Harriet Devine's Blog

Woman Reading

This is 'Reading', by the celebrated French Impressionist painter  Berthe Morisot (1841-1895). Should you happen to be anywhere near Paris, you can see an exhibition of her work at the Musee Marmotan, on till the end of July. She was a beautiful woman as well as a fine artist, and here is a painting of her by Manet:

The Bottle Factory Outing

This is the story of Freda and Brenda, an ill-assorted couple of young women who have ended up sharing a bedsit together and working in the same 'bottle factory' – actually an Italian run wine importers, though the two women are indeed responsible for filling and labelling the bottles. Brenda, middle-class and well brought up, has run away from her drunken husband, while Freda, lush and overweight, has no family apart from an old aunty up north. Their backgrounds are completely different, but so also is the way they view the world. Freda longs for romance, and mostly manages to keep up the fantasy that one day it will happen, hopefully with handsome Vittorio, the trainee manager. Brenda is a pessimist, and disapproves of Freda's warm imaginings. Their diverse reactions to the house they live in typifies their differences.

There was a bathroom up a flight of stairs and a window on the landing bordered with little panes of stained glass. Freda thought it was beautiful. When she chose, the washing on the line, the fragments of tree and brick, were tinted pink and gold. Brenda, avoiding the coloured squares, saw only a back yard grey with soot and a stunted rambling rose that never bloomed sprawled against the crumbling surface of the wall. She felt it was unwise to see things as other than they were.

Ironically, it is scrawny, badly dressed Brenda who seems to attract male attention, particularly that of Mr Rossi, the manager, who every day finds a reason to call her into storerooms and basements and fumble desperately with her clothing. She wishes he wouldn't, but she has been too well brought up to give offence.

As a child she had been taught it was rude to say no, unless she didn't mean it. If she was offered another piece of cake and she wanted it she was obliged to refuse out of politeness. And if she didn't want it she had to say yes, even if it choked her. It was involved but understandable. There had been other small incidents that illustrated her extraordinary capacity for remaining passive while put upon. There had been the man on the bus who felt her leg almost to her knickers without her saying anything, until she had to move because it was her stop and then she'd said, 'Excuse me, I'm sorry'. And the woman with the trumpet who had stopped her in the street and asked her if she could borrow a room to practise in. Brenda loathed music. When Freda opened the door to the trumpet player and told her what to do with her trumpet, Brenda hid behind the wardrobe.

Freda, desperate to get Vittorio to declare himself as she is quite unrealistically sure he wants to do, has arranged an outing for the factory workers – she imagines the two of them wandering off hand in hand in the glorious countryside, a seduction, a marriage. A coach has been hired, but on the morning of the outing it fails to appear, and most of the men, Italian peasants quite bemused by the ways of the country they find themselves in, shuffle off home with their bags of sandwiches. Freda, however, not to be defeated, manages to get a small group into Mr Rossi's car – herself and Brenda, Vittorio, and Irish Patrick who has taken a shine to Brenda. They end up in Windsor Great Park, and there a very surprising and shocking event takes place …

This is a really funny novel. Yes, it's black comedy, but there's nothing wrong with that, and I was smiling and chuckling all the way through. Freda and Brenda are wonderfully conceived characters – Brenda undoubtedly based on Bainbridge herself, who said on her later Desert Island Discs recording that when she was young and lived in London, married men were always coming round and flinging themselves at her and that she had been brought up to believe it was rude to say no. As for Freda, she is appalling and adorable in about equal measure – underneath her robust and forceful exterior is a sad, needy woman who longs for a beautiful husband, adorable children, and a castle in Italy to go with them. In actual fact she will eventually end up in Italy, though not quite in the manner she had imagined.

There's a film, with Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French, but I'm not sure if I want to see it. As you can tell, I really really loved this novel. Bainbridge has become one of my absolute top favourite novelists, along with Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green – oh, and Jane Austen of course. A small but select group (there are probably a few more, but these are who spring to mind right now). Luckily she wrote a good many novels and so even though I've now read six, there are lots more to look forward to. Hooray for Annabel and Beryl Bainbridge Week – even though it's now finished.

