20thC – Kate Macdonald

H G Wells does Lovecraft

The Croquet Player (1936) by H G Wells is set in an alternative universe where croquet and archery have the same exalted sporting status as tennis. It’s a novella of serious frivolity, and seems to be most highly regarded now for its apparent foreshadowing of the Second World War. Given its publication date, after six or more years of literary anticipation of conflict with Nazi Germany, it would be astonishing if anything Wells wrote at this period did not anticipate war. His First World War novel, Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916), and his own first-hand knowledge from that period, supply the detail of what happens when civilians are bombed.

Much more interesting is how he channels H P Lovecraft with Gothic horror. Georgie Frobisher is an international croquet and archery champion, and resides with his maiden aunt, Miss Frobisher. Out of season she and he concern themselves with the Woman’s World Humanity Movement, but as soon as mallets and longbows may be brandished, she drops political agitation and they go on tour. They are at the English seaside resort of Les Noupets, for its fine club croquet lawns, which is near Cainsmarsh, a village name with the highest Lovecraftian implications. The local doctor buttonholes Georgie with a dark and unnerving tale of hauntings, terror, tortured children and open graves.

The delight of this story is the impressive inverse bathos that Wells produces by making the frivolous Georgie, who only lives for his game and is under the severe thumb of his aunt, the serious, unaffected hero character. Wells piles on the Gothic, with a Neanderthal skeleton, a dog beaten to death, murderous threats, endemic panic and a thoroughly objectionable psychiatrist. The reader is thrilled and repelled: Georgie simply listens calmly and then leaves to play a game of croquet for which he has been engaged.

Lifting the surface layers of this intriguing and entertaining story, some interesting elements emerge, not least the wartime predictions, and Wells’ views on the misappropriation of science by the barely educated. I was so happy to stumble upon it.

H G Wells, The Croquet Player (1936), (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 1998, 2003), ISBN 0-905488-89-X.

Penguin New Writing 33: Getting over the war

Some time ago in Penguin New Writing John Lehmann asked for funny stories to print. He also suggested that both women and men would be leaping to their desks at the end of war to write the fiction they’d been bottling up during the war years. None of this is showing in what he’s publishing in Penguin New Writing. There is no humour at all, and several male authors are becoming regular, repeat contributors, while the women authors published so far can be counted on the fingers of one hand. In his Foreword for this first issue of 1948 Lehmann rails against National Service, and the impossible hoops that authors have to jump through to gain exemption. Given that only male authors feature in this issue, and only men were conscripted in peacetime, it’s pretty obvious that Lehmann doesn’t consider post-war women as authors, or have much interest in publishing what they might write. With editors like him, who needs enemies?

However, with authors like P H Newby, the woman’s perspective is not wholly ignored. ‘Crowning Glory’ is about the cutting off of a teenage girl’s long hair, at her mother’s instructions, against her father’s wishes. The barber’s hands are delicately intrusive, and the gypsy’s warning comes true. Newby is one of the few authors that Lehmann publishes who writes about women as fully and perceptively as he does about men.

A short story by the well-known literary critic Lionel Trilling — ‘Of This Time, Of This Place’— was unexpected but jolly good, positing the question of what an American professor can do when presented with madness in the classroom. How to grade incomprehensible brilliance, and how to suppress uncomprehending entitlement?

I was cautious about the critical essays, the last few issues having produced very little that was readable, but this issue has A D B Sylvester’s ‘A Chapter of Revelations’, a splendid report on the fuss and outrage caused by the National Gallery’s move to clean some of its paintings. Their account of conservation techniques, the physics of colour, pigment weirdness and the revealing huffery of eminent critics of the day is seriously entertaining.

Pause here to admire the emotion shared by Alec Guinness’s Richard II and Harry Andrews as Gaveston, in the Old Vic’s 1947 production.

The magazine’s enforced black and white reproductions of paintings don’t do much for the smudgier, blotchier styles, but John Minton’s Corsican landscapes come across beautifully. Crisp and solid.

