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Great Friends by David Garnett

 

David Garnett was very much part of Bloomsbury; having a relationship with Duncan Grant and eventually marrying Anjelica Bell (daughter of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant). He was brought up in a household which moved in literary circles. His father was a literary agent and his mother a translator who translated from Russian to English; all the major nineteenth century Russian works. David therefore met many literary figure through his parents and later on his own account through Bloomsbury.

This a collection of personal reminiscences about some of the people he met and was friends with. These are not potted biographies and the collection is very variable. There are Chapters on Conrad, Woolf, Forster, Lawrence (DH), Keynes, Strachey and Carrington, Wells, Lawrence (TE) and McCullers to name a few.

There are some interesting insights. Conrad was a friend through Garnett’s father who was his literary agent. Garnett tells the story of when he was a young boy being left in Conrad’s charge for a while; they played ships with a laundry basket and a sheet! Their friendship stalled during the war. Garnett was a conscientious objector and Conrad felt he had failed in his duty. The article on Keynes is interesting because Garnett throws some light on the alleged rejection of Keynes’s wife, Lydia Lopokova by Bloomsbury. He recalls that it was Vanessa Bell who objected to Lopokova; partly because she objected to the marriages of all her friends and partly because she saw Keynes as part of her household; all the rest were welcoming.

The Chapter on D H Lawrence confirmed my own feelings about him. Garnett’s relationship with Lawrence and his wife was good at first and they were kind to him. Garnett was present at the occasion when Lawrence was shown some of Duncan Grant’s paintings (by Grant) and he proceeded to attack Grant and his paintings for being misconceived and wrong. In fact Grant is portrayed as the artist Duncan Forbes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence wrote to Garnett advising him to cease mixing with homosexuals, especially Grant, Birrell and Keynes. The letter is reproduced in the book and it is truly awful with phrases like “deep inward dirt”, “a sort of sewer”, “something like carrion” and much more in that vein. Lawrence exhorts Garnett to marry a woman and give up men! Garnett was (not unnaturally) very angry about the letter. It also scared him as he felt that Lawrence might even report his friends to the law.

Virginia Woolf comes across as very warm and deeply interested in people. Garnett reports that Woolf found the Second World War very distressing. Living in Sussex, she often saw fighting planes in the skies above. Garnett goes into literary mode with an interesting analysis of Mrs Dalloway.

The chapter at the end of the book on Carson McCullers is very interesting and she comes across as a fascinating personality.

This is an easy read, not at all taxing and there are some interesting insights into the literary world of the time. Garnett is a good raconteur who isn’t afraid to tell stories which reflect badly on himself and because he can be a bit of a name-dropper there were references to some more obscure writers and works which look worth following up.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Granite and Rainbow by Virginia Woolf

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The Tunnel by William Gass

 

It feels like I have been reading this for as long as Gass spent writing it; it’s a hefty tome and not easy to read. The primary character around whom all this revolves is William Frederick Kohler (I am reliably informed that in the US the word Kohler has plumbing connotations). He is a middle-aged history professor at a mid-western university who has just completed writing his magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. He is struggling to write the introduction and reflecting on his life and marriage. Kohler is trying to escape from his life and a symptom of this is the fact that he is digging a tunnel from his cellar, under the yard. As one reviewer says, the whole is a plotless stream of notes which covers his awful childhood, his deteriorating relationship with his wife, his infidelities with his students, politics with other lecturers, and his general loneliness. Embedded in it all is an undertone of vitriol and bigotry. Kohler, however is an equal opportunities bigot; he hates everyone and adeptly insults and abuses all who are not him. He doesn’t like himself either.

It is driven by language and in some ways has a Dickensian feel; only child raised in a bleak town with an alcoholic mother and a bullying father. Gass could have painted the childhood he does paint at the beginning of the book to get the reader onside with Kohler and to create a sense of journey and understanding. He doesn’t do this; he starts with the middle-aged Kohler who is sex-obsessed, repulsive, sharing some of the fascist views of those he writes about and seducing students. And Gass lays it on, making Kohler deliberately cartoonish in his repulsiveness.

There are plenty of cultural references which non-Americans will probably struggle with (and perhaps those who are younger). A whole section on the sweets and candies of childhood would probably be a delight to readers of a certain age. What there is not (certainly near the beginning of the novel) is interaction with other characters. We spend most of the time with Kohler, in his head. Kohler’s views on Hitler and the Nazis are also challenging. Kohler believes he would have followed Hitler; Kohler puts in a plea for the abuser because it’s easy to be a victim. He is accustomed to making off the cuff remarks that are staggering offensive, such as “I’ve been in bedrooms as bad as Belsen”. Clearly untrue and just adds to the reader’s picture of Kohler.

Kohler is an awful character, routinely racist, sexist and offensive. A number of questions arise. Obviously one asks how much Gass identifies with his creation. Gass has answered that himself;

“To write of such a man, you have to know loneliness, of course, but only of the kind that everyone has experienced at one time or another. It's like the terrible blizzards I once put in a short story. I had never experienced blizzards like that, but I had experienced snow. You just turn up the volume.”

One rather clever reviewer made a comment about Gass sitting in a chair for thirty years writing a novel about a man sitting in a chair for thirty years writing a book!

Another question that occurred relates to a British sitcom of the 1960s, Till Death Us Do Part; written by Johnny Speight. It was about an East End Londoner called Alf Garnett and his family (played by Warren Mitchell). Garnett was racist, sexist, obnoxious and anti-Semitic and was meant to be so outrageous that it would be obvious that it was a satire. Speight was working out his issues with his own father (as Kohler was doing). He was shocked when Garnett was treated as a hero who represented the feelings of many ordinary people (in the US the series was redone with the main character being Archie Bunker). Does Kohler feed into that sort of feeling? There are certainly people around like Kohler. He’s not a criminal, murderer or the sort of monster who populates popular fiction. He is an ordinary university lecturer in an ordinary town. Gass has argued that history is about values and their weighing up. Gass very effectively sums up his creation and why he is as he is;

"Kohler is a master of sophist reasoning. He certainly knows right from wrong, but that does not guarantee that one will make the right choices. Plato said that no one would knowingly do evil. I think people knowingly do evil all the time -- for selfishness or revenge or all sorts of reasons. Evil has always given more pleasure than virtue, and we don't really like virtuous people…. there's contradiction and confusion and deliberate darkness”.

In terms of the writing; Gass produces verbal pyrotechnics on every page and it is certainly the work of a great writer.  There is also a good deal of truly awful poetry, crude and offensive limericks (particularly those about concentration camps). Kohler seems to loathe women (most of them), but his base and inner feelings probably reflect a strain in men which insists on pursuing the illusion of youth. The font changes, and there are drawings and sketches and a whole variety of other stuff.

