A bouquet of Rose Macaulay
Aug. 22nd, 2022 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustThis post has been in progress for longer than you would think possible: as you can tell by the fact that it's about holiday reading. After a rather eccentric start to my holiday reading, I moved on to a more conventional selection. First a piece of detective fiction purchased locally (from the excellent Stromness Bookshop), Laurie R. King's Riviera Gold, pure fun and holiday sunshine. And then what I wanted to write about here, a binge-read of goodies stashed on my Kindle, two novels by Rose Macaulay Dangerous Ages and The Furnace. That brought me home, but I wasn't quite ready to stop, so I picked a favourite, The World My Wilderness, off the shelf, and read that.
By chance, this selection spanned Macaulay's long career: The Furnace, published in 1907, was her second novel (after Abbots Verney) and The World My Wilderness, published in 1950, was last but one (followed only by Towers of Trebizond in 1956).
Right in the middle comes Dangerous Ages, published in 1921 - and set very explicitly in 1920 (it may not have much to say about current events, but it devotes plenty of attention to the weather). It's a conversation piece, a group portrait; it does have a plot, but that is secondary to the depiction of a family, four generations of women at dangerous ages. Which ages would those be? All ages, of course, as the epigraph makes clear:
But the male characters of Dangerous Ages seem to go through life untroubled; it is the women who face the dangers of uncertainty, indecision, discontent.
At the centre is Neville - at least, the book starts with her 43rd birthday, and we meet both her mother and her children, as well as her grandmother and her siblings. Neville is healthy, and well-off: she starts her birthday by slipping out of the house and through the woods to swim in a little pool. But she feels that her life is slipping away: she abandoned her medical studies to marry, to raise her children, to help her MP husband. Now Kay and Gerda (why did she call her children that? it's never explained) are grown, and Neville sees the awful example of her mother: bored, lonely, unhappy (also widowed, which Neville is not, and stupid, which Neville will never be).
Among her siblings, Neville is second, both by age and in her mother's favour: Jim is the eldest, and the favourite, "a man and a doctor" in his mother's thoughts. Nan is the youngest, and in a more conventional novel she would be the central character: if you are looking for a conventional plot, Nan's story is the place to look, with her bohemian life, career as a novelist, her friends and her romantic uncertainties. Between Neville and Nan in age come Gilbert and Pamela. Gilbert is almost entirely colourless, noticeable for his wife Rosalind, whose only characteristics are shallowness and malice: I was almost tempted to sympathise with Rosalind, she is so universally despised - but I couldn't quite do it.
But Pamela goes so calmly and quietly her own way that the dangers of life seem not to touch her. She works "in a settlement in Hoxton", and lives with the woman who has been her closest friend since their college days. Her mother, naturally, disapproves: "[she] thought them very silly, these close friendships between women. They prevented marriage, and led to foolish fussing about one another's health and happiness," but this is one of many illustrations of Mrs Hilary being wrong: no-one else bats an eyelid at Pamela's domestic arrangements or the modesty of her lifestyle. There are two women in the book who are not at dangerous ages: one of them is Pamela, and the other is her grandmother, who is effectively waiting to die, taking what pleasures she can in the interim but not disturbed by the less pleasant moments. In the final scene of the book, these two agree that "Life's so short, you see. Can anything which lasts such a little while be worth making a fuss about?" Which is an admirable philosophy if peace of mind is the aim, but not one which leads to great happiness (or to eventful novels).
Luckily, events are not the main thing I read for, and I enjoyed getting to know this multigenerational family. Also, this being Rose Macaulay, there is some spectacular scenery: Neville's pretty house in Surrey, with its creepers and honeysuckle and elm trees and bluebell patches; her mother's home in St Mary's Bay, once a little fishing village, now a seaside resort; Cornwall, where Nan leads her companions on a breakneck cycling holiday along the coastal path; even Rome is called in as a backdrop to Mrs Hilary's disastrous confrontation with Nan.
