Victorian Mourning

Like most people, I knew that after the death of her husband in 1861 Queen Victoria shut herself away and took little interest in government and public affairs until her own death 40 years later. What I didn’t realise was the extent to which she turned Albert into a kind of icon, or that long before he died she was already obsessed with death, dying, and the ritual of mourning.  So I found Helen Rappaport’s The Magnificent Obsession absolutely fascinating – though by the end I did feel that neither Victoria nor Albert were particularly likeable people.

Rappaport is very scholarly in her approach, and this book is obviously meticulously researched, but she has the gift of making facts interesting, so it is never dull, or dry, and it kept me turning the pages until late into the night (well, to be strictly accurate I should say the early hours of the morning, and I was very tired and grumpy when I got up, which I find that’s always the penalty of reading in bed, but I still do it).

This book only takes us up to 1878, and as well as looking at Victoria’s response to Albert’s death, Rappaport explores the way the monarchy changed during those years and how, despite the Queen’s seclusion and the problems faced by the country, the nation took her to their hearts and a new role as established for her as the Mother of the Nation, who was a figurehead for her people. Rappaport sees Albert’s death as one of the pivotal moments in the development of the modern monarchy: she believes that had Albert lived his role in government and decision making would have become far greater, and led to a clash between Parliamentarians and Royalists. But in the end his death, and Victoria’s response to it, served to consolidate the position of the monarch as head of state, with no political power.

And although there are constitutional crises and battles for power, it’s the human story in the Magnificent Obsession that is so gripping. Towering over everything and everyone is the figure of Albert, a perfectionist, driven, controlling and as obsessive about the monarchy, its duties and role as Victoria was with him – the title could as easily apply to him. He comes across as being rather humourless and dour, very serious, self-righteous, a little pompous, but very hard-working and conscientious, determined to do the best he could for the Royal family and his adopted country.

In February 1872 Queen Victoria made a rare
departure from full mourning by adding ermine
trimming to her black gown for Bertie's
Thanksgiving Service at St Paul's Cathedral.

But it’s hard to know what his motives were. Rappaport sees him as the real power behind the throne, and is convinced that had he lived Victoria would have been happy to hand her authority to him and take a back seat, leading to conflict between the crown and the government, and the crown and the people. I  can’t decide whether he was completely selfless, a man who loved his wife and family and worked tirelessly for her good, wanting nothing for himself, or whether he was very manipulative and was quick to seize an opportunity which would give him unlimited power.

Victoria is equally hard to read. She appears to have been besotted by Albert and it’s easy to say she was willing take direction from him and was easily swayed, but there were times when she was quite capable of standing her ground, even if she did behave like a spoilt teenager hell-bent on getting her own way. And I really do wonder about that love she had for him, because it seems so stifling and obsessive. Did she really feel like that? Did she seize on him and make him the object of her affections and desires because she’d had a lonely, unhappy childhood and was desperate for attention? Was he someone she thought would belong to her, and be there for her, in a way no-one else had ever done? Or was she a young, inexperienced girl, in love with the idea of being in love? The picture Rappaport paints is of a woman who protests her love so loudly and frequently that I began to wonder whether Victoria was simply trying to fool herself, or to create the persona she thought people wanted and expected.

In the hours and days immediately after Albert’s death she is calm, numb almost – everyone who knew her well commented on her behaviour, for they expected a hysterical outpouring of grief. No-one, however, could have anticipated just how extreme her reaction would become, and it seems as if during the initial period she was gearing herself up for a prolonged period of over-the-top mourning. And then it’s almost as if her grief can only be experienced through all those outer appearances of mourning: that’s what makes it real for her.

It’s impossible to even begin to describe what was involved, and Rappaport writes about it so well that my efforts would pale into significance, but I must say that the fashion and jewellery industries did exceedingly well out of Victoria’s mourning!

One of the last official photographs
taken of Prince Albert.

There are unexpected glimpses of the rich and famous of the day, alongside tales of the less of the less well known, like the reporter who broke the news of Albert’s death, which must have been the scoop not just of  his career, but of the entire century. And the details about political situations are sometimes quite extraordinary.  I was unaware that immediately before Albert’s death Britain came perilously close to being dragged into the American Civil War – to defend the cotton producing South, which kept British cotton mills in business!

