extreme legibility

Bear by Marian Engel (McClelland and Stewart, 1976)

 

A strange and disturbing novel about a young Canadian woman who leaves her solitary academic life working for a historical society in Toronto to catalog the contents of a house located on an island in a river in the Canadian wilderness.  She lives alone in the house for the summer, and has an affair with a bear who had been kept in captivity there.  The bear is an excellent lover, and the woman enjoys her solitary life and the bear's good company, but must leave this idyll life behind when autumn arrives and she is forced to return to her passionless urban life.

Engel writes about the woman's relationship with the bear in a wonderfully matter-of-fact fashion, and the inter-species amour is believable and poignant (and quite erotic, as well).

 

*The Custard Boys by John Rae (Farrar, Straus $ Cudahy, 1961)

 

A short, intense, and disturbing novel about a gang of adolescent boys in a northern seaside village in England during WWII.  It's narrated by John Curlew, the most decent and brightest of the boys.  Excited by the war but feeling excluded from the action, the boys play at violent games that ultimately result  in the shooting death of Mark Stein, an Austrian Jewish boy who has escaped Nazism only to encounter and be destroyed by England's more refined anti-semitism.  

Rae is a good writer, although there is perhaps too much dark foreshadowing in the book -- it seems forced and strained and makes the book's shocking conclusion less surprising and potent.

 

The Early Life of Stephen Hind by Storm Jameson (Harper & Row, 1966)

 

The Early Life of Stephen Hind is a  novel about a beautiful, charming, intelligent, and ambitious young man rising in society, set in London in 1963.

Stephen Hind's mother is a whorish clairvoyant and all he wants is to escape her tawdry and dirty world and become part of the upper class.  A job as a secretary to Lord Chatteney, who is writing his memoirs, allows Stephen to enter this world, and his rise is swift: he becomes the boy toy of the elegant and accomplished Collette Hyde, who is married to the best publisher in London, enters a cordial marriage of convenience with a beautiful and wealthy women who is pregnant with a bastard, and sets his sights on a leggy Philadelphia steel heiress.

The main plot revolves around the completion and publication of Lord Chatteney's memoir -- he is considered a great man and his memoirs are heralded as a great work of literature.  Both of these claims seem inflated to raise the stakes, but the novel is an entertaining and interesting look at a transitional time in England, when class distinctions were becoming more fluid and the old world was giving way to a more youthful culture.  

Company Parade by Storm Jameson (Virago Modern Classics, 1982, originally published by Cassell in 1934)

 

This novel, which was intended to be the first of a five- or six-book series that turned out to be a trilogy, is an ambitious and impressive achievement.  I was engrossed by it and impressed by its scope and intelligence and the high quality of the writing and thinking that sustains it.

It's the story mainly of Hervey Russell, a young woman who comes to London soon after Armistice Day in 1918 to pursue fame and fortune as a novelist.  She is disastrously married to a selfish, immature, and incompetent man named Penn who is still serving in thte army as the book begins.  They have a son, Richard, who Hervey has left behind in another woman's (paid) care in her Yorkshire coastal hometown, so that Hervey is alone and independent in the city, qualities that make her an unusual female character from this period.

She's a unique and interesting character: kind, thoughtful, but socially-awkward and hampered by her wasted love for her husband and her estrangement from her son.  She gets a job working for an advertising agency and later as an assistant editor at a radical newspaper, and moves about  London's literary and publishing circles, which gives Jameson the opportunity to introduce and develop many interesting characters, which the narrative flexibly -- and sometimes messily -- embraces.  I look forward to reading the next book in the trilogy, Love in Winter, which is followed by None Turn Back.