In lengthy succession we have Andre Gide’s essay on Paul Valéry and Lehmann himself on James Joyce. Both are undoubtedly important but I could not summon the interest to read them. Penguin New Writing seems to have a tediously instructive element which is beginning to annoy me. However, William Sansom’s essay on Edgar Allen Poe explains much about his alarmingly gothic fiction that we’ve read in earlier issues: this was worth ploughing through.

This issue ends with reportage, so much more enjoyable and interesting to read than pompous criticism. Alan Ross’s ‘From a Corsican Notebook’ offers pretty much what it says on the tin: bar scenes, girls glimpsed sunbathing, traditional male fierceness, and buses with steering wheels on both sides. Keith B Poole’s ‘The Gift’ is an expertly crafted snippet of memoir from the war, shaped to fit a story’s outline and its tensions, but presented as fact. Which makes the box of severed human ears, presented to a squaddie as a gift at the end, all the more unnerving.

Do Not Read These At Home

More duds for your enjoyment and avoidance, the most recent in an occasional series of hatchet jobs. Links to others in the series are at the end of the page.

The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (2008), by Tilar J Mazzeo

After reading this biography, my book club reassembled. ‘So, what did you think?’

A: ‘Complete tripe.’

B: ‘Agreed. The author’s a fraud, can’t possibly be a real historian.’

C: ‘What is a cultural historian anyway?’

D: ‘I liked some of the nuggets of information about champagne making.’

A: ‘And how champagne bottles evolved.’

B: ‘OK, yes, those were interesting. But she can’t be a historian, surely? She’s using 16 pages of “selected bibliography”, but every other sentence has ‘undoubtedly’, or ‘probably’. She invents so much it’s impossible to see what might have been fact.’

D: ‘Perhaps she thought she was writing a novel.’

B: ‘She thanks her parents in the Afterword for helping her spin a yarn through many drafts.’

A: ‘Hang on, in the Read On bit in my US edition, her degrees are all in Eng lit!’ [collective bemusement]

C: ‘So, it’s really a novel, then?’

B: ‘It reads as if she’d much rather write a novel than do any of her own historical research.’

D: ‘Says here that she travelled five thousand miles to see a copy of something, as if we’re supposed to be impressed.’

C: ‘She’s writing a book about Champagne, and we’re to be impressed that she went there?’

B: ‘The Afterword says that “writing this book has been an exercise in the oblique”, and “it sometimes took considerable imagination”.’

A: ‘It’s a really bad novelisation of other people’s historical writing.’

C: ‘It’s so repetitive. And her tone is all over the place.’

B: ‘My unfavourite bit is where she talks gravely about 19thC maternal death rates and infant mortality, and then burbles on about young married women combatting this by going dancing.’

C: ‘It was a waste of time.’

The New SF, edited by Langdon Jones (1969)

My friend Brad and I were going to read this vintage collection of science fiction for a blog conversation, but we gave up in appalled disgust. What a bad, bad book. I knew it was going to be tough going when I got to the end of Michael Moorcock’s survey introduction, in which he only mentions male authors. There is one story in the collection by a woman, Pamela Zoline, and it is the best in the book, the most readable, and least self-aggrandising. I’ll look for her short stories now.

Brad suggested that the first story in the collection, ‘Fourteen Stations on the Northern Line’ by Giles Gordon, should be called ‘Idle Thoughts of a Creepy Sociopathic Stalker’, as it’s about fourteen male voyeurs thinking about how to have sex with one thankfully oblivious woman walking down the street intent on her own business. Their sad little fantasies don’t offend me, but the sense of unwanted intrusion, and Gordon’s assumption that all a woman could possibly desire is male attention, make me angry, as does the waste of opportunity in many of the other pieces. Moorcock’s own ‘Peking Junction’ is aimless, provocatively coy twaddle, or, in Brad’s formulation, ‘Jerry Cornelius Parties with Chinese Generals while his Wife and Child are Immolated in the Distance’. He also contributes a four-line poem aspiring to sound like Ezra Pound. It gets no better until Zoline. George MacBeth recreates a car wash menu as his literary sf contribution, then interviews a perceptibly bored J G Ballard like a breathless sycophant. Brian Aldiss (with an initial W) does contribute a story but it’s not sf. Charles Platt writes a short and dreadful account of his sexual fantasies (again! What was it with men writing sf as penis-worship in the late 1960s?) which include plans for a 14-year old (female) virgin. Maxim Jablowski’s drearily pretentious ‘A science fiction story for Joni Mitchell’ also has nothing to do with sf, he just smears himself over the paper. Why did anyone think this garbage was worth the printer’s ink?