Given all the above; what do I feel. It is a great book, a great literary novel. I didn’t love it in the same way I did Omensetter’s Luck; but I don’t think it is a book to be loved. It’s not comfortable or easy. The scholarship on The Tunnel makes that clear. For me Gass is saying that whatever caused the Holocaust and the rise of Nazism; it’s still there; alive in people like Kohler who just need to be led and captivated. The Tunnel captures the ordinariness of human evil.

9 out of 10

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Dawn's Left Hand by Dorothy Richardson

Tenth in the Pilgrimage series. Miriam moves back to her old lodgings. However the bulk of the novel focuses on Miriam’s relationship with two people. Hypo Wilson (based on H G Wells) with whom she has an affair and a young woman called Amabel who falls in love with Miriam and with whom she has an intense relationship. Wilson is a rationalist who believes in free love and in socialism. Miriam finds him stimulating intellectually; attractive at a cerebral level, but not physically attractive. Amabel and Miriam’s relationship with her is much freer and more fluid. Richardson was writing this at about the time of Radclyffe Hall’s trial for obscenity.

Miriam begins to view herself on a different way as a result of these relationships;

“With the eyes of Amabel, and with her own eyes opened by Amabel, she saw the long honey-coloured ropes of hair framing the face […] falling across her shoulders and along her body where the last foot of their length, red-gold, gleamed marvellously against the rose-tinted velvety gleaming of her flesh. Saw the lines and curves of her limbs, their balance and harmony. Impersonally beautiful and inspiring.”

She also resists Wilson’s attempts to turn her into his type of female novelist and he also imagines her with a child, which she also resists. She even argues with Hypo about the nature of the novel;

“The torment of all novels is what is left out. The moment you are aware of it, there is torment in them. Bang, bang, bang, on they go, these men’s books, like an LCC tram, yet unable to make you forget them, the authors, for a moment.”

Richardson is reimagining the novel in Pilgrimage and now she is channelling her ideas through Miriam. It is as Richardson said herself “a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism” (Richardson was referring to Wells, Conrad and Bennett).

As with the previous novels, there is very little going on; we are following Miriam in her thoughts and feelings. Unlike Oberland this one is very much grounded in the previous books. The novels seem to be getting shorter now; almost snapshots of a brief period; but the standard still remains high.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting the next in the series Clear Horizon

[woolf woolf]

“The torment of all novels is what is left out. The moment you are aware of it, there is torment in them. Bang, bang, bang, on they go, these men’s books, like an LCC tram, yet unable to make you forget them, the authors, for a moment.”

 

Do you agree with this difference between male and female authors? I'm too tired to think of it now and give my interpretation.

Edited October 10, 2015 by woolf woolf

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Woolf woolf; that's a big question and I think there is a danger of generalisation; the interesting question is how do men portray women and women portray men. Not sure I have the answer.

 

Shadow Box by Antonia Logue

 

 

This is an epistolary novel which focuses on three real-life characters whose lives intersected. Mina Loy; poet artist, modernist, bohemian, futurist and much neglected thinker is one of the two main protagonists. The other is Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight champion. The link between them is the enigmatic Arthur Cravan (born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd). Cravan was Oscar Wilde’s nephew. He was known as a poet, boxer (he once fought Johnson), art critic, inventor of conceptual art (taken up by Duchamp), publisher (briefly) of a critical magazine and a lecturer (whose lectures were notoriously anarchistic and designed to shock). Loy and Cravan met in New York, both having left Europe because of the war. They fell in love and moved to Mexico as Cravan was avoiding the army. They planned to travel to South America. They married and the plan was for Loy to travel on a conventional liner whilst Cravan sailed himself. Unfortunately Craven set sail and was never heard of again, presumed lost in a heavy storm.

The premise of the novel is that thirty years later Cravan turns up and contacts Johnson. Johnson corresponds with Loy by letter and they go over their lives thirty years before. The letters are fairly long and of course, being epistolary there is no dialogue. This is the weakest part of the novel and can make it seem a little ponderous.

Its strength is the contrast between Loy and Johnson as they tell their stories. Loy tells of her unhappy marriage and life in Bohemia and some of the characters she met; futurism and her subsequent disenchantment with it. Her poetry was considered shocking in New York;

“I was denounced in Christian journals, in all the right-wing newspapers, slated as a harlot, without morals, shame, dignity or sense. It was magnificent […] Journalists came to interview me, to take pictures. I, they decided, was the personification of the daring Modern Woman. Mina Loy the Modernist. “

Loy charts her discarding of societal mores and her friendships with people like Marinetti (the futurist), Duchamp, William Carlos Williams and others. Johnson describes the brutality of his world, as a professional boxer when there were less rules, up to 45 rounds and where a black boxer as the world champion caused shock, anger and resentment. There are some brutal descriptions of prizefights, but also accounts of Johnson’s celebrity lifestyle.

Critics have been divided over Logue’s novel, but she is presenting two interesting and contrasting lifestyles told thirty years on and Conover has summed up the novel well;

“This novel, then, circles around the symbolic power of the body and the mechanics of grief. It demonstrates, then, that the modernist preoccupation with the narration of the individual’s experience of the sensual has resonance in contemporary fiction. Logue links childbirth, grief, love and the politics of race with her understanding of modernist aesthetics and the power of this novel lies in its visceral connection with the subject and the careful imagining of the desiring female subject.”

The contrasting lives works well. The focus on narrative rather than dialogue will not suit everyone. The elusive Arthur Cravan still seems an enigma. It is an interesting way of looking at a snapshot of the earlier twentieth century and at some of its fascinating characters.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting Rhapsody by Dorothy Edwards

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Family Skeletons by Henrietta Garnett

 

Another Bloomsbury influenced read; but this time from the mid-1980s. Henrietta Garnett is the daughter of David Garnett and Angelica Bell, great niece of Virginia Woolf. Before reading this I should have taken note of Dorothy Parker’s remark about Bloomsbury: “Bloomsbury paints in circles, lives in squares and loves in triangles”. The relationships in this novel are very tangled as you would expect.  

One of the first things that prods your consciousness when you read this is that the author is having a few games with names. The name of the house in Ireland in the first part of the book is Malabay (redolent of Mandalay). One of the main male characters is called Tara (Gone with the Wind; a plantation). The main female character is Catherine and yes she is somewhat dreamy and tempestuous. Those are the obvious ones, but there are others. Catherine is brought up by her uncle Pake at Malabay and the whole of her life revolves around the house and its surrounds. There is a nearby lake which is part of the estate and where Catherine’s mother and father drowned when she was very young. Tara is her cousin and they marry quite suddenly when Catherine is 17 (Tara is ten years older). This event seems to trigger a series of events of a tragic nature. The novel moves from Malabay to a clinic in a mountainous region and then to a remote island owned by Gerald, the other main male character. It is a novel about family secrets which come back to haunt and there is incest, betrayal, rape and estrangement. The most interesting character is Poppy, Pake’s ex-wife who turns up on a regular basis and seems to hold the whole thing together.

