with bags and baskets of them, and they lie about on the roads and the fields where people have run out of energy for the picking up. Lovely.

Girl with Milk and Book

Actually 'My Eldest Daughter Suzanne with Milk and a Book', painted in 1904 by the great Swedish painter Carl Larsson (1853-1919). Here are a great many more of his much-loved paintings. 

 

To The North

If I say that Elizabeth Bowen writes like a poet, I suppose that may put some people off -- perhaps it makes her sound like a pretentious novelist, too much concerned with the beauty of her prose to be really interesting and readable. But that is so not true. To the North is the second of her novels I've read in the past month or so (the first being The Heat of the Day) and I have to tell you that I am even more in love with her writing than I was before. 

To the North, published in 1932, is the story of two young women, Cecilia and Emmeline, who share a house in St John's Wood, a pleasant and well-heeled London suburb. They are related by marriage, Emmeline being the sister of Cecilia's husband Henry, who died suddenly after only a year of marriage. Though fond of each other, they live largely separate lives and differ greatly in their personalities. Emmeline is young, gentle, innocent and rather cool, while Cecilia, though often critical and discontented, is warmer and more open. 

 As the novel begins, Cecilia is on her way back from Italy by train. Bored and rather depressed, she falls into conversation with Markie Linkwater, a moody, sensual,  young barrister who Cecilia sees is attractive, though not to her. But, 'each determined to please though closing the heart against pleasure', they agree to meet in London. Waiting for Cecilia in London is agreeable, sympathetic Julian Towers, who thinks he may be in love with her:

Aware of her pretty figure in black on the sofa beside him, her head turned his way, her expressive hands -- that, unlike other hands, seemed to exist to touch, to communicate their vitality -- he relaxed under the enchantment of her delectable strangeness, this foreigness to himself that passed for her mystery. To be with her, to nearly love her was to lend oneself wholly to an illusion, to hang in a drop of light in the lustres along her mantlepiece, to be reflected for less than a moment, like a bird's shadow flashing across a mirror, in her dazzling ignorance of oneself.

 Cecilia is worried about introducing Markie to Emmeline as she is certain she will dislike him. But in fact they have already met and almost immediately Emmeline has become deeply attracted, which leaves her at once pleased and confused:

The impact of Markie upon her was disproportionate with her life. No one had troubled her, something in her had forbidden anything but indirectness and delicacy. A splinter of ice in the heart is bombed out rather than thawed out.

 Soon, though, they are involved in a passionate relationship and spend a weekend in Paris during which Emmeline gives herself willingly to Markie -- a fact which, given his preference for women who are coy and resistent, he finds rather troublesome. None of this, however, is known to Cecilia, who is wrestling with her own feelings -- her inability to commit to loving Julian which, though she is hardly aware of it, is the result of the sudden loss of her husband after only a year of happy marriage -- as 'when a great house is destroyed by fire -- left with walls bleached and ghastly and windows gaping with the cold sky -- the master has not, perhaps, the heart or the money to rebuild'.

 I could go on, endlessly quoting Bowen's wonderful, metaphoric writing, but I'll spare you and hope you'll read this for yourself. I will tell you that things end badly for Emmeline though, hopefully, more happily for Cecilia. But however much I were to tell you about the plot, this would not begin to give you any idea of what is so stunning about Bowen's writing -- which is, I would say, her ability to see so deeply into the human psyche. Many writers we enjoy can write convincingly about love and its pains and pleasures, but there are levels and levels of fine feeling which only the most brilliant and perceptive of writers can plumb for us, and my goodness is she one of them.

 As for the title -- you won't know what it refers to until nearly the end of the novel. But in a sense the whole thing is permeated by travel, beginning with Cecilia's uncomfortable train journey, on which 'the heart hangs dull in the shaken body, nerves ache, sense quicken, the brain like a horrified cat leaps clawing from object to object, the earth whisked by at such speed looks ephemeral, trashy', through Emmeline and Markie's flight to Paris and their final car journey, and punctuated by trips to the Cotswolds and to Kent.

Teflon or Velcro? Bowen's writing is far from bumpy or scratchy, but I'd still put it in the Velcro camp because it grabs me and shows no sign of ever letting go.

Teflon and Velcro Writers

I've recently discovered a new (to me) blog called Lingua Franca -- thanks to my friend Rob who pointed me in its direction. It's subtitled 'Language and Writing in Academe' so probably doesn't sound wildly exciting to those who are not involved in writing, but I've been finding it fascinating and often very funny.

Today's interesting and entertaining post, written by one Allan Metcalf, is called Teflon and Velcro Writers, and briefly the argument is this:

Teflon writing is smooth, polished, gemlike. You can admire it, but it doesn’t reach out to you. It leaves you in peace.

Velcro writing, on the other hand, grabs you, sticks with you, changes you. It isn’t necessarily pretty to look at, but it gets hold of you and shakes you up.

