Martha in Paris by Margery Sharp ~ 1962. This edition: Little,Brown, 1962. Hardcover. First American Edition. 166 pages.

My rating: 9/10

From the front flyleaf:

In this “portrait of the artist as a young woman,” Margery Sharp uses all her individual observation – humorous, tender and astringent – to recount a climacteric twelve months in the life of eighteen-year-old Martha, who was sent to Paris to learn to paint, and learned a great deal else besides.

Readers who first met Martha as the stolid, matter-of-fact and altogether memorable child  in The Eye of Love and wondered what would happen to this truly independent spirit when confronted with Life now have an opportunity to find out.

Oblivious to the glamour and temptation of Paris, Martha’s single-minded pursuit of creativity and her matronly appearance seem to protect her from her Aunt Dolores’s delicately-put fear that “Martha might come to some harm…” Once called the Young Pachyderm by a friend back home near Paddington Station, perhaps because he glimpsed something tough-carapaced about her even then, Martha is now Mother Bunch to her fellow art students. Apparently the threat of Paris is to be lost ton her as she at once sets herself up in a doggedly methodical routine of working, eating and sleeping.

But Paris has an outrageous joke to play on Martha. It all begins with her somewhat unconventional adoration of deep, hot baths, after which she always looked her most attractive, or as the French say, “appetizing.” Nice hot baths involve Martha in an experience with a young Englishman (City of London Bank, Paris Branch) which would challenge the resources of a far more sophisticated girl than Martha. How she triumphantly copes with the resulting situation is the them of this engaging novel.

That about sums it up. I greatly enjoyed this next installment in Martha’s life-journey. Margery Sharp has settled into her story nicely; she champions Martha’s artistic cause and incidentally tramples over the gender-based lines of common behaviours; Martha is a true feminist, or perhaps we should say humanist; she has zero tolerance for the conventions which govern the behaviours of more conventional beings. Such as, for instance, her would-be lover Eric, and his doting mother. Their persistence in viewing Martha through their own rose-tinted spectacles of wishful thinking as to her personality and motivations lead to an ironically comedic situation, which Martha single-handedly sorts out in a most pragmatic way.

Martha is a deeply unusual heroine; regardless of her lack of sentiment and socially acceptable behaviour I found myself fully on her side in her Parisian adventures, and have no doubt that her ambitions will be fulfilled.

Highly recommended. If you can at all manage to find these three titles, read them in order. This is the middle book of a trilogy. The preceding book is The Eye of Love; the following book is Martha, Eric and George.

The Eye of Love is presently in print, in softcover from Virago Press. Martha in Paris and Martha, Eric and George are readily available and generally reasonably priced through ABE.

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The Eye of Love by Margery Sharp ~ 1957. This edition: Collins, 1957. Hardcover. 1st Edition. 256 pages.

My rating: 9/10

I have been on an unapologetic reading binge these past few days; waking at my husband’s 5 AM alarm to blink the sleep from my tired eyes and reach groggily for the book I laid down the night before –  or, technically, earlier in the morning; too many times it’s been past midnight – foolish me!  A perfectly made cup of tea is always delivered to my bedside or chairside table by a man who values silence above conversation on workday mornings, and is himself stealing some precious reading time over his breakfast before heading out the door at the last possible moment. Our morning exchanges are brief; after thirty years together the pattern is predictably set, and it suits us very well. “What’re you reading?” and “Here, I’m done. You give it a try. Not bad…” and, so often,  “Hey, did you steal my book? I was still working on that one…”

Lately I have had an extravagant number of book-shaped packages from far-flung purveyors, so that like the proverbial child in the candyshop I am overwhelmed by choices and am greedily consuming each treat with an anticipatory eye on the next one. All are light fiction; summer reading at its best.

