Eve in Egypt by Jane Starr (1929)

This is an emanation of its era in a few ways. It is light and funny in the style that is now seen as 'classically' twenties, but with the underhang of the erudition and gravitas of the period directly before it lending it a sense of artistic balance. It has a little of what is now known as casual racism scoring through it, defining its belonging to the colonial era. In a literary sense, it is also an example of that much-discussed thing between the wars, the essay-novel, astonishingly giving it the cred of being at the very outside edges of modernism! Jane Starr was the pseudonym of Stella 'Tennyson' Jesse, sister of the well known novelist and crime writer F. (Fryn) Tennyson Jesse (the 'Tennyson' is an adoption based on their father's name). It could so very easily have been sluggish in comparison, less 'professional' than her sister's work, simply a vanity project. It is thankfully nothing of the kind; Stella was as much of a born writer as her sibling. Her project is to translate a travelogue into fictional form. Based upon an actual journey undertaken by the sisters, Fryn's husband and a bachelor uncle a few years before, it is the story of four people who take a journey in a dahabeah up the Nile, visiting sites of significance and learning about the culture as they go. Stella translates the original four into two couples where the women are indeed sisters, but the other man is now an eligible, knowledgable and capable young bachelor who has to come to terms with the fact that he's in love with Eve, the younger unmarried sister. She has a spirited and fizzing character, and is captivated by Egypt, wanting to learn all he knows and more besides. She also has to come to terms with the fact that he has captured her affections. The slow progress of this familiarity is offset by the continual change of scene, and some quietly delightful witty dialogue and situations, as well as genuine reverence for the fascinations of Egypt. The aspect that marks this out as more than just froth is the writer's understanding of balance. It would be very easy to simply hash material like this together; she wrote it as a ten pound bet with Fryn's husband, the playwright H. M. Harwood, after all. But there is some instinct in her which knows how to pluck charm from each episode, in a flowing run of greater or lesser impact, which gives enormous satisfaction to the reader. It also gives the lie to all the agonising over whether or not the essay-novel was a viable experiment; it was, if the writer knew their stuff.

The Heart of Midlothian by Sir Walter Scott (1818)

The reading of this was marked by a strange chance. I had started on one of the Notable Scottish Trials series, the one on Captain Porteous, and was a fair way through. I started then on this, quickly to discover that the historical incident involving Porteous was its starting point. Strange how these things coincide. This fact also allows a special insight, which is to watch how Scott interprets and magnifies real history in his fictionalising. Only the bare bones of history make it here, almost exclusively in the first part, where the Edinburgh 'mob' become incensed by Porteous' actions at the execution of a well-liked and understood smuggler in 1736, in the fact that he 'authorises' firing by the city guard when it looks like the crowd might try to cut the smuggler down from the gibbet. They are already pelting the guard with sizeable stones. The 'real' history explains that this was all a murky area, where it's not at all certain that he authorized anything, or indeed fired himself. But Scott has felt the need to come down on a side for the advancement of the story, which I understand. Then Porteous himself is imprisoned for his 'lead' in the affray, where several members of the public have been killed. That public wanted his blood for that, which is also understandable. Members of the officialdom of the city feel that he's been hard done by (and probably rightly, according to the trial) and send off to Queen Caroline in the hope of a pardon, which is eventually granted. The Edinburgh public are outraged by this, and rumours abound as to their wish to carry out Porteous' hanging themselves, royal pardon or not. Then the famous city-capture and prison break-in is successfully undertaken by a mob of persons unknown, and the grisly deed done. Scott keeps pretty well to the history here, but surrounds this story with one of a pair of sisters, one of whom has been undone by one of the original smuggler's mates in crime. She is also in prison at the time, for the probable murder of the resulting child. Her calmer, more upright elder sister is then involved in a long journey to London, also to try to obtain a pardon, as real evidence for her sister's crime is virtually non-existent - they have no idea what happened to the child; it was very possibly spirited away as soon as it was born. This journey is complicated by a strange meeting with the nefarious father of her sister's child, this time in his true identity as the young lord of a Lincolnshire estate. Astonishingly, attained of London, she enlists the help of the Duke of Argyle - and manages to meet Queen Caroline and gain her sister's pardon. The last third of the novel takes place in the west of Scotland as she comes under the protection of the Duke, her sister is released and disappears into the disgrace encumbent on a wronged woman, and life begins again in new surrounds, with her beloved (and obsessedly comic) father joining her, and her sweetheart also, a young clergyman for whom the Duke finds a local living. Years later it emerges that her sister has found her undoer and married him, becoming the celebrated and witty Lady Staunton that all British society is talking about, without of course knowing her chequered history, or that her husband was once the ne'erdowell associate of an infamous smuggler! The last act in this mosaic of intersections is the discovery by that husband of the fate of their son, who has indeed survived and become a marauder in a band of Highland banditti. Destiny closes in on him, as he is ambushed by them before being able to identify his son; he is shot in the skirmish, very possibly by the boy himself. The boy escapes on a people-smuggler's vessel to America, where he gets into more and more trouble, finally disappearing into the wilds to live out his life among the native Americans and an unknown end. Scott leavens all of this with bursts of humour associated with larger than life subsidiary characters. A plenitude of colour and crazy coincidence keep this one cracking along, though I will say that it sometimes seemed a little less disciplined than previous novels.

Commonplace Book

'Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death...'

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Chapter 29)

Commonplace Book

'...In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers...'

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Chapter 9)

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