I could go on talking about Dangerous Ages - but that's how I got bogged down in this post-in-perpetual-progress. Instead, I'll try to say rather less about the other two books ...
The Furnace is set in Naples, and in what seem to be real locations along the Bay of Naples. The setting - apart from being quite glorious in itself - plays a major part in the story in more than one way. Initially, it brings together the two family groups whose meeting provides the plot of the novel, and later it provides a grand dramatic crisis: in an extreme application of Chekhov's gun, Vesuvius, which has been vividly onstage from the start, erupts. (There had been a major eruption in April 1906, so Macaulay's novel was entirely topical.) It's hard not to associate the volcano, at some level, with the furnace of the title, but explicitly, at least, that refers to a story Mrs Venables tells Betty, whose moral is that "[l]ife ... is a smelting-furnace, a crucible for the testing of ultimate values", which purges the shiny pleasures of base metal but leaves, if you are lucky, a tiny nugget of real gold. The process by which Betty passes through this furnace (because surely it's clear from her interest in this story that she will?) is entirely internal, but perhaps the great eruption of Vesuvius provides the touchstone, the test which demonstrates the purity of the gold which remains. Which sounds like a triumph, but of course there is also loss, because all the diverting but false pleasures have gone.
The opening chapter is called Youth in the City, a promise of diverting pleasures if ever there was one. Tommy Crevequer is sketching some sort of royal event, and from the first the narrative voice is double-edged: his drawings are "really quite lifelike", but he will later amplify them, making them more broadly humorous, for publication in Marchese Peppino, a publication designed to amuse a readership "whose judgement of humour was possibly, however, not of the most delicate or polished type..." His morning's work done, Tommy meets his sister. They are very alike, and are both dressed with "an untidiness - one might all but say a disreputability - that made their worldly status a matter for speculation." They sit by the harbour, they chat with a friend, they go to a trattoria where they meet more friends and eat lunch, they stroll through the streets and how best to juggle their finances... And so on. It all sounds very agreeable, in a picturesque Neapolitan way.
Chapter two introduces "The Impression-Seeker", a person perfectly suited to appreciate this way of life, not in order to enjoy it herself, but to absorb impressions of it, and in due course to write about it. At first reading I assumed that Mrs Venables and her family were American (sorry, American friends) but this seems not to be the case, because her som Warren recognises Tommy Crevequer as someone he was at school with. Then Mrs Venables recognises the name: Tommy and Betty must be the children of the eccentric genius Maddan Crevequer (hearbreak by name and heartbreak by nature, apparently), and so the connection between the two parties is made. Mrs Venables feels kindly towards Tommy; she sees his poverty, but sympathises, and is interested in what he can show her of Neapolitan life (though she is surprised at his social group). Warren disapproves: he judges more harshly, and predicts that Tommy will want to borrow money - which is true, of course. Tommy, on the other hand, remembers Warren fondly, and would like to renew their acquaintance: he thinks Warren didn't recognise him - unless perhaps he "was feeling proud or something". But "Venables used to be an awfully good sort - I don't believe he's really proud - " Mrs Venables prevails over her son's doubts, and the siblings are invited to lunch, studied as a source of impressions, befriended.
The gulf between them remains: I don't entirely trust myself to summarise what the problem is, which is why I keep snatching at scraps of quotation, but I think the problem is that the Crevequers are disreputable. Mrs Venables is interested in them, and wants to help them (though she does blink when Betty asks outright for a loan). Warren finds them entertaining, but there is always a degree of arm's length - "the tolerance of contempt". (Though there is something so unutterably wrong with Marchese Peppino that a line must be drawn). Only Prudence, Mrs Venables' niece, keeps her distance - though she does ask Betty to sit for her, in a purely businesslike way. She explains to Warren:
The furnace through which Betty and Tommy pass is their gradual realisation of how they stand and why they are not, can not be, accepted - and what they resolve to do about it, and what this costs them. Ultimately it also costs the Venables party, too, I think, and I am not sure that they are not judged the more harshly of the two - but, as that cluster of negatives suggests, I am not entirely confident of my reading here.
