Harriet Devine's Blog

Swans on an Autumn River by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Short stories are not my genre of choice. I rarely read them unless collections come to me for review, and I don't actually remember ever buying one for pure reading pleasure. Until now. A few weeks ago I read Simon's review of this 1961 collection and felt immediately impelled to order a copy. It arrived with commendable speed and it didn't take me long to start reading it. I don't think I've read anything by Warner before - I thought I'd read Summer Will Show but can't find a review of it - but if this collection is anything to go by I've really been missing out.

There are thirteen stories in this volume, varying considerably in subject and tone. Some are serious, some are satirical. But I think they nearly all have one theme in common: their protagonists learn something about themselves and their attitude to the world they live in. For example, in 'Johnnie Brewer', a young man returns from Australia and visits his grandmother and great-aunt for the first time in nine years. He's been looking forward to it tremendously, and has romantic ideas about the idyllic cottage and the two adorable old ladies. But he is disturbed by their constant bickering, finds his grandmother's overblown sweetness hard to take, and cuts his visit short, rejoicing that 'The day was before him, and his own'. In 'A Jump Ahead', a divorced couple who have remained friends meet for the first time for several years. Gilbert is shocked by Mary's reaction to his appearance:

To what extent I had grown old I did not realise until I saw Mary's start of surprise and her immediate assumption of a kind encouraging manner. In her I saw no change.

When he complains to her about the pains of ageing, her reaction irritates him: 'You're lucky to have the time to do it in'. He sees her positive view of old age as an attempt to soothe him into accepting the state of affairs, but as the story ends we discover the real reason for her attitude. In 'Fenella' a ten-year-old girl on holiday in Italy persuades her mother to let her accompany a lady painter, who she admires tremendously, to what she thinks is a romantic church on top of a hill. But the journey is hot and exhausting, the landscape unappealing, the church dirty and smelly. She's appalled when the woman says she wants to paint her portrait: 'Her painting was grisly....she's positively extinct. She's a living corpse, she's...". 

When the story requires it, Warner is capable of witty, perceptive satire. This is most evident in 'Heathy Landscape with Dormouse'. Here a recently, unhappily, married couple go on a picnic with the girl's mother. Leo is annoyed by the endless reminiscences of his mother-in-law and aware of Belinda's irritation with him, and remembers the start of their relationship: 'Belinda's eyes had the fatalistic melancholy of the eyes of hunting cats....she had snatched at his offer of marriage as if it were a warm partridge'. Flying into a sudden rage ('Belinda was one of those fortunate persons who fly into a rage as though into a refrigerator') she walks off to the car, gets into it and drives away. But what starts out as a thoughtless bid for freedom turns very sour on her as everything goes wrong. Hours later, she is reunited with Leo, but there's little evidence that their marriage will be a happy one.

There are many more, each one a delight. But the star of the volume has to be 'A Love Match' - I read somewhere that this is a very famous story and I'm not surprised. The story starts with a middle-aged schoolmaster, Mr Pilkington, on holiday in Brittany. He meets the Tizards, Justin and Celia, a brother and sister who have taken up temporary residence there, and persuades them to leave their rather basic chalet and move back to England, to the small town of Hallowby. He's sorted out several houses for them to look at, but is rather surprised by their choice of what he thinks is the least attractive - away from the town centre, it's a plain, even ugly, house surrounded by a high wall. Once Warner has got them settled there, she moves back in time to Justin's return on leave from the war to a flat Celia has prepared for them both. Shell-shocked by the horrors he has seen, Justin has terrible nightmares, and Celia eventually goes to his room to comfort him. And so begins their love affair, which lasts the whole of their lives. Indeed, what the world would perceive as a shocking incestuous relationship is depicted like the happiest, most successful marriage imaginable:

Returning from their sober junketings Justin and Celia, safe within their brick wall, cast off their weeds of middle age, laughed, chattered and kissed with an intensified delight in their scandalous immunity from blame. They were a model couple, the most respectable couple in Hallowby, treading hand in hand the thornless path to fogydom.