Woman in Green

This is Juliette. sometimes known as The Green Girl, by John Alexander White, painted at the end of the 1890s. I don't know who she was, but her dress is very informal for the period, so I imagine she moved in artistic circles -- daughter, wife, girl-friend, model?

Every Man For Himself

Just because you're writing a book, it doesn't mean you have to explain every damn thing.

So says Beryl Bainbridge in this interview about the novel, and it's all fascinating so do listen to it. Another thing she says is that she thinks people should read her novels three times if they want to really understand them. I suspect this is a really good idea, though of course we get a lot from them in one reading. But I certainly think this one could do with a second read. It's the fifth I have now read, and seems to me to be the best yet, which is saying something, as I've loved them all. Certainly it's the most subtle, complex and eliptical. It's full of hints and teases and we have to be really alert when the solutions appear. 

This is of course one of Bainbridge's historical novels, and it tells of the last four days of the Titanic's doomed voyage. If you think that might be depressing or upsetting, think again. Being Bainbridge, she uses these events as a backdrop to what's really going on, which is the story of Morgan, a wealthy young American, his friends, his loves, and his history. He and his fellow first class passengers spend most of their time eating, drinking and flirting -- an empty life, as Morgan himself realises, but one which he doesn't seem to have the strength of will to abandon. But of course this novel is being told by Morgan himself, after the event, which makes a big difference to how we read his story. We have to assume that he somehow survived the disaster, but he has to narrate the events leading up to it in such a way that he doesn't give anything away, something Bainbridge handles with extraordinary skill. To give just one example, people are taking bets on the arrival time in New York, and Morgan and his friends go off to get some inside knowledge from the crew members. They are told they expect to arrive on Tuesday, barring accidents. Naturally that means a lot to us and also to the narrating Morgan, but he resists the possibility of commenting on it. 

Bainbridge has a habit of starting her novels with a flash forward, and this one is no exception. The beginning episode takes place as the ship is going down, and the short conversation is fascinating but wholly mysterious, though by the time we return to it almost at the end it does of course make sense. This is only one of the many mysteries Bainbridge scatters through the novel. Who is the man who dies in Morgan's arms on a London street the day before he goes to Southampton? Who is the mysetrious, beautiful Adele, who appears sometimes in first class but also sometimes in third? Who is Scurra, what does he know about Morgan's childhood, and how did he get the split in his lip that makes his appearance so unusual? What about Morgan's childhood, anyway -- who was the old woman who appears scarily in his dreams? and why did his uncle have to rescue him from an orphanage? And what does he steal from his uncle's house, leaving a dusty mark on the wall?

All of these things are finally explained, and most if not all have a connection with each other. Add to this a mixture of love affairs, which seem mostly to have more to do with lust than love, wonderfully memorable characters (who may or may not survive the disaster), and much of interest relating to social class (first vs third, crew vs passengers), and all this crammed into just over 200 pages, and you have a most remarkable novel indeed. I'm quite surprised to see that it was not the novel that was awarded a posthumous Booker Prize (Bainbridge was shortlisted five times and falied to win) -- that was Master Georgie which of course I now need to read. 

I have become, as you may have noticed, a most avid adorer of Beryl Bainbridge. I've been thinking about Muriel Spark, whose Reading Week I co-hosted a little while ago. I liked Spark enormously, but in a face-off between her and Bainbridge, I'd give Bainbridge the prize every time. So I'm hugely grateful to Annabel of Gaskella, without whom I might never have discovered this wonderful author.

According to Queeney

Among the many things I have learned about Beryl Bainbridge this week is the fact that halfway through her writing career she suffered badly from writer's block, and beat it by turning from semi-autobiography to history as the basis for her novels. Thence came Young Adolf (Hitler in Liverpool), a Victorian murder (Watson's Apology), the Titanic (Every Man for Himself), Scott's Antarctic expedition (The Birthday Boys) and the Crimean War (Master Georgie). According to Queeney, published in 2001, was the last completed novel in this series, though her almost-finished and posthumously published Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress deals with the assassination of Robert Kennedy. 

