Barbara Pym for a Friday

I've spent my week with three of my favorite comic writers: Mark Twain, whose mess of an autobiography I've finally sunk happily into; Donald E. Westlake, whom I'm sort of always reading; and, this morning, Barbara Pym, who earned her place in my shoulder bag by writing novels that weigh approximately infinity less than Twain's gargantuan book.

And what a good choice! The novel is the posthumously published An Academic Question, one of the very few I still have to read, and it was such pleasant bus-and-train reading. I'll just quickly share a couple of perfectly Pym scenes. First, a brief discussion between Caro Grimstone, a bored academic housewife, and her (presumably gay) fancy male bachelor friend, Coco:

Coco, in whom I had unwisely confided one evening when he took me out for a drink, advised me to acquire a lover.

"That's what people do," he said, as if I had no knowledge of the world.

"Yes, of course," I agreed. "But who, or whom, come to that--who is there in a place like this?"

Coco became vague. He had nobody definite in mind, and I certainly wouldn't be satisfied with just anybody. A distinguished artist or writer, or even a member of a noble family or an exiled royal--perhaps there was one such living in the town. After all, it was the kind of place people like that come to--witness the example of himself and his mother.

"But an exiled royal would probably be decayed and moth-eaten," I protested, "and I want better than that."

"A pity," Coco sighed. "It would have been amusing--I should have liked acting as a go-between."

So much of Pym's particular eye and voice are on display here: all confidences, in Pym, are "unwise," are they not? And who but a Pym character stops midsentence to clarify that her imagined lover is the object ("whom") rather than the subject ("who") of her sentence?

Later, Caro attends a tea at the home of her friend Dolly, who runs a second-hand shop that spills its wares into her living quarters:

We finished the meal and moved into Dolly's sitting room, finding seats as best we could while she made coffee. There was an uneasy silence while she was out of the room, for to settle ourselves at all comfortably various books and objects had to be moved and there was nowhere to put them. To have to do this at all seemed like a criticism of our hostess and I think only Dick Merrilees and I, who knew her best, were unembarrassed.

"Did you see the play about John Aubrey?" Dick asked. "That stage set reminded me of Dolly's room."

Evan Crannon held up what looked like a dried hedgehog's skin which he had moved from a corner of a sagging sofa where he had been about to sit.

"What shall I do with this?" he asked.

"Oh, that's nasty," said Menna in a low voice. "Some old skeleton."

"Yes, I found it in a drain," said Dolly coming into the room and taking it from him. "Goodness knows how long it had been there--see, it's quite dried, all the flesh gone. What happened to that poor creature? That's what we must ask ourselves."

"Perhaps it got run over and somebody flung it over your wall," Alan suggested.

"It may have died of natural causes," I said hastily, feeling that Dolly was becoming distressed.

I promise I didn't quote that scene for the mention of John Aubrey, but because it's amusing on its own terms and because, combined with the conversation above about adultery, it brought to mind Iris Murdoch, and how easily the situation and setting that Pym is creating for her characters could be repurposed for a Murdoch novel. But oh, how different the tone. The playfulness wouldn't be entirely shed, nor would the humor, but the adultery would be undertaken and immediately begin spinning off casualties, while the mess of Dolly's house would be portrayed not as gentle eccentricity but as squalor, uncomfortably unsettling and indicative of a deeper disorder.

Murdoch is another personal favorite, like Pym, and I take great pleasure in reading and rereading her books. But for a Friday morning's commute, I was glad that my companion was the more gentle, more forgiving of the two.

Penelope Fitzgerald on Barbara Pym

Before I leave Barbara Pym for a while, here's one last, quick post in honor of her centennial. In a review of Pym's A Few Green Leaves, Penelope Fitzgerald--who, though nearly Pym's contemporary, didn't truly get established in her writing career until much later, and who clearly felt Pym's influence--offers a description of the mostly hidden stakes that quietly underlie conversations in Pym's works:

In her nine novels Barbara Pym stuck serenely to the [world] she knew best: quiet suburbs, obscure office departments, villages where the neighbours could be observed through the curtains, and, above all, Anglican parishes. . . . This meant that the necessary confrontations must take place at cold Sunday suppers, little gatherings, visits, funerals, and so on, which Barbara Pym, supremely observant in her own territory, was able to convert into a battleground. Here, even without intending it, a given character is either advancing or retreating: you have, for instance, an unfair advantage if your mother is dead, "just a silver-framed photograph," over someone whose mother lives in Putney. And in the course of the struggle strange fragments of conversation float to the surface, lyrical moments dear to Barbara Pym.

"An anthropologist," declared Miss Doggett in an authoritative tone. "He does some kind of scientific work, I believe."

"I thought it meant a cannibal--someone who ate human flesh," said Jane in wonder.

"Well, science has made such strides," said Miss Doggett doubtfully.

Or:

"Well, he is a Roman Catholic priest, and it is not usual for them to marry, is it?"

"No, of course they are forbidden to," Miss Foresight agreed.

"Still, Miss Lydgate is much taller than he is," she added.

In such exchanges the victory is doubtful: indeed, Miss Doggett and Miss Foresight are, in their way, invincible.

Pym's conversational battles, like her humor, are so subtle that an inattentive or unsympathetic reader could easily miss them entirely. Unlike Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose characters fight with words like naked blades and in not a few cases are ready to back up their thrusts with actual violence, Pym's characters leave the social surface unruffled; in fact, a fear of troubling the waters is at the root of many a silent retreat. Pym's dialogue, and what it represents, is part of a lineage that stretches back to Austen--but surely Penelope Fitzgerald was not its last practitioner? Anyone have nominations for the Pym of today, in that regard?

Falling in love (with a writer--specifically Barbara Pym)

Is there any moment more important to us when we're young--more obsessed-over, more fraught--than that of falling in love? The energy and emotion that we, at sixteen or eighteen or twenty, bring to bear on trying to pinpoint the instant when appreciation and amusement and desire and friendship and intrigue crystallize into love . . . well, if it does nothing else it reminds us, ineluctably, that we're ultimately all the centers of our own Copernican scheme.

But when does it happen with a writer? There's no question that sometimes it's instant. For me, that's Borges, or Steven Millhauser: reading both the first time felt uncannily like welcoming old friends into the house--there was surprise and mystery there, certainly, but also a comfort, as if Borges's Library of Babel had already alerted me to the existence of these brilliant permutations of letters. Other times, it's gradual. I didn't really fall for Anthony Powell until well into the second volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, and I didn't--to stay with and extend the metaphor--marry him until my second time through the sequence.

It's probably no surprise, given the ups and downs of her reputation over the decades, that the process was gradual with Barbara Pym. Penelope Fitzgerald's praise led me to Less Than Angels, and I was impressed with her delicacy and humor, but it took time for head and heels to swap. I read another, then another. Then I read the diaries and letters, and used a whole pad of post-it flags. Then I found myself spotting Barbara Pym characters and situations in everyday life. I was caught.

There really is no one quite like her. Oh, Jane Austen is her model, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Anthony Powell impinge on her Venn diagram, but no one else provides her exact cocktail of insight, aphoristic asperity, wit, perceptiveness, and at times painful honesty--mixed, crucially, with love and comfort. Her centennial has sent me back to her books, as it should, and that has only confirmed my love.

I'll close with an anecdote that makes me smile, shared by Pym's sister, Hilary Pym Walton, which opens her brief foreword to "All This Reading": The Literary World of Barbara Pym (2003):

I am reminded of an incident from the distant past when someone, on meeting Barbara and me with our mother, asked, "And which is the clever one?" I am afraid that she was referring to me, as I had drawn a picture of a horse at an early age and had received some sort of certificate.

Which leads me back to Pym's inexhaustible diaries, to an entry from July 10, 1943, when she was in an army training camp:

I went with Peggy Wall, a quiet dark girl who seems to be about the best of our lot--she used to be secretary to a literary agent. She said as soon as she saw me she thought--I bet she's going to write a novel about it. Well--who knows.

If you share my tastes at all--there's nearly eight years of blog posts here to help you determine that--and you've not read Pym, do. It will make your summer.

Good birthday wishes for Thomas Hardy and Barbara Pym!

In a diary entry for May 20, 1977, Barbara Pym noted,

Seeing a handsome Dorset woman at a petrol pump I thought a Hardy heroine of today might well follow such an occupation. Tess for instance.

