Enid Bagnold, “The Loved and Envied”

I’ll get the trivia out of the way first: Enid Bagnold’s great-grand-daughter is Samantha Cameron, wife of David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Also, the film of National Velvet (based on a book by Bagnold) appeared in 1944, seven years before the 1951 publication date of The Loved and Envied.

Now I’ll get the cheating out of the way: though The Loved and Envied was published by Virago, it’s very hard to find in that edition and I re-read it in hardcover. I regret this deeply because the cover of the Virago is a ravishing portrait of Lady Diana Cooper, I believe in her wedding dress. I’d guess it was an Oswald Birley;  if you have it on your book shelf would you tell me?

Lady Diana Manners in 1916

Lady Diana is crucial to The Loved and Envied because this is a book about beauty and old age. I have believed for a while that Bagnold and Lady Diana Manners, as she was then, were debutantes together, though the dates don’t quite tally. Bagnold was presentable but not a beauty. Lady Diana was widely considered the loveliest woman of her era. She was also very near-sighted, hence the slightly unfocused blue stare. And I think I remember from the Philip Ziegler biography of her that she, like Ruby Maclean in The Loved and Envied, felt quite detached from her face. Late in the novel, at the age of 53, Ruby tells a friend that having beauty like hers “gives one, all the time, the something more than one asks, and I shall have now to grow used to the little bit less,… that will in future be given one on demand.”

We meet Ruby as an older woman — actually we see her first, through the eyes of one of the many female characters in the book who envy her. It’s a wonderful set-piece, as Ruby appears in a theater box, decked out in a diamond necklace. What the descriptions of jewels and clothes in this book must have meant in 1951 Britain! The narrative zigzags back and forth, stitching together Ruby’s life with the lives of her family and friends. It is an unrepentantly glamorous story, in which most of the characters are titled and most of the rest are their servants. I admit a deep fascination with the milieu. Especially with the clothes — there is a little haute-couture Cinderella section toward the end that I read several times, almost swooning.

But The Loved and Envied is more than a vintage Vogue between hard covers. It’s a fascinating question: how does stupendous beauty form a character, shape a life? And then what happens as it retreats? To help her story along Bagnold gives Ruby a friend who has overcome ugliness and crafted a satisfying career. Yet Cora says, “Can you faintly imagine what it is not to be well served by one’s appearance, to have, at each new relationship, to live it down?”  Men fall for Ruby like dominoes, and her daughter Miranda — pleasant-looking enough — burns with agonized jealousy of her mother.

Bagnold settles nothing. That’s not her intention (though the end does get a little bit talky as she tries to settle a few characters’ fates). She just wants to set us thinking. I have to add that I adored, as well as the setting and the genuinely attractive characters,the highly metaphorical writing style. It’s very mid-20th century English — far from American simplicity  – and I find it playful, moving, and immensely enjoyable. For instance, about friendship Bagnold says, “… little spoken of is the friendship, in age, of two people who might have loved. For them what has never been said is a last elixir of youth, the only bottle on the shelf never taken down.” If this is the kind of writing that pleases you, The Loved and Envied will be a great treat.

Late-breaking addition: Darlene at Roses Over a Cottage Door found a copy of this in a second-hand shop and has posted a photo if you want to see the lovely cover.

This is my last effort in the Virago Reading Week Challenge, and thanks to Rachel’s and Carolyn’s hard work in putting it together, I’ve read dozens of wonderful blog posts. It’s really been inspiring. The TBR stack (I keep mine in my head where it gathers wool rather than dust) just got a lot taller!

 

 

Somerset Maugham, “The Razor’s Edge”

Baffling. This is one of those books that was on people’s shelves when I grew up. Grandmothers had Maugham’s novels, along with Galsworthy’s: he must have done very well with the Book of the Month Club. I had never read him, never even tried. But Rick is reading the forthcoming Selina Hastings biography and when I darkened the door of a bookstore a few weeks ago, this was on the table so I bought it for him. He seemed to enjoy it. Now I wonder why. And I wonder why I slogged along to the end. And I wonder even more why it remains in print.

I had the vague idea that it was about someone seeking for enlightenment: must have gleaned that much from ads for the 1984 movie with Bill Murray which I never saw. What I couldn’t grasp was that this description was literally true. The Razor’s Edge was published in 1944 by which time Maugham was already an established novelist. And the central character in the book is the enigmatic Larry Darrell who leaves a comfortable upper-middle-class life in Chicago to, basically, bum around the planet. It’s all there, the tramp steamers and the ashram and the guru, the grubby clothes and the cars in disrepair and the despairing relatives. True, Maugham was one of the first to write in this vein; the wisdom of the non-Christian faiths was not widely appreciated in 1944. And maybe, when he wrote this book, Larry Darrell’s ardent longing for enlightenment spoke to readers who saw a predominantly conventional life before them.

But I kept thinking — where is the conflict? Where the narrative tension? Why do I continue to turn the pages when I have no investment in these characters? Pure curiosity is my answer, but I still don’t grasp the appeal. The tale is heavily framed: Maugham himself narrates and keeps appearing. The action (mostly people sitting around talking) occurs over the course of some two dozen years, and takes place largely in London, Paris, and the Riviera, with Chicago interludes. Maugham’s got a sharp eye and his worldly bachelor, Elliott Templeton, is an entertaining sketch of an adept social climber of the post-Edwardian age. (Papal coronet on his pj’s: nice touch.) There’s a good girl, Isabel, and a girl gone bad, Sophie, and a worldly French former artists’ model whose role seemed pretty expendable. I suppose the fairly frank treatment of sexuality might have made this book “racy” when it first came out, and that could have boosted Maugham’s sales figures.

I understand, dimly, that some readers are looking for a path to transcendence. (Our reading material doesn’t overlap widely, I’ll admit.) I would expect, though, that in 2010 you would go directly to Larry Darrell’s sources, which are pretty main-stream today. The social comedy portion of  The Razor’s Edge is delivered more elegantly in Enid Bagnold’s The Loved and Envied, and the Riviera local color in Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw. Which doesn’t leave  Maugham much to do, does it?