The book ends with a discussion on the possible reasons for Albert’s death. As a rule typhoid is blamed, but Rappaport is not convinced, and amasses evidence which leads her to a different conclusion. There is so much information in the book that it’s very difficult to convey it’s flavour, or to give a précis which really does it justice. All I can say is go and read it for yourself, because it is a jolly good read!

A Tedious and Irritating Read!

I must say I found Stella Gibbons’ The Matchmaker somewhat tedious: I struggled to finish it, and I wouldn’t read it again although, like the curate’s egg, it was good in parts. I knew her other writing didn’t follow the satirical style of ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, but this lacks the sparkle and wit of that first novel, as well as its charm and humour. ‘The Matchmaker’ was published in 1950, almost 20 years later than the earlier work, and in that period Gibbons seems to have lost her youthful disregard for literary and societal conventions.

Stella Gibbons, pictured in the late 1980s.

For me, one of the downsides is that you see life through the viewpoint of too many different people, and each time the narrative focuses on one person, the others step back into the shadow, so somehow there seems to be no central character to hold things together, and you are never with one person long enough to get to know them and find out what makes them tick, and no-one is really fleshed out, so it’s difficult to believe in them, and many of the characters are little more than stagey stereotypes.

To start with we meet Major Ronald Lucie-Browne (who is still on active service in Germany), his wife Alda and their three young daughters who have just moved to a cramped, isolated cottage in Sussex, having led a nomadic existence since their own home was bombed. Among the host of other characters are their grumpy chicken-farming neighbour Phil Waite; lazy Italian prisoners of war, and brash Landgirl Sylvia, who wants to be an actress.

Actually, I thought the most interesting person was Alda’s old school friend Jean, who comes to stay following the death of her parents. Wealthy, elegant and lonely, Jean is desperate to find a husband but, despite Alda’s efforts to help, she has been unsuccessful. However, her reactions to Alda’s interference (for that, after all, is what it is, however well intentioned) are not quite what you expect. And just as you start to think Jean has hidden depths and should have been developed to take a more central role, she is whisked away, and you’re almost at the end. But you do find out what happens to her, in a letter which is almost an afterthought, as if Gibbons suddenly realised she needed to tie up loose ends.

I guess the book is very much of its time, but the attitudes about women, foreigners and the working class felt much more redolent of an earlier period – the 1930s perhaps. But I suppose in 1950 the new, post-war world which embraced modernism and new ideas hadn’t really got under way. A lot of the most offensive comments are made by Gibbons as author, not by the characters, and I found her constant asides were an intrusion which, especially when combined with the shifts of emphasis, and the lack of a strong plot line, means there’s a lack of focus, with no clear sense of direction or overall theme.

There’s an obsession with marriage and catching a suitable man which rivals anything you find in Jane Austen, but is nowhere near as humorous, or as well written, and women are mainly portrayed as empty-headed with few, if any, interests outside the home and family. Alda, for example, is very dismissive of Sylvia the Landgirl, claiming she is vulgar and ignorant. But Alda herself is not that bright, and her reading (not that she ever seems to look at a book) has been shaped by 12 years of marriage to a ‘clever’ man. For some reason that throw-away line about Alda annoyed me more than anything else. Why doesn’t she make her own choices about books, and form her own opinions? I can’t equate her attitude to that of my mother and her friends, who would have been young married women in the period this novel portrays, and they were much more independent and intelligent. And, let me tell you, had my father ever tried to influence her reading matter then my mother, usually the most peaceable of women, would probably have thrown the entire bookcase at him!

I could go on at great length about the things in this novel that irritated me beyond measure (especially Alda). But I’ve gone on quite long enough, and before wrapping this up I should mention some of the good things – and there were quite a lot of them. For example, Gibbons is good at describing the small, everyday things of life that are so important to people, and she’s brilliant at providing telling details giving clues about status and social distinctions. But it wasn’t enough to make me want to keep the book.