She mentions reading Hardy a couple of times in her diaries and letters, once accurately describing the right atmosphere for taking comfort from his poetry--

The weather is dull but not unpleasant--rather calming and saddening and I'm glad i have brought Hardy's poems with me.

--and later trying (and failing) to imagine him driving.

If she knew they shared a birthday, she didn't mention it. Yesterday, June 2, would have been Pym's hundredth birthday, Hardy's 173rd. They overlapped for fifteen years, long enough for us to imagine a young Pym, having fallen for Tess, saddened at hearing of Hardy's death. They're not similar writers at all, but in a talk written for the BBC in the spring of 1978, "Finding a Voice," Pym did reveal some passages from Hardy's notebooks that, while she doesn't explicitly make this point, feel like part of the Pym universe:

Let me quote this entry for Sunday, February 1st 1874: "To Trinity Church, Dorchester. The rector in his sermon delivered himself of mean images in a sublime voice, and the effect is that of a glowing landscape in which clothes are hung up to dry." Or another entry, for October 25th 1867, more likely to have inspired a poem: "Martha R --, an old maid whose lover died, has his love letters to her bound, and keeps them on the parlour table."

The latter has the self-aware wistfulness of Pym's characters, the former a hint of her judgment and humor--though if we encountered it in the context of Hardy's work the judgment would predominate.

Which leads to the unanswerable question: Would Hardy have liked Pym's work? It seems wildly unlikely, doesn't it? Hardy bridges the Victorian and Edwardian eras, but for all their ventures into psychology his novels remain nearly as full of incident as their predecessors, whereas Barbara Pym's books turn on such modest changes of heart and fortune that a reader more accustomed to the violence and passion of Hardy could miss them entirely. In fact, the developments in Pym's plots so often don't exist, involving as they do the raising and surrendering of unexpressed dreams--whereas dreams in Hardy are rarely (if ever?) repressed, finding life in wild, dramatic action.

The humor, too, would be a problem. Hardy's novels are almost entirely humorless, at least when it comes to their central characters and concerns, as Anthony Powell noted in a 1971 review for the Telegraph:

Hardy's failing was a total lack of humour, which, one feels, might have prevented some of the absurdities. He could do knockabout up to a point, or irony, but one has only to think of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Proust, or Conrad, to see the missing quality that is possessed by most of the great novelists in one form or another.

Hardy's humor is almost always found in the rustics around his protagonists, the characters who see no disjunction between their dreams and their surroundings, who harbor neither hope nor fear of change--they're Shakespearean jesters (though fortunately less irritating). Gentle satire of Pym's sort, even if you could explain its essential reference points of contemporary social intercourse, would I suspect fall entirely flat with Hardy. As Penelope Fitzgerald notes in her perceptive review of Pym's last novel, A Few Green Leaves,

High comedy needs a settled world, ready to resent disturbance.

--and Hardy's world is anything but settled. What we get in Hardy is the friction caused by different rates of change, between an old way of life that is inexorably being lost (but slowly enough that the fact can be denied) and a new freedom that is emerging too fitfully (and that ultimately may not wholly compensate for what's been lost). Tess as a gas station attendant in Hardy would involve disgrace and rage in at least equal parts with fierce independence; as a Pym character she would be merely a figure of speculative village gossip.

No, much as Pym loved Hardy, the reverse seems unlikely. But birthday mates they are despite. This year, Pym, rightfully, is getting the lion's share of attention: her centennial has sparked a wonderfully astute appreciation by Carrie Frye for the Awl, while bloggers at My Porch and Fig and Thistle are hosting a Barbara Pym reading week. From My Porch's gallery of Pym covers I learned that the New York Times once called her "the novelist most touted by one's most literary friends," while Shirley Hazzard simply noted that "her books will last." Indeed. It's unlikely we'll be around for her bicentennial, but I hold out hopes that her books will.

The Life and Opinions of Barbara Pym, Gentlewoman

It's no secret that I'm a fan of Barbara Pym. I think she's a wonderfully perceptive and comic writer, displaying an amazing economy in her sentences, characterizations, plots, and choice of settings and subjects. So this passage, from her diary (I'm stretching January's theme of letters to include it) entry of April 11, 1943, has brought me much amusement--as the book she's referring to is Tristram Shandy:

It seems a nice inconsequential sort of book--the sort of book one would like to have written--or might even one day write.

The mind boggles? What on earth would Tristram Shandy be like written by Barbara Pym? A hell of a lot shorter, that's for sure.

If only I had the monkey's paw!

{Photo by rocketlass.]

Any fan of ghost stories knows that some of the best come from writers who are known primarily for mainstream fiction, the sort where the only scares are the usual 3 A.M. existential insomnias. Henry James is the most well-known of those writers, having written enough to fill a fat volume, but he shares company, with, among others, Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark, and Rudyard Kipling, who’ve all also written a book’s worth of ghostly tales. And then there are the here-and-there one-offs from Penelope Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Joyce Carol Oates, Donald E. Westlake--the list goes on and on.

But like a classic hungry ghost, I can't help but want more. Herewith, my wish list:

1 Herman Melville. Oh, "The Lightning-Rod Man" comes close--but only in that its lush, overripe language calls to mind Ray Bradbury, and its air of menace feels as if it's building to some supernatural revelation. The fact that it doesn't in no way prevents it from being a great story, mind you. But the autumnal extravagance of this story does make me wonder what Melville might have created had he turned his hand to the world beyond the grave. (Over in the Gotham Ghost Gazette Andrea Janes, meanwhile, has speculated, in a different way, on what might have been: a ghost story not by Melville but of Melville.)

2 Joseph Conrad. In response to a question about Conrad and ghosts I put out on Twitter, Mark Kohut pointed out that not only did Conrad not write any ghost stories that he knew of, but that his story "The Black Mate" was an "anti-ghost story, ghost as con job." But imagine what Conrad's ghosts would be like? They'd be called into existence as much by our own needs as hauntees as by the dead's need to haunt, manifestations of our failures of nerve and honor, our unforgettable regrets, the gnawing acid of our mistakes. They'd certainly not be for the faint of heart two whiskeys in.

3 Barbara Pym. She would be on the other end of the spectrum from Conrad: I imagine Pym's ghost stories being gentle, even cozy. The vicarage would be haunted, manifested by spoilt milk and wobbling mint jellies; the ghost would be the source of quiet worry, its relatively benign activities nonetheless way too far beyond the pale to be acknowledged in polite company, especially as it would be at its most active when unrequited crushes begin to rear their unmentionable heads. Decorum would be at risk of disruption, desire, as always, however, ultimately thwarted by reticence. The ghost, like love, would move on.

4 Rex Stout. Wouldn't it be fun to have Nero Wolfe confronted with an actual, honest-to-goodness ghost, one he couldn't banish with a "Bosh!"? Inconceivable, I realize--Stout's world has no truck with nonsense, and Wolfe would, I suspect, continue to deny the supernatural even in the face of the strongest evidence. But what fun it would be to see the battle of wits and clash of stubbornness that could ensue between two such powerful forces!

5 Iris Murdoch. Murdoch's ghosts would, I trust, be like her characters generally: flighty, impressionable, headlong, emotional. They would haunt because of love, be banished by clarity, wreak havoc in between.

These are my five. Yours? (But let's be clear: I get the first crack at wishing for these when that damned monkey's paw turns up! Then you can go. It's not like anything could go wrong, right?)

Pym, Powell, Murdoch, Bayley

John Bayley's introduction to the 2009 Virago edition of Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings (1958) might as well have been written specifically for me, as it brings in two writers very close to my heart, Anthony Powell and Bayley's wife, Iris Murdoch.

Powell, as I've noted before, was a fan of Pym, writing in his journals in 1992,

From being merely tolerant of [her] as a novelist, I have now got into the swing of her style and characters, find the books very amusing. . . . She is one of the few novelists I regret never having met.

But Bayley reveals much more:

Addicts of Pym tend to get together to discuss their heroine, and that happened to me with Powell. We agreed, for example, that his own immortal character Kenneth Widmerpool might have walked out of a Pym novel, together, of course, with his mother in her famous "bridge coat," a garment that much delighted Pym.

I think Widmerpool is ultimately too grasping to fit in a Pym novel, but his mother--good god, yes!