Some of the events of the novel seemed to stretch credulity a little and the characterisation seemed to me to be a little thin at times. Charming, beautiful and eccentric are all very well, but I need a little more than that. Garnett has created a very enclosed world with charming but fated characters. It just seemed very disconnected and I found it difficult to relate to the characters; they were ethereal and somehow unreal. I think the whole thing might also have being a retelling of part of the Bloomsbury story. There is a lyricism in the writing and some beautiful descriptions and those who love everything Bloomsbury may wish to read it. For me it was interesting, but ultimately didn’t work.

6 out of 10

Starting Charlotte Mew and her friends by Penelope Fitzgerald

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Harriet Hume by Rebecca West

 

This is my first Rebecca West and Harriet Hume is one of West’s lesser known novels. It has mixed reviews, possibly I think because it is not easy to see what West is doing. It is also an unusual modernist novel because it involves a fantasy element. It is a London novel and there are some good descriptions of London streets in the 1920s. The story is a double hander between two protagonists; Harriet Hume and Arnold Condorex. Harriet is a pianist with intuition and sensitivity, Arnold is a worldly aspiring politician. The book opens with them having a romantic tryst. Harriet discovers she can read her lovers thoughts and intentions and sees that his career and power is what motivates him and she is secondary. They part and meet again six years later by chance when again Harriet can see Arnold’s hidden motives and baser thoughts. The nest meeting is over a decade later when Arnold has real political power and again Harriet can see through him; by this time her hates her as his political plotting is beginning to unravel and he has financial problems. The book draws to a close with a final meeting as Arnold’s career is in ruins.

The whole novel revolves entirely around the two main characters and sometimes they tend to talk in speeches which can be a trial. The ending is the fantasy part and to attempt to explain would give it away. I suspect most readers will guess by the end; but that’s not the point. The two characters are opposites; possibly the male and female principles. Victoria Glendinning (in the virago introduction) argues that the two are opposites. The female principle is artistic, unaggressive, unconventional, moral and subjective. The male principle being objective, conventional, aggressive and amoral. It is also suggested that Condorex is based on H G Wells (he gets everyone; I’m reading about him as Hypo Wilson in Pilgrimage!); West had an affair with him. Glendinning’s conclusion is that West is making the point that neither can survive nor thrive in isolation.

However, West is doing more than this in her construction of opposites. Condorex represents power, the establishment and a masculine type of capitalism and so there is an element of political satire. Condorex’s values are pretty much those of the political class with a sense of hierarchy and entitlement which Hume finds repulsive: Condorex judging that revulsion to be because of her gender. Condorex has a drive for power and makes his name with an issue of Empire; West as part of her satire looks at Imperialism too. Condorex, although he seems to understand Hume’s point of view feels he cannot be other than he is:

“ “But a man must rise in the world!” ….(this) intention was unalterably a part of himself. He could not more remove it than he could uproot his own breath. … It dominated him, he was its instrument.”

Condorex abandons his lover to court other women who can assist with his career. Although Condorex comes across as reprehensible; West does give the impression that he is both perpetrator and victim. Arnold and Harriet become more distant over time and Arnold realises she is his opposite and wishes to destroy her. West rejects this type of dualism as too simplistic and the world is more complex; as she says herself at a later date;

“This refusal leaves man to indulge in some of his characteristically false logic. His mind, which is inadequate for the purpose of mastering his environment and therefore always oversimplifies, sees the universe in antitheses, in dichotomies. He says, foolishly enough, for one cannot cut into clean halves two substances that pass into each other by insensible gradation, that there is light and darkness, life and death, pleasure and pain.”

West is critiquing dualism whilst admitting we fall into the habit of accepting it. Condorex has rejected the imagination and the artistic sense that Hume has which leads to the sterile nature of his life and his lack of morals. However Hume as a musician has partially entered the masculine domain as a performer and owner of her own talents. It is also clear that Condorex has a choice whether to follow his heart and stay with Hume, when life would be very different, the question really is; does he have that choice or is he destined to follow the path he does because he is unable to follow his heart. West makes it clear there is a different path for Condorex to follow, it is less clear that he has the ability to follow it.

Although the novel is clearly a political satire, its subtitle is still A London Fantasy. West, through Harriet weaves fairy tales through the book and Harriet has the ability to transform her garden in some way which becomes clearer towards the end of the book as the novel enters more fully into the fantasy area. West uses fantasy to suggest an alternative reality using fantasy and fairy tales as a mirror to highlight faults in society. Harriet’s powers are celebratory and life-affirming. Many of the critics of this novel miss the point that West is not creating a linear and logical plot. More interesting analyses of the plot use Derridean ideas like jouissance and a celebration of heterogeneity, fecundity and excess; dealing with dualism by synthesis. Other interesting analyses of the novel follow ideas related to Foucault’s narrative of sovereignty and its relation to the modernist novel. There is a lot going on here; it’s an interesting and underrated novel.

8 out of 10

Starting The Black Jacobins by C L R James

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Rhapsody by Dorothy Edwards

 

Dorothy Edwards was a Welsh author who is very little read or known these days. Rhapsody is a collection of her short stories. Edwards remained little known and out of print after her death in 1934, until Virago (bless them) published her only novel and this collection of her short stories in the 1980s. The edition I have in the recent Library of Wales edition has three extra stories.

Dorothy Edwards committed suicide leaving a heart-rending note;

“I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life. I have accepted kindness and friendship, and even love, without gratitude and given nothing in return."

She was born in 1903 and her father was a socialist and Independent Labour Party activist; a political tradition she followed. She read Greek and Philosophy at Cardiff University. I found out about her work when reading David Garnett’s book on his friends. The chapter on T E Lawrence mentions her. Garnett was a fan of her writing (as was Lawrence) and she stayed with him and his wife rent free for a time. Lawrence thought that her story A Country House was one of the best written in the English Language. Garnett also thought she was a brilliant writer. Christopher Meredith sums up well in his introduction to this edition;

"Fashion for re-readings according to various theories have helped critics to rediscover her from time to time, but I believe that Dorothy Edwards is a great deal more than an interesting literary case. She's an important, utterly original modernist. Whichever way you read her, she's the extraordinarily accomplished author of powerful and suggestive fictions."

Here’s the rub, where should this type of writer sit in the canon, if at all. Having just finished reading Rhapsody I can say that these stories stand up against any others I have read; Woolf, Mansfield, Chekov, Maupassant. I am astonished that Dorothy Edwards is so little known.

