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Eleanor by Julian Fane (Constable, 1993)

 

Eleanor is a curious novel that chronicles the early life of its heroine, Eleanor Carty, who is born illegitimate in 1905 and raised by two spinster sisters who run a home for children born out of wedlock in a London suburb.  She grows into a beautiful young woman and talented pianist, and at 17 makes a disastrous marriage to David Ashken, a brilliant but brutal violinist.  She manages to escape from his abuse and eventually divorce him, and moves to America, where she becomes an actress in touring companies of Broadway plays.  But after a few years the death of one of her Auntys returns her to London, where she falls in love with a handsome and talented actor who is unfortunately 35 years older than she -- an age difference that forces him to leave her.  Heartbroken, she once again moves to America, this time living in Santa Barbara in a cottage on the estate of Virginia Heim, a millionaire heiress, who is kind and affectionate and sponsors Eleanor as she resumes her study of the piano, which leads to a career of being two of a four-handed piano duo.  She is courted by a beautiful Scottish nobleman who she does not love but marries for security and returns with him to England.

Eleanor is an appealing creation: beautiful, talented, intelligent, honest, independent, strong-willed.  Her story is interesting and original and Fane's writing is succinct and elegant.  It reminded me a little bit of Penelope Gilliat's oddly brilliant and unusual books.  I'd like to learn more about Fane, and read more of his work.  I remember loving his first book, Morning, an incandescent memoir about early childhood.

 

*Ron by Carl Tiktin (Arbor House, 1979)

 

Ron Starr (nee Stansky -- his Jewish father changed the name for "professional" reasons) grows up in a sort of fake Leave-It-To-Beaver home in upstate New York in the 1950s.  His father is an ineffectual and defeated lawyer, his mother is a pretentious hysteric, and both and his older brother, Lenny, are homosexual.

Lenny, who is dark and semitic, is less able, or interested, in hiding his sexuality and is banished from the family when he's discovered having sex with his high school friend.  Ron, a golden boy, learning the value of discretion, keeps his queerness hidden.  In college he discovers an interest and ability in playwrighting and moves to New York City, where he falls in with a bohemian theater crowd.  But his play gets worse and worse the more he rewrites it, and he finally gives up on his dream of Broadway fame and fortune.  He begins selling life insurance, which, thanks to his confidence and charm, he excels at, and is soon managing a team of salesmen, married to a secretary, and the father of a daughter.

But of course his homosexual urges persist and he soon sets up a young lover in a Greenwich Village apartment where he spends about half his time.  He begins drinking and misbehaving in various ways that threaten his career and his marriage, but when he is offered a promotion to management he cannot resist the lures and comforts of a straight life and renounces. his true nature.

Ron is crudely conceived and written but does afford an interesting and entertaining, if skewed, look at midcentury queer life in middle America.

 

Mrs. Panopoulis by Jon Godden (Knopf, 1959)

 

A beautiful, devastating short novel by an author I increasingly admire.

Isa Panopoulis is a wealthy, beautiful, supremely elegant and twice-married (and twice-widowed) elderly Englishwoman traveling with her companion and heir, her niece Flora, in Africa.

The entire novel takes place on a single day when the ship they are cruising on stops at an island off the coast of Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).  Isa and Flora go ashore along with Martin, a kind but penniless English young man who is returning to his struggling farm in the interior, and Humphrey Arbuthnot, a middle-aged English gentleman who knew and admired Mrs. Panopoulis when they were both younger.

Mrs. Panopoulis' heart is failing; the heat onshore is debilitatingly and she grows progressively weaker during the long tiring day.  But she succeeds in her secret mission to arrange an engagement between Martin and Flora, thus guaranteeing Flora's happiness and future.  It's a generous act that concludes her mostly selfish and trivial life, and Godden's honest depiction of the flawed yet charming Mrs. Panopoulis is engaging and admirable.  It's unusual to encounter an elderly character who, though failing physically, is nevertheless bracingly autonomous.

A gentle, yet surprisingly prickly and affecting book, beautifully written.  And in a gorgeously-produced Knopf edition with a stunning jacket and design by George Salter.