The soul of kindness

As usual, I am a little behind everyone else, and have only just caught up with the latest offering from those nice people at the Backlisted Podcast – The Soul of Kindness, by Elizabeth Taylor. Guests included Virago founder Carmen Callil, who was responsible for reviving Taylor’s work, and always has something pertinent and interesting to say about the books and authors she dealt with in Virago’s heyday. Anyway, it reminded me that although I’ve read the book, and Taylor is one of my favorite authors, I never wrote about it, so I thought I’d do a quick post, based on memory, then looked at the book to find a couple of quotes – and ended up so engrossed I re-read the whole thing, and found it every bit as good as I remembered! So here goes…

“Here I am!” Flora called to Richard as she went downstairs. For a second, Meg felt disloyalty. It occurred to her of a sudden that Flora was always saying that, and that it was in the tone of one giving a lovely present. She was bestowing herself.

Sweet, gentle Flora is the soul of kindness. It’s what she – and everyone else – believes. Her husband Richard, and best friend Meg, may get the occasional twinge when they feel uneasy about Flora’s behaviour, but no-one doubts her good intentions. So there are no real complaints when she sets about re-ordering the lives of her nearest and dearest, to bring them joy, happiness and contentment. However, Flora has no interest in what her friends and family actually want, and no idea of what would be good  for them, so others must deal with the disastrous consequences of her well-meaning meddling.

There is Meg, who is in love with author Patrick, who is (as she well knows), in love with Frankie, a young man with few -if any – ‘nice streaks’.  Flora, ignoring the facts, is convinced that Meg and Patrick would be perfect partners. She’s equally determined that her widowed father-in-law Percy should marry his long-time mistress Ba, and that Meg’s younger brother Kit should fulfill his ambition to become a successful actor, even though everyone else realises he has no talent whatsoever.

My Virago cover shows a detail from Winifred Nicholson’s ‘Wild Flowers’

On this second reading I surprised to see just how many clues about Flora’s true nature are there in the opening chapter, which describes Flora and Richard’s wedding. Indeed, Elizabeth Taylor is quite explicit in her portrayal. Speaking about Meg, she tells us:

At school she had been Flora’s Nannie-friend, for it was clear from the day that Flora arrived there that what Mrs Secretan had done – the cherishing, the protecting – could not be  lightly broken off. Someone must carry on. ‘What do I do with this?’ ‘Where do I go from here?’ were questions somebody must answer. Meg disapproved of Mes Secretan’s cossetting, but saw that it would be dangerous for it to be abruptly discontinued – like putting an orchid out into the frosty air, or or suddenly depriving an alcoholic of drink. She had tried – so good she was – to introduce gradual reforms, but Flora peaceably ignored them, for she did not know that there was any necessity to stand on her own feet, or even that she was not doing so.

That tells you everything you need to know about Flora, and quite a bit about her doting mother, and Meg. Mrs Secretan has devoted her life to Flora and Flora’s well-being, and can see no wrong in her beautiful daughter – but even she has moments of clarity when she acknowledges there is something missing. Take the note Flora writes before leaving for honeymoon, in which she says Mrs Secretan has been the most wonderful mother.

If only, Mrs Secretan thought yearningly, if only Flora had written ‘You are such a wonderful mother’. That would have made all the difference…

On my first reading I was struck by how lonely everyone is, and how no-one seems to be in love with the ‘right’ person. On a second reading I was surprised at how much Flora’s perception of herself is influenced by other people’s view of her, and how much their view reflects the kindly persona she has created back at her. It’s an almost symbiotic relationship between Flora and those who love her, and I was suddenly reminded of Jack and Jill in RD Laing’s Knots, which I haven’t read in 30 years or more. This time around it also occurred to me that Liz, the painter (a minor but important character), is the only person who sees Flora clearly – yet she is the only one who doesn’t know Flora and never actually meets her: she merely ‘interprets’ information gleaned from other people.