The stories are fairly minimalist and usually written with a male narrator. There is a control and a holding back, desire is constrained and relationships incomplete, loneliness often a given. Edwards was interested in music and music is a recurrent motif and theme, often representing an undercurrent of passion. Meredith points out that a number of the stories refer to fairy tales, but in themselves they resemble fairy tales that are ironic with a menacing edge, covered by what seems to be a conventional English backdrop. Often outsiders or visitors arrive to disturb marriages and well established relationships. The emotional tensions between the characters is palpable’ the prose is stylised and often deliberately awkward. The movement and development of the stories often seems logical, but on reflection there is an underlying disturbance and all is not as it seems. The opening of A Country House illustrates this;

“From the day when I first met my wife she has been my first consideration always. It is only fair that I should treat her so, because she is young. When I first met her she was a mere child with black ringlets down her back and big blue eyes. She put her hair up to get married. Not that I danced attendance on her. That is nonsense.”

There is an odd construction here, although it may seem straightforward. There is nuance and almost menace and the narrator almost seems to be arguing with himself. On reflection I found that opening quite chilling.

Edwards herself says; “you must be realist or you must invent a personal isolated odd universe composed exclusively of your own experience”

I now feel the need to get hold of Claire Flay’s recent biography. She argues that Edwards uses the male narrators in the way she does in order to deconstruct their authority.

David Garnett has had a good deal of say in how we have seen Edwards until recently as her biography has been written. He indicates that Edwards was not always comfortable with people and indeed her stories are more ice sculpture than ardent passion. There is a picture of her in the back of Rhapsody and it is haunting. Given her upbringing, it is not surprising that class is important element for Edwards, but not in the way you would expect. Her women are often marginalised, but Edwards examines and critiques their position and treatment in a highly original way. These stories deconstruct and explore; the endings are unusual and I was often left thinking “Did that just end?” The stories just stop, often it feels like mid-sentence. However they make you think and they stay with you.

These short stories rank with the best I have ever read; they are haunting and are much more than they seem on the surface. These are a must read.

9 and a half out of 10

Starting Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

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Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain

 

This book has been on my to be read list for over thirty years and I really should not have left it this long to read it. It is much better known these days following the recent film and a TV adaptation some years ago. It is the account of Vera Brittain’s wartime experiences, from a sheltered middle class upbringing to starting at Somerville College Oxford and then to volunteer work as a VAD nurse in Britain, France and Malta. It shows the horrors of war through the eyes of a woman suffering the losses of loved ones and nursing some of the seriously wounded and dying. Brittain takes her story to 1925 covering her time at Oxford, the post-traumatic stress resulting from her wartime service, her growth as a journalist and writer, her friendship with Winifred Holtby, her work for the League of Nations and ending with her marriage.

Any reading in the area of WW1 should include this book. Brittain takes the reader through the loss of innocence and the changes in society wrought by the war. Most of all it charts the loss of a generation. We are introduced to Vera’s brother Edward and his friends Roland, Geoffrey and Victor who all went to Uppingham School. Brittain falls in love with Roland and they become engaged to be married. There are brief meetings during leave and painful partings at railway stations. Inevitably death intervenes and one by one Brittain loses them all. It is heart-rending and being so well written adds to the impact as does Brittain’s poetry, which is included throughout.

Brittain does do much more than tell a tale of sadness and loss. She doesn’t portray herself as a victim because her feminism and determination to make a difference shine through. It is interesting to chart the development of Brittain’s thinking from her conservative middle class background to her espousing of pacifism and socialism after the war. She weaves together the personal and political very well and concludes that she doesn’t have to put up with the outrage of society sending its sons to their death and spends the rest of her life fighting for peace. Brittain’s writing has intellectual force and clarity. She is not afraid of feelings and that combination of intellectual vigour and emotion works very well.

I think I will probably read the two follow ups, Testament of Friendship and Testament of Experience. Particularly Friendship which relates to Brittain’s friendship with Winifred Holtby.

There is nothing I can say about this which has not already been said; one of the best literary works about the First World War.

9 and a half out of 10

Starting Impassioned Clay by Stevie Davies

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Clear Horizon by Dorothy Richardson

 

Number eleven in the pilgrimage series. The end is almost in sight! Miriam makes a decision at the end of this novel to leave London and move to the country; cutting many ties and leaving her job. As ever the plot is not the main thing and drifts along as usual.

Amabel plays an important role. It is easy to place the novel historically as it is the height of the suffragette protests and Amabel gets herself arrested and jailed. The relationship between Amabel and Miriam is close. Interestingly Miriam acts as matchmaker between Michael Shatov and Amabel; two people she is very close to and the bringing together is planned and deliberate. Comparisons have been made between Clear Horizon and The Well of Loneliness where a similar solution to a problem occurs. As always Miriam’s motives are complex;

“Something far below any single, particular motive she could search out, had made the decision, was refusing to attend to this conscious conflict and was already regarding the event as current, even as past and accomplished. This complete, independent response, whose motives were either undiscoverable or non-existent, might be good or bad, but was irrevocable.”

Richardson does expect her readers to work and sometimes throwaway remarks conceal a good deal. Throughout the books the reader will be aware of Richardson’s dislike of Platonic philosophy. There is a neat remark by Miriam; “Look after the being and the becoming will look after itself”. This was also the reason that Richardson disliked the term “stream of consciousness” because it implied a source and preferred something like “a continuous state of being”.

The series continues to fascinate and the final two volumes relate to Richardson’s experience of Quakerism.

9 out of 10

Starting Dimple Hill by Dorothy Richardson

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Charlotte Mew and her friends by Penelope Fitzgerald

 

Having read and reviewed Mew’s poetry recently I felt I had to read this biography by Penelope Fitzgerald whilst her poetry was still fresh in my mind. Fitzgerald is a good, if idiosyncratic biographer and because she wrote this in the early 1980s she was able to speak to a few people who knew Charlotte Mew. She is not as well-known as a poet as she should be but is gradually being read more as a result of works like this and a recent edition of her poems. Thomas Hardy was an admirer and she visited him a number of times towards the end of his life. He felt that she was a poet “who will be read when others are forgotten”. Woolf called her “the greatest living poetess” and Sassoon thought she was the equal of Emily Bronte.

Mew’s life was tragic in many ways, there was a history of mental illness and that was one of the reasons she and her sister Anne decided not to marry. She took her own life a few months after the death of Anne by drinking Lysol (a form of bleach). Mew was almost certainly a lesbian and she fell in love with three women, she was rejected by all three. Her poetry is informed by the fear of mental illness and a sense of rejection and isolation; “the poignancy of thwarted self-fulfilment” as one critic says. Mew’s poetry is deceptively fragile; as Louis Untermeyer puts it, “a cameo cut in steel”.

Mew’s poetry is not traditionally structured and was often a publisher’s nightmare because of the way her poems had to be set. In the original chapbook “The Farmers Bride” was set lengthwise (you had to turn the page sideways to read it). Mew felt it read better that way.