I can't help wondering if this heart-warming, wholly non-judgmental story might have been a way for Warner to write obliquely about her own unconventional life style - she lived for nearly forty years in a relationship with another woman, the poet Valentine Ackland. Whatever the case, it was a bold move and a wonderfully successful one to take such a taboo subject and turn it on its head. I'd say it was worth buying the volume just for this story - you can probably find it online, but then you'd miss the intense pleasure of the rest of the stories. Hooray for Sylvia Townsend Warner - I'm greedy for more - any suggestions?

Girl Reading to Children

This is 'A Bedtime Story', painted in 1878  by the American artist Seymour Joseph Guy (1824-1910). Kindly sent to me by a fired - thanks, Ruth!

Lullaby by Leila Slimani on Shiny

I've been more absent than usual on here lately, and that's largely because a couple of weeks ago my cats managed to drag my laptop off the table onto the tiled floor. where it smashed beyond repair. I've been using an ancient machine which responds with agonising slowness and often refuses to work at all. Good news is that a new one is due to arrive tomorrow, though I still haven't heard whether the insurance will pay.

Anyway I thought I'd draw your attention to a review of mine which has has appeared in Shiny - here's the link.

Lullaby won France's top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, and has been hugely celebrated over there. Here's part of my review:

The novel starts with a huge shock – the immediate aftermath of a terrible, apparently senseless murder of two small children by their seemingly devoted nanny. So the first short chapter is painful reading. After this, the story rewinds to the beginning, in which we learn the history of the incident, right from the beginning when the children’s parents, Myriam and Paul, start their search for someone to take care of their beloved Mira and Adam while they are at work. Several unsuccessful interviews later, they can’t believe their luck when they happen on Louise, who really does seem like the perfect choice.

This is a sensitive exploration of many things, including of course what drove this apparently delightful young woman to a horrendously brutal act. Written with typically French spare elegance and beautifully translated by Sam Taylor, this is a must read.

Scarweather by Anthony Rolls

It's no secret that I'm a great lover of classic crime, and luckily my appetite for it is fed by the arrival from time to time of a lovely package of British Library Crime Classics. Some get read straight away, others put aside for a rainy day. This one came into the second category and has been on the back burner for nearly a year - it came out in February 2017. But that matters little in the grand scheme of things as it was first published in 1934. And what a delightful curiosity it is. 

Dorothy Sayers wrote enthusiastically about Rolls - whose real name was CE Vuillamy - that he 'handles his characters like a "real" novelist and the English language like a "real" writer'.   I can't argue with either of those - this is a really absorbing and enjoyable read. But don't expect a surprise twist at the end - I saw the denouement coming a mile off. However, with a tremendously atmospheric setting and some brilliant characters, this hardly mattered. 

The title of the novel comes from the name of a remote seaside house in the north of England, the property of the distinguished archaeologist Professor Tolgen Reisby. Here's how he appeared to the narrator, a young lawyer called John Farringdale, on their first meeting.

Tolgen Reisby was distinctly impressive. He was tall, rugged and immensely powerful. He wore a brown suit of some fluffy material which added to the natural effect of his bulk and made him look positively gigantic. His trousers were loose and voluminous, the upper buttons of his waistcoat were unfastened, releasing the untidy mass of a blue and yellow tie. The whole appearance of the man was barbaric; you might have taken him for a crofter of the Hebrides, or the skipper of an Aberdeen fishing boat.

Young Farringdale gets involved with Reisby and his family through a mutual friend, the Cambridge academic Frederick Ellingham. The two of them, together with a young friend Eric Foster, travel up north to stay in a hotel near the Reisby's home and to hear about the early stages of a massive excavation planned by Reisby of a prehistoric barrow. While they are there, Foster falls in love with Reisby's young beautiful wife. Sometime later, on another visit, Foster disappears and is assumed to have been drowned, as his clothes were found in drifting rowboat belonging to Reisby. 