Interestingly, the Backlisted team drew parallels between The Soul of Kindness (published in 1964) and Taylor’s earlier and much darker novel, Angel. I hadn’t previously considered this connection, but I think there is a link: Angel and Flora are both heartless monsters, totally self-centred and unable to face the real world, so both create an environment that is more to their liking. On the face of it Angel, who is so obviously not a ‘normal’ member of society, is the more monstrous, but thinking about it, I’m not so sure. Flora manages to get others to accede to her wishes whilst appearing to be sweet, gentle and biddable – but she goes into melt-down when things don’t go according to plan and her nice, safe, sunny world is rocked by tragedy (well, near tragedy if I am being strictly accurate). Her reaction is shocking because it is so extreme, but the reaction of those around her  is even more shocking, because they rally round (against their better judgement in at least one case) and rebuild her up again. This episode, I imagine, will ensure that never again will any of those  who love her oppose her in any way, and never again will they let reality intrude on her charmed life.

I could say lots more about Flora, and the other characters (some of whom I haven’t mentioned at all), and about the places, and the social customs of the times. The wealthy middle class families who feature so often in Elizabeth Taylor’s work, must already have been a dying breed in the mid-1960s, but they still have something to say to say to us today. Taylor understood this world where appearances and convention matter, but she was always able to show us what went on below the surface, and to make us care about her characters, even if we don’t always like them. And her writing is as perfect now as it was then – witty and ironic, with never a word out of place, it is frequently understated, and what she doesn’t say is as important as what she does. Anyway, don’t listen to me wittering on – just read the book!

Novelist Elizabeth Taylor.

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It’s Emily Hilda Young Day!

I thought it would be nice to show the complete picture of The Critics, by Harold Harvey, rather than the cropped version which appears on the front cover of my Virago edition of EH Young’s William. It is apparently, in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, so next time I’m there I’ll see if it is on display.

Today I am celebrating another of the Underappreciated Lady Authors gathered together by Jane at Beyond Eden Rock. Emily Hilda Young, was born on this day in 1880 and, like many of those old ‘green’ VMC authors, has had the misfortune to be forgotten not once, but twice. In her heyday, during the 1920s and 30s, she was enormously popular, but fell into obscurity after the war, when the public’s reading tastes changed. There was a brief renaissance when Virago published some of her novels in the 1980s, but it didn’t endure. More recently the tide seems to be turning, and once again there is an upsurge of interest in her work, so perhaps someone will republish the books – I certainly hope so.

Emily Hilda Young.

Between 1910 and 1947 Young wrote 11 novels, which are primarily domestic, and are very much of their time and place, mostly portraying life in Radstowe, a fictionalised version of Bristol, where she lived for many years. The plots are slight, the story-lines slow, and her writing very quiet, with subtle depictions of the delicate nuances of class and social structure, and the tension caused by the need for public proprietry balanced against private desires. Her observations of relationships are equally acute as she exposes the feelings between man and woman, parent and child, sister and sister. In some ways she’s quite subversive because she’s not afraid to question the moral values of her day.

I have to admit, that whilst running around doing bits and pieces for my mother I forgot about this anniversary, but I wanted to post something, because EH Young is one of my favourite authors, and Jane has gone to all the trouble of organising a ‘Birthday Book’, so fans of forgotten female authors ought to support her. So here are a few rather garbled thoughts on William, which I enjoyed immensely.

It focuses on the relationships within the Nesbitt family – shipping magnate William, his wife Kate, and their five grown-up children, Dora, Mabel, Lydia, Janet and Walter. On the face of it the Nesbitts are a happy, conventional family. Then Lydia leaves her husband for another man, and the scandal affects everyone in different ways (the novel was written in 1925 when such behaviour would have made Lydia a social outcast and brought censure on her family). And as the novel unfolds become cracks appear in other relationships.

There is Dora, miserably married to Herbert, who is a bully, but a wealthy bully, and she remains with him for the sake of the children and her luxurious lifestyle. And there is Mabel, something of an outsider in the family, who marries mean-minded, penny-pinching John and makes a virtue out of wearing ugly shoes. dowdy clothes, and running everywhere because she cannot afford a taxi. Then there is lonely, unhappy Janet, craving independence, but still living at home and in love with Lydia’s husband Oliver. And there is Lydia herself, who remains something of a cipher, seen through the eyes of others, her motives a mystery but, seemingly, no happier for leaving her husband than she was with him.

