Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay ~ 1926. This edition: W. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd, 1926. (One Shilling Library Series.) Hardcover. 307 pages.

My rating: A solid 9/10. It’s been several weeks since I read this rather shabby, more than slightly foxed edition of Crewe Train, but the character of Denham has walked beside me ever since.

TO

THE PHILISTINES,

THE BARBARIANS,

THE UNSOCIABLE,

AND

THOSE WHO DO NOT CARE TO TAKE

ANY TROUBLE.

I must admit that after that introduction I was already more than half won over, which was a good thing, for my initial impression of the characters in this quirky novel was that they were sincerely unlikeable. Our heroine in particular.

And yes, in her twenty-first year, everything changes for Denham. Her father’s in-laws, the Greshams, the family of his first wife, descend upon the Andorran establishment for a visit, and, perhaps brought on by the unwonted stress of having to socialize so strenuously after a self-imposed life of seclusion, Mr. Dobie fatally succumbs to a stroke in the night.

Denham’s stepmother makes no bones about her distaste for her sullen stepdaughter; in her loquacious outpouring of hurt at her new widowhood she presses the responsibility for Denham upon the Gresham family. “You had better take her away with you to England!”

So they do.

Culture shock does not adequately describe Denham’s introduction to English society after her lifetime of relative seclusion. She allows herself to be tidied up and dressed up and trained up in the social conventions; these do not take particularly well though the continually bemused Denham does not actively resist her attempted makeover into a more socially acceptable “young lady”. She merely remains stoic under her Aunt Evelyn’s well-meaning ministrations and her cousins’ continual encouragements. She processes all she’s being exposed to, and does her best in her slow, wordless way to try to live up to the Greshams’ expectations; her success is not noteworthy.

Time moves inexorably on. Denham meets a certain young man, Arnold Chapel, a junior partner in the Gresham family’s publishing firm. Arnold and Denham experience something of a meeting of minds, though Arnold’s quicker intellect runs rings around the plodding progression of Denham’s thought processes. The two embark upon a shared life, and the novel details the peaks and valleys the two must traverse – some literal, most strictly figurative – before coming to a place of joint repose.

A very clever book, this one. I frequently felt much in common with Denham as Macaulay writes her own rings around my own rather plodding (though appreciative) thought process. I identified tremendously well with Denham; I wonder if this is a universal response? Or do the rest of you see her as the unrelateable (though ultimately sympathetic) stranger within the gates of intelligent society?

I suspect we all have something of Denham in us, as onlookers and inner critics of the chatter and occasional excesses perpetuated by the self-proclaimed intellectual classes of our own time. Perhaps this explains the lasting appeal of this mocking (but frequently tender) confection of a tale?

Crewe Train is definitely on my personal short list of “Most Memorable Books of 2013”, even though the year is not quite half over. I am very keen indeed to explore more of Macaulay’s fiction; this novel has wet my appetite for something more of her creative style.

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Excellent Women by Barbara Pym ~ 1952. This edition: The Folio Society, 2005. Introduction by A.N. Wilson. Illustrated by Debra McFarlane. 206 pages.

My rating: 10/10.

This is the second time around for this book. My first reading left me gently pleased but not much more; this reading was much more rewarding, and I found I fully appreciated every nuance, every delicious – and occasionally malicious – little scenario.

This absolutely beautiful Folio edition certainly added to the experience; my first reading was of a yellowing paperback. I wonder if eyestrain is starting to influence my reading enjoyment? I do notice type clarity (and lack thereof) and font size much more these last few years.

And I must confess I almost passed this one by – “I already have it in paperback and it wasn’t that wonderful” – but am so glad I went back and splurged on this much more aesthetically pleasing book. Every sense was indulged by it! The pussywillows picked out in silver tipped the scales and sealed the impulse buy. I’m a sucker for pussywillows; these stole my heart. (On such small things do my buying decisions sometimes rest!)

Barbara Pym. Read her, and then reread her. Second time around is the key, here, I think. (Much as one needs to do with Diana Wynne Jones.)

*****

At the rather young age of thirty-one, Mildred Lathbury, self-described “spinster” and “clergyman’s daughter” (both of these designations serving to explain her clear-eyed observations of other people’s lives, and her lack of sentiment about her own), is well on her way to becoming one of the titular “excellent women” so dutifully and frequently thanklessly keeping things on an even keel in the bleak post-World War II years. Surplus females of every age, in super-abundance at mid-century after the decimation of their generations’ crops of marriageable men in the two brutal cullings of the previous decades.

