All Passion Spent

Vita Sackville-West 

by William Strang.

Like many people I know a little about the colourful life of Vita Sackville-West: her elopement with Violet Trefusis; her affair with Virginia Woolf; her famously open marriage with Harold Nicolson, and her creation of the beautiful gardens at Sissinghurst. But I’d never read any of her work until I spotted a copy of All Passion Spent while I was filling gaps on the shelves in the Oxfam bookshop where I volunteer for a morning a week.

So I bought it (despite promising the family that as they bought me a Kindle there would be no more books brought into the house) and very good I found it. Published in 1931, the novel centres on Lady Slane, whose husband, a former Prime Minister and foreign diplomat, has just died. Now aged 88, she moves into a small house in Hampstead, accompanied only by elderly maid Genoux,  and thinks about the girl she once was – the girl who sublimated her own hopes and needs to become the perfect wife and mother, doing exactly what was expected of her.

She refuses to see her children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren, but enjoys the company of house owner Mr Bucktrout, handyman Mr Gosheron and eccentric millionaire Mr FitzGeorge, who met her many years before in India. Like her, they enjoy beauty, but they make no demands on her: they just let her be what she is.

We learn that although she lived in luxury, with furs and jewels, possessions mean little to her, and she once wanted to become an artist, but got married and became a passive ‘appendage’ while her husband led an active life, but her life was shaped and controlled by the conventions of society.  She has not been unhappy, for she loved her husband, but the things she wanted were not part of his world and were never considered. Here, at the end of her life she is finally able to take control, and when Mr FitzGeorge leaves her his money and art collection she is able to recapture the girl she once was and remain true to herself – by giving the legacy away. And her action gives her great-granddaughter Deborah the courage to break her engagement and pursue a musical career, so she will find the fulfilment that Lady Slane never did.

 

It would be easy to view this as a feminist book, but I think Vita Sackville-West is pleading for everyone’s right to individual freedom. I like the  cover of my Virago edition, which shows A Portrait of Mrs George Henry Boughton, attributed to R Caldecott, who is better known for his humorous work and his illustrations for children's books. The painting, of a woman whose own name is not important enough to be recorded, captures the way women were treated as possessions.

Edited, July 10, 2013: As you can see from Avril Silk's comment below, the portrait is by Kate Carr, and was formerly attributed to Caldecott. And the lady's name is Catherine. 

More Whipple Please!

If anyone at Staffordshire’s library service should read this, please take note: you need more Dorothy Whipple. A request put through by the lovely staff at Tamworth has turned up one book, The Closed Door and Other Stories, for which I am very grateful, but I want to read more. What about Greenbanks, The Priory, They Knew Mr Knight, They were Sisters or Someone at a Distance?

The 10 short stories in this particular book were all taken from three collections of short stories published between 1935 and 1961, and they are all written in that quiet, understated, slightly detached English way that was so popular in the 1930s and 40s. There is little action, and the small details of middle class life and its social conventions take on significance, while major events pass almost without a comment. These are tales of underdogs, outsiders and people who have never fulfilled their potential. There’s an air of retinence, and people rarely display their feelings. For some life continues unchanged, but for others there is the chance of a new or different life, if they are prepared to grasp the opportunity.

In the title story we meet Stella – one of several downtrodden daughters who appear throughout the book. She has never quite managed to escape from the harsh, unloving regime imposed by parents who are determined a child will not alter their life. By the time her mother’s death frees her she still feels hopelessly constrained by the restraints imposed over the years, even when an old friend offers the chance of escape, and we cannot be certain that she will walk through the door and leave the past behind.

Dorothy Whipple

But in After Tea Christine, whose parents treat her as unpaid skivvy, has no qualms about leaving when they reveal she is adopted, and in Family Crisis Mr Parker and his wife Flora finally realise how much they love their daughter (and rekindle their feelings for each other) when she runs away with a married man. There’s a wonderful moment when Mr Parker seeks support from his solicitor son, who responds by saying: “If it had been a gentleman, I might have understood it. But a commercial.” The couple track their daughter down, persuade her to return home with them, and promise that things will be different – but will they?