And, of course, there are William and Kate, and the rift whiich opens between them when Lydia runs away. William is the chief protagonist, and we see things mainly from his point of view. Obviously a shrewd businessman, he’s a self-made man who has worked his way) up in the world, and is satisfied with his achievements (but never smug). Quiet and unassuming, he is, at heart, a family man who loves his wife and children, but is not blind to their faults, or his own – he’s very self-aware, always slightly detached and amused, but never judgemental. And although he wants his children to be happy he realises they must make their own decisions, and that those decisions may not always please him. And although he doesn’t want to interfere he is tempted, on occasions, to nudge things along in what he hopes is the right direction…

His wife Kate is no match for him intellectually, and is inclined to seek refuge in ill health when she thinks she is badly used by family and friends. Social position and doing the right thing are very important to her, and she has her own aspirations for the children, urging them to fall in with her wishes, and she doesn’t agree with William when he says: “I’ve told you, Kate, we can’t have them as we want them. We’re lucky to have them as they are.” She is devastated by Lydia;s behaviour, and is hurt and angry when he supports his favourite daughter. It would be easy to dislike Kate, but I felt sorry for her – I think there’s a bit of empty nest syndrome going on here, and she’s very much a woman of her time and class, with too much time on her hands, and not enough to do.

And while she’s not as self-aware as William, deep down she knows that the children are their own people, with their own dreams and desires, and she does not really understand them. Young tells us: “It had been different when they were all young and at school. She had felt then that they were her own, but perhaps she had been mistaken, perhaps she had not known their secret selves, and she remembered, for the first time for years, how she had once found Lydia crying in the nursery and had not been able to find out what her trouble was. It seemed to her that what she had missed then might be evading her still. She had given birth to five bodies and she would always be a stranger to their souls. This was a terrible thought and it would have been more terrible still if she had known that it was William’s too.”

The old Virago edition.

It’s very much a book about marriage and parenting, and how family life is not always happy, and how different people cope with the problems in different ways. The characters are beautifully drawn, and the relationships between them delicately and sensitively portrayed. And there are some wonderful moments exposing the snobbery and pretensions of middle-class life, and some very funny scenes (many of them involving poor Mabel and her three priggish sons) – the account of a family trip on William’s newest steamboat is absolutely hilarious.

A Typing Ghost…

The Comforters, by Muriel Spark, is probably the only novel to feature a talking typewriter. It ‘belongs’ to Caroline Rose, who is writing a book about the 20th century novel – Form in the Modern Novel, we are told. But she’s having difficulty with the chapter on realism… Which is hardly surprising when you consider that she now believes herself to be a character in a book and her life is turned upside down by Typing Ghost. Not only does she hear the ghostly tap-tappity-tapping of typewriter keys, she also hears a voice (or voices) reciting her every thought, word and action. It is, as I’m sure you’ll agree, most unnerving. Here is her first encounter with the Typing Ghost:

“Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter. It seemed to come through the wall on her left. It stopped, and was followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts. It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any problem with Helena.

There seemed, then, to have been more than one voice: it was a recitative, a chanting in unison. It was something like a concurrent series of echoes.”

Is what she hears real or illusory, she wonders. Is she going mad? Being haunted? Imagining things? Spark famously described how the Typing Ghost was inspired by her own hallucinatory experiences whilst taking Dexedrine. In her case letters formed and re-formed on the page, a phenomenon that couldn’t be replicated on a printed page. And talking about her craft in the early 1960s she explained: “Fiction to me is a kind of parable. You have got to make up your mind it’s not true. Some kind of truth emerges from it.” I think that needs to be borne in mind when reading The Comforters.

The Comforters, by Muriel Spark.

Published in 1957, it was Spark’s first novel, but she was already a very accomplished writer. Her trade mark pared-back prose is already there, and the theme of religious belief, that blurring of boundaries, the mix of reality and unreality, sanity and madness, goodness and evil. The novel poses philosophical questions about life, art, belief and creation, revealing layer upon layer of meaning. It’s difficult to establish what is fact and what is fiction, because this is a book about someone writing a book who is herself a character in a book. I loved this – Spark’s witty, elegant prose is second to none, and she’s very funny, but also very malicious, and a bit of an iconoclast, knocking down societal institutions and behavioural norms. And, as always with spark, there is a dark edge to the humour.