“They have nothing better to do,” shrug their “luckier” compatriots, “they might as well make themselves useful, and be grateful for the occupation…”

So they do. Make themselves useful, that is. Though, as Mildred so delicately observes, the gratitude frequently falls short on both sides of the equation.

Read quickly, this is a rather depressing, non-eventful, bleakly dreary minor tale. Not much happens. Mildred gets new neighbours, watches as the vicar of her church is pursued and almost caught by a predacious widow, narrowly escapes being saddled with an unwanted flatmate, and is offhandedly wooed in a most unromantic way by an anthropologist looking for a meek but competent dogsbody to take on the tedious task of editing his notes.

But, oh! – her inner voice! She misses nothing at all, our Mildred, and her wry observations are a joy to read.

I’m going to stop right here. What with it being Barbara Pym’s centenary year, and with the book blogging world full of mostly fulsome praise and beautifully written, thoughtful book reviews of her work (though the occasional dissenting voice is heard from, mostly from mildly querulous folk wondering what all the fuss is about – I can’t say I’ve yet come across anything resembling a brutal denunciation of Miss Pym) anything I have to add to the conversation is rather superfluous, I feel.

I liked this book.  A whole lot. You might, too. My caveat: it might take more than one try.

Here are some excellent reviews, well worth reading. They include all of the excerpts I would have chosen myself.

Well done, all!

You’ve saved me much typing. Well, that, and also, more importantly, you’ve given me the great pleasure of reading your delightful posts. Thank you. A (fresh) wand of mimosa all round! (And a cup of China tea, if that be your desire. Unless you’d prefer a beer? Or a glass of wine, exciting or merely adequate?)

Excellent Women –  Review at The Captive Reader

Excellent Women – Review at Book Snob

Excellent Women – Review at The Indextrious Reader

And there are many more.

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Antigua, Penny, Puce by Robert Graves ~ 1936. This edition: Penguin, 1947. Paperback. 314 pages.

My rating: 8.5/10. Parts of this one – many parts! – were decidedly “10” in quality. I rated it lower only because the author ran a few sections just a bit harder than they could take; I did have to force myself onwards here and there. But it always got interesting again.

I greatly enjoyed this book, and found it playful, amusing and gloriously cynical in parts. Graves has his authorial knife keenly honed and digs it into such things as British prep and public schools, golf, the British upper classes in general (with the hearty sporting types coming in for the most blatant caricaturizations), and, for reasons known only to himself, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. I laughed out loud several times while reading; a thing I seldom do.

*****

This is an intricately structured, highly detailed, cleverly framed, humorous and yet deeply cautionary tale about sibling rivalry, and the dangers of pursuing familial tit for tat to extreme lengths. Robert Graves, already a well-established and very prolific writer of “serious” literature and poetry, apparently wrote this atypical farcical novel as a result of a bet that he couldn’t pull off a “modern” bestseller. Graves is, of course, probably best known now for his screen-adapted historical fictions I, Claudius and Claudius the God, among something like 150 other published works, most rather sober and scholarly examinations of the classical world, biography, historical fiction and poetry.

*****

Oliver Price and his younger sister Jane grow up together in an atmosphere of stereotypical English upper-middle-class respectability. Their father is a country vicar who hobnobs on equal terms and with a strong element of rivalry with his wealthy neighbour, Sir Reginald Whitebillet. Their mother, the daughter of a marquess, was cast off by her family for marrying the Castle chaplain, and through her there are connections to the aristocratic Babrahams. These details are important; both the Whitebillet and Babraham connections figure crucially in the saga of the siblings a few years later on.

Oliver, at the age of twelve, is the proud curator of a stamp collection while Jane, a year younger, yearns to participate in her brother’s hobby. Through maternal machinations on behalf of Jane and a set of rather devious circumstances – the mother of the family exhibits a strongly manipulative technique which her daughter fully inherits –  Jane attains a half-interest in the collection, and proceeds to contribute a number of rare and unusual items to the album, including a one-of issue of a purple-brown (“puce”) Antiguan one-penny stamp, the only surviving example of a lot which has gone to the bottom of the sea in a ship wreck.