If you read the whole post you'll see that he gives some examples, mostly taken from American poetry. But in principal this can be applied to any writing and I tend to think it's very apt, though it may be quite subjective, and very much sums up my own feelings about literature in general.  I'm just about to finish a review of a writer who I'd definitely put in the Velcro camp -- wonderful Elizabeth Bowen. But maybe she doesn't reach out and grab everyone?

Enchanted again

Having enjoyed the novel so much, as I said in yesterday's post, I was absolutely dying to see the film and luckily managed to get hold of it, so I'm now in a position to compare the two. And I have to say that unlike Teresa, who was of course the blogger who had liked the film better, I did prefer the book. But that's not to say I didn't love the movie -- it would be hard not to as it is really entirely delightful. Wonderful cast, fabulous locations, terrific period detail -- what's not to like. And I was very happy to discover that on the whole it was amazingly true to the novel, though of course, as I'd assumed in my review yesterday, the inner thoughts of the characters are drastically pruned.

I wasn't entirely happy with the casting of Lady Caroline  -- Polly Walker, though undoubtedly pretty, didn't at all measure up to my imagined image of the character who, in the book, is nicknamed Scrap for her extreme slenderness -- Polly, bless her, is far from scrappy, but perhaps the casting people thought she'd have more appeal for 1990s audiences than someone with a typical 1920s boyish figure? Keira Knightly would have been good except she was only seven when the film was made...

Apart from that, the few tweaks that were made to the plot didn't bother me at all, and in fact one of them I thought was a definite improvement. If you've seen it or read it, you'll remember that Briggs is initially very attracted to Rose and then transfers his attention to Caroline. In the novel I found this a bit upsetting and disturbing, and wondered why Caroline was so willing to like him when he'd turned into just another adoring male of the kind she was trying to escape from. But in the movie this was much better handled. Briggs does not fall for Caroline like a ton of bricks because he's got bad eyesight and so is not immediately enthralled by her beauty, which in its turn explains why she  is interested in him -- he's not exactly like all the others. However, I did wonder how, if he was so short sighted, he managed not only to appreciate Rose's beauty but to observe her likeness to the painted madonna on the castle wall. But that's a tiny quibble and all in all it was a joy. 

The Enchanted April

I'm tempted to say that you have a French mosquito to thank for this review. I picked up the novel -- another beautiful VMC hardback -- yesterday evening and read a bit before I went to sleep. Then at 2.15 I woke up, my hand itching like mad and that dreadful high-pitched whine leading me to believe that the mosquito had not fed his fill. But of course when I put the light on, I couldn't find him, and then I was wide awake. So I thought I'd read a few more pages -- and a few more -- and in the end I finished the entire novel. 

Somebody recently, and I can't remember who, wrote on their blog that they preferred the film to the book. I can't comment on this as for some reason I've never seen the film, though now I'm dying to as it's hard to imagine how this very inward story could make a full-length feature. Of course there's a plot, but really it's quite a slender one in terms of action. Published in 1922, it tells the story of two rather unhappy young London housewives who, one cold and rainy March day, spot an advertisment in the Times ("To Those Who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine") for a small medieval castle in Italy and decide to rent it for the month of April. They find two other women to share it with, and off they go. None of them knows each other at all well, and all of them have their various reasons for wanting to escape lives which are far from satisfactory. But as the days go by, the extraordinary beauty of the place, and the distance from home, and the time to think, bring about great and positive changes and by the end all four lives have been completely transformed. Much of the writing focuses on the inner lives of the women -- Lotty Wilkins, married to a London solicitor, given to strange flashes of premonition and odd outbursts of disconnected speech, who instantly responds to the beauty of the place, becoming so astonishingly happy that she seems almost a saint -- beautiful, sad Rose Arbuthnot, convinced that her husband's successful biographies of historical French mistresses are terrible sins in the sight of God -- exquisite Lady Caroline, on the run from the besotted men who surround her at all times, bowled over by her looks and her charm -- and disagreeable elderly Mrs Fisher, who lives in the past, regretting the passing of the long dead literary lions who often visited her childhood home. 

Really this is a novel about love, though its not a love story -- not that romantic love never figures, but here we are confronted with love in its widest sense, experienced initially by Lotty as soon as she arrives in Italy

Happy? Poor, ordinary, everyday word. But what could one say, how could one describe it? It was as though she could hardly stay inside herself, it was as though she were too small to hold so much of joy, it was as though she had been washed through with light...

and spreading gradually to influence the other women and their ways of thinking about themselves and their worlds. You could, I suppose, think it rather unrealistic in its unashamedly happy endings for all concerned, as even horrible, selfish Mrs Fisher starts to feel 'a curious sensation, which worried her, of rising sap...as if she were presently going to burgeon'. But I found it completely delightful, uplifting and, of course, enchanting. 

Woman after Reading

Thanks to Dark Puss for this very sweet picture, painted by Emma Irlam Briggs (British 1890-1950) and called 'A Book at Bedtime'.