It dodges about in time and place as the perspective shifts from character to character, and the various threads of the plot twist, and pull apart, and twine together again, taking in smuggling, bigamy and blackmail, with passing references to the possibility of a Russian spy ring and black magic. The characters (presented with superb ironic detachment) fail to connect with each other in any meaningful way, although they all seem, somehow, to be linked. And they are, on the whole, self-consciously self-obsessed.

Muriel Spark. (Pic from Wikipedia)

There is Caroline herself, recovering from a mental illness and converting to Catholicism, which appears to bring her little joy or comfort – her three days at the Pilgrim Centre of St Philumena are unforgettably awful. Then there is her boyfriend Laurence Manders, who finds diamonds in his grandmother’s bread and wants to know about the strange men who keep calling on her. Who are they, and what do they want? And what about sinister Georgina Hogg, who is the kind of Christian who gets Christians a bad name. A former employee of Laurence’s charitable mother, she is now catering warden at St Philumena’s, but pops up elsewhere when least expected, revealing an uncanny ability to winkle out secrets best left undisturbed.

*This is my first contribution to the year-long celebration of Muriel Spark being held by HeavenAli to mark the centenary of the author’s birth. It’s dead easy to join in and you don’t have to struggle with one of those link thingies – read her introductory post here. 

A Monstrous Mother

My Virago copy features Nahende, Rue des Belles Feuilles, by Felix Vallotton on the cover.

Today’s post is by way of being a tribute to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who was born on this day in 1879, and is one of the Underappreciated Lady Authors being celebrated by Jane at Beyond Eden Rock – you’ll find her explanatory post here.

Mary Bascomb, the central character in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Her Son’s Wife calls to mind Evangeline in The Home-Maker. She must be one of literature’s most monstrous women. A widowed teacher with a grown-up son she is perfect at everything she does, at home and at work, and she keeps a tight hold on all those she comes into contact with – fellow teachers, pupils, their parents, and her son. Especially her son. She has his future all mapped out: she’s selected his future career (a lawyer, like his father before him) and has a suitable girl lined up to marry him… But Ralph throws a spanner in the works when he writes to say he has just got marrried, and is throwing up any idea of the law so he can get a job as soon as he graduates. To say she is devastated is an understatement; Ralph has been the centre of her universe for some 20 years or so, and the phrase ‘possessive mother’ doesn’t come anywhere near describing her relationship with him.

Now she felt a frightful limitless energy, felt that she could have risen from her chair, and walked forty times around the world, if that would unmarry Ralph and give him back to her as she had had him… as she had thought she had him.

But nothing could now give her back Ralph. The deadly certainty of this was what was being served to her as she sat there straight in her straight chair, her arms laid on her well-polished dining-room table.

She felt the deadly poison of this certainty filling her body. But she did not die. There she sat, Mary Bascomb, who must go on living. By nine o’clock the next morning she must have found have found some way of going on living.

Ralph has warned her: “Lottie’s not your kind, but she’s all right.” Lottie certainly isn’t Mrs Bascomb’s kind.

She stepped into her hall and saw hanging on her hatrack a bright green hat of an eccentric shape, made of very shiny, varnished, coarsely-braided straw, which she recognised as one of the cheap models of that season. Below it, leaning against the wall, stood a bright green cotton parasol, with a thick, bright green tassel hanging from the handle. Mrs Bascomb, gazing at it fixedly, saw that the fibers of the artificial silk had worn off in places and showed the rough jute thread of which it was made. The air was heavy with perfume… the sort of perfume that would go with that hat.

That hat, and the parasol, and the perfume, defines her opinion of her daughter-in-law before she even meets her, and Lottie does nothing to change her view. Poor Lottie has had few chances in life. Her mother died when she was young, she has been given little in the way of love and affection, and values people only for the material possessions she can get out of them. She’s badly educated, silly, flirtatious, and isn’t interested in cooking or cleaning. The reason for the hasty marriage soon becomes apparent, but Lottie is no better at looking after her baby daughter than she is at caring for house and husband – and he is no help because his mother has always done everything for him.

At one point, Mrs Bascomb moves away, leaving the couple to muddle through as best they can. Eventually she returns, determined to create a better life her grandaughter Dids and to ensure that the child doesn’t end up like Lottie.

