The Persimmon Tree and other stories by Marjorie Barnard (1943)

I am already a fan of Barnard, so reading this was well anticipated. I read the Virago 1985 reprint which includes three extra stories at the end, selected I'm thinking by Barnard herself. The remainder of her solo stories were collected together a couple of years later in another volume called But Not For Love. These twenty are typical of her, in that they cover the smaller themes in life, as they represent the larger. Thus a woman having a hairdo becomes a meditation on loss in relationships, whereby depression reigns until the 'armour for living' is back up to full strength; a redesign of the cafe of a department store which includes canaries in cages high above the eaters reveals out-of-place passion in the hearts of the little birds who sing intensely once the orchestra begins to play, striking the entire chattering cafe dumb for a few precious moments; the ribbing and jealous sidelong glances of a group of ferry-travellers on Sydney Harbour toward a fellow who is a regular belies the fact that the winner of a lottery is in fact his wife who can't cope with his rigidity and controlling behaviour, and who has packed ready to leave him when he gets home; a family goes ahead with holding a Christmas party and dressing a huge tree despite the loss of the youngest child very recently - the jollity is finally too much for the mother who, at the end of the night, goes upstairs and empties too many sleeping pills into her hand; in Vienna, during the 1934 uprising, a woman goes out for seed for her little bird who is still singing madly despite starving - caught in the ongoing melee, she is struck and slowly dies on the pavement, while her little bird slowly goes silent in her now deserted apartment. A couple of these stories deal with returns to family locations where a person has moved on while other family members haven't, or a new import causes ructions. All bar two are set in Australia. The other thing they do superbly in their love of simple detail is give a strong mental picture of the 1930s, when most, if not all, are set. The one detraction is minor: I think Barnard is at her best when she can cumulate power, meaning that her novels written with Flora Eldershaw are more regal and mythically flowing. But these are far from miserly in their impact as they detail the sadness and vulnerability of those who hope, the bitterness of those who've lost too much to, and the puzzlement of believers in the face of pitiless fate.

The Swan in the Evening by Rosamond Lehmann (1967)

This is the closest Lehmann got to an autobiography in non-fictional form. I hadn't read her for an age, and soon after embarking I had a deep-set recognition: yes, this was the vivid writer I remembered. She achieves here that same sense of vibrating immediacy that made her reputation as a writer pretty well unassailable. And yet here, in subject terms, she has put herself on the line, allowed a huge space for assailants. It starts out with a depiction of her own childhood at Bourne End in very (acknowledgedly) comfortable conditions. There are a significant number of servants, a huge garden, the rowers her father coached always about and on the river, three siblings to clash and conspire with, local notables who visit and so on. Always there is the bright angle of description whereby we get this information in what seems a new-minted way. This clarifies for me the depth of her success, and the starkness of her capability: she manages to turn the traditional zone of the softly poetic away from its sticky path into much more glowing territory; a transmutation occurs which strips away the plodding and replaces it with vision. There is also a revelation here of an important fact for later on: there is a sense of her as a child being prone to what might be called nerve-storms; she's often kept in the dark by the family on hot topics, or we hear of her exploding almost unreasonably about sensitive issues. Then follows the story of the childhood of her daughter Sally. This ends with the horrifying news, not long after Sally's marriage to PJ Kavanagh, and their move to Jakarta, that she has died from a lightning-fast case of polio. Lehmann is shocked and crushed as any mother would be. Crucially, though, as she struggles through the waste land of initial grief, certain signs show that her super-febrile senses are sifting for answers, questing for solution. It soon begins to emerge that she can sense Sally about her, gain impressions of even physical signs of her presence, and, critically, communicate with her on a level which is partially verbal, partially not. These experiences lead her, over the ensuing years, to a fascinated and full exploration of "life after death". This, of course, is where she lays herself open to all sorts of opposition at the best, and abuse at the worst. My turn of mind is generally scientific; on the whole, I would feel a sense of caution about her claims. But, I feel very hesitant about the Stephen Fry-esque fingerwagging and catcalls of FRAUD! FRAUD! FRAUD! at about the same pitch. These seem to me to be responses to the no doubt prevalent charlatanry in this field, which Lehmann herself acknowledges. She is however openly interested in a calm and even-handed manner in investigating her experiences. It is this evenhandedness that claims me. "I've had an experience; it seemed real to me; I want to know about it and if there is any system of thought that backs it" seems her modus, and I have no desire to send a grenade in her direction as a result. I wonder whether or not it was that profound sensitivity, which mounted to nervous tension as a child, that is a clue here, and the reason why these 'connective' happenings were so strong. Interestingly, too, there is an incredibly strong sense, in her description of the first uprush of recognition of Sally's presence and its impacts, at the house of some friends soon after her death, of the sort of emotional burst of energy which comes from substances like MDMA; the intense feeling of wholeness and loving warmth, and the sensory qualities being super-energised and meaning-filled. I wonder whether whatever human substance it is that is released in an MDMA experience was made available to Lehmann's brain via the stress of her grief and the supersensitivity of her emotional nature. A vivid and intriguing memoir of troubled territory, purveyed with dignity and clarity.