About Murdoch, Bayley offers the passing observation that she was "never a fan of Pym's novels," but liked her greatly as a person. His invocation of the pair in his introduction is perfect, for A Glass of Blessings is simultaneously the most Powellian and most Murdochian of the Pym novels I've read (which at this point is most of them).

The Powell links are easy to trace--indeed, it's hard to imagine any Powell fan not perking up at a couple of points in the novel when the narrator and protagonist, Wilmet Forsyth, a thirty-five-year-old married housewife, reflects, Nick Jenkins&8211;like, on the people around her. Here, for example:

At that moment I heard the bell ring and shortly afterwards Sir Denbigh Grote came into the room, rubbing his hands together as if it were a cold afternoon. He looked so much like a retired diplomat is generally supposed to look, even to his monocle, that I never thought of him as being the sort of person one needed to describe in any detail. What did seem unusual was his friendship with Miss Prideaux, who in spite of being a gentlewoman had only been a governess in some of the countries where he had served in a much higher capacity. It could only be supposed that retirement, like death, is a kind of leveller; and that social differences had been forgotten in the common pleasure of recalling garden parties at the embassies to celebrate the sovereign's birthday, and other similar functions which few people would have been capable of discussing at all knowledgeably.

It's Powell to a T--especially from "It could only be supposed" on; the internal reflection is pure Nick Jenkins, especially in its focus on the effects of the passage of time on status and class relations. Pym even uses a semicolon, like Powell, where an ordinary writer would use a comma! The Murdoch echo is more muted, but ultimately, I think, just as inescapable for a fan of both writers. A Glass of Blessings, like many Pym novels, turns on a character who fails to imagine the full scope of the lives of those around her--and is thus surprised when they a revealed to be fully rounded humans, acting on emotion and sentiment, instead of plodding along on the familiar paths she's assumed they'd follow. Late in the novel Wilmet lies abed, thinking about some news she's just had delivered about an acquaintance:

I lay awake for rather a long time, either because of the coffee or my confused thoughts. It seemed as if life had been going on around me without my knowing it, in the disconcerting way that it sometimes does, like the traffic swirling past when one is standing on an island in the middle of the road. Sybil and Professor Root, Piers and Keith, Marius and Mary--the names did sound odd together--all doing things without, as it were, consulting me.

One of Murdoch's great themes is the way that our solipsism blinds us to the reality--and separateness, difference--of other people, and, while usually stated more quietly than in Murdoch's novels, it's also one of Pym's recurring points. Even people we think of as good friends can regularly surprise us with their actions--and, more, with the reminder those actions bring that we're not after all the center of the universe. (Of course--what supplies much of the humor in Pym--we would never think of ourselves as the center of the universe . . . it just happens that only rarely can we achieve the critical distance required to escape our own glorious shadow.)

That said, I'm not surprised that Murdoch wasn't a fan of Pym's novels. She should have been, clearly: the two were working different sections of the same field. But Pym had none of Murdoch's glittering skill with--and love of--plot, none of her excessive qualities, none of her confidence in (and fear of) the tranformative, even demonic powers of love and passion (to say nothing of true eros, which has a deliberately muted place in Pym). Pym, as Bayley puts it in "Barbara Pym as Comforter," an essay he contributed to "All This Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym (2003), "offers the comfort of total non-insistence." She simply presents lives as they are, with the absolute minimum of drama required to sustain a novel; one of the most impressive things about A Glass of Blessings is how little of note happens in the book. Where Murdoch is everywhere overflowing, Pym is everywhere restrained.

And yet perhaps there was a late rapprochement. Bayley concludes "Barbara Pym as Comforter," with a few words about his late wife:

The novel is, ultimately, a very personal form, so I will conclude on a personal note. My wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, suffered in the last years of her life from Alzheimer's disease. When she had been well and writing her own novels, I would sometimes read her bits of Pym that had amused or delighted me. I continued to do this when she was ill, and she always smiled at me or at the writer, even if she did not understand. After I had put her to bed, I came down for my own drink and supper, during which I usually and avidly read a Pym. The novels not only sustained but calmed and satisfied me during those days, as nothing else could.

A key thing that we learn from Pym is that one should take what comfort one can; the world offers little, and we should hold tight to it. Who knows what Iris Murdoch understood, much less appreciated, of what her husband read her, but the comfort the thought brought him was as real as anything.

Barbara Pym

By chance, my January reading looks as if it will be dominated by biographies: James Kaplan on Sinatra, Michael Korda on T. E. Lawrence, and Edmund Morris on Teddy Roosevelt. And while all three are subjects of great interest to me, people whose lives and works are fascinating enough that even merely passable biographies remain interesting, as I look at that stack of books I worry that I might tire of reading about ostentatiously manly men doing Great Things.

So tonight I turn, and will turn again in January, betwixt and between those avatars of masculine achievement, to Barbara Pym. I've written before of the pleasures of Pym; her world of women and the mostly hapless men they alternately coddle and chivvy along couldn't be farther from the perspective I expect I'll find in these biographies of men who self-consciously bestrode the world. Pym's compass is narrow, her casts drawn from a reliable stable of curates and widows, unmarried older ladies and feckless younger men--but from that small range of people and experiences she creates fiction of unforgettable empathy and beauty. Ellie Wymard put it perfectly in an essay in "All This Reading": The Literary World of Barbara Pym:

Pym keeps faith with life itself, even its trivialities.

I'm not sure I could find a better way to draw a contrast between the big biographies and Pym's world than to quote a couple of jottings of plots from her notebooks:

For my next--the middle-aged, or elderly novelist and the young man who admires her and is taken in by her.

A woman living in the country who has had a hopeless love for a man (wife still living perhaps or religious scruples), then, when he is free she finds that after all he means nothing to her--is this the reward of virtue, this nothingness? Or an enviable calm--(He then, presumably, goes and marries a young girl.)

An old woman living in a village with her two husbands (a modern instance of polyandry) one divorced--but, poor thing, unable to cope on his own.

From those bare bones even a newcomer to Pym can begin to get a sense of her approach, of her points of similarity to more highly stylized writers such as Iris Murdoch or even Thomas Hardy, for example--and, more important, her wry, ironic sense of humor. Pym is never caustic like Ivy Compton-Burnett, another influence, and she rarely judges, as Jane Austen occasionally does. We are all, in our ways, silly blunderers in Pym's eyes; how we handle the blundering, and limit its damage, is what matters.

Nearly all of her dozen novels are in print once again, most from Moyer Bell; I plan to spend the interstices of January reading the four I've not read. You could do far worse for winter reading than to join me.

I'll leave you with a bit from a letter Pym wrote on February 25, 1962 to Philip Larkin, whose championing of her work reestablished her reputation (and career) in the 1970s. Its self-effacing honesty never fails to charm:

If you feel like asking me anything about my 'works' please do--the less great are probably far more explicit than the great, so it wouldn't be like asking Mary McCarthy. On the other hand it is often better not to know things.

To which the only sensible reply is, "Indeed."

Notes from the Anthony Powell Society

A few months ago I received a note from Stephen Holden, editor of the newsletter of the Anthony Powell Society, requesting permission to reprint a post I’d written about Venusburg, which I gladly granted. So many people have written about Powell that I tend to doubt whether I have anything new to offer aside from a lure to new readers, so I was pleased to learn that a devoted Powell fan thought I’d hit on something interesting.

I now have the new issue of the newsletter in hand, and it makes me wonder why I’ve never joined the Society. Its thirty-two pages are full of thoughts and tidbits sure to interest and amuse any Powell fan. The most interesting article is one from Jeffrey Manley that clears up something I’ve long wondered about: whether Powell was a Barbara Pym fan--as he clearly should have been--and, if so, why he never reviewed any of her novels. It turns out that, like many readers, he came to her late, and even then took a while to fully appreciate her. By 1992, however, he was writing in his journal,

From being merely tolerant of [her] as a novelist, I have now got into the swing of her style and characters, find the books very amusing. . . . She is one of the few novelists I regret never having met.

In addition to that article, in the Cuttings section we get an amusing anecdote from the life of Lady Violet Powell, taken from a March 26, 2010 obituary for one of her sisters, Lady Mary Clive:

On her return to London she shared a studio with a friend on the top floor of a house in Jubilee Place, Chelsea. Her younger sister, Violet (who was to marry the novelist Anthony Powell), posed nude for her, until news reached them that the mechanics at the motor-works across the road were making ribald remarks about “the young lady they could see undressing in Lady Mary’s studio.”