Fitzgerald’s biography is not an academic tone and it has the touch of a novelist; it reads easily and is fairly concise and understated. She is a sympathetic biographer who looks at human frailty with an amused benevolence. The introduction to the book sums up Mew’s legacy;

“To have written, as Charlotte Mew did, a handful of poems of unique beauty and finish represents an inspiring beating of the odds. They ought to entitle her to a small share of enduring renown. The longings in her poems remain passionately undiminished by time, as do her cries for a world more just and forthcoming. And yet sixty years after her death, as her miseries recede into the gentling past, increasingly her poems themselves become the other world, that 'over there' where longings and love together lie beneath a reconciling sun. Bitter loss becomes lovely loss - bitter yearnings, sweet yearnings”.

It is now almost a ninety years since her death and hopefully readers will continue to discover Mew and to read and appreciate her.

8 out of 10

Starting Elders and Betters by Quentin Bell

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Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte

 

I’ve been conscious for a while of not having read anything by Anne Bronte and decided it was time to remedy that. This is Anne Bronte’s first novel and has the reputation of being not as good as the second; however I certainly felt that it had its strengths. The story is straightforward; Agnes Grey is the daughter of a clergyman whose family finds itself is straightened circumstances. Agnes decides she must contribute to the family finances and takes a post of a governess. There is an account of her time as a governess in two families. The account paints a fairly bleak picture of life as a governess and of the role of women of a certain class. This is certainly based on Anne’s own experience, apart from the romance at the end.

Anne Bronte has always been seen as a lesser writer than her two sisters; this isn’t my impression. Agnes Grey is a strong minded woman, who very much has a sense of independence, “to go out into the world; to act for myself; to exercise my unused faculties; to try my own unknown powers; to earn my own maintenance”. At the end of the novel when she marries Weston the usual Victorian formula would be that he is rescuing her and providing her with hearth and home. The more perceptive reader will realise that he is not rescuing her, but she is rescuing him. Agnes can be very self-effacing at times and her piety I found somewhat irritating, but she is a much stronger character than many Victorian heroines. .

The nature of work that women of Agnes’s type have to do is portrayed as thankless and degrading with cruel employers and children whom are ungovernable and with no respect to someone they treat as a servant. I think Anne’s portrayal of men is very much different to her sisters. There are no smouldering Byronic heroes like Rochester and Heathcliffe. Most of the men are shallow and self-absorbed. Her idea of a leading man is also different; Weston is not heroic or good-looking. He is serious, bookish, kind with obvious faults and vulnerabilities; very unlike the men her sisters created. This makes her books less easy to film; producers like strong male leads!

I was surprised to find that Anne Bronte is much more radical than her sisters. She is concerned about the rights and working conditions of women who work in virtual slavery in domestic service and portrays the upper and moneyed classes who employ them as cruel and unscrupulous. Shades of a socialist and feminist approach to life and no swooning over emotionally stunted heroes. Agnes Grey does not need Weston at the end of the book; she is running a school with her mother and they are independent. It is a positive choice. I would urge those of you who have not read Anne Bronte yet to do so.

8 out of 10

Starting The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair

[woolf woolf]

You made me want to read the book. What do people usually dislike about it?

[Books do furnish a room]

Woolf; it can be seen as more pedestrian than her sisters' novels; not as driven by passion. Anne was more practical possibly.

 

Granite and Rainbow by Virginia Woolf

This is a posthumous collection of essays by Woolf ranging from about 1908 to the late 1930s, but mostly in the 1920s. As the blurb says the essays are on the art of fiction and the art of biography. Leonard Woolf collected together many essays and reportage in three volumes published in the years after Woolf’s death. This one came along in the late 1950s as a result of extensive research by two Woolf scholars in the US. Woolf usually did not keep copies of the articles she wrote and they were often published anonymously.

The title “Granite and Rainbow” comes from an essay entitled The New Biography. Woolf talks about the tension between the “granite-like solidity” of historical facts and the “rainbow-like intangibility” of the human personality and the weaving of these two things into a whole. She uses the necessity of doing this to illustrate the tedious and boring nature of Victorian biography and neatly dissects the book she is reviewing; a biography of Edward VII by Sidney Lee (one rating on GR) comparing it with Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Woolf comes back to this approach to biography a number of times in this collection.

I suppose the best known essay in this book concerns Hemmingway and is eminently quotable. She reviews his collection of short stories Men Without Women and also analyses The Sun Also Rises. The comment she makes about the short stories is classic Woolf; “There are in Men Without Women many stories which, if life were longer, one would wish to read again” (she doesn’t say how much longer). She thought Hemmingway’s characters talked too much; but her real criticism is that Hemmingway “lets his dexterity, like the bullfighter's cloak, get between him and the fact …. But the true writer stands close up to the bull and lets the horns - call them life, truth, reality, whatever you like - pass him close each time”. As to the characterisation, comparing him to Chekov the characters are “flat as cardboard”. The whole is a delight to read.

All the essays are well written as you would expect; this is a different Woolf to her fiction, this is her bread and butter and how she survived for many years. Some of the books reviewed are not well known now, some still known. The longest piece in the book is “Phases of Fiction” and covers novelists and poets like Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, Austen, the Brontes, Stephenson, assorted poets and goes as far as Proust; to name but a few. It is an interesting run through mostly English fiction and Woolf’s judgements are always pertinent and sometimes unexpected. This collection takes its place alongside The Common Reader and the other collections published after Woolf’s death; it contains some interesting reflections on the art of writing and reviewing.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Berlin Mosaic by Eva Tucker

[Brida]

^^This sounds like an interesting read, I'll put it down on my TBR list. And it's a collection of essays so one can read them separately i.e. if I forget to read it for a couple of days (weeks) I can just continue without much trouble how many essays btw?

 

Great review, very insighful yet not too long

[Books do furnish a room]

Thanks Brida; there are 28 essays; most are not too long.

 

The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair

 

This is a brief novella; readable in one or two sittings and was written by May Sinclair in 1922. It was Sinclair who coined the term “stream of consciousness” when reviewing Dorothy Richardson. Sinclair was a suffragist and modernist who also was influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis. Sinclair is an accomplished novelist, but most of her work is rather puzzlingly out of print.

This is a study of the Victorian notion of women and their role. The story of Harriet Frean’s life from birth to death, and a look at self-sacrifice and self-denial. She is brought up in a particular way and to behave properly; here is her father speaking to her;

“His arm tightened, drawing her closer. And the kind, secret voice went on. “Forget ugly things. Understand, Hatty, nothing is forbidden. We don’t forbid, because we trust you to do what we wish. To behave beautifully…”

All this helps to create her identity. There are also some passages which may have deeper meaning;

“Mamma would come in carrying the lighted candle. Her face shone white between her long, hanging curls. She would stoop over the cot and lift Harriett up, and her face would be hidden in curls. That was the kiss-me-to-sleep kiss. And when she had gone Harriett lay still again, waiting. Presently Papa would come in, large and dark in the firelight. He stooped and she leapt up into his arms. That was the kiss-me-awake kiss; it was their secret. Then they played. Papa was the Pussycat and she was the little mouse in her hole under the bed-clothes. They played till Papa said, “No more!” and tucked the blankets tight in.

