Persephone Book No.132. The Second Persephone Book of Short Stories

A month ago, modestly eschewing Proust, I thought that the answer to lockdown reading was total immersion: nothing shorter than six hundred pages. As we enter week 6 a different reality has hit. The ‘holiday reading’ plan was ill-conceived. A myriad of small un-foreseen tasks fill the day, shopping strategies have replaced simple lists, every meal must be prepared, eaten and tidied away, and the housework – How to Run Your Home Without Help (Persephone Book No. 62) should be flying off the shelves. Far from dragging, the days are shrinking, and so is the attention span. I am finding greater solace in short stories. The plan for the Forum is that we should write about Persephone Books in order of publication. But this month the Country Cousin is diverging. The Second Persephone Book of Short Stories  was quite simply too tempting.

At the Persephone Bookshop in September 2018, to the usual tightly packed audience (how long ago that seems), Philip Hensher enthused about the short stories of Malachi Whitaker. In his preface to The Journey Home and Other Stories (Persephone Book No. 124), he had written of her intense, scrupulous gaze, under which ‘the event that happens all the time and the event that is happening only once are, in the logic of art, strangely identical.’ Describing Whitaker’s particular style earlier in his introduction to The Penguin Book of the British Short Story 2, he made particular note in her writing of ‘an exquisitely withdrawn and precise vein, often claimed by women writers.’ Hensher uses the phrase ‘withdrawn exactitudes’. Vita Sackville-West praised Whitaker’s ‘determination to make each word do the duty required of it’. In the preface to The Woman Novelist and Other Stories (Persephone Book No. 64) Claire Gardner, the author’s niece, quotes Walter Allen’s 1946 review in the Spectator, in which he praises ‘the simplicity, exactness and quietness of her style’, adding that ‘she knows the value of understatement’. The central character in Carol Shields’  ‘Accidents’, the penultimate story in The Second Persephone Book of Short Stories, an abridger, defines his craft: ‘One must have a sharp eye for turning points and seismic sensitivity for the fragile, indeed invisible tissue, that links one event with another.’ All ground rules for the genre.

 

"K.F.M. Prescott, author "by Robert Lyon. 1941. Arts Council Collection
K.F.M. Prescott, author by Robert Lyon. 1941.
Arts Council Collection

 

Persephone Books has published twelve collections of short stories by individual writers, and two anthologies. Interestingly, Philip Hensher considers the mixed anthology to be truer to the nature of the short story than a collection, short stories being written ‘to be read singly and in very varied company’. Turning to the final pages of The Second Persephone Book of Short Stories, which lists where each was originally published  – The Yellow Book, The New Yorker, Modern Reading, Liberty, London Calling amongst others – we find that few appeared in ‘single author’ collections. The company here is varied indeed, and perfect for our changing moods. The longest story is just over twenty pages, the shortest only four. Time frames range widely, from half a lifetime, to the length of a train journey, or the duration of a shower of rain. Many are melancholy, some deeply sad, others optimistic, some bring a definite smile to the lips.  Some end with a twist, others leave us wondering what will happen, and in some cases uncertain what has happened.

Twelve of the stories are taken from volumes by individual authors published by Persephone, nine from the Persephone Quarterly (later Biannually) and nine have been selected especially for this anthology. We might choose to turn first to old friends, Dorothy Whipple, Mollie Panter-Downes, and, like children seeking the comfort of a familiar bed-time story, ask them to tell us once more the one about the triumph of the exploited daughter, whose mother ‘was devoted to the care of herself and expected the same devotion from Christine’, or the one about the family gathered to make arrangements for their old mother. ‘Vestiges of everyone’s interrupted everyday business seemed to have trailed into the room with them. Grasping handbags or gloves, they sat forward in their chairs like strangers brought together in a railway waiting room by some accident on the line.’ We know them almost by heart, but there is a special pleasure in getting them, as it were, note perfect. Some we return to, recalling how they made us smile. The wildly imaginative three-year-old Britta (‘I aren’t Britta … I’m a bull’), in ‘The Professor’s Daughter’ by Margaret Bonham, never fails to charm, not least when she tears the invisible wings from the spectral flower fairy dreamt up by her tiresomely innocent new ‘minder’, announcing grimly ‘I’ve killed it’, before setting off with an imaginary, but nonetheless awkward, bicycle. Others like Malachi Whitaker’s ‘Thunder Shower’, Elizabeth Berridge’s ‘The Prisoner’ or Frances Tower’s ‘The Little Willow’, the last two touchingly individual and very different snapshots of wartime loss, we know will make us sad, but sadness may be just the right ‘fit’ for the moment.

