The War-Workers by EM Delafield (1918)

 This is enormously different to her debut a year earlier. That was a standard novel, in a sense anyway, of a young girl of established means starting on the journey of adult life, albeit with a nice comic conceit of her self-storytelling giving it swing. This is a troupe-novel. The crew are the female clerical workers of the Midland Supply Depot in 1915-16. The Depot is run by Charmian 'Char' Vivian, a forceful high-up, the daughter of one of the local country-houses. The majority of the office staff are in awe of her, idolizing her huge attention to the work, and of course, true to the times, her social status. She has a free ride with them therefore, and the fact that some of her attitudes are much more to do with self-aggrandisement than belief in the importance of their work (despite her great protestations to the contrary), is one they miss in their adoration. The main purpose of the piece is comedy, though there are the obvious moral undertones. So we get the snotty and devoted secretary, the bumbling but loveable stats-keeper, the salt-of-the-earth general staffers locked in a tart mesh of status and posturing. The main part of the action aside from the office is set in the hostel over the street where they live. There, the slightly inefficient but delightful Irish superintendent tries to keep them all alive and rested under the phenomenal wallop of Char's regimen. The focus comes when an under-secretary is recruited to help snotty with her duties. Grace Jones is a young Welsh woman of great straightforwardness, and an ability to get on with most people despite her honesty. Char finds her skill and lack of nonsense irritating almost subconsciously - the sublimated knowledge of her less altruistic motivations playing in her quite freshly. Grace just gets on with it. The key comes when Char's father has a stroke, and she is drawn away from the Depot for a while. Grace is deputized to go out to Plessing, the family home, to keep up the work pace. But there she furthers her friendship with Lady Vivian, Char's mother, who sees very clearly what a gem she is, and respects her. The tension between daughter and mother is never very far from the surface - Lady Vivian is clear-sighted about her daughter's failings and not afraid to enumerate them. Grace keeps clear of this of course, but can't help confirming Lady Vivian's prejudices. Various contretemps play out, as Char's father experiences another stroke, and her unwillingness to leave her work at the Depot to be there for her father in his last days is revealed inadvertently to the staff back at the hostel. Though the bursting of this bubble is one of the main centres of the climax, and the much more realistic view of Char held by all the staff bar the snotty secretary is the result, in Delafield's hands it doesn't turn into a pantomime, and the resolution is realistically muted. Some staff resign, their delusions blasted, but they're still friends with those who remain. Lady Vivian's plan to turn Plessing into a convalescent home for badly wounded soldiers comes to pass with the help of a local doctor. They manage to keep it from Char's empire of control with some deft moves, and the hostel superintendent, who has been summarily dismissed by Char for no good reason, goes to work there independent of her arbitrary influence. The friendship between Lady Vivian and Grace has developed to such an extent that Grace also heads there to work, extricated from Char's dominion. But Char carries on with the Depot, and is still the centre of her own small world of orders, the same old work carrying on at the same cracking pace. The fact that this one has that muted denouement, where someone of great energy and effectiveness is nevertheless a very faulty character, and still contrastingly quite successful, and yet taken by those who know her well with an enormous grain of salt, gives it the edge of modernity. These nuances show that Delafield was wanting to embrace, I think, modern psychological tropes, whilst showing a lot of evidence of the traditional expected in her times. A very interesting balancing act.

Commonplace Book

 '"Every animal on this globe, down to the amoeba, has got hands enough for its survival. Man is the only one with hands enough for more than that - hands to make what he doesn't need, as much as what he does. And it isn't until you've got six times what's necessary you begin muddling your mind what is necessary, and why, and how it's come by. A man upsets the jungle order with a half a dozen trinkets that've got no use, and then - then, mind you, not before - it strikes him that there is an order to things, and he's got to make it out. Only, make it out in such a way that he can keep his trinkets..."'

from The Dancer from the Dance by Janet Burroway (Part One)

Commonplace Book

 '...he stood watching a splendid ladder of flame in the heart of the fleet. It had a rhythmic movement which fascinated the eye. Its flat, jagged head oscillated backwards and forwards slowly, like the head of a snake. This was the main sheet of flame, whose splendour and terror mesmerised. It took a hundred fantastic shapes - now like the chain mail of warriors tearing at each other with bloody hands in a cauldron; now like witches with streaming hair of flame; like ghosts in winding-sheets of Tophet; and again like a wall of beaten gold. In greater gusts of the wind the wall swayed, bellied, and broke, and great golden balloons hovered in the air. At the foot of this wall vicious tongues leapt out everywhere, seized the cordage, writhed about the masts, licking everything in their path; united and fanned upwards, they swooped across the golden wall as if fighting for life. The anchor chains were red hot; spars crackled like musketry and hissed in the sea. Stars seemed falling from heaven. The wall of flame swayed and bent, and fell across the boats like gigantic flowers...'

from Gillespie by J. MacDougall Hay (Book II, Chapter 30)

Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell (1930)