A Little Less Conversation Please!

Edward Hopper's Room in New York... And there is a link to
this week's Short Story Sunday, I promise... Just read on...

It’s Sunday again (it does seem to come round very quickly), and that means it’s time for another short story, so out of my wonderful Persephone anthology comes Here We Are, by Dorothy Parker,  which I didn’t really like.  I’d never read any of her fiction before, and I’d expected something sharper, wittier, more satiric.

Written in 1931, set in America, it features a young couple travelling by train to their honeymoon hotel. They’ve been married exactly two hours and twenty-six minutes, though to her it already seems longer, and here they are, alone together, not knowing what to say to each other.  They are obviously nervous, and slightly embarrassed, but their conversation is so strained I really do wonder if they have anything in common at all. It would seem not, for at one point Parker writes:

“I don’t know,” she said. “We used to squabble a lot when we going to together and then engaged and everything but I thought everything would be so different when you were married. And now I feel so sort of strange and everything. I feel so sort of alone.”

Despite their protestations that they ‘won’t fight or be nasty or anything’ they are very quarrelsome couple– especially her. They bicker about her new hat, her old admirer, bridesmaid Louise and how they should spend their wedding night... she has letters she ‘simply must’ write, while he suggests going to see a show. And even if he apologises and tries to placate her, she turns things around so he’s still in the wrong, and she seems to take everything he says the wrong way, and to twist it, reading more into it, and making it mean something he never intended.

Somehow I feel their future as husband and wife is going to be terribly bleak and empty, and that she will become even more petty-minded, spiteful and downright vindictive, punishing him because nothing will ever turn out as she hoped. And he, easy-going, will be just as dissatisfied but will do anything to please her, for the sake of a quiet life, and will never understand what it is that he has done wrong.

I would have to say I loved the opening of this tale as the nervous young man in his new blue suit spends too long arranging their ‘glistening luggage’ in the Pullman carriage – obviously putting off the moment when he and his bride must communicate in some way. In fact, not only do they never seem to connect mentally or emotionally, but there is no contact between them, for they sit opposite each other and the girl, who looks ‘as new as a peeled egg’ finds it hard to meet his eyes, and prefers to gaze out of the window. These two never touch. They are strangers, and it’s like one of those Edward Hopper paintings, where people always seem so lonely, even if they are together. I think Room in New York, painted in New York in 1932  kind of captures the feeling of separateness of this couple, who are headed for a hotel in the city.

Parker manages to create the image and atmosphere in very few words, and to place these two in their social class through the description of their cheap shiny luggage, and their cheap shiny clothes. And they’ve got a new life to match their new possessions but, sadly, it will be no better than the old. I thought this first page was so well written, and I had high hopes of what was to come, but as far as I was concerned it was all downhill after that, because it was all dialogues. Eleven-and-a-half pages of dialogue. 

You can tell I’m not keen on lots of dialogue, except in plays, of course. Personally, I blame Walter Scott, because I’ve had an aversion to conversation-dominated fiction since studying Guy Mannering at school, with all that incomprehensible, archaic Scottish dialect. It put me off Scott for life as well. Am I the only one who feels that too much dialogue in a novel or short story is a bad thing? And has anyone else been that influenced by something they read and hated when they were young? 

Dorothy Parker

Crime Ration with Maigret

I’m not the greatest fan of crime fiction – I don’t like descriptions of blood and gore – but I do like the Maigret books, and you don’t often see them around, so I was delighted to pick up three in the last couple of weeks. First there was Maigret and the Idle burglar, which I spotted in a charity shop in Ledbury while I was staying with my mother, and read and left for her to enjoy. Then My Friend Maigret and Inspector Cadaver emerged from a box of donations at Oxfam looking a little grubby, but then Maigret’s Paris is always a little grubby and down at heel. Anyway, they’ve cleaned up fine, but obviously belonged to a smoker, and the smell of stale cigarettes is hard to get rid of, so I sprinkled bicarbonate of soda and talc between the pages! I left it overnight and shook the books very carefully before starting to read – I did this once and ended up with white powder sprinkled over everything, including me! I was planning on sending these to Mum, but they are still a bit pongy, so if anyone knows any other ways to freshen them up please let me know.