Trickling in much too slowly are a number of new-to-me vintage books by my beloved Margery Sharp. Margery wrote a trilogy of sorts between 1957 and 1964: The Eye of Love, Martha in Paris, and Martha, Eric and George. Naturally, the third book came first, then the second, with a dreadfully long lag before the first one showed up just a few days ago. I had been nobly holding off on reading them out of sequence, and I’m glad I did. These definitely need to be read in order to get a full appreciation of the journey of our unlikely heroine Martha. I am surprised that these do not appear in an omnibus edition; that would be kindest to the reader, and not unmanageable, as the three books are individually short and quick reads. Having gobbled them up, I will now review them in order, with a probably doomed attempt at brevity, and place them together on my dedicated Margery Sharp shelf in our bedroom (where all the “chuck out the window in case of house fire” treasures reside) to await happy re-reading in future.

Ladies of ambiguous status have by convention hearts of gold, and Miss Diver was nothing if not conventional; but a child in an irregular household is often an embarrassment. It had been wonderfully kind of Miss Diver to save her brother’s child from an orphanage, but not surprising; what was surprising was how well the arrangement had worked out.

It is 1929; Miss Dolores Diver’s widowed brother Richard Hogg has just died, leaving behind nothing of worldly value to his six-year-old-child, Martha, now a bona-fide orphan with an uncertain future. Miss Diver gallantly steps in.

She had never seen the child until an hour earlier; she had never before visited the shabby Brixton lodging-house in whose shabby parlour the thinly-attended wake was being held. – A dozen or so of Richard Hogg’s ex-colleagues from the post office stared inquisitively; this meeting between the two chief mourners provided a touch of drama, something to talk about afterwards, otherwise conspicuously lacking. (As Doctor Johnson might have said, it wasn’t a funeral to invite a man to: only one bottle of sherry and fish-paste sandwiches. Richard Hogg, with his motherless daughter, had lodged two full years in Hasty Street; but a landlady never does these things so wholeheartedly as relations, even with the Burial Club paid up and the next week’s rent in hand.)

Several years pass in complete amiability; young Martha is a rather odd but markedly placid child, and the Diver ménage, financed and patronized by Harry Gibson, head of a small furrier’s establishment, absorbs her without a hitch. Things are about to change, though. Harry’s business is struggling in the depths of the financial depression, and to save it he has contracted to marry one Miranda Joyce, hitherto-unmarriageable daughter of a very successful, upper-end furrier. Her father, in return for getting his daughter finally settled, is willing to re-finance Gibson’s. Harry decides to do the right thing by his prospective fiancé and renounce his mistress and his comfortable routine: five days of the week living quietly with his doting mother, with the weekend secretly spent in the little house with faithful Dolores and a tactful Martha, with the story to the rest of the world that he has continual weekend business in Leeds.

Since their meeting ten years earlier, at a Chelsea Arts Ball, Dolores and Harry have grown even more deeply in love. Now, on the eve of their parting, they cling together and reminisce.

“I’m sorry, Harry, but I can’t bear it,” said Dolores.

She huddled closer against his solid chest. It was his solidness shed always loved, as he her exotic fragility. For ten years they’d given each other what each most wanted out of life: romance. Now both were middle-aged, and if they looked and sounded ridiculous, it was the fault less of themselves than of time.

To be fair to Time, each had been pretty ridiculous even  at the Chelsea Ball. Miss Diver, in her second or third year as a Spanish Dancer, was already known to aficionados as Old Madrid. Mr. Gibson, who had never attended before, found the advertised bohemianism more bohemian than he’s bargained for. To the young devils from the Slade, unwrapping him, [Harry has come dressed as a brown paper parcel],his humiliated cries promised bare buff rather than pyjamas. Naked, indeed, he might have made headlines by being arrested; in neat Vyella, he was merely absurd.

Dolores, Old Madrid, not only pitied his condition but also lacked a partner. She’s have been glad to dance with anyone, all the rest of the night. But though rooted in such unlikely soil their love had proved a true plant of Eden, flourishing and flowering, and shading from the heat of day – not Old Madrid and Harry Gibson, but King Hal and his Spanish rose.