We know nothing will change in Wednesday. Here a divorced wife pays her monthly visit to her three children, who are forming allegiances to their new ‘mumsie’, while she is shut out from the home and family, watching curtains being drawn and smelling the perfume of sweet peas drifting from the garden that was once her own.

I particularly liked The Handbag, where a forgotten handbag allows an aging, overlooked wife to take quiet revenge on her husband and his lover, and Saturday Afternoon was another favourite. In this, Mrs Thorpe and her daughter Muriel enjoy their Saturday afternoons eating chocolates and reading by the fire, unencumbered by George, whom they encourage to pursue his interests elsewhere. George may provide them with all their creature comforts, but they have ‘gone through him like an old suit’ (isn’t that an incredible phrase?). But one Saturday afternoon a policeman calls with tragic news for George, and the two women discover the exact nature of his interests. 

The design for a 1930s dress fabric has been used

 for the endpaper in Persephone's edition of 

The Closed Door and Other Stories.

Orwell's Effortless Essays

George Orwell

It’s a long time since I’ve read any of George Orwell’s essays, and I’d forgotten just how good they are. They tend to take second place to his novels, but personally I think they are much, much better, and the essay format seems to suit Orwell’s style. He writes about anything that catches his interest: books, authors, the art of writing, making tea, a toad, his ideal pub, his experiences as a policeman in colonial Burma, and politics – especially politics.

He writes with humour and passion, sharing his likes and dislikes, while his observations on human life and the world around him are always thought provoking – and it’s all in lovely crisp prose, with a wonderfully balanced structure and clearly expressed premise. He never put a word wrong, yet he makes it look so effortless.

It’s the small details that are often so telling in his essays. In A Hanging, written in 1931 and set in Burma, he realises the ‘unspeakable wrongness’ of cutting a life short when he sees the condemned man step aside to avoid a puddle.

An old Penguin edition of
one of Orwell's essay
collections

Shooting an Elephant, is also set in Burma, based on a real incident when he was a sub-divisional police officer. An elephant escapes, and rampages through the bazaar,  causing damage, and killing a man. Orwell has no intention of killing the beast, but sends for a rifle to defend himself, and sets off to deal with the situation,  followed by a large crowd of natives. He tells us: “But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have.”

He makes the beast seem very vulnerable, despite its size, and his description is oddly accurate – elephants do have that slow, distracted, benign air possessed by some elderly ladies. Reluctant though he is, Orwell suddenly understands he will have to shoot the animal, even though it is now quiet and ignoring the crowd. “The people expected it of me and I had got to do it,” he says.  “I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly.” He realises that the tyranny of the white man has destroyed his own freedom, and adds: “He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”

Orwell (real name Eric Blair) died in 1950. The world he writes about is long gone, and attitudes prevalent in the days of the British Empire are shockingly incorrect today, but he  was horrified by much of what he saw, and politics was the driving force in his life. He fought against totalitarianism in all forms, and believed in democratic socialism and freedom of intellect.

His politics and his writing were inextricably linked, as he explains in Why I Write, describing four main reasons for writing: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. He tries to ‘fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole’, and says: “I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”

A nice cup of tea - though I'm not sure Orwell would approve of it being
'Russian style', without milk.

If you’ve never read any of Orwell’s essays, and you don’t like politics, try reading A Nice Cup of Tea, in which he lists 11 rules for making a perfect cup tea – not an easy task when a weekly ration of 2oz made around 2o drinks.  Then there’s Books v Cigarettes, where he considers the cost of both habits; The Moon Under the Water, where he describes his ideal pub; Bookshop Memories; Boys’ Weeklies, Decline of the English Murder, and a host of others about books and authors.

Thanks to CarrieK who is hosting a reading challenge at http://booksandmovies.colvilleblogger.com/reading-challenges-im-hosting/2012-essay-reading-challenge/ I’ve had a wonderful couple of days immersed in Orwell’s essays after a gap of many years.