“Now you’re kissing like Mamma—””

 

Harriet idealises her parents; as most children do; but most children grow out of that idealisation, Harriet doesn’t. In many ways she doesn’t need to enter the adult world and tends to approach it very tentatively;

 

“She wasn't sure that she liked dancing. There was something obscurely dangerous about it. She was afraid of being lifted off her feet and swung on and on, away from her safe, happy life. She was stiff and abrupt with her partners, convinced that none of those men who liked Connie Hancock could like her, and anxious to show them that she didn't expect them to. She was afraid of what they were thinking. And she would slip away early, running down the garden to the gate at the bottom where her father waited for her. She loved the still coldness of the night under the elms, and the strong, tight feel of her father's arm when she hung on it leaning towards him, and his "There we are!" as he drew her closer. Her mother would look up from the sofa and ask always the same question, "Well, did anything nice happen?"

We also have to remember all we see as readers is filtered by Harriet; there is no omniscient narrator. It does, however enable the reader to see how Harriet supresses her own feelings and desires. When she does fall in love (a love that is reciprocated) it is with the fiancé of her best friend. Needless to say, Harriet behaves beautifully and retains her view of herself. Consequently all three parts of the triangle are made miserable.

Harriet shrivels as she grows older and overall the whole is rather bleak; Harriet never really becomes a person in her own right. Her parents remain with her as does the expectations she feels society has of her. It is a modernist treatment of Victorian repression as well as an examination of the role of women in Victorian society.

8 out of 10

Starting Lady Anna by Anthony Trollope

[Books do furnish a room]

Berlin Mosaic by Eva Tucker

 

I have thoroughly enjoyed this brief (too brief for my liking) autobiographical novel based on the history of a family. It reminded me strongly of Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. Reading it was made more poignant by the discovery that Eva Tucker died this month. This is really the story of Eva Tucker’s (mostly Jewish) family from 1891 to 1939 with a 1990 update. It is well written and the characterisation is good and I think there is a three volume work trying to get out! For a work ostensibly about the holocaust, the actual event is absent apart from a few brief paragraphs near the end.

Tucker was born in Berlin and was evacuated to Britain in 1939 with her mother as a result of Quaker sponsorship. Tucker wrote a couple of experimental novels in the 1960s, but Berlin Mosaic only came along in 2005. She has also been a journalist and short story writer and worked for English PEN, an organisation promoting the freedom of writers worldwide and fighting against censorship. She also worked for interfaith dialogue; being both Jewish and a Quaker, this seems rather apt.

The family history reflects the changes, twists and tensions in German society and the changing attitudes to Jews; the sense of disbelief in the motives of the Nazis, the thought that they would “soon settle down”. Most of all the novel is about the choices and compromises made by ordinary people. The loves and losses of daily life are captured well. It is very matter of fact and not at all melodramatic with a touch of irony and well-rounded characters with human flaws and frailty. There is a character early in the novel who is committed to an asylum; she is a presence throughout who begins to appear saner as madness descends on society.

This is an excellent novel; my only quibble is that it should have been longer.

8 and a half out of 10

Starting Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

[Books do furnish a room]

Elders and Betters by Quentin Bell

 

Another book of Bloomsbury recollections, this time by Quentin Bell, son of Vanessa and Clive Bell. It takes the form of a series of chapters on major figures in and around Bloomsbury. It apparently began as an attempt at an autobiography, but turned into this. There are chapters about the usual suspects (but not Virginia Woolf, because Bell has written a biography of her), but also some less expected, like Anthony Blunt, Mary Butts, Claude Rogers, Lawrence Gowring, Ethel Smyth and Robert Medley.

Bell is observant and tells some good tales; thankfully he isn’t reverential and this is a warts and all portrayal; particularly about his parents. As he says “I loved my parents, and I had more than the usual number to love”. He is candid about his father’s political leanings and about the conduct of both his parents, especially in relation to his sister Angelica. Bell revisits the sexual abuse of Virginia and Vanessa by their step brothers and its long term effects. He is able to be candid, but is forgiving of human frailty. He is less forgiving of David Garnett and his marriage to Angelica; “Old men have no right to prey upon the young”.

This is an interesting set of recollections and Bell is aware he has a good tale to tell;

“I was born at 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The doors of No. 45, No. 47, and indeed of all the other houses in the square were black, or if not black, dark grey or a funereal blue. The door of No. 46 was a startling bright vermilion. The colour had been chosen by my mother, Vanessa; she also decorated the interior of the house, making use of equally startling colours. My father, Clive Bell, was in those days a left-wing radical. From an early age I knew that we were odd.”

 

There are extra chapters at the end; one on the way Maynard Keynes’s political views changed over time and the other on Virginia Woolf’s works A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. He examines attitudes to pacifism in Bloomsbury, especially in relation to the rise of fascism. He does not always manage to contain his own radicalism, asserting that his aunt Virginia would have been horrified at the legacy of Thatcherism and at a pointless war with Argentina. The chapter on Anthony Blunt contains some interesting reflections on espionage, treachery and treason. Bell is never dull and there is always something to contend with.

7 out of 10

Starting Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns

[Books do furnish a room]

Impassioned Clay by Stevie Davies

 

Stevie Davies has rapidly become one of my favourite authors. She writes beautifully and this novel is no exception. Earlier in the year I read Davies’s work on reclaiming women’s voices and writing from the Civil War period of English History. This novel revisits the women of the Civil War period. Olivia comes from a Quaker background in modern Cheshire. When her mother dies she is buried in the garden of the family home. A skeleton is discovered of a seventeenth century woman; her neck is broken and she has a scold’s bridle on her head. This is a secured metal cap with a metal flange which fixes in the mouth and on the tongue. This scold had metal spikes on it. Olivia becomes increasingly fascinated by the woman and as years go by she begins to try to establish her identity. This is interspersed with Olivia’s growing up, her difficult relationship with her father and his new wife, and Olivia’s struggles with herself and her sexuality. Olivia follows the historical trail as would any scholar and the work becomes part detective story as the woman is gradually brought to light. Hannah Williams/Jones/Emanuel is the woman in question and Olivia follows contemporary writings, some by Hannah herself to tell her story.