So they had rapidly identified each other – he so big and bluff, she so dark and fragile: as King Hal and his Spanish rose. Of all the couples who danced that night in the Albert Hall, they were probably the happiest.

Off Harry goes, to reluctantly propose to the very willing Miranda.

A quarter of an hour passed long as a century. To an impatient lover it would no doubt have seemed longer: Mr. Gibson was impatient only as a man about to be shot might be impatient. (Why hadn’t he been shot, in ’17?) The bitter parenthesis, by the memories it evoked, nonetheless helped his courage: when at last the door opened, like an officer and a gentleman Mr. Gibson clutched his carnations and stood bravely up to meet the firing squad.

Curiously enough, Miranda Joyce bore a marked physical resemblance to Miss Diver. Both were tall, black-haired, and bony. They were about the same age. Miss Joyce had even certain advantages: her make-up was better, she hadn’t Dolores’ slight moustache, and she was far better dressed. But whereas Mr. Gibson saw Dolores with the eye of love, he saw Miss Joyce as she was, and whereas the aspect of Old Madrid made his heart flutter with delicious emotion, the aspect of Miss Joyce sunk it to his boots.

But Harry Gibson soldiers on. The proposal is duly made and predictably accepted; the necessary conventions are observed.

Kissing her had been like kissing a sea-horse. Mr. Gibson knocked back his drink thankfully. (“I shall turn into a sozzler,” thought Mr. Gibson – dispassionate as a physician diagnosing the course of a disease.)

Fortunately Harry finds consolation in a growing friendship with his father-in-law to be. Mr. Joyce becomes a kindred spirit, and the one bright spot in Harry’s dark night of the soul.

Meanwhile Martha and Dolores are also soldiering on gamely. Dolores soon finds that she is unemployable; her only resource seems to be to let out rooms in her house. Fortunately for aunt and niece, Martha is quick to seize a chance while visiting her old home, and is instrumental in bringing home the perfect boarder. Bachelor Mr. Phillips, clerk of an insurance company, is at first innocuously quiet and reliable with the rent money. However, Dolores’ broken heart and subsequent stand-offish attitude soon have the effect on her boarder of rousing in him a great curiosity as to her personal situation, and, quite soon, a desire to wed this woman whom he very wrongly perceives to be financially independent and a property owner to boot.  What Mr. Phillips doesn’t know is that the house is merely leased, with the term coming up; hence Dolores’ desperate need for Mr. Phillips’ financial contribution, and her reluctance to snub his distasteful though so-far polite advances

The games of in-and-out and false pretences escalate, and while her elders are torturing themselves with emotional gymnastics, young Martha is single-mindedly pursuing her one interest. She is teaching herself to draw. Martha sees the world as a series of shapes; capturing images, fitting them into those categories, and transferring them from her eyes to her mind to paper takes up every waking moment.

Dismissed as merely a scribbling child, Martha stolidly ignores the adult world, and it in turn takes little notice of her. Until one day Mr. Joyce, through a series on coincidences, happens upon Martha drawing a tree. He is a connoisseur of the arts; he recognizes a budding young talent when he sees it. He offers Martha his patronage, and buys her much-desired paper, charcoal and chalks, which she unemotionally accepts while refusing the offer of  a longer-term artistic relationship and sincere, friendly interest which Mr. Joyce extends.

These complicated relationships get more tangled as time goes on; their multiple resolutions are a typically Margery Sharp juggling act. The tale winds up with a combination of most satisfactory endings, and we leave Martha in particular with the hopeful idea that her future, if not exactly easy, will be extremely interesting.

A cleverly written, very smart, satirical, darkly amusing novel. On par with Something Light, though not quite as gentle; the humour of The Eye of Love is decidedly savage at times.

I’m not at all sure if Margery Sharp planned at first to continue Martha’s saga, as The Eye of Love is a decidedly stand-alone novel, but I am so glad she did. Very highly recommended. Next book in the trilogy: Martha in Paris.

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Four Gardens by Margery Sharp ~ 1935. This edition: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1935. Hardcover. 297 pages.