Aha! That’s the explanation of the rather odd title. Antigua, penny, puce. It’s the description of a postage stamp! I did not grasp this until I started reading, at which point it became as clear as day.

Time marches on, and Oliver and Jane grow up and go their separate ways, with varying degrees of success.

With the assistance of her childhood friend Edith Whitebillet – a scientific prodigy – and her own single-focus ambition, Jane has become first a highly successful actress and then the brilliantly manipulative proprietor of a theatrical company known as Jane Palfrey Amalgamated, consisting of actors whom she has groomed and renamed to each fill a very defined character with a strong appeal to public sentiment of one sort or another.

Oliver has gone through his school career and on to Oxford aiming for and just falling short of his desired goals in every aspect of his endeavours. He only makes the Second Eleven in football, misses the scholarships he aims for, and generally places as an also-ran in everything he does. Now he’s deeply involved in writing his first novel, which he has stellar plans for, but samples we are given  of his prose style make it very clear that in this too Oliver will be less than successful.

Oliver is by nature rather pompous and quickly belligerent; his clever sister runs rings around him now as she did in their younger days. First as a joke engineered to raise his ire so she could examine closely his mannerisms when taunted – one of her stage characters is based on her blustery and rather laughable brother – Jane reminds Oliver of her half-ownership of that childhood stamp collection, and announces her intention of coming to take away every second stamp. Oliver’s subsequent tantrum swings Jane over from merely joking to deadly serious about this intention.

Much devious work on both sides now goes on, as Jane and Oliver are well-matched in their desires to not let the other get the better in any sort of confrontation. A series of wins, losses and draws ensues, with the titular Antiguan stamp as the catalyst of their many explosive altercations.

Robert Graves was nothing if not a well-prepared author. His attention to detail was legendary, and even in this “light” novel he includes a plethora of background information on every subject he touches upon. This article, from a website dedicated to his work, details the research and process of writing Antigua, Penny, Puce. Absolutely fascinating!

As well as being a well researched author, Graves has a strong sense of humour and a very readable, deeply satirical way with words. He examines the real world, translates it into a fictional one, and rather maliciously – though never mean-spiritedly – probes and lays bare the absurdities he finds.

Good stuff.

Little Raven says it well; she approves, too.

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The Joyous Season by Patrick Dennis ~ 1964. This edition: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965. Hardcover. 230 pages.

My rating: 9/10.

Ignore the candy cane on the dust jacket, and the internet references you may find to this being a “holiday book.” No, no, no. It is not. Christmas features, but only incidentally. The scope is much broader than that.

“Patrick Dennis,” you’ll possibly be saying to yourself. “Sounds familiar, but ???”

Auntie Mame, darlings!

Ten years after penning his highly successful social satire starring the exuberant Mame and her sedate nephew Patrick, author Edward Tanner – writing under the pseudonym Patrick Dennis – came up with this little  comedic gem. I wasn’t sure what to expect, having only ever previously experienced Mame, but The Joyous Season was absolutely marvelous, and better than I had anticipated. Such a treat!

10-year-old Kerrington – Kerry – is our narrator. He lives in a posh New York apartment with his 6-year-old sister Melissa – Missy – and his parents, both members of the New York “aristocracy”, though his mother’s family is higher up in the strata, and his maternal grandmother never lets his father forget that for a moment. Dad’s a successful architect, and Mom is most definitely one of the ladies-who-lunch, leaving much of the care of her two children to the fifth member of the menage, Lulu.

Lulu’s our nurse. We need a nurse like we need a case of mumps. I mean, hell, I’m ten and eleven twelfths years old and I’ve already smoked over two packs of Tareytons. (They’ve got that extra charcoal filter, you know, for cancer.) Even old Missy can take a bath and get dressed and wipe herself without any help, which is pretty good for six, I guess. But like Mom always said, we can’t go around New York alone because of kidnappers and Dirty Old Men (especially on East Eighty-sixth Street) and types like that. So Lulu drags us across town every day, me to St. Barnaby’s – although she turns me loose at the stationery store so the kids won’t think I’m being hauled around by a nurse at my age – and Missy two blocks further (or farther, whichever it is) to Miss Farthingale’s. Except for that, Lulu hasn’t got much to do except see we go to bed and get up and eat and don’t fight.