Second opinions welcomed!
That wasn't noticeably briefer - it suffers from an overload of thinking aloud, I think. I should be on solider ground with The World My Wilderness, an old favourite, about which I could say many things, but can, thank goodness, prioritise just three that I want to talk about today. Edited, though, to add in the light of the small-hours-of-the-morning thought, that there are some fairly dark things lurking in the background of this story. I haven't talked about them because those are not what I wanted to talk about on this occasion, not only because I don't want to tackle head-on what Macaulay writes about obliquely - but if you would rather not read about traumatised adolescents, or about occupied France, the resistance and its aftermath, proceed with caution.
What I love about The World My Wilderness is that it is a book about London. Well, of course, what always makes me love a book is the author's voice, if that doesn't work for me, nothing will, so let's take that as read. And of course it isn't just about London, the wilderness of the blitzed city echoes a wilderness within the characters, particularly seventeen-year old Barbary, and within a society fractured by the war. But this emotional significance enriches and is enriched by my enjoyment of the depiction of the city - or should that be the City, and quite a small area at that - as the world-building of a post-apocalyptic fantasy. I am lucky enough to have a copy with the Barbara Jones cover (illustrated in this article, which also has some photographs of London at the time; more Barbara Jones here) which conveys this perfectly. From 2022 and the glass towers of modern London, the old-fashioned offices and guild halls are as exotic as the jungle of "bracken and bramble, golden ragwort and coltsfoot, fennel and foxglove and vetch..." that washes over them.
This is so much the aspect of the book that sticks in my mind that I was quite surprised to be reminded that it starts at the Villa Fraises, above Collioure in Provence. Yet this is the earthly paradise from which Barbary is exiled, and which she still regards as home: in London she feels uprooted, untethered, so the Villa Fraises is not mere glorious candy for the imagination, but helps set up what follows. (As the recent history of France helps frame the plot, but I am not ready to write about the plot yet.) As if this weren't enough, Barbary visits another landscape: she is taken by her father to holiday with his family in the Scottish highlands.
I'm afraid I reveal myself as a very superficial reader: throughout the book, landscape provides a window into the mind of the central character, the ways in which her view of the world has been shaped by a wartime childhood on the fringes of the maquis, and I brush it aside because it gets in the way of my admiration of the view...
All I can say in my defence is that I do not entirely believe in the characters. They are what the plot requires them to be, and - this is my 'third thing' - I do not entirely believe in the plot. It has a much stronger plot than either of the other two books: people have reasons for their actions, though these are often secret; the actions have consequences; and ultimately there is a resolution. But this depends on some quite extreme characters: as well as the semi-feral Barbary, there is her mother, a talented artist but also "[a] large, handsome, dissipated, detached and idle woman," intelligent and capable of deep affection, who sends her daughter away indefinitely to live with a father she barely knows (and who is, himself, the perfect, repressed, unemotional Englishman). The situation is apparently deadlocked, but the crisis is precipitated by an accident which (by the sheer chance that I read the two books so close together) reminded me strongly of one in Dangerous Ages. This isn't a problem, and doesn't impinge on my affection for the book: plot isn't what I read for, it's just a framework on which to hang the narrative. Though I do admit to a certain irritation with one late plot twist: a character produces a statement which is received, as intended, as changing everything, but leaves me asking how do I know that's true? (and indeed so what?).
Never mind: we'll always have London.
PS: We went to the market on Thursday - I persist in thinking of the third Thursday of the month as 'Farmers' Market', but that's really not the case. Among he scattering of outdoor stalls, though, was Cordelia the bookshop van. Collected books sell books by women authors, and I bought a copy of Rose Macaulay's Keeping up Appearances. The bookseller asked whether I had read many titles in this series (the British Library Women Writers series)? No, I said, but I had read quite a lot of Rose Macaulay...