Gene Wolfe, Soldier of the Mist

This was a disappointment, because I like Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer a lot, and admire Wolfe as a world-builder. However, in this novel he is a far better world-builder than he is a teller of tales, and he sets himself impossible technical obstacles. Latro is a soldier in Ancient Greece, and he’s received a head wound that takes away his memory every night, so he has to commit the day’s events to a scroll to be able to remember who he is, what’s going on, who he’s met. This is a spectacularly inventive way to tell a story, but it requires the characters to tell Latro who they are and what he’s done and how they connect with his quest. By halfway through I was desperately bored of little Io, Latro’s slave-girl, piping up ‘Don’t forget the scroll, master!’ I was very, very tired of Wolfe’s method of hurrying up the narrative by deliberately missing bits out, that Latro will brief us on later, in linear time, so we are perpetually dealing with unintroduced characters already well-embedded in Latro’s own life. I liked the blend of fantasy and historical fiction, and the gods and goddesses are terrific, but I did wonder why they were bothering with the humans. This wasn’t a bad book as such, but it fails, heavily, from its own conceits.

Richard Matheson, The Shrinking Man

The premise is brilliant, and Matheson is a superb dreamer-up of ideas and science fiction concepts ahead of his time (see I Am Legend for the birth of the zombie in pulp fiction, for example), but his style sticks in my craw. I cannot be doing with the hyper-masculine angst of the 1950s American man. I know it’s important, I know the novel was influential, but I found it unreadable. There’s a good quote on the back from David Pringle: ‘like a Kafka fable in an Ideal Home Exhibition setting’. I don’t much enjoy Kafka either, but the Ideal Home setting is spot-on. Matheson’s character is utterly self-absorbed (yes, I would be too, if I were shrinking every day), and cannot, just CANNOT get over the fact that he is smaller than his wife and has no authority over his daughter because he is shorter than her. Enduring this is wearying, and tiresome, and thoroughly irritating, as a novel and as a situation. So many emotions, so little interest.

Lindy Woodhead, War Paint: Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden

This double biography about the two most influential businesswomen in cosmetics is written by a fashion insider, but she isn’t a natural writer: she’s a publicist, and adopts the put-all-your-research-in method for writing this book. I was bored and tired by 1933, with 30 years more to go. There is no selectivity, no discernment about what story could be told: this book is a dumper-truck of facts tipped over the pages, and far too many uninteresting letters printed in full, ad oblivium, without editing. The story should have been sparkling and riveting, but it was tedious. The forthcoming Broadway show has a lot to fix.

Penguin New Writing 32: still in 1947

John Lehmann opens this issue’s Foreword by apologising for the sudden disappearance of the coloured plates. They’d vanished in issue 31, presumably a last-minute or force majeure decision, because in this issue the reasons are discussed. All the good colour printers in Britain are booked up for months at a time, so there is no room in the queue without unacceptable delays, affecting the whole magazine’s schedule. It’s a pity, but I expect that readers would have preferred reliable delivery and black and white photographs, rather than uncertain and unpredictable beauty.

Another reliable factor for Penguin New Writing is the steady increase of fiction and reportage grumbling about the lack of servants, or the impossibility of servants’ behaviour. Some of the biographies of the new contributors also reflect this unquestioning privilege: ‘… was educated at Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford’. Like territorial cries across the pampas, these are signals of class, position, expectation and niche.

P H Newby’s ‘Khamseen’, however, isn’t about predictable English privilege, but unaccountable and alien privileges. Fawzia is sold to the Widow Hamed as a child, and after a week of eating well is revealed to be a child of twelve rather than a scrawny seven or eight. She is the servant-of-all-work, but she comes to dominate the household, and her estranged mother begins to haunt the street outside, aware now of a daughter’s value as a very saleable trained beauty. The men in the story seem to be ineffectual and hated: the three women prowl around each other’s spaces, debating ownership.