Lulu’s quite a character. She’s colored and elderly and has been with us ever since I was born. She’s kind of old fashioned and hates the N.A.A.C.P. and says she doesn’t want to integrate with any white people except Missy and me and that’s only because she gets paid to. Lulu says that after us she needs a rest, if we don’t kill her first, and she wants to retire and move back down South. Gadzeeks, South! I mean I don’t even like Palm Beach, which is supposed to be the next thing to heaven… Give me New York City and keep the rest. Crazy! Anyhow, Lulu tells us real interesting stories and knows every kind of poker there is – except strip – and always lets us have some of her beer and hates Gran’s place in East Haddock almost worse than we do. I mean Lulu is great, even if we don’t need a nurse.

Oh – I forgot one more family member. There’s also Maxl, the incontinent, prone-to-carsickness, full-of-mild-vice dachshund. His escapades run in a kind of sub fusc harmony to the ups and downs of Kerry’s and Missy’s lives, providing a counterpoint to the human drama of this gloriously dramatic tale.

So as the story opens, Kerry, Missy, Lulu and Maxl are reluctantly heading out the door to Gran’s place in East Haddock. Gran is Mom’s mother, and oh boy, is she ever a snooty piece of work! And she’s more or less the reason for the whole darned situation Kerry and Missy are in. To condense greatly, on Christmas morning there was a bit of a situation with Mom and Daddy which saw several kinds of shots fired, much broken glass, some physical violence and some exceedingly blunt words spoken. As a result, Kerr and Missy are poised to become Children of Divorce, much to the delight of meddling Gran. Everyone (except Gran, who openly gloats about the come-uppance of her despised soon-to-be-ex son-in-law) has decided to be Very Civilized About It All, and Not To Make The Children Suffer, but suffering they are indeed, though not perhaps in the way one would expect.

Kerry and Missy, despite all of the adult antics going on in their world, are the epitome of well-adjusted, though no one but Lulu seems to quite get that, and Kerry’s knowing-naive narrative exposes the follies of the grown ups, and New York upper crust society at large, to our appreciative eyes.

Mom is suddenly being courted by her own divorce lawyer, the social-climbing Sam Reynolds, while Daddy is pounced on by the predatory Dorian Glen, a self-invented fashion magazine editor. This gives much glorious scope for satirical commentary, and Kerry is well up to it. His descriptive passages are true works of art, and I found myself wearing a perpetual smile as I willingly gave myself up to the contrivances of the complicated plot.

For example, as this is New York in the 1960s, psychoanalysis is all the rage, and Kerry finds himself saddled with three hours a week with Dr. Epston. The adults in his life just want to ensure that he is coping well, and they are sure that he needs “fixing”, which if nothing else gives Patrick Dennis via Kerry an opportunity to get in some juicy digs at the world of the well-paid New York shrinks.

Dr. Epston’s consulting room is small and dim with a couch to lie on; two easy chairs; Kleenex, for crying into, I guess; a desk and a bookshelf with about a million copies of Tensions in the Metropolitan Adolescent by I. Lorenz Epston. I guess it wasn’t exactly what they call a best seller, but he’s getting rid of the supply bit by bit by making each patient’s family buy a copy (at ten bucks a throw). There are also some pictures on the wall that look like Missy painted them and a framed photograph of Dr. Epston’s three daughters. One is in the upper school at Dalton, one goes to Rudolf Steiner and the littlest one is in the School for Nursery Years – if that gives you some idea of what kind of kids he’s got. They also look like Eskimos. In fact, Dr. Epston’s first question was always, “What are you thinking about right now?” And my answer was always “Eskimos.” But when he’d ask me why, I just couldn’t tell him, because even if he is kind of a boob, I didn’t want to hurt the poor guy’s feelings. So I’d hem and haw and talk about igloos and blubber and wasn’t it interesting that the French spelled Eskimos Esquimaux and like that. So I always got kind of a demerit for being what Dr. Epston called “evasive” (when I was only trying to be polite) and at the end of the first week Mom sent off to Wakefield-Young Books for copies of Nanook of the North and Inyuk and some other suitable reading about the North Pole, when I didn’t care much one way or another.

