Elizabeth Taylor, “A View of the Harbour”

Elizabeth Taylor is one of the few writers whose books I will choose blindly. If she wrote a novel and I haven’t read it, I don’t even bother to see what it’s about. Or “about,” because with Taylor there’s always a great deal seething away below the surface. A View of the Harbour, for instance, is one of the more ostensibly quiet of her novels. The structure is apparently casual: the omniscient narrator rambles from one resident to another of the seaside village of Newby, examining the little community and its surroundings in a clear, dispassionate light.

Cadgwith Cove, probably more picturesque than Taylor’s Newby.

The outlander is Bertram Hemingway, a retired naval officer who fancies himself an artist and has come to Newby to paint. His function for Taylor, of course, is to be the outsider who misunderstands or the outsider who notices afresh, and provides insight. The two genteel families are the Cazabons and their next-door neighbor, Tory Foyle. Tory is an unstable element in this setting, a beautiful young divorcee with a young son and a propensity for fecklessness. Beth Cazabon, the novelist who lives next door, has always been Tory’s staid, predictable sidekick. But, this being an Elizabeth Taylor novel, Beth Cazabon has her own unruly qualities. In Angela Thirkell’s hands, she would merely be the frumpy neighbor with the peculiar daughters, but Beth, as Tory points out, has a wild and reliable source of satisfaction in her writing. “‘She is about the only happy person I know,’” Tory tells Robert Cazabon. “‘Don’t you see how she is to be envied? Nothing people do can ever break her.’”

And why is Tory discussing Robert’s wife with him, on these intimate terms? Well might you ask: this relationship is another un-Thirkell development. So is the coarse but vital Mrs. Bracey, fat, crippled and malicious, who makes life grim for her daughters Maisie and Iris. Then the widowed Lily Wilson, proprietress of a pathetic Wax Museum, seems on the verge of slipping into alcoholism or a kind of informal prostitution or possibly both. In fact A View of the Harbour resembles Stella Gibbons’ classic Cold Comfort Farm, with its relish of peculiarities. Taylor, though, avoids Gibbons‘ satiric tone, so we participate in Lily Wilson’s desperation and Mrs. Bracey’s will to dominate.

And what happens in the novel? Oh, life and death. The war is recently over, Newby is poor and shabby. Summer comes and the tourists don’t. Bertram doesn’t paint. Maisie flirts with her mother’s lodger, a fisherman, and Mrs. Bracey kicks him out of the house. The Cazabons’ daft daughter Prudence feeds disgusting messes to her two elegant Siamese cats, Yvette and Guilbert. Tory buys frivolous hats. A yacht skims the water of the bay, white sails looking irrelevant in their beauty. Hats, cats, boats, hearts, they’re all equally important.

Dorothy Whipple, “Someone at a Distance”

If I knew how, I would subtitle this post “Persephone Power.” Of course I knew Dorothy Whipple’s name because some of you read her for Persephone Reading Weekend back in February. But last week, when I was in Southern California promoting LVG, a woman at a luncheon told me how much she loved Whipple. Then when I walked into the charming Laguna Beach Books for a reading (I need you to imagine the sun setting over the Pacific here, to add local color to the scene), there was Someone at a Distance next to the cash register to welcome me. Has to be a good sign when you’re reading in a store that carries Persephones, right?

The fateful beautiful cover by Megan Wilson

But THEN at a Memorial Day luncheon I sat next to a very charming and funny woman who, as it turned out, designed the cover! (Along with many other covers I have admired, including the beautiful cover of Wait for Me!) So the stars or the fates were all pushing me toward Dorothy Whipple and Someone at a Distance and I was not disappointed.

It’s a rather stealthy novel, actually. Ellen and Avery North lead a charmed life in a big comfortable house in the country. Avery, bluff and handsome, owns half of a publishing house and commutes to London while Ellen joyfully keeps the house running with help from a pair of picturesque daily women. Hugh, eighteen, is in the Army; Anne, fifteen, is at boarding school and chiefly lives for her horse Roma. The only flaw in the picture is Avery’s selfish and bored mother, who lives nearby and meddles.