 This was the author's second volume of stories and novellas, following his debut, Triple Fugue, six years earlier. The title story is a sad and horrifying glimpse into the inhumanity that stretches between people and animals, and the thoughtlessness. That Flesh is Heir To is in Sitwell's pyrotechnic mode, as are most of the works in this volume, where he bitingly explores some societal flabbiness or vulnerability. In this case, the novella follows a nondescript but piercing woman's continuing odd proximity to instances of plague and fatal illness. Of course, it is she all along, with her terribly decent concern for the health of those with whom she interacts, who is carrying the devastating bacillus. It's occasionally very funny, but just misses finishing well. Echoes is short and prescient, detailing a visit to a Mediterranean seaside town, and the growing fascism with which it's being infected, realised in its people's savage treatment of someone who is intellectually disabled. The Love-Bird tells the story of an eccentric dilettante, who divests himself of the family fortune once it has been inherited, leaving only his favourite things, often automata and strange moving toys, many of which are birds, amongst which he loses himself. On a visit to the Zoo, a little love-bird takes a decided liking to him, the charm of a living thing enchanting him for the first time. When one flutters in through his window one afternoon later on, he catches it, and places it in a cage he owns with an automaton fellow of its own kind. The real bird goes mad with jealousy of its mechanical rival, and is found dead next to it, both of them plucked and ragged. Another example of the author's more high-concept mode. Charles and Charlemagne speaks of the glittering career of an American in London, when such women were in the midst of conquering British society. Adèle is first inconspicuous, but slowly grows less concerned by what all around her think. Finally she is quite notorious, and Sitwell delights in enumerating all her changes of decor with each lover that she takes on, these being her particular eccentricity. She has a most unusual and chilling end in the South Seas. Alive-Alive Oh! is a throwback to the literary satires of his earlier volume. A middling and largely dreary poet gains the most extravagant praise, and just as his career shows signs of waning, it is saved by his war poetry. He has always been fashionably ill, and the public and all the critics are waiting for him to die early, so as to set the proverbial seal to his reputation. He disappears to Italy at what is thought to be the final stages of his life, and his death is duly reported. Much, much later, Sitwell is astonished, as a visitor to Italy, to discover that he is still alive and living in absolute secrecy, the death stage-managed to make sure of his literary survival. Happy Endings is not even a novella, it is a short novel. This final piece takes the tone down a few notches from the conceptual spinnings of most of the longer works in this volume. It is an example of Sitwell engaging on a more low-key and moving level with material which is familiar to him. It is a story which uses, as he often does, himself as the main character. In this instance, he is a young man, sent to military college in Aldershot before the war. This is his opportunity to send up the stupidity and dense-headedness of the 'scholars' and masters, in his usual satiric vein. But he creates a moving portrait of one of the masters who befriends him, Mr Windrell, who is a devotee of 'the Circle' and is fascinated by past lives and future ones, wizardry, and occult sciences - no doubt influenced by the notoriety of Crowley and company at the time. He is racked with consumption, and Sitwell takes time to present him somewhat sympathetically, as well as exploding mercilessly all his silly superstitions. It ends with something unexpected - scenes on the battleground at Loos, and quite harsh depictions of corpses and the stench of death. Most of his contemporaries at the college are done away with through the course of the war, and there is, amongst his tart celebration of their dunderheadedness, also elegiac wonder at how pointless and grotesque were their deaths. The very end is a feeling exploration of Mr Windrell after the war, dying in 'Newborough' (Scarborough), whose experiences in witnessing the horror of the conflict have finally disabused him of his crazy obsessions, though he can't quite admit it. This is a very fine piece of work, completing a volume of widely varying colours, which is by turns hilariously funny and profoundly erudite.

Commonplace Book

 '...I began to understand only too well the frame of mind that had facilitated the spread of religions of compassion, such as Christianity, and could easily comprehend how the slaves had longed to accept the doctrines, however improbable they sounded. At first, no doubt, they had been sceptical, and to cover their longing, had mocked at them: and then, as their misery had become more and more confirmed, they were forced to take to some form of spiritual drugging. Besides, they may have said to themselves, if this creed is fantastic, yet nothing in the world, no superstition of any sort, is more fantastic than the actual existence I am obliged to lead, and the misery it affords me...'

from Happy Endings, a piece in Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell

Commonplace Book

 '...how was one to foresee that all these peaceful lands of Europe, with their progressive thought, were to be ruined by being placed in the grasp of their stupidest citizens for four whole years?'

from Happy Endings, a piece in Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell

Commonplace Book

 'Then, sometimes, if there was a holiday, Mr Windrell, very romantically but elegantly dressed under his old overcoat, would journey up to London for a meeting of the Brethren (they all bore names in the "Circle," such as Brother Aloysius or Brother Merlin). It always seemed somewhat incongruous that, instead of travelling up to this gathering of fellow-warlocks by broomstick at midnight, or on the tail of a shooting star, he should thus be conveyed to it in full daylight by such very matter-of-fact methods of locomotion as trains and tubes: a blasted heath, one felt too, or some horrid glade in a tangled forest, would have been a more suitable setting for it than a stuffy, mid-Victorian sitting-room in a lodging-house near Paddington Station...'

from Happy Endings, a piece in Dumb-Animal by Osbert Sitwell