From Cuttings, we also learn that Hilary Spurling, whose new biography of Pearl S. Buck has just arrived in stores, still plans to tackle Powell next. In addition we get a quote from a blog post by Lance Mannion that nicely marks the primary difference between Powell and Waugh:

For Waugh, bad behaviour is mainly defined as what other people do to offend people like him. For Trollope and Powell, bad behaviour is what we all do as a matter of course along with the good.

The most unexpected perspective on Powell comes from the opening article by Nick Birns. Adapted from his foreword to a new collection of writings on Dance by high school students, it manages to make that seemingly unpromising concept sound interesting--one student decodes the economic references in Widmerpool’s excruciating Old Boys speech!--while reminding us that reading Dance attentively when young could offer advantages:

But reading Dance so early will give these young women and men important gifts to have at their disposal throughout their lives, a gift that will never stop giving. They will have a stock of archetypes with which to associate acquaintances. When they have to talk about current politics as a way of breaking the social ice, they will reap the humour of the resemblance to uttering “It seems the nationalists have reached Peking” in 1928. They will learn how to deal unflappably with the wide range of preposterous situations, all the while facing melancholy ones with poise and resolution, having been partially made immune to the depredations of the world’s Blackheads and Widmerpools and Pamelas and Murtlocks, and made receptive to the joys of the world’s Stringhams, Morelands, Barnbys, and Umfravilles.

I tend to think of lessons learned from literature as a secondary benefit at best, but looking back on my teenage self, I do think he could have used a dash of the patience, perspective, and openness to idiosyncrasy that he could have learned from Nick Jenkins.

And now to go join the Society!

Reading the menu

{Photos by rocketlass.}

An unexpected--and unwanted--theme developed in last weekend's reading: terrible food. The first batch came via Barbara Pym, who can always be relied on to convey the bland-to-nauseating menu of the spinsters and curates who make up her cast. This time, I was reading A Few Green Leaves (1980), which offered not only a "shape" and the classic English abomination lamb with mint jelly, but a ham mousse and a salmon mousse as well--the horrors of which are simultaneously set in relief and leavened somewhat by the opposite horror represented by the one character with aspirations to better eating, the comically self-regarding reviewer of restaurants Adam Prince:

"Tonight," [Adam] was saying, "all I shall be capable of eating is a plate of spaghetti"--he gave it an exaggeratedly Italian pronunciation--"perfectly al dente, you understand--exactly twelve and a half minutes, in my opinion--with a sprinkling of Parmesan and a knob of butter."

I wonder whether Prince's failure to whip out the Italian flair for "Parmesan" is an indication of the English habit of regarding all cheeses as in some sense fundamentally domestic? Anyway, Prince's conversation with Tom, the vicar, continues:

"Ah, butter," said Tom, seizing on something he had heard of. "What kind of butter?" he was inspired to ask, for he knew that there was a great variety of butters.

"I prefer Danish for spaghetti, otherwise Normandy, of course."

"And what will you drink?" tom asked, thinking of tea-bag tea, instant coffee, or West Oxfordshire water.

"It doesn't matter all that much what one drinks with spaghetti so I shall surprise myself. I shall go to my cellar and shut my eyes and reach out to touch a bottle and then, ah then, who knows what it might be! . . . Do you ever do that?" he asked Tom. "Just go to your cellar and pick a bottle at random?"

"Unfortunately, I have no cellar, as such," said Tom, for naturally there were cellars at the rectory, a whole floor of them underneath the house.

Adam seemed surprised. "But wine's so much part of the job," he said.

Even the ghastly instant coffee still so common in England would have been welcomed by the characters in the next book I read, Harry Harrison's Make Room! Make Room! (1966), the novel on which the movie Soylent Green was loosely based. In Harrison's novel, the deprived residents of overcrowded Manhattan fight over soy-lentil steaks, drink a bitter faux-coffee drink called kofee, make broth out of weedcrumbs and sandwiches out of meatflakes. Oh, and they take LSD that's mostly dirt and industrial waste.

Strangely enough, however, they don't eat the one substance that gives Soylent Green (and Charlton Heston) its best-known line:



It was the final horror I kept waiting for, the hideous dessert at the end of my reading buffet, but it never came. I guess if I'm still hungry later I can go read How to Eat Fried Worms.

"We both are rather comic people," or, Letters Week, Part II!

It seems right to follow the high seriousness of Tolstoy's letters with the more down-to-earth concerns of Barbara Pym. She offers a nice contrast, too in that, for all that Tolstoy took himself too seriously, Pym, at least in her letters, often presented herself too lightly; like the sharper characters in her novels, she tended to try to put the best face on bad news, offering up everything with a leaven of wry, self-deprecating humor.

In this letter to Henry Harvey, a longtime object of failed love interest, for example, her attempts at levity can't hide the emotional strain of a collapsed affair:

I can't exactly remember what I did tell you in my last letter. Did I tell you that I was in love and that it was all hopeless? I expect so--well if I did you may be interested (and relieved?) to hear that we parted at Christmas and haven't seen or written to each other since then--a real Victorian renunciation--the sort of thing I adore in novels, but find extremely painful in real life. Of course we may come together again in the future--time alone will tell (sorry!) but in the meantime he thought it better I should try to find somebody else who can marry me, which he wouldn't be able to do for at least a year. . . . Luckily we both are rather comic people so it isn't as bad as it sounds.

Or take this letter to her friend Bob Smith, from April 22, 1954, about her recurring struggles with the publishing industry:

I had a letter from Jock recently. He liked Jane and Prudence very much. But the Americans and Continentals most definitely don't and now I am feeling a little bruised! In answer to my enquiries Cape tells me that 8 Americans and 10 Continental publishers saw and "declined" (that seems to be the word) Excellent Women and they are still plodding on with J & P. So humble yourself, Miss Pym, and do not give yourself airs!

But late on this Tuesday night, something more truly cheerful seems in order--and what's more reliably entertaining than descriptions of Cyril Connolly? This one is from another letter to Henry Harvey, dated February 20, 1946:

If you haven't read Cyril Connolly's book The Unquiet Grave, you will wonder what I am talking about and say [angst] is just one of my silly German words, but as I expect you have read it you will see that I am keeping up to date with all our clever young men. Not that he is young exactly--he is approaching forty, indeed, probably is forty now, is fat and given to self-pity and nostalgia. But he is clever and puts his finger on what it is we suffer from now--though maybe you don't in the bracing air of Sweden. He is "soaked in French Literature"--not my expression, but the kind of thing one would like to be!

And this passage from a letter to her friend Richard Campbell Roberts, from January 5, 1965, seems a good way to close for today:

It says on this Airmail pad that 12 sheets and an envelope weighs less than half an nounce, but I doubt if I can go on at that length. Also I am writing this in the office in the morning, which seems frightfully sinful.

If simply writing a letter in the office of a morning makes her feel sinful, I think she needs a copy of Personal Days! Ed, how's your time machine working?

Some advice to the love-lorn, of questionable value, from Barbara Pym's journals

From A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters (1984), by Barbara Pym, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym

31 July 1933

After lunch I took some Yeastvite tablets and continued to take them after tea and super. A slightly unromantic way of curing lovesickness I admit, but certainly I feel a lot better now. (Hilary is playing "Stormy Weather" incessantly--my theme song I think!) . . . I turned to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and began to read about Love Melancholy--but I haven't yet got to the part where he deals with the cure. Perhaps I'm suffering from the spleen, too--in that case I may be completely cured by taking a course of our English poets--which all points to drowning my sorrows in work.

Friday 23 April 1943

Hilary has gone to the cottage this weekend--so Honor and I are by ourselves. We talked about things--the folly of day-dreaming amongst otheres. She thinks I ought to have a really good affaire. I quite agree, but OH DEAR.

January 1957

One talks so gaily about "old loves," but there comes a time when they really are old.

And to close, a description of a location that could serve to host the beginning of an intrigue--romantic or perhaps more sinister. Whichever it might turn out to be, though, Pym is clear that it would not be likely to end well:

7 Sepember 1954
Lisbon, Hotel Metropole

Near the Moorish style railway station. Dark little room looking into a well. I can see them washing up at 11 o'clock at night. The lower part of the walls covered with striped canvas like luggage (it's like living in a suitcase), the dim light and the grey iron bedstead like a French film. Setting for a Graham Greene novel.

