Hugh Walpole – Kate Macdonald

Rose Macaulay’s The Lee Shore

Today’s novel from the Really Like This Book’s podcast scripts catch-up is about art: buying it, faking it, selling it, advising on it, collecting it, and valuing your life by what you say about it. Rose Macaulay’s novel The Lee Shore really is completely forgotten, but is a fascinating read. It’s one of a clutch of Macaulay’s pre-war novels that she herself didn’t want to be reprinted once she had become successful in the 1920s, and which have largely avoided being rediscovered by modern publishers. (You can get it as a free ebook download if you shop around between apps.) But in its day it was a triumph. It won a fabulous prize of £1000 from Hodder & Stoughton (about £50,000 in today’s money), which enabled Macaulay to leave home and set herself up in literary London an author.

In the Edwardian period Macaulay wrote a lot about the danger of slipping out of your class if you were upper class, and the importance of maintaining your personal honour and integrity, even if this meant abandoning or being abandoned by your class and all that you had been brought up to expect to have as your life. The way she combines these two contra-indicators makes The Lee Shore a serious investigation of modern and traditional mores.

She uses what we in the trade call the free indirect voice, which is when the reader not only sees the action of the story from one or more characters’ perspectives, but is shown their point of view, their feelings, by having parts of the narrative told in their own words, as if their thoughts had taken over the narration. It’s a hugely effective way to reveal, for example, underlying nastiness or hypocrisy in a character, by having their unpleasantness emerge in how they say what they say. In the case of this novel, all the characters are painfully concerned with their class position, and what they ought to be doing, wearing and saying, because of their birth and status. The tensions caused by the inevitable have-nots clashing with the haves produce disasters. The focus of the novel is the nicest character of all, a kind and helpful and honest young man called Peter Margerison. His free indirect voice is used as the narrative to show us, despite the awful things that happen to him, how he manages to maintain cheerfulness and hope.

We first meet Peter when he is being carried off injured from the football field by the god of his public school, Denis Urquhart. Denis is captain of rugby, and is slightly related to Peter in the sense that Peter’s widowed mother was once married to Denis’s father. Denis inherits money and property and a very comfortable life, while Peter has to struggle to keep up with the class into which he has been born. But he himself isn’t very interested in class status, it’s the standards that his class insist on that drive his life.

Peter makes his living by advising the wealthy and ignorant what art to buy, how to decorate their homes, and tries to educate their taste. He is such an honourable person that he takes great pains to work with his clients’ taste, and to steer them away from the hideous in favour of the beautiful. All this goes very well, and Peter builds up good relationships with his distant Urquhart relations. Until one day he and his main client travel to Venice, and come across a terribly pretentious and possibly fraudulent local art newspaper which advises its readers to buy things that Peter knows are fakes, or impossible to acquire at the prices quoted. To his horror, he finds that the editor of this nasty little newspaper is his own half-brother Hilary.

Hilary is the elder of the brothers by a good ten years or more. He makes sure that Peter feels obliged to follow his lead, and to defer to him as the de facto head of the Margerison family. He is a masterful portrait of petulant entitlement, he is quite the most horrible character in this novel, and it is against him and his shoddy values and slippery standards that Peter has to struggle. But which come first: family solidarity and blood ties, or the abstract values of integrity and honour? Peter chooses honour, in the sense that his honour will not allow him to see his brother fail and go under, and he also chooses honour by refusing to let Hilary dabble any longer in fake art dealing, or to take bribes from the art fakers of Venice. Hilary’s feckless but heroic wife Peggy has too much to do in bringing up their too many children, and she tries to run boarding houses to make a living. Her family spends the entire novel slithering slowly but inexorably into poverty, to Hilary’s fury, because it is never his fault. And Peter, naturally, goes down too, despite the hopes he has, and the good deeds he does, and the social credit and goodwill he still has with his rich friends and the Urquhart family.

The free indirect voice narration, because it brings us so close to Peter’s thoughts but still keeps us at a distance, produces a powerful impression of fragility. Peter’s decent acts and honourable behaviour seem to bring him nothing but trouble, and the worst thing he does, as well as one of the best, is to marry Rhoda, a stray girl who finds herself abandoned in Peggy’s boarding house, to protect her from inevitable degradation at the hands of the villainous dandy Vivian. Rhoda is not of Peter’s class, though she tries hard to keep up with his talk and his standards, and he tries very hard to make her happy and give her security. They have a baby boy, lovely baby Thomas who is the delight of Peter’s heart, and who gives him something to live for when the worst happens and Peter thinks that nothing else can possibly make his world any more awful. He tries for happiness again with his cousin Lucy, whom he has always loved, but who has – inexplicably – married Denis Urquhart.

At the last minute they change their minds, and Peter runs away without Lucy, taking Thomas with him, and finds happiness in a simple vagabond life in a cart pulled by a donkey wandering around the coast of Italy in the summer sunshine. Peter earns money by selling his embroidery – this was a period when embroidery by an artistic young man was considered a little odd but quite reasonable as an aesthetic choice of activity – and they find rest and safety on the lee shore of life, sheltered from the rough winds of the world.