By chance, this selection spanned Macaulay's long career: The Furnace, published in 1907, was her second novel (after Abbots Verney) and The World My Wilderness, published in 1950, was last but one (followed only by Towers of Trebizond in 1956).
Right in the middle comes Dangerous Ages, published in 1921 - and set very explicitly in 1920 (it may not have much to say about current events, but it devotes plenty of attention to the weather). It's a conversation piece, a group portrait; it does have a plot, but that is secondary to the depiction of a family, four generations of women at dangerous ages. Which ages would those be? All ages, of course, as the epigraph makes clear:
'As to that,' said Mr Cradock, 'we may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live.'
Logan Pearsall Smith, Trivia
But the male characters of Dangerous Ages seem to go through life untroubled; it is the women who face the dangers of uncertainty, indecision, discontent.
At the centre is Neville - at least, the book starts with her 43rd birthday, and we meet both her mother and her children, as well as her grandmother and her siblings. Neville is healthy, and well-off: she starts her birthday by slipping out of the house and through the woods to swim in a little pool. But she feels that her life is slipping away: she abandoned her medical studies to marry, to raise her children, to help her MP husband. Now Kay and Gerda (why did she call her children that? it's never explained) are grown, and Neville sees the awful example of her mother: bored, lonely, unhappy (also widowed, which Neville is not, and stupid, which Neville will never be).
Among her siblings, Neville is second, both by age and in her mother's favour: Jim is the eldest, and the favourite, "a man and a doctor" in his mother's thoughts. Nan is the youngest, and in a more conventional novel she would be the central character: if you are looking for a conventional plot, Nan's story is the place to look, with her bohemian life, career as a novelist, her friends and her romantic uncertainties. Between Neville and Nan in age come Gilbert and Pamela. Gilbert is almost entirely colourless, noticeable for his wife Rosalind, whose only characteristics are shallowness and malice: I was almost tempted to sympathise with Rosalind, she is so universally despised - but I couldn't quite do it.
But Pamela goes so calmly and quietly her own way that the dangers of life seem not to touch her. She works "in a settlement in Hoxton", and lives with the woman who has been her closest friend since their college days. Her mother, naturally, disapproves: "[she] thought them very silly, these close friendships between women. They prevented marriage, and led to foolish fussing about one another's health and happiness," but this is one of many illustrations of Mrs Hilary being wrong: no-one else bats an eyelid at Pamela's domestic arrangements or the modesty of her lifestyle. There are two women in the book who are not at dangerous ages: one of them is Pamela, and the other is her grandmother, who is effectively waiting to die, taking what pleasures she can in the interim but not disturbed by the less pleasant moments. In the final scene of the book, these two agree that "Life's so short, you see. Can anything which lasts such a little while be worth making a fuss about?" Which is an admirable philosophy if peace of mind is the aim, but not one which leads to great happiness (or to eventful novels).
Luckily, events are not the main thing I read for, and I enjoyed getting to know this multigenerational family. Also, this being Rose Macaulay, there is some spectacular scenery: Neville's pretty house in Surrey, with its creepers and honeysuckle and elm trees and bluebell patches; her mother's home in St Mary's Bay, once a little fishing village, now a seaside resort; Cornwall, where Nan leads her companions on a breakneck cycling holiday along the coastal path; even Rome is called in as a backdrop to Mrs Hilary's disastrous confrontation with Nan.
I could go on talking about Dangerous Ages - but that's how I got bogged down in this post-in-perpetual-progress. Instead, I'll try to say rather less about the other two books ...