Dear snooping posterity,

{Photo by rocketlass of our niece writing postcards.}

Lest you get the wrong impression from my post the other night in which I quoted Virginia Woolf writing that "the Victorian age killed the art of letter writing with kindness," I thought I should tonight state very clearly my firmly held belief that there can never be too many letters! Never! I want the letters of all my favorite authors published in multiple, handsome volumes! With rich annotations! And while we're at it, let's make them fully searchable on the Internet!

That said, a volume of selected letters is a splendid thing as well, and in a just world great glory would accrue to those patient scholars who winnow down the corpus of correspondence to meet the requirements of both the marketplace and bookbinding technology. Tempting though some of the complete sets may be--I'm looking at you, Lord Byron--a stack of Selecteds around one's laptop exudes a powerful joy of its own, because by dipping in almost at random, one can pluck such gems as this, from a letter Gustave Flaubert sent to Louise Colet on Easter of 1853:

The impression that my travel notes made upon you has prompted me, dear Muse, into strange reflections on the hearts of men and women. Decidedly, they are not the same, whatever people say.

On our side there is candour, if not delicacy; we are in the wrong even so, for this candour is a kind of hard-heartedness. If I had omitted my impressions of women, then you would not have found anything to cause you distress! Women keep everything to themselves. They never confide in your unequivocally. The most they can manage is to set you guessing, and, when they tell you things, it comes with such quantities of sauce that the meat disappears beneath it. But if we allow ourselves two or three delinquent little ejaculations, even though our hearts are not really in it, they start moaning and groaning!

Or this, from a letter Barbara Pym sent to Philip Larkin on September 14, 1964:

Our library has been made slightly more interesting--in a macabre way--by a rather peculiar young man joining the staff. He doesn't come in till 10:35 most mornings and is given to cryptic utterances which one can only half hear. I don't have much to do with him myself but hear all this from the other staff. I find it is pleasanter to observe these things rather than actually participate in them.

As a nod to friends who have recently wrestled with book proofs, I'll pass along this opening to a letter sent by the aforementioned Lord Byron to his publisher John Murray:

Dear Sir--I have received & return by this post under cover--the first proof of "Don Juan."--Before the second can arrive it is probably that I may have left Venice--and the length of my absence is so uncertain--that you had better proceed to the publication without boring me with more proofs--I sent by the last post an addition--and a new copy of "Julia's letter," perceiving or supposing the former one in Winter did not arrive.--Mr. Hobhouse is at it again about indelicacy--there is no indelicacy--if he wants that, let him read Swift--his great Idol--but his imagination must be a dunghill with a Viper's nest in the middle--to engender such a supposition about this poem.--For my part I think you are all crazed.

The next time a deadline looms, you might consider seeing if you can put over that closing line.

Staying with the publishing theme, here's Jessica Mitford, getting right to the point in a letter to a literary agent friend in 1990:

Thanks SO much for yr letter, what a pleasure to get it. PUBLISHING: Too ghastly here, too, as I'm sure you know.

Here's a more circumspect passage from a letter E. B. White sent his editor on May 24, 1952, after first seeing the jacket design for Charlotte's Web:

Thanks for the dummy cuts and the jacket design. I like everything. The group on the jacket is charming. My only complaint is that the goose looks, for some reason, a bit snakelike. Perhaps this is because its beak is open, or perhaps because the eye is round like a snake's. You sound so rushed that I presume you don't want to make any revisions, and I would be satisfied have the jacket go as is, if it seems right to you. But no goose-lover in this house is satisfied.

The web effect is OK for the purposes of jacket design but that type of rather mussy Charles Addams attic web is not right for the illustrations. I'm sure that Garth realizes that. Charlotte weaves quite an orderly, symmetrical web.

Closing this batch of publishing correspondence is Herman Melville, who, in writing to his editor about Moby-Dick, not unsurprisingly brings the spooky:

It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ship's cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it.

I've only just begun to flip through the new collection of Noel Coward's letters, but I've already found great pleasures, like this installment, sent from New Jersey in November of 1926, of his weekly letters to his doting mother:

The play, dear, has all the earmarks of being a failure! Gladys and Jack and I sat grandly in a box on the First Night and watched it falling flatter and flatter. And I must admit we got bad giggles! They were all expecting something very dirty indeed after the English Censor banning it and they were bitterly disappointed.

Francine Larrimore was very good an A. E. Matthews, too, tho' he forgot most of his lines.

Speaking of parenting, Lord Chesterfield's cynical letters to his son always reward a browse; here's an entertaining bit from a particularly long one, sent on January 8, 1750:

There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so; for it hurts nobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly: these people deal in the marvellous; they have seen some things that never existed; they have seen other things which they never really saw, though they did exist, only because they were thought worth seeing. Has anything remarkable been said or done in any place, or in any company, they immediately present and declare themselves eye or ear witnesses of it. They have done feats themselves, unattempted, or at least unperformed by others. Thy are always the heroes of their own fables; and think that they gain consideration, or at least present attention, by it. Whereas, in truth, all they get is ridicule and contempt, not without a good degree of distrust: for one must naturally conclude, that he who will tell any lie from idle vanity, will not scruple telling a greater for interest. Had I really seen anything so very extraordinary as to be almost incredible, I would keep it to myself, rather than by telling it give anybody room to doubt, for one minute, of my veracity.

Note that Lord Chesterfield, as is his wont, is not objecting to lying, per se, but to lying for no reason.

I'll close with some top-shelf cruel wit, from some masters of the art. First, a few lines from Nancy Mitford, writing from Paris to Evelyn Waugh on August 20, 1952:

Here we are obsessed by the fate of Sire Jacques Drumont, an English millionaire who has been murdered with his wife & small child while camping out. Though all are very sorry for Sire Jacques, & Lady Ann his wife, it is rather hoped that this will cure English millionaires of their mania for camping, they are a bore & start forest fires everywhere.

Finally, there's this comment from Waugh to Mitford from April 8, 1951:

Everyone I met in London was in debt & despair & either much too fat or much too thin.

Note to today's writers: put down those iPhones and write more letters! I'll want to read them when you're dead and I'm old!

Baroque asperity

Whenever I read Ivy Compton-Burnett I find myself remembering some lines from one of Barbara Pym's letters, which I quoted last year when I first wrote about Compton-Burnett:

The influence of Miss Compton-Burnett is very powerful once it takes a hold, isn’t it? For a time there seems to be no point in writing any other way, indeed, there seems not to be any other way, but I have found that it passes (like so much in this life) and I have now got back to my own way, such as it is. But purified and strengthened, as after a rich spiritual experience, or a shattering love affair.

What stays most firmly in the mind is Compton-Burnett's precise language, which she deploys to create a tone of stunning astringency. One of her tendencies that I find particularly infectious is her habit of ending her characters' pointed exchanges with a clarifying aside, often delivered as a corrective of sorts by the character who's gotten the worst of the discussion. Take the following scene from Manservant and Maidservant (1947), for example. Sarah, the eldest daughter, has just been discovered with grateful tears in her eyes that were brought on by overheard words of praise from her siblings. The family nurse, two younger brothers (Avery and Marcus), and the unfeeling patriarch, Horace, discuss the discovery:

"Why does Sarah cry?" said Avery.

"She was touched by what she heard," said Nurse, blinking her own eyelids.

"What is touched?"

"Her heart was touched," said Nurse.

"There is no need to elaborate the matter," said Horace, sharply. "There is no occasion to pity anyone, because she hears a pleasant word of herself."

"She doesn't always," said Avery.

"It is when people don't, that they are made to cry when they do," said Marcus.

The adverb, "sharply," attached to Horace's comment reminds of how often, and how well, Compton-Burnett uses adverbial phrases--a trait she shares with Pym, though their use of them could hardly be more different. Compton-Burnett, needing adverbs to help anchor her lengthy stretches of dialogue--words are spoken "in an indulgent tone," "half to himself," "with grim comprehension"--employs them almost as much as markers of the speaker's intentions as of actuality: this is the way the speaker, arching an eyebrow and looking around, wants his words to be taken. Pym, on the other hand, seems most often to rely on the adverbs that the listener would be likely to supply; in her world of timid church ladies and ineffectual curates, the way a remark is taken tends to have far more weight that the intentions behind its utterance.