The story begins just before WW1, and continues on, or rather checks in from time to time, until the mid-1930s. Despite the fact that the reader is bound to be fairly sure of who was responsible for Foster's disappearance, there's a good deal of tension and interest in following the intricacies of the plot. The characters are attractive - the intellectual Ellingham, in particular, who acts as a sort of amateur detective here, is interesting and likeable, and Farringdale, his Watson, pleasantly naive without being irritatingly stupid. As for the setting, somewhere unspecified on the wild northerly coast of England, it's powerfully evoked. And of course the archaeology is interesting and certainly accurate - Vuillamy was a bit of an archaeologist himself. Above all, though, you won't forget Tolgen Reisby - brilliant, half mad, given to increasingly frightening changes of mood, he's a wonderfully vivid character. Well worth reading!

Boy with Book

Painted by the sublime (and sublimely beautiful) Russian artist Zinaida Serebriakova (1884-1967) this is a portrait of her son Alexander, who became a painter himself. She was born into a family of artists and was painting superbly from a very early age. She moved to Paris and lived there till she died, but was sadly separated from her two elder children, though not from Alexander and his younger sister.

The Longest Journey by EM Forster

I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend, To cold oblivion, though it is the code Of modern morals, and the beaten road Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread Who travel to their home among the dead By the broad highway of the world, and so With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The dreariest and the longest journey go.

So wrote Shelley, defending his own fondness for marital infidelity, or at least serial monogamy. It's worth knowing that this is the source of Forster's title - the longest journey in Shelley's poem is life, but one blighted by an unhappy marriage, an important theme of this great, though oddly neglected, novel. I seized upon it after being bowled over by the recent BBC adaptation of Howards End, which I thought was superb. It had left me hungry for more Forster - I've read all his novels, but strangely enough this was the first I encountered. I read it when I was a teenager, and coming back to it I wondered what it was that had so grabbed me about it, because grabbed I certainly had been. This time it was an audiobook, and at first I wasn't sure why I'd liked it so much, but I soon got the hang of it and was very glad I'd chosen it.

 This is the story of Rickie Elliot, the only son of an unhappy marriage. His unpleasant, controlling father moved out when Rickie was quite young, and he was brought up by his adored mother until both parents died within a short space of time. Money was not a problem, and Rickie lived with relatives until he was old enough to go to Cambridge. This we actually discover a way into the novel, which starts with Rickie's university days - he's a member of a group of young men who meet to discuss philosophy and morality, things about which he feel quite ambivalent (the group is based on Forster's own membership of the Cambridge Apostles). Rickie is thoughtful and imaginative, and longs to be a writer. He spends a vacation with Herbert and Agnes Pembroke, a brother and sister, childhood friends, and witnesses a moment of intense physical passion between Agnes and her fiancé Gerald. Gerald is killed in an accident and Rickie comforts Agnes, urging her to give in to her grief.

Next time we meet Rickie, he and Agnes are engaged, and they pay a visit to Rickie's aunt, Mrs Failing. Wealthy and rather eccentric, she is bringing up her unruly 19-year-old ward, Stephen. She deliberately throws the young men together and they quarrel, after which she reveals to Rickie that Stephen is his illegitimate half-brother. Agnes is particularly shocked by this, and urges Rickie to have nothing to do with Stephen. 

Rickie and Agnes soon marry and move into a school where Herbert is a master. Rickie starts teaching, which he does not particularly enjoy. To survive, he abandons all his previous values and aspirations. His Cambridge friend Ansell cuts him off and refuses to answer his letters. Finally, though, Ansell does visit, coincidentally at the same time as Stephen, who has turned up unannounced, having been disinherited by Mrs Failing, partly on the strength of some damaging information given to her by Agnes. Stephen has discovered that he is Rickie's brother, and expects to be welcomed with open arms, but this is not the case. He is accused of wanting to blackmail them, but when Agnes offers him money he refuses, horrified. Ansell then reveals that Stephen is not the son of Rickie's hated father, as he assumed, but of his beloved mother. Realising his marriage is over, Rickie leaves with Stephen and the two forge a brotherly relationship, before tragedy strikes. The ending, however, is optimistic.