Anyway, that’s quite enough of my wittering – this is supposed to be a post about Maigret who, as I’m sure you all know, was created in 1930 by Belgian author Georges Simenon, who was a prolific writer. He published more than 200 novels and a lot of short stories, including the 75 novels and 28 short stories about Superintendent  Jules Maigret.

Simenon had a colourful private life (in old age he claimed to have slept with 10,000 women), and if his complicated love affairs didn’t guarantee notoriety, his conduct during WW2 did. Throughout the conflict his career continued to flourish and he was suspected of collaboration. After the war he left France for America, where he remained for 10 years: nevertheless, he was investigated, and in 1950 a five-year ban was levied on the publication of new work – the penalty for negotiating film rights for his books with German studios during the Occupation.

But whatever his morals and politics may have been, he wrote a cracking good detective story, and there’s a brilliant interview in the Paris Review archives in which he explains how he wrote. He followed advice from Colette (who rejected his early work while she was employed as a literary editor) and honed his work by paring it to the bone and making it less ‘literary’.  Asked by the interviewer what words he cut, he replied:

 

Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.

He was a fast worker: he would knock out a novel in 11 days, writing a chapter a day (they are all short books – Simenon didn’t go in for lengthy blockbusters). Then, he says, he would cut, and cut, and cut. At the start he would scan the phone book searching for suitable names for characters, and study his town map ‘to see exactly where things happen’, then make notes on an envelope.  He says:

And the beginning will be always the same; it is almost a geometrical problem: I have such a man, such a woman, in such surroundings. What can happen to them to oblige them to go to their limit? That’s the question. It will be sometimes a very simple incident, anything which will change their lives.

And he adds:

I know nothing about the events when I begin the novel. On the envelope I put only the names of the characters, their ages, their families. I know nothing whatever about the events that will occur later. Otherwise it would not be interesting to me.

Having been a professional writer myself, albeit a journalist and not a novelist, I’m always interested in the process of writing, and I found this insight into Simenon’s methods absolutely fascinating, although it confirmed my opinion that he was a very strange man indeed.

Anyway, as far as the books go I’d recommend them all, but Maigret and the Idle Burglar was my favourite, perhaps because it shows Maigret protecting the interests of a little, unimportant man, and we see him developing a feeling of respect for a man who may have been criminal, but who hurt no-one and was, after his fashion, an artiste, as skilled at his job as Maigret is at his. The novel opens with a phone call in the night, and off Maigret goes to see the battered body discovered in the Bois de Boulogne. It’s well outside his usual remit, and Maigret is supposed to be tracking down a gang of bank robbers, but something about this death disturbs him, and he refuses to write it off as a mere gangland killing.

For in the past he knew the victim, Cuendet, a quiet, inoffensive man who lives with his mother who leads a double life as a burglar, always working alone, targeting the richest houses, in the wealthiest areas, and only plying his trade when the occupants are in residence,  and always ensuring there is nothing to connect him to the robbery, and that no trace of his ill-gotten gains to be found. As Maigret investigates he uncovers more secrets of Cuendet’s life, and he seems to feel an odd kinship and sympathy with the dead man. He knows who the killers are, but he knows they will never be brought to justice, because they move in rich and powerful circles.

The world of policing is not what it was when Maigret was young, and the powers that be are more interested in administration and paperwork than in good, old-fashioned detective work, and they want high profile cases, where prosecution  will be successful.

In My Friend Maigret the Superintendent leaves Paris for Porquerolles, an idyllic island off the Cote d’Azur where a criminal has been killed after boasting that Maigret is a friend – and an old letter from the Superintendent has been found among the man’s possessions. The police believe Marcel Pacaud was killed because of his connection with Maigret – and they fear the Superintendent himself could be at risk. But is he the target? And could any of the island’s lazy, laid-back, pleasure-seeking inhabitants really have the energy and motivation tobe a killer? Maigret is accompanied by Mr Pyke, a Scotland Yard detective who is on a fact finding mission with the French Police, and his presence, together with the Mediterranean heat, seems to inhibit Maigret.

