Commonplace Book

'Five minutes after he had spoken it would have been impossible for me to tell him that my simplicity and not my cleverness had caused his overthrow. From this I learnt that simplicity is the keenest weapon and a beautiful refinement of cleverness...'

from The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith (Chapter IX)

Nancy by Rhoda Broughton (1873)

This novel is marked in a couple of ways. The most insistently noticeable is that it is written in the present tense. We follow Nancy Grey as one of six 'children' in a mid-Victorian family in the country. At their sizeable house, the children (who are in reality aged between 11 and the early twenties) still occupy the supplicant position in their home - they are all still regular denizens of the nursery, where their tea is taken separately, and they indulge in boisterous games. This is an excellent reminder of the very different position of young adults at that time. Whilst on the one hand they are frightened of their gruff father, and repair to their upper floor to shout and carry on, on the other the older ones are thinking about marriage and smoking freely. The unusual feel of the present tense keeps this unusual (for us, not them) situation humming. An old school friend of their despised father, Roger Tempest, who is in his late forties, is staying with them. Previously his age has kept him apart, but he has proved interesting because he doesn't appear to harbour the same bitterness as their parent. Needless to say, he shows signs of interest in Nancy, who is around 20. She is youthful, immature, noisy-but-thoughtful - and cannot wait to get away from childhood and their grim father. So, despite his incredible age, she accepts him. On their honeymoon in Germany they meet a young neighbour of Roger, Frank Musgrave, who pays Nancy a lot of attention and clearly finds her company appealing. Nancy persists, in her ignorance, in regarding him simply as a friend in these tough first times away from the only companions she has ever known. Back in England, and ensconced in her new large home, Musgrave is a regular visitor. He tells her of another neighbour, Zelphine Huntley, who he claims was Roger's fiancee in both their youths, and who abandoned him. Nancy's bounding nature jumps to jealousy, much as Musgrave may have hoped it would. Every time she sees Zelphine, she seems to be having private tete-a-tetes with Roger - at parties and balls she favours him and whisks him off for private conversations. Nancy is left reeling, and the all-but-confrontations she and Roger keep having keep amounting to nothing at the last moment. Roger is absent for a while in the West Indies on business, trying to save Zelphine's dissolute husband from making even more of a mess of his affairs. Musgrave capitalises on this to press his suit. Again and again, the same almostness pervades the scene. They keep almost coming to grips, and missing it by inches. Nancy remains apparently blissfully unaware of the deeper affections which surround her, and yet.....not completely so. One evening, in a wood between their estates, Musgrave finally blurts out his feelings directly, and Nancy is "horrified" and crying, despite there having been hints of her nascent understanding of him. She emerges from the wood, teary and flustered, only to see Zelphine driving by, and noticing her particularly with a meaning look! When Roger returns it soon becomes clear that Zelphine has mentioned it. Roger urges Nancy, in guarded terms, to come clean about what has occurred, clearly thinking that she's been unfaithful to him. Nancy is lost in her own suspicions about Zelphine and her husband, as well as shame at having seemed to lead Musgrave on and been involved in 'questionable' behaviour in public, and makes an odd decision - to lie. Nothing has happened at all, she insists to Roger, Zelphine is lying. They both go through agonies of uncertainty and non-communication with one another, and their marriage looks doomed. Musgrave, bitter and confused, seeks out Nancy's softer elder sister Barbara, and asks her to marry him, which had been the outward plan all through his secret affection for Nancy. Barbara is delighted that her seemingly terminally hesitant suitor has finally come around, and Nancy feels separation from her for the first time in her life - she can't tell her the real story for fear of breaking Barbara's heart. All this time, Nancy and Barbara's oldest brother, Algy, has been the faithful dog at Zelphine's feet, having fallen for her and developed drooping and sotted habits as his fortunes with this temptress rise and fall, and jealousy at Roger's closeness to her takes its toll. Eventually he becomes ill, and is near to dying. Barbara nurses him back from the brink of succumbing to the fever which has been decimating the district, only to feel its effects herself almost as soon as Algy is out of danger. Barbara is not so lucky as her brother, and catastrophe comes in her death. Nancy is prostrate with grief, and nothing at her new home is calling her to stay. She heads back to the family home, and to a period of intense reflection. Having decided to try to forgive Roger his love for Zelphine, and ask him for his forgiveness for her lies, she returns to the marital home, stopping in first to the churchyard where Barbara is buried. There she encounters a miserable Roger by Barbara's grave, and they finally have the honest conversation which has been in the offing for so long, clearing the air and providing the makings for a chastened new beginning. Roger and Zelphine's engagement is revealed as a gossip-originated construction of Musgrave's in order to gull Nancy, and so the road is cleared for reconciliation with Nancy's own honesty about what happened in the wood. My impatience with the consistent avoidance of these two (and Nancy and Musgrave's) coming to an understanding resides in the fact that it doesn't follow their characters as set up - they are both engagers, and Nancy is a perversely honest blurter. It makes for a feeling of trumped-upness which mars this a little. Broughton is still as charming as always, however, so it's a flaw in the crystal which is more noticeable, and yet not terminal. Here's hoping for more psychologically tenable plotting from her in future.