Social distancing is not only keeping us from our families and our friends, it has put a stop to the pleasure of fresh encounters. An anthology offers us the reading equivalent, and it’s a joy. What better way to meet a previously unknown author, or become better acquainted with one known to us only for her novels, and seen in a fresh guise. Sally Benson and Kathleen Warren were two names new to me: their two very short stories ‘Going Home’, and ‘To Open a Door’, draw us in, hold our attention, stir a sense of unease, only to turn our expectations upside down in the last line,  and we understand that we have been party to a pivotal moment. Perfect.

 

 

"The Patchwork Quilt"  by Lance Calkin. 1887. Nottingham City Museums and Galleries
“The Patchwork Quilt” by Lance Calkin. 1887.
Nottingham City Museums and Galleries

 

Persephone novelists Dorothy Canfield Fisher (The Home-Maker Persephone Book No. 7) and Joanna Cannan (Princes in the Land Persephone Book No. 63), narrow their focus to small but significant incidents in the lives of individual women. ‘The Bedquilt’ tenderly tracks the years it takes an overworked, unmarried, poor relation in rural New England to complete the perfect patchwork. ‘The Exile’ features another, spinster aunt ( something of a stock character until the 1950s), prosperous in this case, rich enough to travel to China to learn the fate of a long lost but much talked of uncle. Two brilliant stories which surprise the reader in different ways.

Philip Hensher has pointed out that writing time plus the logistics of publication make it impossible for novels to cover contemporary events: some literary editors are already asking when we can expect the first Covid-19 novel.The short story, on the other hand, being quicker, can ‘more reliably speak to participants in a current situation.’ It wasn’t until 1947 that the first war novels began to appear. The first of Mollie Panter-Downes wartime stories was published in The New Yorker a fortnight after war broke out. Of the thirty stories, first published between 1896 and 1984, six were published during the war years, and there is a compelling immediacy in the detail and the rawness of the pain. In the opening pages of ‘Miss Anstruther’s Letters’ Rose Macaulay shows the aftermath of a night of bombing more vividly than any photograph or newsreel. ‘ … The massed debris on the basement floor, where piles of burnt, soaked and blackened fragments had fallen through four floors to lie in indistinguishable anonymity together. The tenant of the basement flat spent her days there, sorting and burrowing among the chaotic mass that had invaded her home from the dwellings of her co-tenants above.’

 

"Bombed Houses" by Martin Bell. 1943.  Walker Art Gallery
Bombed Houses by Martin Bell. 1943.
Walker Art Gallery

 

Writing a year ago about Every Good Deed and Other Stories (Persephone Book No. 118), I marvelled at Dorothy Whipple’s ear, pricked for the telling snippet of conversation, for her eye permanently focused on people around her, comparing her to a photographer never without her camera, ready to capture the hidden story. I suggested that we might for a while, having read the stories, find ourselves noticing the sad face at the bus stop, the cumbersome package, the anxious smile. The unexpected upside of lockdown life is that with so few people in the streets, and so little urgency in life, there is space and time to register small incidents and ask what lies behind them. What can be troubling the angry woman in the queue? Why is a middle-aged man swearing at the pet shop owner while urgently signalling to his wife to decide between two squeeky dog toys? Who is the lone passenger on a double decker bus in the middle of the day? But sadly our imagination and narrative skills fail us. So we turn back to those who do it so well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Persephone Book No.129: The Call by Edith Ayrton Zangwill

