Tag: UK

I am really getting into this writer big time.  This book is apparently semi-autobiographical and if so: wow.  It tells about a family of sisters growing up in a crumbling mansion who are left pretty much to their own devices.  Try this story of how their parents got together:

. . .  he thought she looked very nice so he said ‘When you grow up I will marry you ask your Mother to teach you how to cook’ He bought her a goat and a white kitten to remember him by, but the goat burst and the kitten was run over by a train . .

The book is full of strange, fanciful stuff, a weird evocation of childhood, where you don’t know quite what is real and what is not.  And when you accept what is happening around you is normal:

Once when Beatrix was a baby he (their father) got so furious because of her crying her threw her down the stairs, fortunately a cook called Harriat caught her . . after that Harriat kept her in her bedroom at night so that he couldn’t hear her crying which was a good thing in case there hadn’t been anyone to catch her the next time, but Harriat had to leave soon after because her feet smelt.

I mean: ?!?  Comyns went on to have an inspirationally varied life: lived everywhere, worked multiple jobs (many of them bizarre), struggled with the rent, failed as a painter, succeeded as a writer.  What a woman, what an example to us all. 

Here is a novel about how you ought to love your co-workers. It tells the story of four older people, two men and two women, working in an office together. None have any close family, and all live alone. They spend all day together, do not have much use for holidays, and yet do not make much effort to get to know each other. They begin to retire, and are at a loss without work and each other. Okay, that’s not really true: it’s far more subtle and sad than that sentence suggests; but it’s more or less what happens.

It’s a remarkably good novel about many things, among them lost opportunities and what your life amounts to. Pym is an amazing writer, and it’s mind-blowing that this novel, written in 1977, just before her death, was her first to be published in 16 years. Her agent had rejected her last, and this had apparently silenced her for a couple of decades. She got her own back, getting a Booker nomination, so BOOM.

In this book a woman finally gives up on her childhood dreams. It is inspirational. The woman was brought up strictly, in a vicarage. She has never married, and is now a governess. She leads a rather joyless, but rigidly upright, life. Then she is sent in error to a job interview for a maid, and meets a young woman who is cycling through a large number of wealthy men, looking for love and backing for her theatre career. It’s amoral but apparently a lot of fun. Here is a sample of one of the women she meets, a beautician, telling about her late husband:

“If you act “ marriage or nothing” they generally give you marriage. I was very lucky. I went to his head, but he couldn’t stand the pace. He got a nice tombstone and I got the parlour.”

The governess gives up her old ideas, throws herself in a life of nightclubs and hair dye, and is much happier. It’s a silly, sort of dated book, but I enjoyed it as a story about how it’s never too late to find your own personal freedom.

I found this in a second hand shop for £1. It is a never-ending chore, finding something to read, so sometimes it is nice to not have a preference and rely on chance. It turned out to be a pretty interesting book about a failing marriage. This couple agreed to have an open marriage, though this was really the wife’s preference rather than the husband’s. It ws supposed to only imply anonymous one night stands. The husband however falls in love with a woman named Ada, and they start an affair. Meanwhile, Ada is busy falling in love with the wife. Drama!

I admit though I just couldn’t get into it, and the reason is not very attractive: it filled me with class rage. I was feeling okay about the story until the wife casually mentions that their children go to DULWICH COLLEGE. And this while complaining about the traffic as she DRIVES FROM DULWICH TO PECKHAM. Shut the f*ck up. If you live in London these indicators will tell you that these are revoltingly upper middle class characters, and that shouldn’t be a problem except it is. Also I thought it was strange that the author seemed to think the characters main problem was their marriage. They also don’t really have any friends and barely speak to their teenage children. Like I think their problems run deeper than their marriage, probably having their roots in all that UNEARNED INCOME.

Appallingly, I may have become too woke for Victorian literature. I hope not, because I have always liked Elizabeth Gaskell. But this book, MARY BARTON, I had to give up. The title character is a young seamstress who it is clear is about to be led astray by a wealthy man. There are lot of warnings about getting puffed up by vanity and etc. I just couldn’t slog through to where this poor girl gets her just deserts. Her aunt had followed the same path and there is a gross/laughable section in which we meet her as a despondent prostitute.

That said, Gaskell was woke by the standards of her day. In the introduction, she speaks about how she wrote this book to speak for the working classes, who she unself-consciously calls ‘this dumb people’. She is making a valiant effort to capture the lives of the poor, and It is interesting to reflect that even so recently as 1848, working class people had so little access to literacy, or leisure for writing, that indeed they had no hope of writing their own story.

I re-read this while slogging through COVID, and I am struck by what a good book it is. According to my blog, I haven’t read it since at least 2009 (when I started keeping track). I am amazed by how clearly I remember it: characters, incidents, even lines. Pandora Braithwaite is the ur-crush of Western Culture.

I was surprised to learn that Townsend was 35 when she wrote it, and it was her first published book. Her teenage son apparently once asked her why they didn’t go on safari ‘like everyone else; and the voice for the book popped into her head fully formed. She wrote the first third in a matter of weeks – and then put it away in a box. It only got finished because other people pushed for it (a similar story btw for Stephen King’s CARRIE) and it just shows you: we really have no idea about the quality of what we are doing. I find that both horrifying and liberating.

This is a harrowing story of a marriage going bad. I clearly have little to no experience of really toxic relationships, because mostly I was just like: why don’t you leave? Clearly I lack experience, because I struggle to even imagine a world where I would put with how this lady gets spoken to.

Also super harrowing is her relationship with her mother, possibly worse because here there are not so many harsh words. Let me quote at length. Here she is on her mother:

Perhaps I should be moved by her more than I am. I love animals, their natural ways. I have asked her about my – our – childhood, that house, but you wouldn’t think I’d spoken. She just stared back at me. Maybe she never noticed what we grew up with. Left to herself, back there, as I’m sure she felt she was, she laced the fetid air with her high-pitched humming her little self-announcements:

‘Well, I’m going to sit in the sun lounge if anyone wants me. Do they? No.’

‘Well, I’m going to eat some strawberries and cream and watch Wimbledon, Yes.’

My brother was even more incensed by these notices than I.

‘Do I give a shit?’ he’d scream.

You couldn’t see the television if the curtains were open, so they never were open. She’d clear aspace on the settee and hold up by her chest a bowl of mushy frozen strawberries, topped with a spray cream. She lifted her chin, bared her teeth.