Nigel Heseltine’s ‘A day’s pleasure’ is the story of a chaotic picnic party in which the children run wild, say rude words, cheek the nurse who will have her revenge, but also bring along the forbidden best cups. It’s a thoroughly miserable and agonising story. The impotent fury of the thwarted children’s nurse is a portrait of unjust tyranny.

In Alan Pryce-Jones’ ‘Inheritance’ the daughters of the house are the servants, and they and their mother are quietly, disloyally longing for the death of their father, who has been lingering for a very long time. Their tea-party visitors talk about what the ladies of the family might do if the head of household dies: buy a small, convenient, comfortable flat they can afford to run so the daughters don’t spend all their time servanting. But we get the feeling that the father (apparently well into dementia) is not going to go except at a time of his own choosing.

The critical essays are very, very boring, even Rosamond Lehmann (ooh, who’s she, John?) on Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. The paintings by Lucian Freud are fresh and powerful.

Modern French tapestries by Saint-Säens and others are sparkling, like crisper, more colourfully precise Chagalls.

Angus McBean’s photographs of Twelfth Night at Stratford upon Avon (starring Beatrix Lehmann: another sister, John?), Paul Scofield and Walter Hudd show a sturdy, primary-coloured production with some odd hats.

The best contributions appear at the end of the issue, by which time people will be flicking through the pages sleepily. Dunstan Thompson’s ‘A traveller to Deptford’ is reportage of a journey he took by train to Deptford. He was advised to get a train to New Cross and then to walk, since it would be faster than the direct train an hour later. Having once lived in Brockley I know exactly how long it takes to walk to Deptford from New Cross, so this intrigued me. Turns out he was ill-advised, and enters a foreign land. His account of a bombed-out and desolate urban wasteland teeming with savage children is so close to Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness as to corroborate all her descriptions of the devastated City churches. Thompson is looking for St Nicholas, Deptford, and Marlowe’s grave, and finds it a ruin. The vicar lives ‘very far away’, nowhere near this milling bombsite of graffiti, broken tombs, chapel alcoves used by prostitutes and ruined stonework. The curate is exhausted, with no hope of restoring the site. ‘His voice was passionless with the weary right accent: he was from some university. There was nothing to be done, he said. Everything that had not been bombed had been stolen. “They have taken the last of the timber for firewood.” I asked “Can no one stop the children from breaking into the graves?” This is post-war London, very far away from Mayfair and the servant problem. This is also post-war Europe.

The final story, Jiří Mucha’s ‘Roots’, translated by E Osers, is charmingly, pleasantly bucolic. A farmer is digging in the good earth, he is pleased that the roof of the old farmhouse is now mended, and that he’s got new gates fixed in the farmyard with the old ones chopped for firewood. His wife arrives with his lunch in a basket, and while he stops work to eat, she waits, and they think about sex, basically. She wants more children, he’s determined to set down roots in this new country, where vines grow healthily and the soil is good, and the land is empty. Then the church bell begins to toll, and the wife pulls her shawl over her head and disappears back to the house. The funeral procession approaches, and the farmer removes himself from the grave he’s been digging. Why is the village empty? Whose land was this? The thrusting, gentle progress of life returning to a deserted place contrasts with the hollow feeling inside the reader when we wonder where the people are, who used to live here. Again, this is post-war Europe.

Penguin New Writing 31, autumn 1947

My feelings about the prevailing mood of the previous issues of Penguin New Writing have been borne out by the Foreword in this issue of autumn 1947, by John Lehmann himself.

‘Your Editor has had a dream. A mad, fantastic dream, not to be credited at all. [there follows a paragraph of escalating impossibilities] That Eton thought Harrow would do, and Manchester Grammar School decided to adopt top-hats out of respect to Eton?

No, none of these things. Something far more extraordinary. I dreamt that a brilliant new young writer had arisen and sent me in an MS. A funny writer.’