Recommendations for the coronavirus lockdown have been appearing on almost every newspaper book page. ‘What are you reading?’ ask friends, once they have enquired if one has adequate supplies of haricot beans, bread flour, yeast (unobtainable), loo rolls … gold-dust. Some are planning the great catchup: Proust, Pallisers, others are happy to admit to indulging in the reading equivalent of eating their own body weight in Maltesers, full works of Donna Leon. Our suggestion, of course, would be ‘any Persephone book’, adding perhaps, the longer the better. We need total immersion at the moment.

The Forum book for March 2020 happens by good fortune to be The Call, perfect. It is a terrific read, an absolute page-turner, which ticks all boxes – great plot, engaging characters, historical interest, domestic detail. And ‘Persephone Books’ seems watermarked on every page: I found myself half expecting other Persephone characters to walk in to a picnic, a party, a suffragette meeting or a WW1 convalescent  hospital: Delia and Muriel (The Crowded Street PB 76)) making the case for women’s education and independence, Wilfred and Eileen (Wilfred and Eileen PB 107) sharing the agony of love in wartime, Alice Walker and Mary O’Neil (aka Constance Lytton) exemplifying the courage of the suffragettes (No Surrender PB 94).

The Call opens in 1908, the year in which Constance Maud, author of No Surrender, joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant breakaway suffragette movement led by Christabel and Emmeline Pankhurst, and closes as the War nears its end: turbulent years, politically, militarily and socially, years in which minds were changed, the positions of men and women challenged, and the class structure re-evaluated. Edith Ayrton Zangwill’s and her stepmother had joined the WSPU the previous year.

The Ayrtons were no ordinary family. Edith’s mother, who died when Edith was eight, practised as a doctor, having been awarded a degree by the University of Paris, medical courses in England and Scotland being barred to her (she was awarded a posthumous MBChB at the University of Edinburgh in July 2019). Her father, Wiliam Ayrton, an electrical engineer, was a committed supporter of the WSPU. Her stepmother, Hertha, was a physicist, friend of Marie Curie, and of George Eliot – Mirah Cohen in Daniel Deronda  is based on Hertha. Neither Hertha, nor Edith, for health reasons, took part in militant action, but suffragettes who had gone on hunger strikes would often recuperate at the Ayrtons’ house.

 

Hertha Ayrton in her laboratory

Hertha was the model for Ursula Winfield, the novel’s heroine, and what a heroine! We meet her only after having been given a tour of the family’s fashionable Knightsbridge house , ‘the sort of house that inspired trust in tradespeople and caused the socialists to fulminate’, a house with handsomely proportioned rooms, well filled with  handsome furniture, boasting, as the property agents would say, a library, in which there were hardly any books, a study, with a large writing table, ‘again a figure of speech, for the gallant colonel [our heroine’s step-father] never wrote anything but cheques’. This is not an intellectual family. Our heroine’s mother, who favours pink chiffon and ninon for her wardrobe, has furnished her large drawing room with ‘so-called Louis Seize’ furniture, while her boudoir is scattered with Dresden figurines, and photographs, ‘chiefly of good-looking young men’. Edith Zangwill doesn’t pull her punches.

How surprising, when we follow Mrs Hibbert up the stairs to the top of the house, past the servants’ (many servants) bedrooms, to find a young woman in a shapeless blue overall, and dark goggles leaning over a laboratory bench. Even more surprising is the young woman’s greeting: ‘What has brought you up, Mummy?’ ‘Mummy’, ‘Mum’, ‘Mammykin’: the relationship is warm: ‘hardly of a filial character’, writes Zangwill, but both real and deep. Mrs Hibbert’s perfectly manicured pink nails, and her tiny shoes with Louis Seize heels and gold buckles (to match her drawing room?) belie more sense than such fluffy prettiness suggests.