Away from Paris and his usual milieu he is lost and nothing seems to go his way but, as usual, his slow, gentle manner and his aimless questioning belie his sharp mind, and produce the results he needs, whether through luck, or application, it’s hard to say. I always have the feeling that Maigret’s instinct, or intuition, leads him to the truth at a very early stage of the investigations, and that he is just looking to back the knowledge up with facts.

In Inspector Cadaver the Superintendent is off on his travels again, this time to help an examining magistrate whose brother-in-law has been accused of murder after a young man, Albert Retailleau, is found dead on the railway track near his home. So Maigret finds himself in the marshlands of the Vendée, in the small town of Saint-Aubin-les-Marais, picking his way through truth and lies as he tries to separate fact from rumour.

And his efforts to find the murderer are hampered by a former colleague, the ex-inspector Cavre, known to everyone as Inspector Cadaver, who was discharged from the force for corruption and is now working as a private detective.

Georges Simenon

Short Story Sunday: The Music Box

The Music Box, by Malachi Whitaker, reminded me of DH Lawrence – the setting, that is, not the style.

Short story writer Malachi Whitaker.

Here we have a sensitive woman and her timid young son living in a grim, bleak, northern mill town, married to a joyless man who works in the quarry and is hard and uncompromising as the stone he trims.

Theakstone Morphett, known to his wife and little Henry as ‘t’father’, knows life is a serious business, and the one bright spot in the lives of his wife and child is their weekly visit to the tiny stone chapel where they sit on ‘plain. Wooden forms’ covered in lengths of red baize. To be honest, it doesn’t sound all that beautiful, and it’s certainly not grand. In fact, it strikes me as being rather cheerless. But:

Everything at the chapel was delightful. There as a hanging chandelier filled with gas burners which had to be lighted, one by one, with a taper at the end of the pole, if ever the day grew too dark for the preacher to see. There was a pulpit with two lots of stairs running down from it, so that you could walk in at one side, and out of the other, if you were the preacher, and you wanted to. But the best thing of all was the music.

The music is provided by a harmonium – the only thing the congregation can afford. The boy and has mother love it, and love singing the hymns, however wet the day. On one never to be forgotten occasion there’s a tea at the chapel, and the boy discovers the unlocked instrument stored in a small side room, so he and his mother try it out.

Afterwards, because he yearns to have some music in the house, she starts saving to buy an instrument, even though she knows ‘t’father’ won’t approve. Eventually they set out to buy a harmonium, but the only thing they can afford is a yellow music box, decorated with red flowers. When I was a child I had a music box, with a little pink ballerina, which turned and turned as Brahms’ Lullaby tinkled out, and each time it played I was captivated by its magic. So I can understand how enchanted the boy and his mother are with their purchase, which is bigger than mine was and plays a variety of tunes.

I kept hoping and hoping that this tale would have a happy ending. After all, the music box is such a simple pleasure, and it offers hope for a brighter future. But I knew it wasn’t to be, for the man ‘could not see why his wife and son should want music when he did not’.

 This was such a sad little tale, and I thought the close relationship between mother and son was sensitively drawn, but the portrayal of lives lived without hope or aspiration was quite shocking in a way. ‘T’father’ remains a bit a cipher, but he doesn’t seem to have any enjoyment in life, or any desire for anything better, and he doesn’t want opportunities opened up for his wife and son. He has been defeated by life, so his wife and son are to be defeated as well, and must be denied the chance of a brief escape into happiness through the music.

As with so many short stories, there is no resolution at the end. Life must go on, however drudging and dreary – but I so hope poor little Henry got away and made a better life for himself.

Malachi Whitaker’s real name was Marjorie Taylor (apparently Whitaker was her married name, while Malachi came from the Bible). She’s new to me, but I gather she published almost 100 short stories, and was very popular during the 1920s and ‘30s, when she was known as the ‘Bradford Chechov’, and was admired by Vita Sackville-West and HE Bates. This story, the fifth in The Persephone Book of Short Stories, first appeared in 1929