Davies skilfully weaves fact and fiction in the historical side of the tale and does so with great empathy. Hannah is a rebel and through her research Olivia sheds light on her own situation. Hannah, through ill-treatment, disillusionment and contact with the radicalism of the Civil War, develops her own interpretation of religion. Hannah rejects the notion of a male God and an established church and is persecuted and tortured, but refuses to be quiet. Hannah has a “yoke-fellow” (wife and religious helpmate) Isabel and her anarchistic notions and challenge to the establishment means her fate is sealed. Davies says that many of her characters are transients, displaced or wayfarers (Hannah is Welsh and crosses the border) and often “mouthy and anomalous”. There is a connection of personal identity between the two women which transcends time and makes the novel work well. Davies gives a voice to characters usually confined to academic books and offering a critique of conventional historical fictions with conventional meanings.

A moving novel with an interesting and feisty protagonist; I really do now want to read the rest of Davies’s work.

9 out of 10

Starting Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair

[willoyd]

 She thought Hemmingway’s characters talked too much; but her real criticism is that Hemmingway “lets his dexterity, like the bullfighter's cloak, get between him and the fact …. But the true writer stands close up to the bull and lets the horns - call them life, truth, reality, whatever you like - pass him close each time”. As to the characterisation, comparing him to Chekov the characters are “flat as cardboard”. The whole is a delight to read.

 

I went off to read that essay in the light of your comments: sharp is an understatement - she's lethal!  I found her comments on his dialogue particularly interesting: that's something I've been trying to drum into my children all term, as they will insist on writing reams of the d*mn stuff!  Good to see that even the likes of Hemingway could get carried away.

 

You've reminded me that I really ought to make some headway - I've recently finally tracked down my last missing volume of her complete essays, and have only dipped in so far.  She's a wee bit daunting initially,  but once stuck in, what a brilliant read!

[Books do furnish a room]

I agree Willoyd; she writes lethally and I must read more of her essays!

 

Dimple Hill by Dorothy Richardson

 

Number 12 of 13 novels in the Pilgrimage series; almost there!! Dimple Hill reflects the time Richardson spent with the Quaker Penrose family on their Sussex farm (1908-1911). It was during this time that Richardson developed her sense as a writer and indeed her sense of having a vocation as a writer. It seems almost unnecessary to say that we continue to see everything through Miriam’s eyes.

Dimple Hill is the name of the farm run by the Roscorla family. Interestingly Kate McLoughlin has argued (in Modernist Cultures 10:3) that Richardson depicts Erfahrung (the wise yield of reflected upon experience) as a response to a “crisis in transferable experience” as a result of the War. She goes on to argue that the very length of Pilgrimage is intended to prompt this sort of reflection in the reader.

Richardson was strongly influenced by the Quakers; never quite joining, but very attracted to their spirituality and the silence and stillness. She also wrote about the Quakers and her stay in Sussex before starting Pilgrimage. The descriptions of the daily life of the farm are fascinating and apparently accurate as has been confirmed by descendants of the family Richardson stayed with. The description of Miriam being taught how to prune the developing bunches of grapes on the vine to give space to the remaining bunches is at the same time moving and hilarious. There is also an interesting contrast between city and country life. Miriam has previously been very London centred and the rhythms and pace of country life are very different. One contrast noted by Miriam is the change in the type of food she is eating; fresh and much less processed.

Miriam, although she is clearly very attracted to the Quaker way of life has a moment where she realises that she could never become a full member;

“the church that confronted her silently reminded her that the depths of her nature had been subtly moulded long ago by its manifold operations and could never fully belong to the household on the hill”

Miriam is beginning to come to a sense of herself as possibly being a writer; a process Richardson herself went through as she says in her forward to Pilgrimage;

“Since all these novelists happen to be men, the present writer, proposing at this moment to write a novel and looking round for a contemporary pattern, was faced with the choice between following one of her regiments and attempting to produce a feminine equivalent of the current masculine realism.”

Richardson found her voice in giving one to Miriam.

8 and a half out of 10.

Starting the last in the series; March Moonlight

[Books do furnish a room]

Uncanny Stories by May Sinclair

 

If you like your ghost stories slightly more subtle with a modernist edge then these may be for you. The introduction suggests that Sinclair combines the nineteenth century ghost story tradition with insights from Freud and Einstein. The concept of the uncanny is developed by Freud as meaning familiar but somehow incongruous with an element of cognitive dissonance. I can see point, but it can be stretched a little far. The last (and best) of the stories, The Intercessor, was written in 1911 before Freud wrote about the uncanny.

There is a good deal of intelligence in the twists and turns and not all the stories are about ghosts. A couple are about a rather unexpected afterlife and one is about a telepath who is confronted by the nature of mental illness. The stories are unexpected. A servant murders his master. The master returns as a ghost, for revenge you would expect; but no, very much no; it’s much more complex than that. Sinclair’s ghosts want explanation, understanding, acknowledgement and even emotional maturity. The Intercessor is straight from Emily Bronte and is an exploration of child abuse and neglect and provokes a good deal of thought.

There is a feminist twist as would be expected and “The Flaw in the Crystal” is an important work, examining the relationship between men and women in the context of the traditions of Eve and Mary, so influential in western thought about the role of women and is suggestive of a different way of perceiving and working out these processing against the backdrop of evolutionary thought.

I’m deliberately not going into detail about the stories because the power is in the reading. If you get hold of the edition with the introduction by Paul March-Russell; don’t read it until the end because he gives most of the plots away!

These stories feel like a reinterpretation and moving on from Victorian Gothic and ghost stories to a more modern/modernist form. If you are looking for shocks, gore and horror these are not the place to find them. Sinclair’s stories are more psychological and subtle, but not the less chilling for that.

8 out of 10

Starting Fireworks by Angela Carter

[Books do furnish a room]

Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns

This is the third novel I have read by Comyns and this one is autobiographical; covering her early years. It describes life in her family home, a run down and crumbling manor house, on the banks of the Avon in Warwickshire, with her parents and five siblings. I read a little about Comyns’ life and the description of how she made ends meet before she began writing endeared her to me;

“Comyns generated money by breeding poodles, renovating pianos, dealing in antiques and classic cars and drawing for commercial advertisements”.

A word of caution; the spelling (and sometimes diction and grammar) are that of a child. This can be an irritant but the book is still readable and understandable and some of the mistakes are amusing.  As it was written much later and has passed through an editor’s hands it is certainly deliberate. The eccentric spelling does ameliorate at times the horrors Comyns is describing and one reviewer has speculated that the writings are indicative of the wounds inflicted on the child. Sometimes the errors illustrate a hidden level of meaning and so are worth noting. The family is dysfunctional (as are most families I suspect) and sometimes one wonders how they all survived childhood (these days social services would have removed them). Both parents were cruel in different ways; her father was almost certainly an alcoholic and periodically violent, especially (but not exclusively) towards her mother.

'Occaisonally he unsuccessfully tried shooting Mammy and as she was quite deaf she didn't even notice.'

One sister as a baby was thrown down done the stairs by father because she wouldn’t stop crying (she survived with little damage).