Soon everythng in the house is running more or less smoothly, but Mrs Bascomb needs to do somethng about Lottie – and a visit from a quack doctor gives her the opening she needs. Plump, pretty Lottie is a bit of a hypochondriac and is persuads that bed rest will cure her ailments. In reality there is nothing wrong her that wouldn’t be cured by sensible shoes, diet and exercise, but its only a short step from bedrest to becoming a permanent invalid, and Mrs Bascomb softens the pill by ensuring that Lottie has the best everything – the latest books and magazines, the choicest morsels of food, the most fashionable dresses, and the softest slippers. With Lottie confined to her room, Mrs Bascomb has a free hand to bring up her grandaughter as she wants. She does everything in her power to make Lottie’s life pleasant and happy, and to ensure she won’t want to resume normal life. But she is not proud of her actions and stops wearing the locket that contains a photo of her husband.

Aas the book progresses Mrs Bascomb becomes more human and more compassionate. She rebuilds her relationship with her son, and comes to realise that she never let him make decisions for himself or stand on his own feet, and that he felt intimidated by her high expectations. She can say he is frustrated, stuck in a job he hates, and works subtly behind the scenes to help get him a job as a sports reporter – and he turns out to be cery good at it, because spot is his one big passion.

She is still controlling people, but she has managed to find Ralph something that will make him happy, rather than something which makes her happy. And, surprisingly, it turns out that Lottie is perfectly satisfied with he life as an invalid, where she can be the centre of the attention and have all the pretty things she craves without having to lift a finger to get them. Like a small child, she enjoys being petted and fussed by her friends, is adored by her daugher, and likes having Mrs Bascombe to ‘mother’ her.

Even more surprising is the way she treats Dibs, providing love, encouragement and advice, but never imposing her own will on the girl. She has learned from her past mistakes, and the measure of her success is that at the end of the novel Dids is clever, intelligent, compassionate, caring and independent, and is able to set off for college with her friends, to make a life of her own, on her own terms.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

I think I enjoyed this more than The Home-Maker, and it was interesting to see how a mother’s obsessive love for a child can be a destructive force that can wreck lives – but can also be used for good. There are themes of possessive love, emotional manipulation, and the need for people to find thir own place in the world, doing what they are good at and what makes them (and the people around them) happy. I think this last point was an ongoing concern for the author. And while the characters may not always be very likable, you can sympathise with them and see how they got to be as they are, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher is not afraid to let them grow and develop.

And a word about the cover, which features Nahende, Rue des Belles Feuilles, by Felix Vallotton, Nine times out of ten I think the pictures on those old green-spined books are well-chosen and fit the theme or the feel of the novel. But this is the tenth time, and while I don’t dislike the painting, I think the lady looks too plump and cosy. It needs someone taller and thinner, who makes you feel a little uncomfortable.

Poor Cow

Poor Cow, by Nell Dunn, was one of those iconic ‘social reality’ books of the 1960s. Published in 1967, it passed me by at the time (I was probably too young), but later I remember seeing the film, starring Terence Stamp and Carol White. It was controversial, presenting a picture of East End life that many people didn’t know existed – it was more than 20 years since the war had ended, and 10 years since Harold Macmillan’s famous ‘we have never had it so good’ speech, so there was an assumption that ‘homes for heroes’ had been built and a new social order established. But Dunn revealed the world of the urban poor, with bad housing, inadequate education, ill-paid jobs and little opportunity for improvement, and I think this book still has relevance today, when the gulf between rich and poor seems greater than ever. But it’s not overtly political, and Dunn doesn’t judge or campaign. Dunn simply presents a slice of life, telling it like it is.

At the novel’s heart is Joy, 22 years old, with a baby son (Jonny), and a husband who is a thief. We see the world from her perspective – her thoughts, her dreams, her relationships, her friends, her jobs. She is, as Margaret Drabble points out in the introduction to my 1988 Virago edition, both immoral and amoral; but she’s also warm, loving, passionate and gutsy, getting by as best she can, just like everyone else, seizing life with both hands and embracing what fate offers, whether it’s good or bad. She’s a curious mix of street wise and innocent, but she makes her own decisions about her life, refusing to see herself as a victim and, since she never stops to think, the story has a vibrancy and immediacy.