Commonplace Book

'...How could he ever explain to Helen the bleak reasoning that saved his own sanity and supported him while it did not comfort? This was the knowledge that to lose, to suffer, to die were as much a part of living, as natural, as birth and happiness. Men and women took on the human lot and when it could not be changed stood by it for the dignity and integrity of their souls...'

from Tree Without Earth, a story in The Persimmon Tree and other stories by Marjorie Barnard

Young Lives by Richard Le Gallienne (1899)

This is a critical piece in my understanding of Gallienne. Up until now, I've been wondering about what his reasons were for writing as he did. His writing had always seemed to me a little bloodless, with the beefier exception of a novel from later in 1899 entitled The Worshipper of the Image, where ideas and execution married to the point of much greater wealth of impact. This one is a return, stylistically, to the novel before. It's the story of young people of the 1890s, just starting out in their lives. In that former novel, tragedy struck in the form of an interloper in a relationship. In this one there is no such challenge; the main characters, a Birkenhead (translated into 'Sidon', as against Liverpool's 'Tyre') brother and sister, have one main area of negativity in their lives: their father's conservative attitudes that won't allow them easily to pursue their modern ideals. A minor issue is also penury, but it is surprisingly quickly got over in their lives, and that of their partners; quick successes come easily to him, a writer, and her lover, an actor. Because Henry, the brother, is a writer, an excuse is given for Gallienne to outline, through a visit by him to London when he's just starting to be noticed, exactly what his lights are. I get the feeling, by the way, that this novel is largely autobiographical - Henry seems very likely to be following a good part of the author's own path. The idea he gets across, by having Henry meet some part of the avant garde of the London literary scene, is that both realism and aesthetic decadence, as they were seen at that time, were dead end reaches of the stream of literature, and that the place Henry occupied, and by association Gallienne himself, was much closer to the centre of the warm flow of literature's great river. He was "alive", they were "dead"; he was the true inheritor of the great novelists of yesterday, they were misguided. Although I can accept that this is simply what the author thinks, I have to say that I think he misunderstands a crucial issue. This is that it's not what authors' underlying notions were that determined their success, but something much more ground level and substantial, which comes down to a sense of believability in what's actually on the page and an idea of balance in verbal illustration which meant that their stories rang 'true'. It is precisely this which seems to be something which doesn't occupy Gallienne overly, meaning that his novels often feel sweet and light, like children's literature of the time, rewritten for adults with a few adult themes. He genuinely didn't think that his writing suffered by it, I think, and what I call 'sweetness' he would have called a terribly straightforward and necessary goodness, denied by dead late 19th century realism and aestheticism. Even though he is quite thin in impact as a result of espousing these angles, I can't say that it isn't interesting to read him, as it is anyone who doesn't 'fit the standard bill'. Now I need to read on, ballasted by new understanding, and see if the damage he was doing to the powerfulness of his fictions dawned on him at any further point of a very long career.