The beautiful painting on the cover of According to Queeney is by Joshua Reynolds, and it shows the two main female protagonists of the novel, Mrs Hester Thrale and her daughter, also called Hester but always known as Queeney. Really, the story is mostly about Mrs Thrale's relationship with Dr Samuel Johnson, or perhaps more properly Johnson's relationship with Mrs Thrale. 

If you click Queeney's link above, you will get to a Wikipedia article which claims that Queeney is the narrator of According to Queeney, but that is not so. Queeney is certainly a central figure, and there are letters from her (to Laeititia Hawkins and Fanny Burney, possibly authentic?) dotted through the text. But most of the novel is narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator, though Queeney's point of view is much in evidence. Another of BB's interesting, quirky girls, Queeney is a prodigy and recognised as such by Johnson, who pays special attention to her and to her education. But Johnson's passion, unexpressed and perhaps unrecognised even by himself, is for Mrs Thrale, who, however, appears rather undeserving of it. Trapped in a loveless marriage with the frequently drunk and compulsively eating Henry Thrale, Hester certainly has a fondness for Johnson and takes him into her home for long periods. Somewhat cool and unreliable, Hester is an unsatisfactory mother to her many children, and Queeney, though not in fact her favorite, gets special attention perhaps only because of Johnson's liking for her. 

To write a novel about someone as well-known and well-documented as Johnson could appear to be courting disaster. However, Bainbridge makes the most amazingly impressive job of it. Johnson's habits, personal life and above all conversation have been painstakingly recorded by several of his contemporaries, including Hester Thrale and of course James Boswell. But you really feel, when reading this, that Bainbridge knows him at least as well as any of them. He is an extraordinary figure, wise and childlike, devout and guilt-ridden, troubled by the 'black dog' of depression, and totally unpredictable. Although viewed with some suspicion, he was generally much loved in his day and I don't think anyone who reads this novel could fail to love him now. 

I was really impressed with this novel, but I loved it less than any of the others I've read, and that includes the next one I'll be reviewing, Every Man For Himself. 

An Awfully Big Adventure

This is my second Bainbridge for BB Reading Week. Published in 1989, it was shortlisted for the Booker but was beaten by Possession which I don't think it should have been. Perhaps not everyone would agree with me -- I suppose it depends whether you prefer your novels big, show-offy, and plot-driven or slim, subtle, quirky and dark.

Here's what the Guardian obituary said about Bainbridge's writing practice:

Her discipline as a writer was intense. Each novel emerged from a few months in which she wrote through the nights, smoked a lot, slept and ate little. She constantly read aloud what she had produced, to get "the music of the prose" right, and in an alchemical process of cutting and perfecting, she would distil every dozen or so draft pages into one sheet without a single wasted word.

The books that survived this surgery were short. In case anyone called them slight, she would quote Voltaire's apology when he wrote a long letter: "I didn't have time to make it shorter." 

An Awfully Big Adventure, like many of BB's early novels, is partly autobiographical. As she said once in an interview, "I have never really written fiction; what would be the point? What is more peculiar, more riveting, devious and horrific than real life?" Based on her experience as an assistant stage manager in a Liverpool theatre, it is the story of teenage Stella, whose Uncle Vernon has sent her to work at the theatre because despite her brains she has left school with no qualifications and the only alternative is working behind the counter in Woolworths. Abandoned as a baby by her mother, brought up by Uncle Vernon and Aunt Lily, Stella lives largely in a world of her own imagination, transforming everyday events into dramas that have little or no relation to reality. She falls desperately in love with the director, Meredith Potter, who shows no interest at all in her for reasons obvious to everyone except herself, and fantasises about offering herself to him:

In the mirror above the wash-basin she spoke to Meredith. 'Good evening. I'm Stella Bradshaw. I don't expect you'll ever want to love me'. It was only make-believe but her mouth trembled at the suggestion. She thought she looked haunted, as though there was a demon standing at her shoulder. Perhaps it had something to do with the swooping shadows thrown by the naked light bulb swinging in the draught from the window. 