The Furnace is set in Naples, and in what seem to be real locations along the Bay of Naples. The setting - apart from being quite glorious in itself - plays a major part in the story in more than one way. Initially, it brings together the two family groups whose meeting provides the plot of the novel, and later it provides a grand dramatic crisis: in an extreme application of Chekhov's gun, Vesuvius, which has been vividly onstage from the start, erupts. (There had been a major eruption in April 1906, so Macaulay's novel was entirely topical.) It's hard not to associate the volcano, at some level, with the furnace of the title, but explicitly, at least, that refers to a story Mrs Venables tells Betty, whose moral is that "[l]ife ... is a smelting-furnace, a crucible for the testing of ultimate values", which purges the shiny pleasures of base metal but leaves, if you are lucky, a tiny nugget of real gold. The process by which Betty passes through this furnace (because surely it's clear from her interest in this story that she will?) is entirely internal, but perhaps the great eruption of Vesuvius provides the touchstone, the test which demonstrates the purity of the gold which remains. Which sounds like a triumph, but of course there is also loss, because all the diverting but false pleasures have gone.
The opening chapter is called Youth in the City, a promise of diverting pleasures if ever there was one. Tommy Crevequer is sketching some sort of royal event, and from the first the narrative voice is double-edged: his drawings are "really quite lifelike", but he will later amplify them, making them more broadly humorous, for publication in Marchese Peppino, a publication designed to amuse a readership "whose judgement of humour was possibly, however, not of the most delicate or polished type..." His morning's work done, Tommy meets his sister. They are very alike, and are both dressed with "an untidiness - one might all but say a disreputability - that made their worldly status a matter for speculation." They sit by the harbour, they chat with a friend, they go to a trattoria where they meet more friends and eat lunch, they stroll through the streets and how best to juggle their finances... And so on. It all sounds very agreeable, in a picturesque Neapolitan way.
Chapter two introduces "The Impression-Seeker", a person perfectly suited to appreciate this way of life, not in order to enjoy it herself, but to absorb impressions of it, and in due course to write about it. At first reading I assumed that Mrs Venables and her family were American (sorry, American friends) but this seems not to be the case, because her som Warren recognises Tommy Crevequer as someone he was at school with. Then Mrs Venables recognises the name: Tommy and Betty must be the children of the eccentric genius Maddan Crevequer (hearbreak by name and heartbreak by nature, apparently), and so the connection between the two parties is made. Mrs Venables feels kindly towards Tommy; she sees his poverty, but sympathises, and is interested in what he can show her of Neapolitan life (though she is surprised at his social group). Warren disapproves: he judges more harshly, and predicts that Tommy will want to borrow money - which is true, of course. Tommy, on the other hand, remembers Warren fondly, and would like to renew their acquaintance: he thinks Warren didn't recognise him - unless perhaps he "was feeling proud or something". But "Venables used to be an awfully good sort - I don't believe he's really proud - " Mrs Venables prevails over her son's doubts, and the siblings are invited to lunch, studied as a source of impressions, befriended.
The gulf between them remains: I don't entirely trust myself to summarise what the problem is, which is why I keep snatching at scraps of quotation, but I think the problem is that the Crevequers are disreputable. Mrs Venables is interested in them, and wants to help them (though she does blink when Betty asks outright for a loan). Warren finds them entertaining, but there is always a degree of arm's length - "the tolerance of contempt". (Though there is something so unutterably wrong with Marchese Peppino that a line must be drawn). Only Prudence, Mrs Venables' niece, keeps her distance - though she does ask Betty to sit for her, in a purely businesslike way. She explains to Warren:
...somehow, either because they are made so, or because they've missed their chances, they know - well, really very little indeed about themselves and how they stand. And that - if that's so - makes it worse; because, do you see, if we accepted them, they would take it naturally, and be content to be accepted; and all the time there would be all kinds of things between us, that we knew of and that they didn't. That would be ugly. Don't you see? But if we don't accept them, the things between don't matter; it's all right and fair.
The furnace through which Betty and Tommy pass is their gradual realisation of how they stand and why they are not, can not be, accepted - and what they resolve to do about it, and what this costs them. Ultimately it also costs the Venables party, too, I think, and I am not sure that they are not judged the more harshly of the two - but, as that cluster of negatives suggests, I am not entirely confident of my reading here.
Second opinions welcomed!