Peter turns into a modernised version of the Victorian scholar-gypsy, though he must take responsibility for feeding his child and the donkey. More Victorian elements poke through the Edwardian setting with the incessant sermonising. Those rich and well-off Urquharts and related peers keep summoning Peter to interviews and offer to lend him money, asked or unasked, and he always refuses. The novel seems to act out a strange, warped version of the code of honourable conduct derived from public schools which we are expected to admire, since Peter sticks to it so assiduously, even though he is made to suffer almost all the way through the plot. In that respect he’s very like Hugh Walpole’s Peter Westcott from Fortitude. He too has his life bound up tightly with the friends he made at school, both the faithful and the cads.

Macaulay, who had grown up in Italy, was perfectly conversant with how English gentlemen could live there without losing caste. Her earlier novels The Furnace (1907) and Views and Vagabonds (1912) have a good look at the danger to the English character that will ensue if certain standards are not upheld when living abroad, though she is generally, though not always, on the side of the vagabonds. She always depicted the freedom of Italian living as a beautiful, desirable, perfect existence, but also an impossible one if an English gentleman was to fulfil his national and class destiny. Living like an Italian would be like going native, and a gentleman must never do that. Somehow, Macaulay does try to get around this for Peter, to find a way he can retain his integrity while still living in freedom, and in a rather unrealistic way, she does manage this. But I can’t help thinking, what was going to happen to baby Thomas when he caught cold in the winter, and there were no more tourists to buy his father’s embroideries, and they needed a doctor, and new boots, and so on? And what about school? Would Peter have been content to send his son to an Italian village school? How would he bridge the gap between the public school of an English gentleman’s son, and the total lack of income or savings that his life of freedom brought him?

The Lee Shore is about the essential question of choices in living, and how to live with them. An excellent novel, very good for a long train ride.

Hugh Walpole’s Fortitude

This Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is about the 1913 novel called Fortitude by Hugh Walpole, and you need fortitude to finish it, to be brutally honest. It is not a snappy two-hour read. On the other hand, if what you’re after is something for a long wet weekend on your own during which you don’t want to go for long walks and the TV reception is bad, this is the book for you. Fortitude is very long, is certainly over-written, but I strongly encourage you to keep reading. It is really very unusual: Cornish Gothic crossed with the Edwardian novel of letters.

It is the 1870s. Peter Westcott is growing up in Cornwall, in a Gothic mansion called the House of Scaw, in a village called Treliss. He is tested by one personal catastrophe after another. His father beats him regularly and refuses to allow him to see his bedridden mother. He is sent away to a brutal school, where his defence of small bullied boys and his resistance to the culture of institutional violence lose the school an important match, in rugby, I think, and make him an outcast. Sport is important in schools, obviously, but I wonder whether Walpole deliberately tips over into satire here. By reporting a particularly violent bully to the headmaster Peter ensures that the bully is expelled, and so the team lose the game because the bully is their best player, and so then the whole school lines up to try to stare Peter out of countenance because, being Head of School, Peter must call the roll, to which no boy will answer. It is a ridiculous scene to today’s sensibilities because it seems so much like the pious excesses of martyrdom more familiar from nearly a hundred years earlier in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. What I do find interesting is that Walpole insisted that Peter rejects success in games in preference for honour and the law. This is a sign of the Edwardian era’s openness to the possibility of rejecting Victorian school brutality.

When Peter leaves school and comes home, he realises with cold horror that his cackling grandfather and demonic violent father are waiting eagerly for him to fall into their bullying, violent, cruel ways. Peter runs off to London and takes a job in a second-hand bookshop. This is a quite a jump in the plot, made possible by the meetings Peter has had in a mysterious junk shop in Treliss, where he encounters the enigmatic, romantic and also mysterious Mr Zanti, who offers him the job. Zanti is a deliberately curious character when he first appears, giving an impression of being all astrakhan coat and dark curling moustaches. He is important because he keeps appearing at all the turns in Peter’s fortunes. Consequently we take him at Peter’s estimation all through the novel: first as a figure of glamour and cosmopolitanism, later as a kind benefactor, then as a hapless victim, and finally as a devoted and loyal friend.

Peter may be ostensibly working in the London bookshop, but he doesn’t seem to do very much except read the books and know instinctively where the cheap classics are shelved. His home life is more interesting, since he boards at Brockett’s, a boarding house full of poor and quaint characters. This is the only positive portrait of a London boarding house that I’ve ever read from this period. Peter works at the bookshop for seven years, boarding at Brockett’s all this time, while he writes his novel.