There was something wrong with her hair: she had too much forehead and her neck wasn't long enough. When she was concentrating her eyebrows shot up and her mouth fell open. But then, when she willed her face to remain immobile, her mind stopped working.

Stella gets a small part in Caesar and Cleopatra, and then the job of waving the torch around to represent Tinkerbell in the production of Peter Pan. When the leading man breaks his leg, Meredith sends for O'Hara, a rather distinguished actor who nevertheless agree to come back to Liverpool and give his Captain Hook. O'Hara is strangely drawn to Stella and manages to seduce her, and though she is far from enthralled by the experience she continues to visit him in the rather seedy bedsit he has chosen to stay in for old times sake. But when O'Hara pays a visit to Uncle Vernon he discovers things about Stella's origins that disturb him very much and everything ends tragically.

Having now read three of BB's novels (I read, and loved, The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress almost exactly a year ago) and almost finished a fourth, I'm aware that she seems to be fascinated with young women who have a peculiar perspective on life, seeing everything somehow slantwise, and lacking what most people would think of as ordinary morality. I can believe that this would not be everyone's cup of tea -- the often hilarous dark humour, the bizarre characters, the frequently shocking events -- but I am completely in love with these novels and can't wait to get my hands on some more of them.

 

 

 

 

Harriet Said

When Annabel announced Beryl Bainbridge Week and posted a full bibliography, it wasn't hard for me to choose which of BB's novels I was going to start with. And believe me, this is going to be a hard act to follow.

This was, in fact and amazingly enough, BB's first novel, though it was the third to be published. When she wrote it in 1958, she failed to find a publisher because of the subject matter -- here's what one rejection letter said:

what repulsive little creatures you have made the two central characters, repulsive almost beyond belief! And I think the scene in which the two men and the two girls meet in the Tsar's house is too indecent and unpleasant even for these lax days. What is more, I fear that even now a respectable printer would not print it!

Apparently partly inspired by the Parker-Hulme murder (1954), in which two young girls bludgeoned a woman to death, this is the very disturbing story of fourteen-year-old Harriet and her friend, a year younger and never named, who narrates the story. Harriet is sophisticated, knowing, and highly manipulative, and has the other girl completely in her thrall. Both girls have already had some kind of  sexual experience, mostly with Italian prisoners of war, and they have now homed in on a middle-aged man, Peter Biggs, who they call the Tsar. The Tsar fascinates the two of them -- 'slightly unsober, slightly dishevelled, always elegant, he swayed moodily past us through all the days of our growing up'. He is unhappily married, and is drawn to the younger girl in a mildly sexual way. She, in return, decides to be in love with him and is encouraged in this by Harriet, though Harriet warns her that at thirteen there is very little you can expect to salvage from loving someone but experience -- a warning that will come to have a huge resonance in the light of later events. The two girls follow the Tsar around, spy on him, and, in a most striking scene, watch through the window of his house as his wife pins him like a moth on the sofa as

Like an oiled snake, deep delving and twisting, Mrs Biggs poisoned him slowly, rearing and stabbing convulsively. Her body writhed gently and was still. Ignoring the woman above him the grey Tsar lay as if dead, pinioned limply, eyes wide and staring, speared in an act of contrition. Full-blown love eddied from the woman, blowsy hips sunk in weariness, soaking up virtue from the body beneath.

Perhaps from this you can get a flavour of the brilliance of the writing, and also of the immense skill with which Bainbridge captures the girl's perspective -- her combination of rather precocious knowledge and still childish innocence is extraordinarily well conveyed. And of course through her eyes we see Harriet, who the Tsar describes as evil, but who the narrator adores and at first unquestionably obeys, though as the novel progresses her willingness to do this is eroded to some extent. I can't tell you what happens in the final scene of the novel, in which the two girls spend an evening at the Tsar's house with two middle-aged men, but it is both like and unlike the way they have anticipated it before the event:

We both sat silent, imagining the scene at the house of the Tsar, drinking coffee out of thin white cups, locked together in the lamplight with the two men: the delicious secrecy of the night, the unfamiliar bitter taste of the dark liquid, the fearful danger, footsteps coming up the path, the Tsar crumpling paper-pale against the window as Mrs Biggs returned before time and fitted her key into the locked door. It was a lovely fearful thing to imagine and we kept the image of it all the way to the station.

