Category Archives: Books

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather (1925)

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I keep returning to inter-war Britain. One novel just leads to another. Time, I thought, to drag myself away, so I accepted a recommendation of Willa Cather. Inter-war America instead.

The professor actually has two houses – the old one is ugly, inconvenient, cramped, the home of his work and family; the new one he has had built with a literary prize for his histories should be a great improvement. But he cannot bear to move completely into the new house; he returns to the old house, with its dangerous stove, to continue his work. In the same way the whole narrative shuttles between the surface story and something else beneath. The novel’s structure is as higgledy-piggledy as the house: for example, the narrative dwells on domestic interiors and almost phenomenological detail of the professor’s head (he’s called St Peter BTW) or his wife’s long upper lip, but skims lightly over their mutual regrets about what their marriage has become. And yet . . . stair carpets and beards are more visible than occasional mild sadness.

Quite what is beneath the surface sets my mind buzzing. His explanation of metonymy to Augusta can’t be accidental. There are opposites: Rosamond’s two suitors: Tom Outland (oh, the names) – poor, brilliant, sensitive, attached to the American landscape and its pre-European history – and Louie Marsellus – thrusting, loud, generous, well-meaning and quite definitely a city man. Honest piety and worldly delight. Scholarship vs getting students through exams. The professor’s French-style walled garden and the New Mexico mesa. The clear air under the sun that Tom Outland exults in and the smoking stove in the professor’s attic; both are places of retreat and study for the men.

The novel grew on me as I read further. So much is left hanging (as in real life), corresponding perhaps to the way that St Peter remembers and dwells on events. How much has St Peter idealised Outland? Had Outland courted Kitty unbeknownst to St Peter? (Names again! I noted the worldly “Rosamond”, but I’ve just realised that her sister’s pet name suggests a fireside creature.) Roddy has vanished, Crane is bringing a lawsuit.

The novel is in three parts: the professor’s life in the university town, expansively if obliquely told; a first-person account by Outland as he explores a long-abandoned native American village in New Mexico; and then back to the professor as, in the space of a few pages, he has what would now be called a mid-life crisis, is convinced (despite good health) that he is near death, cannot bear the thought of living again with his family, almost dies, and then has a quick change of heart after a few words with a religious, stoical seamstress. Just like that.

And yet, writing the above and re-reading some passages, my irritation with the ending begins to fade. The sudden shift in the narrative reflects the professor’s breakdown. He is put back together again but is no longer whole. He has lived for intellectual pursuits, love, delight, interest, and has avoided “the taste of bitter herbs . . . the bloomless side of life”. Henceforth that may be how he has to live. The Book of Ecclesiastes comes to mind: vanity, toil, “under the sun”.

One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes (1946)

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As I read this novel I thought of “A Canterbury Tale” and the way the present and the past mingle in the depiction of the landscape. I could also hear another Mollie’s voice – the songs of Molly Drake and their evocation of the English countryside with an undertone of melancholy. And yet what remains here is not melancholy but a sense of good-nature and hopefulness.

There is much for the characters to be melancholy about. The setting is somewhere around the South Downs in the first year after the war. Peace has returned but the upheavals of war are everywhere. Not just the rusting coils of barbed wire among the sorrel but also in rationing, bereavement, disorientation, social upheaval. If I were feeling caustic I could sum up the novel as a middle-class couple having to come to terms with the post-war “servant problem” (diddums). But it’s beautifully and perceptively written from a viewpoint that is sympathetic to all sides.

Pre-war Laura and Stephen lived in a large house with servants who ensured their domestic life ran on well-oiled rollers. Garden, kitchen, child – all looked after without any effort on their part. Perfect roses and vegetables grown for them, dinners served to them by lamplight, daughter presented to them bathed and ready for bed. Now they have a slapdash daily and an ageing occasional gardener and not much money and they must do everything else themselves. The house has become a tyrant rather than a retreat, but they – or, at least, Stephen – try to maintain their former way of life.