So there we have it. John Lehmann himself realised that the post-war issues were appallingly gloomy, and was looking for humour to leaven the weight of the post-war world in his pages. I find that very encouraging, because the sheer misery of the stories in this and the last few issues has been grim. Let us hope that Lehmann’s plea was heard, and that future issues have something funny waiting for us.

While waiting for Lawrence Durrell to discover his inner satirist, though, we shall do our duty and read some modern fiction for the good of our health. William Sansom’s ‘Various temptations’ is an assured, meticulous story of a man who strangles women he picks up, and how he does it. It’s frightening, not just because of the author’s assured use of tension, but because he expended so much effort in getting the details of this misogynist story exactly right. He’s written about murdering women in Penguin New Writing before.

Annabel Farjeon’s ‘San Spirito’ is the only piece in this issue that allows women to have opinions and not also suffer at the hands of men because of these. Though they do suffer. Two nurses in Italy with a day’s leave absentmindedly open a bottle of peach brandy while they enjoy the sunset and the peace around them. Before the brandy is finished we have learned that Hannah’s Jewish family have all died, and that Adina’s sister is in danger in Romania from their mother. At least they get to enjoy the brandy by themselves. Male authors, I venture to speculate, would invade the scene with lecherous doctors or patients and reduce the women to objects. Farjeon does not, and I am grateful for it.

William Plomer’s ‘The Naiad of Ostend, Or, A Fatal Passion’ is a sequence of delicate pastiches describing the difficult position of an early Victorian maiden at the seaside when she is consumed by a passion for swimming at all hours, and Neptune is consumed with a passion for her. Charming and dark.

James Stern’s ‘Solitaire’ tells the events that follow an Irish doctor’s ill-advised phone call to a girl he once met, and his invitation to take her out to lunch. The doctor is married, with a child, but chooses to live rather dangerously for a few hours in a New York restaurant with Stella, who knows his eight letters to her by heart and has been carrying the torch of all torches for him in all the years since they last met. A knife is waved, there is much being drunk, and one wonders why the idiot ever put himself in such a ridiculous and selfish position. Because, of course, the poor obsessed young woman gives him up all over again. She should have burnt the letters and had a life instead.

Dorothy Baker’s story ‘A little white cat’ also has an oppressed woman, the mother of Cyril, a fatherless child of the war who bullies her and his teachers and rules the roost because he knows no other way to behave. A colder, more unpleasant child I have never read. He loves a stray white cat, though, and pours all the affection of which he is capable over this oblivious animal, until he encounters a man who is tougher than he is.

Gwyn Williams’ two translated poems from medieval and Tudor Welsh are absolutely delightful.

There are two extremely long and not very interesting (to me) articles about poetry, by E Martin Browne (about whose wife’s book on wartime theatrical productions I wrote here), and Dame Helen Gardner. I ought to be more pleased to read Gardner’s writing, for she is a critical genius, but I’m not interested in Matthew Arnold at all. Sorry. Henry Reed’s essay about W H Auden in America is similarly erudite and important, I’m sure, but it’s not very readable.

Barry Hicks’ photographs of Eliot’s The Family Reunion, produced at the Mercury Theatre by Browne, are classically stagey, serious tableaux.

The photographs of productions of Mardi Gras and The Vagabonds at Sadlers’ Wells are similarly attractive for recording staging and costume.

Ghika’s pre- and post-war paintings are glorious. I think he must be the Greek artist Nikos Ghika.

‘Lieut Z’’s ‘Military Detention’ is a long piece of reportage, on being in military detention, detailing the brutality and ill-logic of the system and the men placed in command of others. I hope the War Office read this piece carefully.

Sid Chaplin’s ‘The Cage’ is a tense vignette about miners ascending from the pit, when their cage gets stuck and the strands of wire begin to fail. It’s a thriller in miniature, unbearable to read.

Jocelyn Brooke’s ‘Blackthorn winter’ is cruel and unforgiving, and hopelessly, scrupulously true to human nature. It’s wartime, and a soldier is waiting to be sent abroad, and is missing his home and garden. He offers gardening help to a woman in the village, and a relationship develops, and it is so sad, and completely believable. The subtle shift from his to her perspective twists the knife decisively.