Carol White and Terence Stamp in the film version of Poor Cow.

“I’ve always been a daydreamer, me Joy – Joysy as my Auntie calls me, Daydreamed about – oh, loads of things – just to have something, to be something. I don’t want to be down and out all the time,” Joy tells us, which is kind of sad because you just know it’s never, ever going to happen. For a short time things start to look up and the couple get a luxury flat in Ruislip, financed by Tom’s ill-gotten gains. Joy doesn’t have a very high opinion of Ruislip. “The world was our oyster and we chose Ruislip,” she says. But they don’t stay long because he’s sent to prison and Joy moves in with her Auntie Emm, who lives in one room, ‘off National Assistance and pills’.

Then she gets together with Tom’s mate Dave, who is quite nice, but a bit dopey, and a very inept buglar. He arrives home one night with pockets full of necklaces, and relates how the ‘old girl’ wasn’t away after all, so was locked in the toilet while he and his friends took her jewellery. “I gave her a glass of water when we finished,” he tells Joy (but omits to say that one of them hit her over the head). The police are hard on his heels, and as they hammer on the door he tries to climb out of the window – until Joy begs him not to leave, at which point he returns and lets them in!

Soon Joy’s back with Antie Emm, working as a barmaid, doing some nude modelling (for £2 an hour, which seems like a fortune), and having lots of sex – she says she was never bothered before, but now she takes her pleasures when and where she can. and is hard-headed enough to get what she can out of the encounters, but she has her standards, and refuses to prostitute herself, maintaining that ‘you lose the pleasure of it if you turn professional’. She also writes long, ill-spelt letters to Dave, vowing eternal love, promising to wait for him, and giving him an (edited) acount of her life. Eventually Tom is released from jail and she resumes her wifely duties, and although he doesn’t seem to appreciate her efforts she remains optimistic about the future:

“Then sometimes, when he’s home, he’s good to me, that’s another thing. If he were rotten all the time I could go but sometimes for a week at a time he’s all over me. I can’t do no wromg – I’m a smashing wife – he even lets me wear me pony tail – and I feel a proper mum, I feel great. I go up the park with Jonny and buy daffodils for the table and put a red tulip in the toilet to make it smell nice and the place looks smashing and we’re happy again.”

The one constant in her life seems to be her fiercely protective love for her son (although I’m not sure she would be regarded as a good mother by today’s standards) and it’s hard to think of a similar lterary heroine – the nearest equivalent might be Babe Gordon in Mae West’s The Constant Sinner. But Joy is warm-hearted and much more human – basically, she just wants someone to love her. And Dunn is a better writer. Oddly, her writing probably has more in common with Virginia Woolf than Mae West: the life she portrays is a world away from the rarified atmosphere of Woolf’s world, with its well educated, well-heeled characters, but Poor Cow is written in a kind of up-dated stream of consciousness, using colloquial language. It moves between the author’s words, to Joy’s thoughts and her ill-written letters to her jailed lover Dave (her spelling is idiosynccratic), but it is always about her or from her point view, creating a very personal picture of a of a poor, ill-educated working class girl. According to Drabble the ‘elegance’ of the prose ‘conceals the craft’ but I don’t think elegance is the right word at all. Woolf may be elegant, Dunn is not. But there’s a freshness to the writing and the novel, which moves from episode to episode in an almost picaresque fashion, is actually quite tightly structured.

Dunn came from a ‘good’ background, but lived in Battersea, worked in local sweet factory for a time, and listened to local women talking about their lives. This, presumably, provided material for Poor Cow, and Up The Junction. Today she seems to be somewhat forgotten, but she deserves to be remembered as a pioneering author. She was one of the first novelists (male or female) to write a grittily realistic novel about working-class women in the 20^th century, showing their relationships and sexual desires while exposing social issues.

This has been languishing among the TBRs for ages, and I thought it would make a nice start to the The Official 2018 TBR Pile Challenge, hosted by https://roofbeamreader.com/2017/11/07/announcing-the-official-2018-tbr-pile-challenge/ but I forgot to sign up while I was ill. So I;m having my own unofficial TBR Pile Challenge!