The adverbial phrases are actually themselves characteristic of a larger trait, perhaps the one I most admire in Compton-Burnett's writing: she seems never to let a joke rest with its first effect. Rather, one gets the sense that she meticulously worked and reworked her scenes, pushing and prodding every exchange to see if she could squeeze out one more barbed line--and thus expose one more facet of her characters' relationships. It reminds me of what football commentators refer to as "a good second effort," that extra push a strong running back will deliver after first being rebuffed. It may only gain him one or two additional yards, but those yards can be crucial. (I can't believe I'm comparing Ivy Compton-Burnett to football, but there you are.)

I'll give you two brief examples. In the first, the childrens' new tutor, Gideon, tells his widowed mother, Gertrude, about his employer, whom she declares an intention to meet.

"Why do you want to meet the man?" said Gideon, who did not know that his mother wanted to meet any man within twenty years of her own age, and was willing to meet any one outside this limit.

"I do not want to meet him," said Gertrude, who hardly knew it herself.

It would have been a good joke had it ended with the revelation of his mother's catholic interest in men; it becomes sublime with the addition of her lack of self-knowledge.

Something similar happens in this scene, wherein Sarah reads to her seven-year-old brother, Avery, who has been severely chastised for mild misbehavior:

Sarah was seated on Avery's bed, reading from the Book of Job, not from any sense of fitness, but because it was her brother's choice. He lay with a convalescent air, his face responding as the words confirmed his memory.

To close, I'll return to Barbara Pym, but this time by way of Nancy Mitford. I would have expected Mitford to be a fan of Compton-Burnett, whose portraits of isolated families of precocious children and eccentric, tyrannical parents would have, I thought, appealed to any of the Mitfords But no: as she confessed in a letter to her friend Heywood Hill, "I wish I could get on with Miss Compton-Burnett, but it's my blind spot." She was always interested in gossip, however, so Hill later wrote to her about Compton-Burnett's last days:

She'd shrunk but still had her darting brain. She died in her home which she'd been frightened of not doing--and she still had a maid. Anne reminded me how Ivy had once said to her about some woman, "Well--she still had a maid to the end."

Influence, it turns out, can be read both ways: Barbara Pym may have lamented falling under the spell of Compton-Burnett, but can you imagine a more Barbara Pym line than that one?

Austerity Britain, part two

Part one is here.

Noel Coward's not the only famous person that turns up in passing. Accounts from Barbara Pym (whose novels all seem to have the feel of this period, with its scrimping and saving), Bill Wyman, George Orwell, James Lees-Milne, Doris Lessing, and others are interwoven with those of the many unknown people, and while their words are accorded no additional status, the very presence of people we already know enlarges and grounds Kynaston's narrative, linking it to the larger, different cultural stories we already associate with them.

For example, an extra layer of irony accrues to the following open letter from Dirk Bogarde to Woman's Own magazine, because he is now generally thought to have been gay, yet in the letter he's setting out the qualities he will require in the girl he marries:

Do not smoke in public.
Do not wear high heels with slacks.
Wear a little skilful make-up.
Never draw attention to yourself in public places by loud laughter, conversation, or clothing.
NEVER try to order a meal from a menu with I am with you.
Never laugh at me in front of my friends.
Never welcome me back in the evening with a smutty face, the smell of cooking in your hair, broken nails, and a whine about the day's trials and difficulties.

It's not unlikely that Bogarde's view is fairly representative of expected gender roles in the period, which seem straightforwardly horrid for women. But Kynaston tends to try to allow issues to retain their complexity and uncertainty, so he follows that letter with a contemporary response from a Woman's Own reader:

After reading Dirk Bogarde's article, I find that I am his ideal woman. The only snag is, I breathe? Do you think it matters?

Then there are the longer passages, interesting simultaneously as human stories and potent glimpses of the times, like this portrait of a fairly high-level official in the Board of Trade, from the memoirs of Roy Denman, at the time a fresh-faced Cambridge grad:

Mr Bacon had a square jaw, keen blue eyes and dressed, unusually for those days, with a certain elegance. These unfortunately were his main qualification for senior office. Before anyone from the outside world came to see him he would get his secretary to stack his desk high with files garnered from obscure cupboards in order to show how busy he was. With a weary sigh, a wave of his hand indicated to his visitor the crushing burden of administration which he daily bore. "These are difficult times," he would say in a resonant voice. "But if we all pull together the country will get through."

That view of the inefficiencies of the old boy network is only amplified by the description by a leading business manager of the "balanced cultivated life" that a high-level manager should lead:

He should have long weekends . . . he should play golf . . . he should garden . . . he should play bridge . . . he should read, he should do something different.

Needless to say, he thought nothing of the sort was necessary for lower-level employees.

And finally, I can't resist sharing this 1950 Mass-Observation report on attitudes toward Americans:

Cordial detestation. (Schoolmaster)

I like their generosity, but I dislike their wealthy condescension. (Forester)

I do not like their habit of preening themselves and their way of life before the world and of giving advice to the rest of us in a somewhat sermonising manner. (Civil servant)

I like them and consider them our absolute friends. They give me the feeling of being able to do anything if they put their mind to it. Nothing would be too big. (Clerk)

Something like horror though that is much too strong a word. Their strident vitality makes me want to shrink into myself. (Vicar)

As individuals charming. As a race "We are it." (Sales organiser)

I dislike their worship of Mammon and hugeness but one must admire their ability and success. (Retired civil servant)

I hate their "high pressure salesman" society. (Hearing aid technician)

I feel that the Americans are rather too big for their boots. (Civil servant)

The Americans are obviously becoming the Master race, whether we like it or not, so let's all begin to hero-worship them. (Designer)

The question seems to have driven the respondents to new heights of linguistic invention: "cordial detestation," "Strident vitality," "shrink into myself"--all unforgettable turns of phrase. Meanwhile, I have no idea what the sales organizer is trying to say, but I'm comfortable guessing that the designer at the end was questioned in a pub, when a few pints had blurred the lines separating sarcasm, irony, and weary cynicism.

Together, all the anecdotes and letters and journal entries and surveys add up to one of the most vivid and engrossing histories I've ever read, almost impossible to put down, even when it comes to detailed sections about labor relations and industrial history (or the mostly incomprehensible notes on cricket). And there's more to look forward to: Kynaston's announced plan is to write three more volumes that will take the story up to the election of Margaret Thatcher--the emotional, if not necessarily the actual, death of the welfare state that we see created in this first volume--under the overall title Tales of a New Jerusalem.

Here's to him having the time and energy to maintain this level of care and craft throughout. If so, he will have created an indispensable document, a true gift both for the English and for us Anglophiles. If we're lucky, someday someone will attempt to do the same for that period of American history.

One last post on Thomas and Emma Hardy, and Jude

I'm worn out from working the election today, but nothing puts a tired mind to rest like forcing it to make some sentences, so here are a few last thoughts for the week about Thomas Hardy.

1) In the past two posts, I've written about Jude the Obscure, agreeing with Claire Tomalin that at points in the novel Hardy's characters suffer tragedies so extreme they les the result of blind, uncaring fate than the effects of a willfully malevolent god--or, in this case, a willfully cruel author. "See--see how bad life can be?" he seems to be saying, but the very intensity of the suffering undercuts our willingness to believe his assertion--it feels, as Nick Hornby has put it before when talking about a different author, as if Hardy has his thumb on the scale.

Anthony Powell, in reviewing J.I.M. Stewart's biography of Hardy for the Daily Telegraph back in 1971 quoted T. S. Eliot saying,

What again and again introduces a note of falsity into Hardy's novels is that he will leave nothing to nature, but will always be giving one last turn of the screw himself, and of his motives for doing I have the gravest suspicion.

In this case I think Eliot is being too general. I have no trouble believing the suffering in Hardy's other great novels (Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Far from the Madding Crowd); once the plot necessities of Victorian serial publication are allowed for, the events of all seem fully within the realm of possibility, potential outcomes of the very real human emotions and ambitions that animate their characters.

After all this complaining, I should say that Jude is still well worth reading, if only for the character of Sue (which Powell calls "astonishingly well expressed") and for Hardy's ability to convey, in the early portions of the book, the palpable ache of Jude's ambitions. As you might guess from how much I've written about it, it's a hard book to forget.