Penguin New Writing 30

This issue of Penguin New Writing, from spring 1947, has a depth that the previous issues reviewed don’t seem to have achieved. John Lehmann goes all-out in his Foreword by saying that the fires that decimated London’s publishing offices and warehouses in the bombing in December 1940 did ‘the book-trade — and the authors who live from it — a notable service; it cleared off hundreds of thousands of third-rate books that had been clogging the market for years, and led to an astounding revival in sales for the intelligent novelist and critic’.

This is a fairly astonishing iconoclastic stance: booksellers and book historians have universally regretted the losses of archives, editions and plates in those fires, so it is bracing, and rather challenging, to read Lehmann expressing relief only a few years later that because of the need for new books ‘British booksellers no longer turned a lacklustre eye upon the so-called “highbrow” author’. Lehmann’s idea of such ‘highbrow’ survivals is disputable: ‘the kind of author whose work lives and is read when all the best-sellers of the day have been swirled away in Lethe’s waters’. He then ventures to hope that the present issue will be rich in this quality.

Looking at the contents page, Lehmann’s roster of ‘highbrows’ does indeed contain a slightly higher number of authors who are still being read, or have a recognisable name, in 2017: Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, Boris Pasternak, V S Pritchett and John Lehmann himself. Others might be for specialists only, but they are still known, some of them even in print: Julian Maclaren-Ross, Henry Reed, Donagh MacDonagh, Tom Hopkinson (for his journalism) and Norman Nicholson. But so many of these names are poets, and only Greene (possibly also Pasternak for one famous novel) could ever be described as a best-seller.

However, let us not wallow in the hubris of 1947, but enjoy what it had to offer. Julian Maclaren-Ross’s piece of memoir, ‘Monsieur Félix’, is about beggars, exploring Marseilles as a child, and a master of Grand Guignol. Maclaren-Ross is better than a raconteur, he’s an artist in description who pulls you in. It doesn’t matter that this short piece may or may not be complete invention, it is story, good and proper.

Tom Hopkinson, more famous for his editorship of Picture Post and championing of documentary photographer Bert Hardy, ‘wrote several novels’ according to his online record. This is one of the most accomplished and readable short stories so far read in Penguin New Writing, a thriller crossed with a seduction narrative, and a masterclass in story construction.

Graham Greene’s ‘Across the Border’ is advertised as ‘an unfinished novel’. Not knowing his oeuvre well, I don’t know if this fragment was reused after 1947 by adding it to something else to become a real full-length novel. It’s certainly gripping, and drenched with anticipatory misery. A weak good man returns from a mining enterprise in Africa to report the evils wrought by his superior, to find that the company doesn’t care because they have faith in the bad man. And then we backtrack to read exactly how the bad the bad man is, and how weak and corrupt the whole bally enterprise is too. Is it classic Greene? It’s certainly grim, and would have been eminently expandable, had the war not intervened to wreck this world of 1930s colonial extortion.

Edward Burra’s ‘Miracle in the Gorbals’: all soft colours and bulbous figures, with pencilled character names attached to the grotesque portraits.

Leslie Hurry’s ‘design for the ballet Hamlet’ looks very commedia dell’Arte, with skull and a skullcap.

The author of ‘Growing up in Chad Street’, A C Wann, seems not to have left any online trail, so I can’t say anything more than I’d like to read more of their writing. It’s a story of how a small English town reacts to the woman who moves in next door to Peter and his family, when she starts carrying on with the itinerant pedlar and ex-bank employee. The men are envious, the women are furious, and she has what seems like a baby a year. It’s a remarkable portrait of the vicious responses to social transgression, the events seen through the eyes of an innocent and uncomplicated ten year old boy.

John Gielgud as Raskolnikoff in Crime and Punishment. Those eyebrows, that nose!