Oh, well. There’s an apple and a snake in every Eden, apparently. (We wouldn’t have novels otherwise.) Whipple spent so much time building the picture of family comfort, loyalty and happiness that I was startled by her even-handedness. With the same thoroughness she dismantled her own creation — thereby putting a comfortable distance between herself and Angela Thirkell. Whipple’s omniscient narrator spends as much time in the consciousness of the French hussy Louise as she does in the baffled masculine inner world of Avery or the sweet, warm, cluelessness of Ellen. Result: I don’t know what I’m supposed to make of the story, and I keep turning it over in my head. Should Ellen have been more wary? Were the children spoiled? Can this marriage be saved? Why do we so enjoy reading about nasties like Louise and Mrs. North — to prove that we aren’t like them?

Or is the point merely that, as an Episcopal priest told a friend of mine at pre-wedding counseling, “Men can be beasts, you know.” (True story.)

Clearly I need to read more Dorothy Whipple to find out what she really thinks.

Angela Thirkell, “What Did It Mean?”

Published in 1954, What Did It Mean is Thirkell’s homage to the Coronation. It focuses on the Coronation festivities in Northbridge, and the comedy resides largely in observation of a group of volunteers mounting a theatrical production. Now that I think of it, E.F. Benson’s account in one of the Lucia novels provides the precedent though Benson is bitchier than Thirkell.  Pleasure in this one is diluted by Thirkell’s habit of repetition; if she tells us once she tells us six times about Noel Merton’s slight crush on Mrs. Brandon. Every time she brings two characters together she re-establishes their previous relationship. If you were talking to her, you’d say, “Yes, I remember that.” Tedious, but redeemed by the business in which young Lord Mellings performs with Aubrey Clover, Thirkell’s answer to Noel Coward.

Angela Thirkell, “Jutland Cottage”

I wasn’t kidding. If I want comfort reading, I know where to get it. Some of the post-war Thirkells get dyspeptic. The woman was a crashing snob and you’re almost embarrassed for her when she starts going on about the newly rich or the more dreaful manifestations of mid-century culture like slang or women in trousers. But Jutland Cottage is a rather sweet Cinderella story, and that’s always fun. Margot Phelps, the forty-year-old daughter of elderly and impoverished Admiral Phelps, works herself to the bone to support and care for her infirm parents. Thirkell much admires her courage and selflessness. A group of neighbors band together to ease Margot’s burden and to perform a kind of upper-class postwar English makeover which involves supplying her with a new tweed suit and a better “foundation belt” which sinister item is never clearly described but does a great deal to improve Margot’s looks. Once cleaned up, Margot finds love with a rich commercial gardener. That’s class mobility in Barsetshire.  Very soothing.

Mollie Panter-Downes, “Good Evening, Mrs. Craven”

Another nifty revival from those folks at Persephone Books in London. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote the “Letter from London” in the New Yorker for 45 years. In addition, she wrote short stories, 21 of which are collected here. They all date from World War II. They are small in scope, more like snapshots of a situation than narratives, but the keen observation and the lack of sentiment make them quite fascinating. Panter-Downes seems immensely reliable.

She deals largely with the women left behind in England, ever more  hungry, lonely, anxious, and cold. One story is narrated from the point of view of a man, kept in London on important war work, who chafes at his safe domestic routine and envies a former schoolmate who manages to get himself killed as a parachutist. A couple of them focus on the strange relationships wartime forged: lodgers, paying guests, master/servant relationships turned topsy turvey. There are a couple of lovely ones (“Battle of the Greeks” and “Literary Scandal at the Sewing Party”) that poke fun at the country working parties where the women of a village cooperated to make “comforts for the troops.” (Angela Thirkell had a good time with these, too.) Melancholy is never far away, though. The title story, “Good Evening, Mrs. Craven” uses the device of a dinner at a Strand steakhouse to sketch the pitiful situation of a long-time kept woman whose lover has been sent abroad with the military. It’s all very small-scale but affecting nonetheless.

Andrew Taylor, “Bleeding Heart Square”

It’s a really good day when you find a new writer who publishes clever, literate murder mysteries. It’s an especially good day when this writer has been at it for a while and there’s a backlog of titles for you to work through. And it’s a terrific day when the writer is Andrew Taylor, and your introduction to him is Bleeding Heart Square.