That wasn't noticeably briefer - it suffers from an overload of thinking aloud, I think. I should be on solider ground with The World My Wilderness, an old favourite, about which I could say many things, but can, thank goodness, prioritise just three that I want to talk about today. Edited, though, to add in the light of the small-hours-of-the-morning thought, that there are some fairly dark things lurking in the background of this story. I haven't talked about them because those are not what I wanted to talk about on this occasion, not only because I don't want to tackle head-on what Macaulay writes about obliquely - but if you would rather not read about traumatised adolescents, or about occupied France, the resistance and its aftermath, proceed with caution.
What I love about The World My Wilderness is that it is a book about London. Well, of course, what always makes me love a book is the author's voice, if that doesn't work for me, nothing will, so let's take that as read. And of course it isn't just about London, the wilderness of the blitzed city echoes a wilderness within the characters, particularly seventeen-year old Barbary, and within a society fractured by the war. But this emotional significance enriches and is enriched by my enjoyment of the depiction of the city - or should that be the City, and quite a small area at that - as the world-building of a post-apocalyptic fantasy. I am lucky enough to have a copy with the Barbara Jones cover (illustrated in this article, which also has some photographs of London at the time; more Barbara Jones here) which conveys this perfectly. From 2022 and the glass towers of modern London, the old-fashioned offices and guild halls are as exotic as the jungle of "bracken and bramble, golden ragwort and coltsfoot, fennel and foxglove and vetch..." that washes over them.
This is so much the aspect of the book that sticks in my mind that I was quite surprised to be reminded that it starts at the Villa Fraises, above Collioure in Provence. Yet this is the earthly paradise from which Barbary is exiled, and which she still regards as home: in London she feels uprooted, untethered, so the Villa Fraises is not mere glorious candy for the imagination, but helps set up what follows. (As the recent history of France helps frame the plot, but I am not ready to write about the plot yet.) As if this weren't enough, Barbary visits another landscape: she is taken by her father to holiday with his family in the Scottish highlands.
Riding Jock the Pony up the moor track to Loch Dubh with Molly and Hugh, Barbary thought, this would make a good maquis, for the purple heather swelled and rolled about them knee high, and the bog myrtle made patches of blue-green,and clumps of birches and rocks stood together, and rabbits jumped across the sandy track..
I'm afraid I reveal myself as a very superficial reader: throughout the book, landscape provides a window into the mind of the central character, the ways in which her view of the world has been shaped by a wartime childhood on the fringes of the maquis, and I brush it aside because it gets in the way of my admiration of the view...
All I can say in my defence is that I do not entirely believe in the characters. They are what the plot requires them to be, and - this is my 'third thing' - I do not entirely believe in the plot. It has a much stronger plot than either of the other two books: people have reasons for their actions, though these are often secret; the actions have consequences; and ultimately there is a resolution. But this depends on some quite extreme characters: as well as the semi-feral Barbary, there is her mother, a talented artist but also "[a] large, handsome, dissipated, detached and idle woman," intelligent and capable of deep affection, who sends her daughter away indefinitely to live with a father she barely knows (and who is, himself, the perfect, repressed, unemotional Englishman). The situation is apparently deadlocked, but the crisis is precipitated by an accident which (by the sheer chance that I read the two books so close together) reminded me strongly of one in Dangerous Ages. This isn't a problem, and doesn't impinge on my affection for the book: plot isn't what I read for, it's just a framework on which to hang the narrative. Though I do admit to a certain irritation with one late plot twist: a character produces a statement which is received, as intended, as changing everything, but leaves me asking how do I know that's true? (and indeed so what?).
Never mind: we'll always have London.
PS: We went to the market on Thursday - I persist in thinking of the third Thursday of the month as 'Farmers' Market', but that's really not the case. Among he scattering of outdoor stalls, though, was Cordelia the bookshop van. Collected books sell books by women authors, and I bought a copy of Rose Macaulay's Keeping up Appearances. The bookseller asked whether I had read many titles in this series (the British Library Women Writers series)? No, I said, but I had read quite a lot of Rose Macaulay...