Poor Stephen, thought Laura . . . He hated the way they scraped along, scrambled and muddled along, though he said nothing. He took off his coat after dinner, hung it over a chair, and pitched into the washing up. Wretched victims of their class, they still had dinner. Without the slaves, they still cherished the useless lamp. Left alone, Laura would have settled and clung somewhere like that butterfly, sipping without ceremony, perfectly happy. While Stephen was away she had snatched her meals anywhere. But now there was a man in the house again, they faced each other over polished wood, branching candlelight, the small ivory electric bell which was nothing but a joke.

The novel follows mostly Laura over the course of one beautiful summer’s day: her thoughts, her chores, her short journeys, her interactions with other people. Nothing much happens, but perhaps this one day is to be a turning point in her personal life. Every little detail tells you something about the changed state of the country. The beautiful widow in the village shop is going to marry repulsive Mr Rudge the builder – someone who knows how to look after Number One and is doing well in the post-war world. But whereas Evelyn Waugh in “Brideshead Revisited“ gave us Hooper whom he obviously loathed, Mollie Panter-Downes is not hostile to the new world. In fact I wondered if the likely puppies of Stuffy’s fling with the gypsy’s greyhounds were a closing symbol of the post-war world.

I can see why she wrote so little fiction and concentrated on journalism. She sticks to what she observes and doesn’t stray beyond that; the characters and their situations in this novel are very similar to her wartime short stories and presented in the same sympathetic, expansive manner. It really was a pleasure to read it.

Afterword

I read “My Husband Simon” a few weeks later – published in 1931. My goodness, how different the tone towards the lower orders! There is no mercy for the negligent cleaner here – unlike the latitude in the portrayal of the careless Mrs Prout in “One Fine Day”. Panter-Downes seemed to unlearn her earlier snobbishness.

Two Lives by William Trevor (1991)

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I wondered at first if the two short novels were linked – but no, not by more than being about the lives of middle-aged women with their own take on life. It’s been years since I last read Trevor; my enduring recollection is of muddy Irish farmyards, tightly bound little lives and idiosyncratic characters.

Reading Turgenev

Small-town Ireland, dwindling numbers of Protestants, a fairly unchanging way of life, and little escape from poisonous relatives and prying eyes. The third-person story switches between middle-aged Mary Louise in her mental asylum, shortly to close (present tense), and young Mary Louise (past tense). Perhaps she was always a little vulnerable, but this is only implied through the thoughts of her old teacher. In another life, she could have been a different person. She attracts the attention of an older draper – another Protestant, now of an age to take a wife to live above the shop with himself and his two sisters. Shades of Cinderella, for the sisters are horrible, and, once unhappily married, Mary Louise finds her Prince Charming in her sickly cousin. He reads Turgenev with her; it’s never clear whether she values the stories beyond the fact that he introduced her to them. After his death she retreats into a fantasy world – partly propelled and kept there by the sisters’ behaviour and her shame-faced husband’s increasing alcoholism. The outside world goes on around her for 30 years until the asylum closes – and she returns to the shop above the flat, her husband and sisters-in-law and continues with her gentle, oppressive obsession. Quietly and simply told, and rather heartbreaking all round.

My House in Umbria

Another middle-aged woman, but quite different. Told in the first person by someone who has had several incarnations. We gradually learn that she has been abused and exploited, but she has survived and even thrived. I wondered at first if the house in Umbria was going to be a brothel, but no – she takes respectable paying guests. (Her manservant is called Quinty – shades of Peter Quint? He has that same potential for malevolence.) She has had a late career as a romantic novelist – perhaps a way of transmuting the base metal of her experiences into gold. She survives the terrorist bombing of a train and invites the other three survivors – all bereaved, all now damaged – to her house in Umbria until they are ready to face the world again. It’s questionable how reliable a narrator she is: she has either a quasi-supernatural understanding of other people or she’s a garrulous lush. A bit of both, but where the dividing line is between the two I couldn’t say. She does get drunk and carried away – but she also has a fine sense of empathy and character. (Or – since she is the narrator – she appears to have etc etc.)

I loved the final page:

I am as women of my professional past often are, made practical through bedroom dealings, made sentimental through fear. I know all that, I do not deny it. I do not care much for the woman I am, but there you are. None of us has a choice in that. . . .

When the season’s over I walk among the shrubs myself, making the most of the colours while they last and the fountain while it flows.