Sacha Carnegie’s ‘Snow’ is a haunting return to the brutality and horror of war. A soldier is reconnoitreing on skis, aware that the recent retreat by the enemy has left slaughtered and burnt-out villages all over the territory. Near dusk, he comes to a village where he thinks that no-one has survived, but hears the unearthly cries of a mother holding her dead baby in the snow, surrounded by her family and neighbours in a scene of true war atrocity. When the soldier returns next day with help, she has died, and the unit bury the village. Horrifying. The war is still a relentless memory in 1947.

Penguin New Writing 29, autumn 1946

New Writing, John Lehmann’s influential British literary magazine, first appeared in 1936, and fostered politically Left writers and artists. It stopped publication in 1950, with issue 40, just as Tennessee Williams and John Wain (for example) joined the contributors. I found issues 27 to 40 in an Oxfam shop, and bought them for a fiver. I’ll be reviewing each issue each week: you’ll find links to the other issue reviews at the end.

There’s an unsettling mood of repressed sexuality emanating from this issue’s contents, as if the lid was being held down, but not quite tight enough. William Sansom’s ‘Murder’ is a meditation on letting your imagination get carried away with what the chimney sweep is doing to your wife behind closed doors while you’re making a mess of repainting a chair in the next-door room. The wife is a servant or a possession in all but name, and can only be imagined sexually.

Neal suddenly felt the presence of the next-wall room, of its separation, of the two people enclosed in it alone: and he felt a sense of evil, of the perpetration of things not right. But – what exactly could not be right? Something against his orders? … Nonsense … he gave no orders … Then something opposed to his views of behaviour … again, what? He had few such views, except on some violences, some extreme familiarities. Such as Elsa flirting with the sweep?

Such an unpleasantly possessive narrative character makes this a compelling story, if only because I want to root for the sweep.

Patrick Greer’s ‘The Woman and the Dog’ is another story set (see issues 27 and 28) in godforsaken agricultural struggle, populated by unsuitable unhappy people. Townies shouldn’t farm because they’ll only make a mess of it, and the younger women can only think miserably of the men who ignore them. Older women are simply horrible: where did such a mood of hatred and failure come from? Did no-one come to farming and enjoy it, after the war?

John Ward’s ‘Ill Wind’ continues to park the woman in the nurturing, sexualised role, but at least she’s given a robust voice and thoughts that indicate an independent spirit. Class consciousness among Lake District hikers, and an authentic echo of the war that shocks like an unexploded bomb.

In the criticism section, Julian Maclaren-Ross’s regular survey article tackles ‘British feature films’ with impressively strong knowledge of the genre that also ensures that we know what a highbrow he is. He fervently praises Brief Encounter as a triumph for Noel Coward, and very welcome after his ‘glorification of poker-faced naval captains and middle-class stolidity’.

A long article on D H Lawrence, and an even longer one of Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee are followed by an extraordinarily long commentary by Helen Gardner on the Four Quartets. This needs the poems in front of you to be properly appreciated, but Gardner was a practised teacher of the sublime to the under-educated, and this is probably the most accessible essay on T S Eliot I have ever read.

The war creeps in again with beautiful lithographs or pen-and-ink works by Edward Bawden and Anthony Gross.

Angus McBean‘s photographs of Peter Brook’s production of Love Labour’s Lost sit beside a melodramatic scene from J B Priestley: British theatre of the period.

James Stern’s ‘A Peaceful Place’ is narrated by an American working in immediate post-war Germany, who comes across a US Army war cemetery in the middle of a bombed forest near Nurnberg. The grass is impeccably mowed, the white headstones are militarily arranged in an aesthetically satisfying way, and the custodian keeps his tools in an old German sportsplatz. But the inhabitants of the graveyard are not the victims of battles: there are other causes of death for the Americans trapped in Europe for three long years.

After all this nervous dark trauma of a post-war world, I read Jocelyn Brooke‘s story ‘The blanket’ expecting horrors. Would the roaming servicemen brutalise the Italian children while the padrone was at the fields? Would the faunlike eldest son avenge his mother’s indignity, or would the soldiers lose their sense of propriety or good sense, and take more than they could drink, or pay for? Would the sergeant throw them in clink for crawling back to camp blind-drunk? Would anyone notice the theft of an army blanket? Could anything worse than these things happen?

Other issue reviews:

Category: 20thC

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