My rating: 10/10

In the early years of the 20th Century, Caroline Smith lives the quiet life of a dutiful middle class daughter with her widowed mother. Walks on the Common, occasional tea parties and church bazaars, helping with the housekeeping and pursuing quiet amusements; such is her life. Occasionally Caroline muses about her place in the world, and wistfully thinks of what her future may hold, but all in all she is of an accepting nature.

Caroline’s one weakness is gardens; on her strolls with her mother she peers through gates and quietly and deeply absorbs what she sees. We pick up Caroline’s story during her seventeenth year, as she takes possession of her first garden; the abandoned wilderness of an empty estate house. Caroline finds a secret way in, and there in the garden she has her first innocent encounter with romance.

Time moves on, and that first garden is lost to Caroline, but after some secret mourning she accepts it as something that must be. She marries a good (though not romantic) man, has two children, and does her duty in all of her relationships even though they are not always what she’d hoped for. The second garden, very different from the first, is a balm to Caroline’s sometimes troubled soul, and is the backdrop of her early wifehood and motherhood, darkly overshadowed by the Great War.

Circumstances change for the better; Caroline is presented with a chance at a new life and a rise in her social position; she gracefully takes it all in stride, though she quietly remains the same thoughtful, uncomplaining soul. Her third garden is one in which a didactic gardener holds sway; Caroline secretly mourns her new distance from physical contact and a real relationship with the plants and the soil, but she does  the correct thing as always and goes forward into this newer, more luxurious world as staunchly as she faced adversity in her younger days.

The fourth garden is the one Caroline creates for herself when her situation again changes; though the smallest and most makeshift, it is perhaps the most satisfying. Life has come full circle, and there is a strong sense of the fitness of things.

This is a gentle but not sentimental book; Margery Sharp keeps it crisp and interesting by allowing us to hear the ongoing commentary of Caroline’s innermost thoughts. Though I continually call Caroline gentle and accepting (and rightly so), she is also keenly perceptive of both her own and others’ motivations and reactions; her inner voice is wry and quietly witty. We are therefore thoroughly on her side as she copes with difficult social situations, troublesome relationships, a well-meaning but emotionally distant husband, and confusingly complex and progressively minded (but by-and-large loving) children.

Not as full of parody as some of Margery Sharp’s works, Four Gardens is a touch more serious and thought-provoking. Beautifully written; often very funny; occasionally very poignant. By the end, the story has become something of a celebration of the quiet satisfaction of dealing well with the not always exciting commonplace life one is dealt by fate, keeping one’s head up, and carrying on.

Very highly recommended.

***

Updated to add a contemporary review I have just discovered, from the New York Times Saturday Review of Books, February 1, 1936

FOUR GARDENS. Margery Sharp. Putnams. 1935. $2.50.

There is refreshment in this book of Margery Sharp’s, a cool sanity that is infinitely restful. She has by nature something of the Jane Austen touch, springing from a detached, quiet power of observation, a delicious, satirical way of relishing affectation, and a respect for sensible, genuine people.

It is a quiet book, the life-story of a woman to whom very little ever happens, a woman as undistinguished as her name of Caroline Smith. But it is a pleasure to read about her and her great good sense; she is lovable in her simplicity, and because of the gentle, irrepressible spark of humor that she possesses. But for all her simplicity she has maturity and wisdom. There is a note of high comedy, rare enough in these days, in the deftness with which she copes with her two ultra-modem children.

All the details are so right and neat, the shades of social difference in the little English town where Caroline lives shown to such nicety, the varying relationships between people set forth with so much exactness and delicacy, that the book makes delightful reading.

***

Note: Four Gardens may be a bit hard to come across, as it was published early in Margery Sharp’s long career and was eclipsed by her later, much more highly publicised works. A few copies show up on AbeBooks, but be prepared to pay a premium price, $40 into the hundreds, for a hardcover in good condition. There appears to have been at least one reissue in paperback in the 1960s, so there should be reasonably priced editions out there in the used book world for a patient collector to track down.

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