 

Prepare, though, to be shocked by the final outcome. Of course you may well be shocked from page one, as this novel deals with some very thought-provoking matters, and it's easy to understand why publishers in the 1950s were not brave enough to take it on. But what is so impressive about it, apart from the quality of the writing, which is remarkable by any standards and quite extraordinary for a first novel, is the skill with which the moral issues are handled. You might think, reading about it, that the Tsar is despicable in his willingness to succumb to the girls, but this is not how he really seems -- essentially he appears a weak and unhappy man who gets drawn into something he has no idea how to handle. 

I cannot recommend this novel highly enough. I've got three other BBs lined up for review this week, and I'm delighted that I got a chance to explore this terrific novelist. This one, in any case, goes straight onto my list of the best books ever. Thanks so much, Annabel!

 

 

 

The Help

Although my primary reading for a while has been Beryl Bainbridge, in preparation for BB Week which starts tomorrow, I have also been listening to this as an audio book. I absolutely loved it. I know it's been controversial, as it deals with race relations on the southern United States in the 1960s and though written by a white woman, much of it is told from the point of view of the 'coloured' domestic servants, but that did not bother me. Perhaps someone will tell me I am wrong, but I just found it completely rivetting from beginning to end.

I'm often rather late in the day in getting to contemporary fiction, and this one has been made into a film which I have yet to see, so perhaps you have all read it already. If you haven't, this novel, set in Jackson Mississippi, is the story of four women, who you can see on the cover. They are Aibileen, who works for Elizabeth Leefold, Minny, who at the start works for Hilly Holbrook's mother, Eugenia, known as Skeeter, an aspiring writer, and Hilly herself. The novel begins at a bridge party at Elizabeth's house, attended by Skeeter, Hilly and her mother. Abileen, who is telling this part of the story, listens to the conversation, in which Hilly is telling the rest of the women about her new initiative -- that every house in Jackson should have a separate bathroom for the coloured help, because "they have different diseases than we do". Elizabeth, weak and foolish, objects that she and her husband can't afford it, but Skeeter waits till the other women have left and asks Abileen if she doesn't think it's time things changed. This sows the seeds for the whole complex plot, as Skeeter and Abileen start a secret project, interviewing a number of maids about their experiences working for white women and editing the interviews into a book. 

I'm not at all surprised this was a best seller. Moving and horrific in about equal measure, it confronts the civil rights struggle of the 1960s and tells of it from the inside. The misery and humiliation suffered by the maids is beyond belief, except that it has to be believed because it is clearly true. Hilly, the villain of the piece, is undoubtedly monstrous, but unfortunately only too convincing. It seemed to me almost incredible that this kind of thing was going on in many of our lifetimes. The novel ends on a note of hope -- things have certainly changed, or begun to change -- but there are no certainties and it would be great to know if Skeeter's career was going to take off or whether Abileen would fulfil her new aspirations. As for Hilly -- well, you'll have to read it if you haven't already -- she certainly gets her comeuppance in one way, but it's doubtful whether she will ever reform. 

I'm now going to watch the film and hoping it isn't a disappointment.

Dog on a Bed

Here, for all those who prefer dogs to cats, is a companion painting to Christina's Bedroom by Andrew Wyeth, which I showed you last week. It's actually called Master Bedroom and I like it very much, especially as once upon a time I had a golden labrador (Ash) who was a wonderfully loveable member of the family. Thanks to Helen for drawing my attention to this one. 

A Cat on a Bed

This is Christina’s Bedroom (1947), painted by Andrew Wyeth. Not a woman reading, or writing, or doing anything else, in sight. But it rather reminds me of my own bedroom, though my cat Mimi is grey and white rather than black. And I love the subtle colours here -- almost monochrome but not quite. 

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) was an American painter, and one of his most famous paintings is called Christina's World, which you might recognise as it is said by Wikipedia to be 'one of the icons of American art'.