There are also regular descriptions of beloved family pets getting the wrong side of father’s shotgun. Comyns’ mother tended to wish the children didn’t exist and consequently ignored them a good deal of the time. Childhood was in a rural idyll and the children were able to run wild much of the time. This combined with the fact they were quite isolated made them eccentric and in their mother’s words “grubby”. The children were also quite cruel to animals and the descriptions of their attempts to ride their pet rabbits are rather gruesome.

The book is often bleak, but is told with the matter of factness and optimism of a child and at times is very funny (often in ways it shouldn’t be). There is a gothic edge to it and the tale is told by a perceptive and able chronicler. It is also rather surreal, but well worth looking out for.

8 out of 10

 

Starting Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

[Books do furnish a room]

Fireworks by Angela Carter

 

A set of short stories by Angela Carter from the early 1970s; some are based on Carter’s time in Japan from 1969 to 1971. She describes that time as one of change, transition and radicalisation and the stories reflect this. Carter says that the position of women in Japan and their repression drew her towards feminism. The stories cover awakening, abuse and the dynamics of relationships. One of the stories is an experiment with magic realism and there is a touch of the fairy tale about a number of them.

There is a Garden of Eden story (Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest) relating to a brother and sister brought up by their father in a village on the edge of a forest. The village culture says there is an evil tree at the centre of the unexplored forest. The children, who have always done things together, set off to explore and find it. Things begin to change and after a carnivorous plant bites the sister;

“Her words fell heavy with a strange weight, as heavy as her own gravity, as if she might have received some mysterious communication from the perfidious mouth that wounded her. At once, listening to her, Emile thought of that legendary tree; and then he realised that, for the first time in his life, that he did not understand her, for, of course, they had heard of the tree. Looking at her in a new puzzlement, he sensed the ultimate difference of a femininity he had never before known or any need or desire to acknowledge and this difference might give her the key to some order of knowledge to which he might not yet aspire, himself, for all at once she seemed far older than he. She raised her eyes and fixed on him a long, solemn regard which chained him in a conspiracy of secrecy, so that, henceforth, they would share only with one another the treacherous marvels round them.”

It is of course The Fall, with a new and sacred Eve (a theme Carter will return to).

These stories aren’t consistently as good as her later work, but you can sense her finding her feet. The Loves of Lady Purple is about a life size puppet, whose puppeteer creates a story for her which involves poverty, abuse and a life in a brothel as a dominatrix and then an old age of poverty. When, of course, the puppet comes to life, she does and becomes the only thing she is able to do. A fable about the narrowness of the roles women are forced into.

Reflections is also about gender roles; a gothic tale with a mirror into another (reversed) world, a hermaphrodite who knits to keep the world in place, penises as guns and guns as penises with some analysis of rape in this world and the reversed world.

Some of the stories are about cityscapes and being in an alien city, or in the underbelly of the city; usually with gender relations as part of the backdrop. The prose is lush and heavy at times and there is great intensity in the writing. This isn’t Carter at her very best, but these stories are still better than most.

7 and a half out of 10

Starting The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

[Books do furnish a room]

The Black Jacobins by C L R James

This is the classic account of the Haitian revolution; one of the most significant slave revolts. C L R James is a historian in the Marxist tradition and he is passionate about his subject. James was a Trinidadian and I knew him originally as a writer about cricket (I kid you not) and he has written one of the best books ever written about cricket (Beyond a Boundary). The Black Jacobins was first published in 1938 and was one of the seminal works of the history of the African diaspora.

James was a writer and thinker who covered a wide range of issues. His love of sport led to books and writing on cricket; asking the question "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?", directly parodying Kipling and he showed how his love of the sport meshed with his political views. He wrote novels and plays (including one about Toussaint L’Ouverture which starred Paul Robeson). James was also a tireless political agitator over several decades. He met and worked with Trotsky, Kenyatta, Nkrumah to name a few and was very involved with many of the independence movements of the mid twentieth century.

In 1791 the French colony of San Domingo was the richest slave colony in the Caribbean. James charts the rebellion and struggle for independence which lasted until 1803; and the leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture, himself a slave until the age of 45. James very consciously wrote this as a blueprint for how to run a successful revolution, he was aware that there would be a movement towards independence and away from the current imperial powers. He is clearly impressed by L’Ouverture;

“Pericles, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Marx and Engels, were men of a liberal education, formed in the traditions of ethics, philosophy and history. Toussaint was a slave, not six years out of slavery, bearing alone the unaccustomed burden of war and government, dictating his thoughts in the crude words of a broken dialect, written and rewritten by his secretaries until their devotion and his will had hammered them into adequate shape.”

This is history from below before historians like Hill and Hobsbawm popularized it. It is written almost in novel style, but the historical analysis is still there. The slaves are the agents of their own emancipation and the story as it develops is gripping. This is a detailed historical text and is not a quick read and there are plenty of twists and turns. The slave rebellion ultimately fought off attempts to overthrow it by the Spanish, British and the French. Toussaint L’Ouverture cuts a heroic figure as a wise and thoughtful (though flawed) leader. He did not survive to see the revolution safe and complete and was captured by the French and died in France. Wordsworth wrote a sonnet in lament which ends

thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and man's unconquerable mind.

James argues against the prevailing historiography of the time. Traditionally it has been argued that the French expedition of 1801-3 which consisted of some 60 000 troops was only defeated by weather and yellow fever and the revolutionaries were inferior militarily and could only succeed with white officers, and that Napoleon was not trying to reinstate slavery. James explodes all these myths. Napoleon had appointed his brother-in-law to lead the expedition and James tracked down extensive correspondence and pieced together the campaign. It is clear that there was every intention by the French to reinstate slavery and James suggests that there is evidence of a plan to exterminate the whole non-white population (hundreds of thousands of people) and bring across new slaves from Africa because they would be less likely to rebel.

James takes on a few myths; one in particular, that the abolition of the slave trade was due to the campaigning of people in Britain like Wilberforce and other anti-slavery activists. James does not demean their views, but he argues they were being used and the real reasons were economic. San Domingo was an economic powerhouse, producing great riches for France and many of the slaves were being bought from the British. Voices in Britain were beginning to question why the government was helping fund a French colony. From a capitalist perspective Adam Smith was already arguing that slavery was not an efficient economic system. It may have made and kept much of the aristocracy and establishment rich, but it was ceasing to make economic sense in terms of the growing industrial revolution.

James brings the book up to date with an appendix written in the 1960s linking the Haitian revolution with that of Cuba. Of course the study of history moves on and some of James’s detailed work and conclusions have been amended and developed. He also does not detail the important role women played in the revolution. He hints at their importance and later historians have begun to tell their story. Despite its faults The Black Jacobins, as a review in Time Out says;

“Contains some of the finest and most deeply felt polemical writing against slavery and racism ever to be published”

I could not put it better.

9 out of 10

Starting The Ghost Stories of Walter de la Mare