2) The same collection of Anthony Powell's reviews from which I drew the Eliot quote above includes a review of the memoir written by Hardy's much-maligned first wife, Emma, Some Recollections, which despite her lack of literary training is fairly well-regarded. While Powell admits that she does display talent and a "certain gift for appreciation of what was happening round her," he also says,

One can see how captivated Hardy must have been by her; at the same time, what an appalling bore she must have become in middle age. Her egotism was obviously tremendous. What appeared imaginative energy was mostly an immense concentration on herself.

Even if we cut Emma Hardy significant slack to compensate for Hardy's failures as a husband (of attention, of care, of understanding) and for the ill effects of the intensely circumscribed world in which Victorian women were forced to dwell, she still comes across as an inherent problem. Her deep insecurity and outsized sense of self-importance seem a toxic combination. In later years she took to reminding guests of the gap in social standing between her family and Hardy's; she also frequently went so far as to talk of his novels as "their work" and even to hint at coauthorship of important works. It is easy to see why Hardy drew away from her; easy as well to see how that drawing away could easily lead to more of the very behavior by Emma that troubled the marriage in the first place.

Powell, in a 1979 review of Denys Kay-Robinson's The First Mrs. Thomas Hardy says

Kay-Robinson thinks Emma Hardy has been unfairly treated, and one of the aims of his book is to set right the balance. He does convince the reader that Hardy was very much in love when the first marriage took place, and no one would disagree with the view that Hardy was a difficult husband. At the same time, as the list of witnesses to the first Mrs. Hardy's shortcomings are assembled--some of them to a certain degree confused--we begin to wonder whether, if Emma Hardy is to be presented in a sympathetic light, it would have been easier to prove the case without calling on so many people who found her tiresome.

For all that, when Emma died, Hardy embarked almost instantly on a lengthy set of eulogizing poems, ones that Claire Tomalin regards as his best. Those very poems, and the reborn (or reimagined) love they expressed, had the perverse effect of greatly damaging, at its very outset, Hardy's marriage to his second wife, who had been waiting patiently in the wings for Emma's passing.

If nothing else, Hardy's marriages remind us that few people are ever really simple, and that a marriage not one's own is perhaps best thought of as, like L. P. Hartley said about the past, "another country. They do things differently there."

3) From Barbara Pym's diary, the entry for 20 May, 1977:

Seeing a handsome Dorset woman at a petrol pump I thought a Hardy heroine of today might follow such an occupation. Tess for instance.

4) From a letter from Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh, 26 December 1945:

Uncle Matthew has been here, deep in my book. He says he once read a book that ended badly and he hasn't ever been the same since--it was called Tess of the D'Urbervilles. This is news to all of us and very interesting news too.

Graham Greene

A busy week of work and the death of our laptop's monitor conspired to make last week a light blogging week. So this week might be a bit disjointed, like a whole week of notes rather than separate entries.

And tonight's topic is Graham Greene. It seems like anywhere Greene the man turns up, he's interesting or entertaining. Julian MacLaren-Ross, in Memoirs of the Forties (1965), tells of meeting Greene for the first time at Greene's apartment. Late in the evening, they are taken into the nursery by Vivien Greene to say goodnight to the children. On returning to the parlor:

"Lovely children," I said, "charming," in the hearty voice used by my father when he'd survived a social ordeal, and I was further relieved to see Greene had a brandy bottle in his hand.

He said: "Who was it complained that not enough children get murdered in detective stories?"

Evelyn Waugh tells a good story in a letter to Nancy Mitford, dated October 4, 1948 and collected in The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1996):

So my friend Graham Greene whose books you won't read was sitting in a New York hotel feeling quite well when he felt very wet & sticking in the lap & hurried to the lavatory & found that his penis was pouring with blood. So he fainted & and was taken to a hospital and the doctors said "It may be caused by five diseases two of which are not immediately fatal, the others are." Then they chloroformed him & he woke up two days later & they said: "Well, we can't find anything wrong at all. What have you been up to? Too much womanizing?" "No, not for weeks since I left my home in England." "Ah" they said "That's it." What a terrible warning. No wonder his books are sad.

And from a October 19, 1954 letter:

Graham Green prefers spirits to wine and was not happy. As we started [a trip to Reims] he saw the name [Alan] Pryce-Jones (a harmless gentle Welsh journalist) on the list and said: "I can't go. I won't meet Pryce-Jones. He's too negative." Well, he came. That evening we all went to bed at about midnight--Lord Long haranguing the night porter--"Don't tell me all brothels are closed. I'll wake them up"--Next morning we met again at ten Graham looking ghastly. "I didn't get to bed until after four." "What were you doing?" "Drinking marc." "Who with?" "Pryce-Jones."

Then there's this, from Anthony Powell, who got along well enough with Greene but didn't like his books. In his journal (available in Journals: 1990-1992 (1997)), Powell wrote, on April 3, 1991, the day of Greene's death:

There was always an element of deviousness, indeed humbug, about all Graham's public utterances and behaviour. I think he was completely cynical, really only liking sex and money and his own particular form of publicity. I always go on pretty well with him, chiefly just before the war. We had the only colossal row after the war when he was my publisher. He would go white with rage on such occasions, admitting that he had to have rows from time to time for his health.

The occasion for the white-with-rage row was that Greene, who was at the time the managing director of Eyre & Spottiswode, was delaying the publication of Powell's book on John Aubrey, during which argument he let slip that he found the book "bloody boring."

Then there's Barbara Pym, in a letter to Philip Larkin of July 14, 1974, taking inspiration from Greene:

The sun is coming out again and I will turn to my novel. They say Graham Greene writes only 250 words a day, so I should be able to manage that!

I don't think those 250 words included the writing he did in his two journals, one real and one false, of which I learned from reviews of Norman Sherry's enormous, three-volume biography. That fact alone may force me to read the whole biography someday after all.

Conversation as combat

Simply by chance, I followed Stephen Miller’s Conversation with A House and Its Head (1938) the first novel I’ve read by Ivy Compton-Burnett , who wrote almost entirely in dialogue, telling stories of utterly self-involved, ethically bankrupt turn-of-the-century English families. Compton-Burnett is in her singular way a descendant of Jane Austen, brutally analyzing the gap between what is said and what is meant in polite society, baring the cruelty underlying banal pleasantries. But whereas in Austen there’s always some hope, and a heroine, Compton-Burnett’s world is utterly unredeemed. Power and self-interest trump all.

Anthony Powell, in an obituary appreciation in the Spectator in 1969, wrote:

She saw life in the relentless terms of Greek tragedy, its cruelties, ironies, hypocrisies—above all its passions—played out against a background of triviality and ennui.

Dead-on, but awfully bleak. So why read her? Well, she can be as perceptive as Jane Austen, more brutal than Evelyn Waugh, and, at times, as precise and funny as Wodehouse. For example, in this exchange, some friends are talking about the central family in A House and Its Head, the Edgeworths, which has just lost its matriarch:

“Ellen’s family! What a beautiful and intimate sound! That is how I shall think of them. I shall not feel it presumptuous, kept to the confines of my own mind.”

“It will be narrowly restricted,” agreed her brother.

Later, the widower’s daughter, speaking to the governess about her father’s grief, says:

“Well, I would rather be myself than him just now.”

“Why?” said Cassie.

“Cassie, you must know he was not kind enough to Mother. It does no good to pretend to forget.”

“I should have thought it would do a great deal of good.”

After the father remarries, the neighbors, who serve as an impressively uninformed Greek chorus, discuss the new bride:

”Did Mr. Edgeworth seem very attached?” said Miss Burtenshaw at the same moment.

“Yes,” said the men together.

“As much as to the first Mrs. Edgeworth? “

“Yes.”

“How could you tell?” said Miss Burtenshaw.

“Well, you must know of ways, to ask the question,” said Oscar.

That’s more or less how the manner of the whole book. Line after line of cutting dialogue, veering from funny to horrifying to painful, the difference sometimes being as little as a change of a word or two. The dialogue—like the situations themselves—is too stylized to be realistic, yet it has a fractured quality that feels particularly modern, even contemporary. Characters mutter under their breath, interrupt, don’t listen, and talk over one another. With each exchange, even between supposed friends, points are scored—and kept. Barbara Pym, in a 1938 letter to her friend Robert Liddell, asked,

Does one ever make consciously Compton-Burnett remarks in situations where they would be most fruitful I wonder? I must have the courage to try someday.