Like Forster's other novels, this one is at heart as critique of middle-class hypocritical values. Sensitive gentle Rickie is for a while sucked into his wife's and brother-in-law's prudish, repressive morality, a process which is painful to read about, but is saved in the end by his relationship with his honest, open brother. Stephen - apparently the character was inspired by a young shepherd Forster met on a country walk - though he likes getting drunk, is fundamentally a good man with a keen appreciation of nature and the natural things of life. I suspect there's a touch of the influence of DH Lawrence in his character, but handled so much more lightly and credibly than DHL would have done, for my money anyway. Though the ending is sad, it manages to be also heartwarming. I'm really glad to have read it. I wish Forster had written more novels - he seems to me to be a really important novelist and observer of the skewed morality and class consciousness of his own day.

 

 

Two Girls Reading

This is 'Two Girls Reading on a Bench' by the French artist Georges d'Espagnat (1870-1950). His Wikipedia entry, which is in French, tells us very little apart from the fact that he attended the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Part, but being possessed of a strong and independent character,  preferred to teach himself by copying works in the Louvre. 

Best of 2017

 

 
Happy New Year all. I couldn't let 2017 pass by without a look back at what I've read and loved this year. It's rather arbitrary, and I may have let much loved books slip thought my fingers, but here are my selections.

2017 started with an amazing novel by an author I'd heard much of and never read - 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster. The story of the life of a young man from childhood to young adulthood, it's divided into 4 consecutive parts, each showing a different outcome. I reviewed it for Shiny, narrowly beating Annabel who loved it too and reviewed it on her blog  - it's one of her books of the year.

I get quite a few books arriving unsolicited and this was one of them - The Sixteen Trees of the Somme by Lars Matting  - a translation from Norwegian of a lovely, wide-ranging novel about a man's search for his own personal history. The action flows from Norway to the Shetland Islands to northern France. Captivating.

Jean Hanff Korelitz is a writer of highly intelligent, witty psychological thrillers, and the The Devil and Webster was her latest, a witty and perceptive campus novel.  Excellent.

As a great lover of children's literature, I couldn't wait to get my hands on A History of Children's Literature in 100 Books - a sumptuously illustrated and wonderfully informative production from the British Library.

A Forger's Tale by Shaun Greenhalgh - I actually got this one as a present and found it absolutely fascinating. The autobiography of a man with highly developed artistic sensibilities and incredible skill in every branch of the fine arts, Greenhalgh wrote this while serving a prison sentence for forging numerous exquisite artefacts in his father's garden shed.

I've read three of Elizabeth Strout's novels in a twelve month and love them all - but this one, the most recent, is probably my favourite - the great Olive Kitteridge. Wonderfully subtly observed and extremely moving, this is perhaps the best of Strout's explorations of apparently ordinary people in dull suburban towns, showing the intense personal dramas under the surface.

This was actually an audiobook - The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead - wonderfully evocative and frequently tragic novel of slavery in America. The story follows one young woman as she manages to escape plantation life and attempts to make her way to a safe haven.

I'm quite surprised to find so little crime on this list - it's a genre I read a lot of, but apparently haven't been swept away by this year. There are two here, one a reprint and one a new publication. I've always enjoyed PD James, but for some reason had never encountered what I think is her finest novel, Innocent Blood.  Published in the 1960s this is a brilliant psychological novel about a mother and daughter attempting to forget a relationship. 

The other crime novel is Nine Lessons by Nicola Upson, another addition to her Josephine Tey series. Set mainly in Cambridge, the novel shows Josephine struggling with the conflicting demands of her desire to bring a criminal to justice and her important personal relationships.

Finally, a very recent read, The Book of Forgotten Authors by Christopher Fowler. An exciting list of authors, many unknown to me so lots to look for this year.