Commonplace Book

'To hope, and not be impatient, is really to believe...'

from The Adventures of Harry Richmond by George Meredith (Chapter III)

Mist in the Tagus by Tom Hopkinson (1946)

Positioned as it is just after the war, this straddles some really interesting territory. It is the story of a young dissatisfied woman in 1939, who has left her stultifying and slightly blank family, changed her name, moved to Northampton, and is fending for herself. Caroline (formerly Hazel) works in an advertising agency and isn't finding life enormously satisfying, but anything would be better than her grim and dull family. Having a few adventures in relationships has been part of the journey, and now, off the back of the end of one of them, and approaching the time for a holiday, she decides to avoid all the offered jaunts of her workmates and set off somewhere on her own. She focuses in on Portugal, and in particular on Marinha, a coastal town somewhere in the estuary region of the Tagus. There she meets a typically 30s pan-European group of 'bohemians' - among whom lives a lionised gay German poet, Leo, who is away in Estoril at the time. This group fascinates Caroline: Maxim, a dapper Italian waster; Helene, a fashion-obsessed, socially haughty French worryer; Paul, a slightly camp, slightly egotistical English bitch; Bettina, a Carrington-like, insightful and emotionally-aware German free-thinker, and Robert, another intense worryer, who is a German doctor and Leo's partner. Alongside discovering Marinha's cliffs with their little chapel balanced on top, a local castle-fortification, the hot market and town, the incredible gado musicians, the sectioned beach with tourists at one end and almost indigent local fishing families at the other, Caroline gets swept away by a rip and rescued by Robert. This first focuses her attention on him particularly. True to the times, his relationship with Leo is understood but only glancingly referred to, and it feels clear to Caroline that he is 'fluid' in his interests. As she gets to know him, she can feel herself falling for him. It is revealed that Leo is away because it has been felt that he should absent himself for a while. This aspect is where this novel reveals its age a little - he has apparently enjoyed the company of one of the young fisher-lads, and this has been very much frowned upon by the local people. What Hopkinson doesn't make clear is how old this young chap is and anything of the circumstances, but there is a strong feeling of taboo surrounding it. Whether this is more of a typically 40s homosexuality taboo, or one associated with pederasty is not clear, but it tends to the latter. With Leo away, Caroline is able to intensely interact with Robert and they grow close. Bettina encourages her to at least try to connect with him, because she feels that his and Leo's relationship may not be good for him. Backgrounding all of this is the feeling of Europe in 1939. Leo and Robert, being German and definitely non-Nazi in sympathies, are needing to find some way to get to relative safety. But the fact that Leo's misdemeanor has been reported to police may make that very difficult. Paul is attempting to gird himself and get into the diplomatic service, and it is possible that he may be able to help them get to England, but only without a police record. Bettina thinks that perhaps her convenient relationship with a local police chief, Quinta, may be useful in getting Leo's record quashed. All of these options are live and swirling at the time of Caroline's visit. In the end, with the end of her stay looming, Caroline and Robert come to grips and spend the night together. But at the end of it, she is devastated to see Robert's attention slip away to the clock and the possibility of Leo's return by the daily bus, and realises that what she wants is not going to happen; Robert is ultimately completely attached to Leo. The distinguishing features of this novel are its emotional maturity - Caroline is aware and broadly realistic about the chances she is taking; its modernity of theme and telling - it is an extraordinarily early example of what became grist to the mill of modernity as the next 20 years passed; and the singularity of Hopkinson creating a very capable and independent modern female lead character who anticipates many who came later. Hopkinson is the least of figures on the postwar literary stage, but by the evidence of this, this lowly position is not at all deserved. It is also an object lesson in not despatching a novel to the bin because its first chapter doesn't hit the spot - this one's is a bit lame, but it makes up for the lapse later most resolutely.

Commonplace Book

'...What was moving and affecting about Leo, what, at this moment, and in spite if everything, shafted to her heart, was the air of detachment which hung round him like a mist. It was as though he did not quite belong - as though, in spite of all the efforts he made, in spite of the most intimate contacts and a power of the deepest sympathy with others, of active suffering upon their account, he was still not one among other men. He could not ever forget, or lose, himself. He conveyed to every seeing eye a haunted feeling, the tooth-mark of the hidden worm. Leo had been born with the fox inside his shirt, the murdered albatross about his neck, that would never, do what he would, slide off into the sea - until one day it would drop with a dull echo but without a splash, and carry him down with it...'

from The Wanderer's Return, a chapter in Mist in the Tagus by Tom Hopkinson