Disappointed that her daughter has refused even to be presented, that she refuses to ‘go anywhere’ – not quite true: she has been seen and admired in Society – Mrs Hibbert nevertheless feels none of the desperation of other Persephone mothers fearing for the prospects of daughters unmarried after three ‘seasons’. Mrs Hibbert has been left a rich woman by her late husband, Ursula’s father.  Ursula has an income of her own, £400 a year, and though her mother may hold fiercely conventional views on how a young woman of her class should behave in society, she has not been negligent about her education, nor, apparently, has she allowed her daughter’s even more conventional military step-father to intervene. After governesses, and a brief period at school, Ursula has been allowed, most unusually, to go to Bedford College, the first higher education college for women in the United Kingdom, perhaps even encouraged, in spite of the fact that her mother considers the other students ‘impossible’ (Mrs H’s word for anyone of the wrong class). The Call is Ursula’s story, but the slow reveal of her mother’s strength is woven into it.

Ursula is her own woman, a woman in a man’s world. In her early twenties, she is a regular attender at the august Chemical Society, a lone woman: ‘the Fellows had got used to her presence and, with some exceptions, rather liked it’, but Ursula could not aspire to be a Fellow herself. Women Fellows ‘would reduce its meetings to frivolous social functions’: the President was ‘genuinely unconscious of any sex hostility that lay behind his argument’, adds Zangwill, with a perceptible shrug of the shoulders. The chivalrous soft underbelly of sexism. Ursula is not raring for a fight. When her paper is announced as being by a Mr Winfield, she is amused rather than upset that it should be attributed to a man.

While she might welcome equal opportunity, the ‘woman question’ comes a distant second to her scientific work in importance. She attends the Society meetings under the auspices of her Professor, mentor, and inappropriate admirer. Professor Smee is something of a champion of women’s rights, excluding any right his plain, sad wife might have to faithfulness on the part of her husband. When he enquires of Ursula whether she is a suffragist, she replies that she is not Anti, but doesn’t consider it important, adding, ‘I am quite decided about the suffragettes. I utterly and entirely disapprove of them …. These “militants” make themselves so ridiculous.’

But Ursula is about to hear ‘the Call’, no more than a whisper at first. The Society meeting is the first of a series of vivid, perfectly constructed scenes, marking the stages of her journey from minimal interest and outright disapproval, to total commitment to the cause and horrific spells in Holloway.

 

Holloway brooch designed by Sylvia Pankhurst
Holloway brooch designed by Sylvia Pankhurst

 

 

A glorious light-hearted day at the Henley Regatta proves life changing. Her mother has lined up some eligible young men, one ‘a positive Adonis’, Anthony Belestier, out of the right drawer and a Balliol scholar, ‘but you would never think he was clever’ adds her mother, ‘he is too handsome!’ Ursula finds his well-cut features pleasant, and his figure admirable, no more. He fears that she will expect him to talk seriously, ’as though he didn’t get all the serious talk he wanted with other men.’ Tony Balastier is a young man of his times. But his conviction that ‘intellect in women was a mistake’, and Ursula’s avowed lack of interest in marriage, are far from rock-solid. The threads of a complex love story have begun to weave their way into the novel. The political and the personal will become inextricable, and conflicted.

As the Hibbert party picnic on the bank, the sight of a group of suffragettes on the river awakens in Ursula a glimmer of curiosity.  She is surprised that they should be so good-looking and ladylike – ‘quite indistinguishable from other girls in other boats. Was it possible that these were the raging viragos of whom the papers were full?’  Determined to find out ‘why these girls demeaned themselves by doing these horrible things,’ she heads to observe a gathering in Parliament Square (we would now call it a demonstration), all the while protesting that she is not one of them. It is not what the women do but what the police do that shocks her.