Instead, she would go on to write some.

Only two of Compton-Burnett’s twenty novels are currently in print, with the New York Review of Books continuing its heroic publishing efforts by reissuing recently her Manservant and Maidservant (1947) and A House and Its Head. Not being part of any real school or fashion has probably played a part in her falling out of favor, as would not being known for any one particular book above others.

But I think the most important reason she is little read these days is that, as Arnold Bennett put it in reviewing her third novel, Brothers and Sisters (1929), she is “by no means easy to read.” Like Jane Austen (or Penelope Fitzgerald, who took after both Austen and Compton-Burnett), she demands that her readers pay very close attention or risk missing everything. Important shifts in emotion—and even key plot points—are conveyed only through dialogue, buried beneath exaggerated late-Victorian indirection.

Yet, as Arnold Bennett argued later in that same review, Brothers and Sisters was “original, strong and incontestably true to life.” Odd and claustrophobic as Compton-Burnett’s vicious, astringent world is, after twenty or thirty pages it comes to seem very real. I think Anthony Powell was right when he wrote, later in that same obituary,

My reason for thinking [the world of her novels] is not wholly extinct is partly on account of the vitality of the novels themselves—if people were ever like this, there must be people always like this; partly because one will suddenly be confronted—in a railway carriage, for example—with a great burst of overheard Compton-Burnett dialogue.

And, as Barbara Pym put it in another letter to Robert Liddell, two years later,

The influence of Miss Compton-Burnett is very powerful once it takes a hold, isn’t it? For a time there seems to be no point in writing any other way, indeed, there seems not to be any other way, but I have found that it passes (like so much in this life) and I have now got back to my own way, such as it is. But purified and strengthened, as after a rich spiritual experience, or a shattering love affair.

It’s worth picking up one of her novels and reading a few pages. You’ll know pretty quickly if she’s for you.

Conversation: A Declining Art?, Part Two

Part one, which is full of praise for the first two-thirds of the book, is here.

In the last third of Conversation: A Declining Art , Stephen Miller attempts to track what he perceives as the decline of conversation in twentieth-century America. He begins with a flat and fairly perfunctory consideration of the laconic hero in twentieth-century American literature and film. But while he points to Hemingway and John Wayne in order to demonstrate that the strong, silent type was the American ideal in this period, he ignores substantial contrary evidence, everything from screwball comedies to the golden age of radio to Dorothy Parker.

He uses evidence selectively like that throughout the closing chapters. The worst is when Miller attempts to blame the most recent downturn in the quality and place of conversation in American life on fifties and sixties counterculture. He considers Easy Rider at length, then spends more time than anyone ought to spend these days on Norman Mailer. His critique boils down to this: neither privileging visceral experience nor doing drugs makes for good conversation. That’s not news (Garry Wills, for one, manages a much more interesting and nuanced critique of those aspects of sixties youth culture, in passing, in Nixon Agonistes), and by using that as the crux of his argument Miller takes ignores the fact that the late sixties were also a time of contentious private and public discussions about how society should be structured. Serious conversations, in groups large and small, were central to that reconsideration.

Then we get pages and pages on possibly the most over-analyzed subject since Madonna, talk shows, and suddenly we’re back to “conversation avoidance mechanisms.” I’ll spare you the details; as I said before, anyone who willfully misrepresents the purpose of an iPod as a barrier to conversation has no authority to speak on the subject.

But once Miller gets to the present, the details are less important. The real reason his arguments about conversation’s decline fail is that he's writing about our era, and I think he’s flat-out wrong. I live in a world of great conversation. No, I don’t want to talk to strangers on planes, or on the L (though I'm a shameless eavesdropper), and I don’t spend time chatting with strangers in coffeehouses or bars. But within my circle of friends and family, conversation is the basis of our relationship. When my friends get together, we talk. We cook and talk, we eat dinner and talk, we have drinks and talk. We tell stories, discuss work and family life, talk politics. When we go to baseball games—or when we watch the playoffs at my house throughout October—we analyze the game, gossip about the players, and chat. Even when we watch a TV show, it’s frequently a group event, and we talk and talk about the show afterwards. I don’t think we’re that unusual.

One of my favorite adult memories is of a night in January of 2005 when my parents were in town and we invited half a dozen friends to dinner. Dinner turned into an hours-long conversation, running well past bedtime, about our perplexity over George Bush’s reelection. My parents brought a downstate, rural perspective; most of their neighbors had voted for Bush. My friends and I came at the question as residents of the city that had given Kerry his largest plurality. The conversation was impassioned, serious, and interesting. It was a real attempt, by all of us, to understand something we feared was inexplicable. I think we all experienced the exhilaration that Hazlitt describes following a good talk, “feelings lighter and more ethereal than I have at any other time.”

And, while there are plenty of times when I am an awkward conversationalist, I have friends whose conversational facility, with everyone and in every situation, regularly amazes me. This description by Hazlitt of his friend, painter James Northcote, could easily apply to my friend Becky:

He lends his ear to an observation as if you have brought him a piece of news and enters into it with as much avidity and earnestness as if it interested himself personally. . . . His thoughts bubble up and sparkle like heads on old wine. The fund of anecdote, the collection of curious particulars, is enough to set up any common retailer of jests that dines out every day; but these are not strung together like a row of galley-slaves, but are always introduced to illustrate some argument or bring out some fine distinction of character.

I greatly admire, deeply envy, and hopelessly aspire to her talents as a conversationalist. And I have many other friends like her.

Maybe Miller doesn’t have such friends. Maybe he’s stuck in an academic environment, where talk, as in the novels of Barbara Pym or Ivy Compton-Burnett, can be more combat than conversation. Maybe he is paying too much attention to young people and teenagers—as, it seems, do many cultural commentators—forgetting that, while they’re certainly different from us adults, they’ll also soon, as adults, be different from what they are now. They might turn out to be able to have good conversations, even with a curmudgeon like Miller.

I’m not saying the state of conversation in America is perfect, but just as the golden age was never that golden, the fallen present is certainly brighter than Miller makes it out to be. If he’s ever in town, I’ll gladly introduce him to people who, I hope, will make him see my side. I’ll gladly make the martinis and sit back and listen.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 1 of 8

If this series of entries is anyone’s fault, it’s Julian MacLaren-Ross’s. It was he, talking about World War I uniforms, as worn by his ne’er-do-well brother, who got me thinking about the many appearances of fashion and clothing in things I’ve been reading. A few hours later, when I happened across Barbara Pym’s note about the fashions at Oxford in her youth, suddenly I was off to consult Samuel Johnson. The rest was inevitable.

From Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755)

Fashionist: A follower of the mode; a fop; a coxcomb.

From a letter by Barbara Pym to Philip Larkin, collected in A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters (1984)

I suppose when you were at Oxford nobody came into The George wearing a silver lamé shirt or went around with a lizard on their shoulder or carried a toy kangaroo—that was the early thirties when I was up. But surely there must have been girls, even in the austere, one-bottle-of-wine a term forties (shoulder-length pageboy hair, square shoulders and short skirts?).

From Edward Lear’s The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense

There was an Old Man of Blackheath,
Whose head was adorned with a wreath
Of lobsters and spice, pickled onions and mice,
That uncommon Old Man of Blackheath.

From Julian Maclaren-Ross’s The Weeping and the Laughter (1953), in Collected Memoirs

My brother, pardonably bitter, turned his back on the church, and for a time went about getting drunk in a black cloak lined with crimson silk—but somehow he was not really cut out for a roisterer.

From P. G. Wodehouse’s “Jeeves Takes Charge,” collected in Carry on, Jeeves (1925)

“Oh, Jeeves,” I said. “About that check suit.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Is it really a frost?”

“A trifle too bizarre, sir, in my opinion.’

“But lots of fellows have asked me who my tailor is.”

“Doubtless in order to avoid him sir.”

“He’s supposed to be one of the best men in London.”

“I am saying nothing against his moral character, sir.”

. . . .

“All right, Jeeves,” I said. ‘You know! Give the bally thing away to somebody.”

He looked down at me like a father gazing tenderly at the wayward child.

“Thank you, sir. I gave it to the under-gardener last night. A little more tea, sir?”