Peter’s novel is the point of Fortitude, which we are now only a third of the way through (I’d go and get a slice of cake and a cup of tea if I were you). It is a novel of literary life in London as seen by the ingénue writer, which Walpole had recently lived through himself. Fortitude was his fifth novel, succeeding Walpole’s big success, Mr Perrin and Mr Traill from 1911. The plot of Fortitude is about Peter’s development as a writer, how he handles the creative process and his celebrity, balanced against the call of Cornwall and a settling of accounts back at the gloomy House of Scaw.

Fortitude is also the first of what would be later grouped together as Walpole’s eight London novels. London is quite clearly the centre of the known world for Walpole’s characters in this novel, with a range of Dickensian socio-economic and class settings. Walpole also added some pointed portraits of people who might well have been of his friends and acquaintances in the literary London of his own day, including Henry James, of whom he was a protegé. But the London parts of Fortitude begin in the 1890s, so as well as recreating his own early successes from the Edwardian period, Walpole also does a nice job of recreating the society that was withdrawing the hem of its garments from The Yellow Book, ten years earlier. Walpole is writing this novel for insiders and for those who wanted recent literary fashions revisited.

The British critic and author Peter Hitchens wrote, some years ago, “Henry James and John Buchan praised Walpole. Joseph Conrad, T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf were kind about him. What’s more, his books sold enormously well on both sides of the Atlantic, he was knighted, and he became very rich … Yet now he has vanished completely, his books not even to be found on the back shelves of most second hand shops, dismissed as ‘unreadable'”. Walpole was hugely popular in the 1920s and 1930s, but he was mocked in Somerset Maugham’s autobiographical novel Cakes and Ale in 1930, and apparently Walpole did not take criticism well. He became most known for writing novels of Gothic creepiness, and was satirised by detective novelist Francis Iles in the 1936 collection of literary parodies, Parody Party, with a nice episode of everyday ritual murder in an English cathedral town. Fortitude is quite Gothic, but only in the Cornish parts, and in the bookshop of Mr Zanti. In the bright and glittering social life of literary London Walpole writes a tragedy of friendship and disappointed love, all wrapped up with an incessant urge to get back to Cornwall from whence the wellspring of Peter’s creative being lies. Or something like that.

What makes this a true novel of 1913, if you ignore the now timeless Gothic bits and the David Copperfield plot, is the secret socialist circle and the anarchist bomb plot. Anarchism had been fashionable in fiction for some time, and Walpole duly inserts an anarchist episode into Fortitude. Closely linked to the Cornish Gothic is the new fashion for rural extravagance, to be made popular by Mary Webb’s novels The Golden Arrow and Gone to Earth, during the First World War. Walpole expends a great deal of effort establishing the character of the big, muscular, simple and faithful farmer and lovelorn suitor Stephen Brant, who waits and suffers for literally decades while the woman he loves is married to another man. Stephen is Peter’s faithful friend and protector, going to extraordinary lengths to keep him alive in moments of danger, and to bring him news from home. But as soon as the woman is free, she and Stephen hop onto a ship for Canada.

It’s not too far-fetched to read Peter as Stephen’s surrogate child and light of his life. Stephen does a fair amount of raging through the winter fields at sunset, recalling very forcibly the Starkadder brothers in Stella Gibbons’s much later Cold Comfort Farm, but he is out of place in London, even in the poorer quarters. There is a cataclysmic scene when Stephen and Mr Zanti and Peter are playing a riotously enjoyable game of romps with Peter’s baby son, and all seems happy and natural and all boys together, until Peter’s wife opens the nursery door and stands there, glaring icily down at them. She disapproves of them playing with the child at all, and she hates everything about Cornwall and Peter’s former life. Stephen is shrunken by her hatred, and he and Mr Zanti slink out of the door.

So, yes, this wife. I have to say, I found Clare Rossiter, with whom Peter falls blindly and madly in love, a fairly believable character and a loathsome one. Selfish and idle and uneducated, living only for her own amusement, her kind of character is familiar, a spoilt child with no idea how to cope with suffering. Walpole expects his readers to be unforgiving of Clare’s behaviour because she is weak and shallow. She doesn’t have one saving grace or realistically normal feature, except, perhaps, a very powerful fear of having to give birth again. Her one childbirth scene is long and harrowing, but Walpole’s sympathies are all for Peter who has to listen to days of Clare screaming. She is bored by and scared of her baby son, and says and does things pertaining to him that will have all parental hackles raised and sharpened.

I don’t think Walpole knew or cared much about women, or babies. He was, as the obituaries in the quality press say, a confirmed bachelor. Clare is an appalling monster because of her weaknesses and improbable characteristics, whereas her mother is a masterwork of socially-sanctioned monstrous behaviour, who calmly moves into her daughter’s marital home at the first sign of trouble, and never leaves until disaster arrives. Compared to these London ladies, the demonic Gothic horror waiting for Peter when he finally returns to the House of Scaw was always going to be a damp squib. Walpole manipulates our expectations and produces a truly surprising, and oddly satisfying ending to the novel.

Category: Hugh Walpole

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