 

Good Behavior by Molly Keane (New York Review Books, 2021, originally published in by Andre Deutsch in 1981)

 

A dark, weird and disturbingly funny book with a gimmick that I felt reduces it to something smaller than its brilliant illparts.  Aroon, the narrator, is an ungainly, very large, and rather obtuse girl growing up in an aristocratic but financially challenged Anglo-Irish family.  Her mother is a heartless and abusive bitch, her father is benign but ineffectual, and her brother uses Aroon to unwittingly disguise his homosexual relationships.

Aroon sees and feels none of this ill-treatment and considers herself happy, well-loved, and fulfilled.  Whether this is a result of repression and self-deception or merely stupidity is hard to know, but it begins to seem contrived and manipulative, and the book's effect is correspondingly diminished.

 

*Radcliffe by David Storey (Coward-McCann, 1964)

 

Radcliffe is a strange, densely-written book about the passionate and obsessive relationship between two men in the north of England.  Leonard Radcliffe is the scion of an ancient aristocratic family who no longer have money and whose ancestral home, called The Place, is crumbling and derelict.  It is now controlled by a trusteeship, and Leonard's father (John) works as the caretaker and lives with his family in the few remaining  habitable rooms.

The novel follows Leonard Radcliffe from his early boyhood through his adolescence, when he first meets and connects with Vic Tolson, whose magnificent body seems to be mysteriously and symbiotically connected to Leonard's soul and mind.  Radcliff  reencounters Tolson as an adult and begins a tortured sexual and psychological relationship with him that ultimately kills them both.

Leonard Radcliffe is what today would be called "on the spectrum."  He's a strange, solitary, non-communicative boy who grows into an even more troubled and antisocial man.  His only affection and connection come from Tolson, and since their relationship is totally destructive and impossible, Radcliffe knows he will always be estranged and alone.

Storey unfolds this dark, gothic novel over 400 very densely-written pages.  The third-person narrator is hyper-descriptive and psychologically analytical -- almost every sentence includes some sort of comparison using "as if" or "as though," all in an effort to describe the bizarre internal world of the character.  It's a bad dream of a book, played out on a level of psychological abstraction that prevents the reader from identifying or sympathizing with Radcliffe (or any of the other characters).  But realism is obviously not Storey's aim here, and the book's peculiarity, while often puzzling and distancing, makes for a reading experience unlike any other, and there is something commendably courageous about that.

 

*Despised and Rejected by Rose Allatini (Persephone Books, 2018, originally published in 1918 by C. W. Daniel).

 

A fascinating book about homosexuality and pacifism, two dangerous subjects that caused the book to be banned, with all remaining copies destroyed, when it was first published in 1918.

The book begins in the summer of 1914, with the threat of war with Germany looming.  The first part of the book is set at a country  hotel where several genteel families are spending their summer holiday.  We're introduced to the Blackwoods, a family with three sons  and one daughter.  Antoinette De Courcey, a young woman with French parents who was born and is living in England, has joined another family, the Fayne's, as a guest of their daughter.  Antoinette's beauty and high spirits attract the attention of everyone, but she has eyes only for Hester Cawthorn, a mysteriously beguiling woman in her 30s who is staying at the hotel by herself and holds herself apart from all the other guests.  Dennis, the Blackwood's oldest child, is "sensitive" and "artistic" -- he's a composer and arrives at the hotel for a weekend visit while on a walking tour with his friend Crispin (who is also sensitive and artistic).  Dennis detects Antoinette's fascination with Hester, and immediately identifies her as a fellow traveler.  He invites her out for a long moonlit walk in the countryside, and alludes to their shared "abnormality," which Antoinette neither denies or confirms.  Dennis wants to tell her the truth about himself, but cannot bring himself to, despite their mutual interest in and sympathy for one another.

Dennis, who can't imagine a life for himself as a homosexual, decides that he and Antoinette should marry one another and spends most of the book trying to convince her that it is a good idea.  Antoinette is not sure, but after she is rejected by Hester -- whose social aloofness is not a reflection of lesbianism as Antoinette assumed, but a screen to obscure her love affair with a married man -- reconsiders and thinks that perhaps she does love Dennis enough to marry him.  But by that time Dennis has met a beautiful and charming young man named Alan, and fallen completely and hopelessly in love.