The Rector’s Daughter by F M Mayor (1924)

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At times I had to check the date of publication of this book, for it seemed so thoroughly Edwardian or even Victorian in its sensibility and its depiction of lives rooted in faith and classical learning. It was a bit of a shock to encounter Kathy, a “modern woman”, with her slang and her cigarettes, otherwise I would have thought myself in Jane Eyre land. The Parsonage at Haworth was often in my mind.

The book is the life of Mary Jocelyn, daughter of a canon, plain, not young, socially awkward, prone to occasional outbursts. She lives with her widowed father in Dedmayne for almost all her life. (Like Lowick in “Middlemarch”, the name must be intentional.) Nothing much happens: she cares for her ailing sister until she dies, falls in love with a curate and briefly he seems to reciprocate – but his head is turned by Kathy, and Mary must endure disappointment and find her own path back to equilibrium. She longs for affection from her father, but he is – it seems – unintentionally a monster of selfishness. Here lies the subtlety (even slyness) of Mayor’s writing: Canon Joycelyn’s actions (or, rather, inactions) circumscribe Mary’s life and suppress her natural warmth, but he is not an unkind man. Mary’s life – to modern eyes – seems dull and wasted: it is a constant struggle for her to overcome and hide her unhappiness once her deeper feelings are engaged, but she is never presented as someone to be pitied. She has her inner life and resources. Towards the end, though, even her faith brings no lightness to her; she keeps herself busy, and in this she is valued and feels useful, but it seems that only nature and her memories offer her consolation. (And it is a life that needs consolation.) And then she dies. The epitaph for such an unmodern person is spoken by a bright young Bloomsbury atheist:

“She had a life so shrivelled it became absurd. She ought to have been married to that man and been happy. . . . [She] had a pull over us in a way . . . she cared, and we can’t care, not much, and never for long, not even for big things, and after a time they aren’t big, but quite, quite small.”

Perhaps it could have been a shorter and tighter novel, but it was a salutary pleasure to read it and be so thoroughly immersed in a whole different world.

Good Evening, Mrs Craven: the wartime stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

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Perfectly crafted short stories on a small canvas: the largely middle-class experience of WWII in southern England. It was reading David Kynaston that introduced me to Mollie Panter-Downes and her regular “Letter from London” in The New Yorker, which she wrote for decades. I don’t think that magazine was on my mind as I read these short stories and detected a kinship with some of Dorothy Parker’s stories: concise, detached accounts of real feeling. There was also the added interest of the contemporary depiction of the home front: these stories were written between 1939 and 1944 – so from the outbreak of war to D-Day, at a time when you really wouldn’t have known the outcome of the war or whether your own husband or son would return in one piece. The sense of one’s life no longer being under your control: you could be uprooted and evacuated, or you could have evacuees billeted on you. And yet it’s more than just reportage. There’s a sympathetic eye looking at the lives around her. In “The Waste Of It All”, for example, a young wife is vaguely aware of the toll three years apart from her barely-remembered husband has taken on her emotional life. Or in “Cut Down The Trees” there’s a glimpse of the tension between change/vitality and the familiar stasis of pre-war life. Just perfect.

Jackson Brodie books

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I made the mistake of binge-reading these, so that Kate Atkinson’s style – which I enjoy in her other novels – soon turned into tiresome tics and tricks. I think it was the self-referential knowingness that grated: a series of detective stories which are practically made for television: interweaving of short scenes, every character (it seemed) with a backstory of childhood trauma, and a parodic reliance on coincidence to keep the plot spinning. Along with (pot and kettle here, obvs) her use of parentheses and the constant asides as other voices butt into interior monologues.

There’s much to enjoy, of course. The wit, the settings, the recreation of past decades, the final plot twists. I just shouldn’t have binged.

The Postcard by Anne Berest

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I don’t generally read novels about the Holocaust, but this one was lent to me and I felt the weight of an “ought to”. For me, the Dairy of Anne Frank in my teenage years and Primo Levi later were enough, although I understand why authors still write them – particularly in this case, where the story concerns the author’s relatives. It’s very readable: poignant and gripping. I was stopped in my tracks by thoughts that reading it inspired: to be “outsidered” when you think you are “one of us”.