 

Suffragette at Henley
Suffragettes at Henley

 

 

Accounts of police brutality at the time are familiar enough, but I was shocked, though I suppose not surprised, by the description of a human chain of young men laughing and singing as they charge about in the crowd (am I alone in not having heard of this?), and then charmed by the constable regretting his actions and shielding what he thinks to be a baby in the arms of a woman he has  mistreated;  all the more charmed when the ‘baby’ turns out to be a brown paper package containing a newly bought and treasured blouse, ‘pink silk with them new glass buttings … and reel lace’, its owner no more a signed-up suffragette than Ursula at that point. But curiosity turns to anger and, eventually, much later, to solidarity, action and prison.

Zangwill’s detail is wonderful, sometimes quirkily funny. Mrs Hibbert writes after Ursula’s first spell in prison, enquiring as to whether she had remembered to take her manicure set to prison, ‘you have such nice nails: it would break my heart if you spoilt them picking oakum. By the way what is oakum? Can you eat it when it’s picked?’  Fully engaged in Suffragette action, Ursula is sent on speaking tours, where she is encouraged to accept local hospitality: ‘often her hosts were well-to-do business folk, only differing from the rest of their class in a passion for “causes” …. Vegetarianism, anti-vivisection, anti-vaccination … almost invariable co-existed with a suffrage sympathy.’ Offered in one such house a chopped apple and a Brazil nut, she risks asking if there might not be other food, perhaps for the servants?  ‘At last a small boiled egg and a slice of bread and butter appeared. This I consumed under the reproachful gaze of seven infant nut-eaters …’

Some details are so specific that we hardly question that she is writing from her own experience: the unbearable never-ending chatter of the police waiting room such that Ursula longs for the quiet of a cell; the cardboard armour worn by the woman under their clothes to protect themselves; empty seats in the Albert Hall belonging to life holders released for other political meetings but not to suffragettes. Passive aggression on the part of the public.

Some, like Ursula’s brief respite from force feeding when a broken tooth makes it impossible to prise open her mouth, are unbelievably grim. Zangwill does not spare her reader, but she is never hectoring, deftly changing the tone and the mood, before revealing each new horror.

Nearly a hundred years on, the jury is still out as to how far the Suffragette movement helped win the vote. The lives of the women involved were changed without doubt, and the opinions of many of their husbands, fiancés, and brothers, though perhaps not their fathers. Ursula Winfield’s life was changed. A lonely scientist, ‘self-isolating’ in her laboratory, she emerges into the light to form new friendships, to develop into a confident speaker, an active champion of the rights of women, not only voting rights, but simple human rights. Her eyes have been opened. The Cause may have damaged her health but it has revealed untapped strengths.

 

"Young Woman in a Red Shawl" by Gwen John. York Museums Trust
“Young Woman in a Red Shawl” by Gwen John. York Museums Trust

Zangwill does not forget the women, who cared nothing for the vote, but whose strength would be needed in another cause. Mrs Hibbert and Mrs Smee stand for them. The fluffy upper-class socialite had been so relieved in 1910 that the King should have died when she chanced to be in Paris, perfect for elegant mourning clothes. Four years later she changes out of her habitual chiffon into a tailor-made suit, removes the Dresden china in her boudoir to make room for khaki knitting, and sets out each morning to help in a war canteen. Mrs Smee, who has always secretly preferred to be without servants, enjoying domestic chores, finding an ‘artist’s pleasure’ in cooking, is in her element running the canteen. Her husband, at last, respects her, and all the smart women, Mrs Hibbert reveals, are afraid of her. When the woman she had despised and disliked at first sight years before, ‘almost’ tells her that ‘she’s not such a fool as most of the others’, Ursula’s mother can hardly contain her delight.

Helped by a couple of serendipitous coincidences (but there are serendipitous coincidences in all our lives) the plot brilliantly entwines the several plotlines, giving every character (with the possible exception of the rather ghastly Colonel Hibbert) the chance to change and grow. Regardless of their flaws we love them all by the end.