There is an almost farcical nature to these various overlapping love stories, and ultimately Dennis, who is open about his pacifism, is jailed for it, although he is despised and rejected for both his homosexuality and pacifism.  What was most interesting about this book -- which is competently but indifferently written -- is the different ways that Dennis and Antoinette regard their sexuality: Dennis is frightened and ashamed, and despondent, while Antoinette feels that her attraction to women is perfectly natural and delightful -- she pursues Hester openly and honestly.  I wonder if this is somewhat indicative of the difference between how society perceived male versus female homosexuality in the early 20th century.

Treasure Hunt by Molly Keane (Virago Modern Classics, 1990, originally published in 1952)

 

This novel (originally published under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell), is about three generations of an Anglo-Irish family who inherit a magnificent family house, full of beautiful and valuable things, but have no money to maintain it, so must resort to hosting "paying guests," an idea the younger generation, who are most responsible, propose, but that the careless and selfish middle generation reject and attempt to sabotage.  The paying guests are three wealthy Londoners eager to escape the deprivations of post-WWII England, and imagine that at an Irish castle they will be warm, well-fed, and cosseted.  They are immediately and severely disappointed, but stay on nevertheless, and eventually things work themselves out, much helped by the discovery of precious rubies hidden in a stuffed bird.

Molly Keane writes with eccentric brio and originality.  Her thoughts, and sentences, are odd and interesting, and one feels fortunate to experience the world from her unique point of view.

The Foxglove Saga by Auberon Waugh (Chapman & Hall, 1960)

 

This rather slap-dash, silly novel is amusing -- it follows three English boys from their days at a Catholic prep school through their early adulthood, detailing their misadventures in both civilian and military life.  The most amusing character is Lady Julia Foxglove, one of the boys' mother, a beautiful and ostensibly pious and charitable woman who is actually a selfish and interfering monster.  Her ability to manipulate others under the guise of helping them is quite entertaining, but the satire and humor here is gentler and less trenchant then Eveyln Waugh's (the author's father), and the book seems correspondingly negligible. 

 

*The Imperfect Marriage by Edith de Born (Chapman & Hall, 1954)

 

As its title suggests, this novel is a portrait of a marriage.  Roger and Louise (nee de Castillac) Warnier are married in 1936.  Roger is the scion of a wealthy family that owns fabric mills in a provincial city north of Paris; Louise is from an aristocratic but impoverished land-owning family in the South of France.  They meet in Paris, fall quickly in love, and marry to the delight of their families, who see their combination of wealth and aristocracy as beneficial to all.  Louise moves to the estate in the ugly industrial city where the Warnier empire located, and has several children.  Everything seems fairly happy until Roger becomes a prisoner during WWII and spends several years living in a German prison camp.  When he returns to France after the war he seems changed, and is no longer sexually interested in Louise.  He finally admits that he now prefers men to women, and begins (or more likely resumes) to have a not-entirely-discreet affair with a younger Frenchman he met in the prison camp.  Louise sees no alternative other than to continue living with Roger under these disappointing circumstances, although she does have a short-lived affair with a young philosophy teacher she meets on the train to Paris.

Edith de Born (which is the pen-name of Edith Bisch, an Austrian writer born in 1901) treats this subject with sensitivity and complexity.  Both Roger and Louise are complex, interesting, and sympathetic characters, and they are surrounded by a gallery of vivid secondary characters, including two old aunts of Roger's who both loved the same man -- one as his wife and one as his mistress.  The scenes of the provincial northern city, of Paris, and of the de Castillac's estate and vineyard in the South are all nicely evoked.  

The  Imperfect Marriage is an unusual, accomplished book that I enjoyed reading very much -- I felt immersed in its world and interested in its characters, and was sad to finish it.