The first day Dr. Epston made me lie down on the couch and darned if I didn’t drop right off to sleep while he was droning away about trusting him and telling him everything that came into my mind, no matter what. After he woke me up he kept asking me what I was trying to escape from and he wouldn’t believe me when I told him I’d stayed up late the night before watching “The Nurses” (it was all about this dope fiend) and it would have rude to say that also he was kind of a bore. But after that he let me sit up straight in a chair.

And so on, and so on. Kerry certainly does not suffer from lack of things to say; his self-confessed verbosity is what makes this satire such a delight. He’s a truly nice kid, for all the knowingness and the cynical tone he tries to maintain, and his relationship with the volatile Missy is just plain sweet, though they swap sibling-appropriate verbal digs and occasional blows.

Missy is a glorious character in her own right, and it would take me pages and pages to do her proper justice, so I’m not going to even try.

If you liked Auntie Mame, I’ll guarantee that you’ll love The Joyous Season. Highly recommended.

And here, as a bit of a bonus (because I do like to read reviews from the time of publication, and usually try to seek them out to see what those of the time had to say to compare it to my own years-further-on take), is the Kirkus review from October 14, 1965, because it sums things up quite well. I did edit to remove the spoiler; the ending is blatantly given away; that’s such a cheat in a commercial review, don’t you think? Liked the Holden Caulfield reference, because I thought that too, before I ever read the Kirkus review!

The people from the Auntie Mame strata are back under the snickersee of Patrick Dennis. The narrator is 10-year-old Kerrington, scion of a bloodline so inside Society that he yawns at the mere thought. After Daddy’s monumental Christmas hangover, Kerry and his 6-year-old sister, Missy, are slated to become Children of Divorce. Kerry’s prose style would make even a Holden Caulfield blanch, but his reportage is as complete. It seems Mommy and Daddy are going to do the Terribly Civilized bit. The demoniacally wholesome children are taken in on the divorce plans and exposed to the new interests of their wayward parents. Daddy falls victim to a voracious career woman (whose job allows P.D. to vivisect the fashion magazine sub-culture) and Mommy gets stuck with a stuffed shirt (who polarizes the P.D. thunderbolts directed at the nouveau riche). No tribal rite of the East Coast uppercrust, no Southern smarm and no mid-Western gaucherie is sacred … P.D. has picked their milieu to tatters. His full cast of credible caricatures are given dazzlingly funny dialogue. It’s a fair guess that this could easily go the Auntie Mame route — book to play to movie.

I honestly don’t know if this book did ever make it onto stage or screen, but it could well have. All I know is that I’d never heard of it before doing my bit of casual research on the author while reviewing Auntie Mame last year. He was well on my radar as one to watch out for, and when I came across The Joyous Season last week on the bottom shelf of the used book section of a secondhand furniture store in Prince George which I visit every few months “on spec” – for locals, that would be City Furniture right in the core of the scruffy old P.G. downtown on 3rd and Quebec – stacks and stacks of dusty books which I’ve now mined fairly thoroughly but which still contain some occasional vintage “finds” – I grabbed it with a silent shout of glee.

Young Kerry, narrator of the story, could have come across as either cloying or annoying, but Patrick Dennis has nimbly avoided either obnoxious extreme, to create a character whom I found I could completely relate too, after checking my own cynicism at the door, as it were. (Young Kerry’s dialogue occasionally slips to reveal the very adult puppet master handling the authorial strings, but it didn’t matter at all; I was happily and deliberately complicit in my own deception and looked away the few times it happened.)

I liked the likeability of Kerry’s whole family, for though Daddy and Mom were guilty of high tempers and hasty words to each other, they truly came across as loving parents, which was much appreciated; it could so easily have had a sour tone. The in-laws on both sides, and the assorted friends and hangers-on of each of the parents, gave loads of scope for Patrick Dennis to work with; he was bang on the mark with each and every one. Brilliant.

And though I saw the ending coming from just a few pages in, it never ruined things for me to find out I was right. Great “light” escape reading, and definitely a keeper.

I do believe this title is fairly easy to obtain, as it was republished in 2002, and looks to be available as a new softcover through Amazon, or, hopefully, your favourite local bookstore. There are a few vintage copies available through ABE, but these are priced a bit high, up into the $20s and $30s and beyond, so unless you’re a purist and need the original hardcover, I’d say go for the cheapest decent copy you can find, which might well be the 2002 reprint. Or perhaps try the library?

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