A Book-worm and his Book

I spotted this little green book-worm, engrossed in his book, in a bookshop at Ledbury when I was visiting my mother, and I couldn’t resist. Entitled Book Worm (what else could it possibly be called?), the picture is reproduced from a water colour by Fran Evans, on a card printed by Two Bad Mice, and it set me wondering about the origin of the word book-worm.

A quick online search threw up lots of entries on computer games and viruses, but nothing at all about bibliophiles, which I think is rather sad. However, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a book-worm (OED editors hyphenate it) is: “One who seems to find his chief sustenance in reading, one who is always poring over books.”

And there are quotes, including one from playwright Ben Jonson, in Fountaine of Self-Love (1601), who obviously had a low opinion of book-worms, for he said: “Peruerted, and spoyld, by a whoore-sonne Book-worme, a Candle-waster.”  However, the poet Alexander Pope had a slightly different view apparently, for in a letter of 1717 he wrote: “I wanted nothing but a black Gown and a Salary, to be as meer a Bookworm as any there.”

The OED also reveals that a book-worm is a kind of maggot which destroys books by eating its way through the leaves. Fortunately, human book-worms don’t destroy the volumes they read, but I suppose they got their name because they are as addicted to books as the maggots, which don’t sound nearly as attractive as the creature in the picture.

Anyway, if anyone out there has any more information I would love to know. 

An Enjoyable Page Turner is Tremendous Fun

“She gripped the rubber bulb with her left hand and heard a slight crackle as light tripped through the one hundred and twenty light bulbs on her dress and the fifty in her diadem. It was as if a firework had been set off in the mirrored ballroom.

“As she turned round slowly she was reminded of the yachts in Newport harbour illuminated for the recent visit of the German Emperor. The back view was quite as splendid as the front; the train fell from her shoulders and looked like a swathe of the night sky.”

The ‘she’ in this piece is the overbearing, socially ambitious Mrs Cash, wife of a flour magnate and mother of Cora, the richest and most beautiful heiress in America – and heroine (if that’s the right word) of My Last Duchess, by Daisy Goodwin.  Although the old guard in New York may regard her as brash and vulgar, Mrs Cash is determined to use her husband’s wealth to buy a titled husband for her daughter.

So off they go to England where Cora is thrown  from her horse while out hunting, and is rescued by Ivo, the Duke of Wareham, who takes her back to his family seat, Lulworth Castle. Naturally, Ivo and Cora fall in love, and are wed in a spectacular ceremony. But married life is not as blissful as Cora hopes. First she must learn about life in England, and avoid the many pitfalls presented by the complex social rules which govern the behavior of the English upper classes. Then she must contend with her mother-in-law, the redoubtable ‘Double Duchess’, who is a close friend of the Prince of Wales. And finally there is the Duke, who has a past which intrudes on the present and threatens Cora’s happiness.

Set in the 1890s, at the very end of Victoria’s reign, Goodwin’s story recreates the period when newly-rich American industrialists sought to consolidate their position by marrying their daughters off to impoverished European noblemen, who welcomed the much-needed injection cash which paid for the repair and improvement of stately homes, as well as financing lavish lifestyles. The extravagance of those lifestyles has been well documented, and Goodwin has gone on record as saying that Cora is loosely based on Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the 10th Duke of Marlborough in 1895.

Cora is not always likeable, and in some ways the side story about the growing relationship between her coloured  maid, Bertha, and the Duke’s valet was more interesting, especially the fact that segregation existed in New York, which just 30 years earlier had fought to end slavery. Naïve of me, perhaps, but I somehow expected the American North to be more tolerant.

The novel, which highlights the differences between the old world and the new, between old money and new, explores the same territory as Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers, but is not as well written, and fails to get under skin of its characters. It’s not great literature but, nevertheless, it is tremendous fun,very enjoyable, and will keep you turning the pages to find out what happens.