Bleeding Heart Square hardcover

His U.S. publisher, Hyperion, is issuing some of this previous books along with this one, and they all have beautiful covers with architectural photographs, vaguely sinister, dark-toned — not unlike the covers of the Alan Furst books. Say what you will, these designers know just how to signal the contents of these novels. Bleeding Heart Square is set in 1934 London, as economic conditions reduce the options of many Britons, and the Fascist party starts to stir up all kinds of ugly trouble. But Taylor, clever man, maps this situation onto a 19th-century framework. Did you remember that Bleeding Heart Yard is the setting of a big chunk of Little Dorrit? (It’s OK, I had to check, and I just read the darn thing.) Furthermore certain characters in Bleeding Heart Square — the alcoholic gentleman ne’er-do-well, the physically imposing and menacing landlord — share DNA with Dickens’ characters.

But Taylor’s not slavish, and the mystery part eventually overruns the Dickensian scaffolding. Lydia Langstone, 28 and pretty, has left her boorish rich husband (soon to join the British Union of Fascists) because he bullies her. She flees to her estranged father, Captain Ingleby-Lewis, who lives in a squalid boarding house in Bleeding Heart Square. Taylor is especially good on the nitty-gritty reality here: Lydia left home with “Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Ones’ Own but she had forgotten her toothbrush.”

There’s a murder, there are sinister clues (literal bleeding hearts are regularly sent to the frightening landlord, Serridge). There’s a downtrodden police investigator (more Dickens) and a fresh-faced journalist who falls for Lydia. Several sections take place in the country but it’s more Stella Gibbons than Angela Thirkell. No laughs, though.

Still, all the literary allusions bring a level of playfulness to the plotting. Which, by the way, is excellent. Twists and turns all the way, right to the end. A really artful piece of work.

Sarah Waters, “The Little Stranger”

Why is this title sinister? Maybe it’s the combination of ideas: “stranger” always connotes something potentially menacing, and when you add the diminutive you tip over into the creepy. Then you fabricate a decaying English country house, a self-deceiving narrator, the social chaos of the years just after World War II, and you have The Little Stranger.

I don’t read a lot of this kind of thing, but  I don’t suppose anyone writing it gets far from the shadow of The Turn of the Screw. In this instance Waters seems to be enjoying both discipleship and freedom from influence. Her overriding concern here is the dislocation and anxiety provoked by the downward mobility of the “county” family that owns Hundreds Hall and the upward mobility of characters like the local builder Babb, who buys land (“the grass-snake meadow,” in family parlance) from the Ayres family and builds council houses within view of the house. In a way it’s like reading post-war Angela Thirkell from the other side of the green baize door.

Our narrator has complete social mobility. He is Doctor Faraday (no first name that I can remember: hmmmmm), son of a maid at Hundreds, a “clever boy” who was sent to good schools, worked hard, and has established a foothold in the professional class.  He’s like one of Thomas Hardy’s characters, though, in that no one, least of all he himself, can forget his plebeian origins. Faraday first comes to Hundreds Hall to see the teenage maid Betty, who is disturbed by what we’d now call paranormal phenomena in the house. He naturally becomes emotionally involved in the lives of all four of the residents, and falls under the spell of the house.

So… is Hundreds Hall really haunted? This has to be the engine of a ghost story, the need to know what’s actually going on.  Waters spins out the tension, as the weird incidents pile up, family members succumb, and the house itself takes on an uncanny power. Quite early on, Faraday has the sense to grasp that the local people of Warwickshire, the former servants and farm laborers, had “begun to withdraw their labour, their belief in the house; and the house was collapsing, like a pyramid of cards.”  So, of course, is the gentry. Waters brilliantly sketches the threat posed by a nouveau-riche family that takes over a nearby house and desecrates it by tearing out paneling and threatening to install a swimming pool. Also brilliant is a visit Faraday makes with Caroline Ayres (daughter of the house and eventually the object of his romantic intentions) to one of the unfinished council houses. “What is a fitted kitchen?” asks Caroline. “There are no nasty gaps,” Faraday answers, “and no odd corners.”

Hundreds, of course, is nothing but  nasty gaps and odd corners. Waters is even-handed enough to show us its extraordinary beauty as well as its nastiness. The book ends — as, really, it had to — on an unsettling note. The house continues to crumble. Faraday, who still has keys, visits it and attempts to stave off the worst of the decay. He claims no understanding of the strange occurrences, saying only that the house has “thrown the family off, like springing turf throwing off a footprint.”  In a way it makes the fate of the House of Usher look refreshingly clear-cut.