Archives: Persephone Forum

The workhouse in the title of this collection is no Victorian institution for the destitute, but a philanthropic retreat for writers and painters, a large country house, set in a large park, with a large kitchen garden. Hetherston Hall is reigned over by the philanthropist’s widow who provides board and lodging and occasional advice, more practical than artistic. Recognising a case of writer’s block in one of ‘her’ young authors, Mrs Lucas cites previous visitors, Mr Doherty, the poet, who used to find regular exercise beneficial, and ‘Miss – I forget her name – pretty red-haired girl –plays in verse, I think. She found the best thing was whisky.’ Cecilia Mathers doesn’t mention that she has already, to no avail, been spending her days in the kitchen garden, picking strawberries and hoeing between the lettuces.

 

 

The solution turns out to lie elsewhere. Missing her path on a solitary night walk and finding herself alarmed (though not excessively) by a herd of curious heifers, Cecilia is ‘rescued’ by the current Hetherston ‘celeb’, a recently divorced, successful author, escaping his mistress. A midnight fumble on the sofa, routine for him, easily rebuffed by her, triggers startlingly vivid memories of a past lover as she climbs the stairs to her room: his pigskin stud-box, polished with use, and the lotion he used after shaving, too expensive to smell vulgar. ‘All I needed,’ she imagines herself saying to Mrs Lucas, ‘was to have my bottom pinched, so to speak, by a best-selling novelist in a yellow waistcoat.’ Cecilia has her story. ‘Things were hooking onto each other – smells, words, gestures – not yet amounting to a sequence of events but weaving a feeling of Max … I’ll call him Louis, she thought …’.

 

 

The American collection of Diana Athill’s short stories took its title from the first story she wrote, ‘An Unavoidable Delay’, whose genesis she recalls in the Preface to the Persephone collection, and which she described at slightly greater length in her memoir Instead of a Letter (1963), briefly, concluding: ‘The story came straight out with no pause, exactly as I meant it to, and I was perfectly happy all the time it was coming.’ The experience sounds almost prosaic by comparison with Cecilia’s.

‘Midsummer Night in the Workhouse’ is a better choice of title story. Longer, and with a far larger cast than the others, it is written with the keen eye for detail, sharp ear for dialogue, succinctness and, not least, humour that characterises the whole collection. Elements of all the principal themes are there, many autobiographical, about which the author makes no secret:  childhood, sex, relationships between men and women, women’s choices and independence, addressed with a cool frankness and in a manner way ahead of their time. Age has not tempered Diana Athill’s frankness: before I could download her fascinating interview with Alan Yentob in 2010, one of the BBC arts series Imagine (available on BBC iPlayer), I had to click on the box confirming that I was ‘over 16’, having first been warned of ‘strong language’.

In her own relationships Athill determined, after two deeply unhappy episodes, that it was best to ‘avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness.’ She wrote of herself that until her forties she could be at ease only in a relationship which she knew to be ‘trivial’. The collection reflects this. Cecilia’s affair with Max, the inspiration for her story, had been short and sweet, without a bad ending, ‘her one painless affair’ – a telling aside, easily missed. In ‘An Unavoidable Delay’ Rose, travelling alone through Yugoslavia, has enjoyed a brief flirtation with an architect until he remarks how unfortunate it is that English women should be married to English husbands: ‘Rose always hoped that foreigners would not make this remark but they usually did.’ ‘Always’ and ‘usually’, two words suffice: it’s clear that this is far from being her first foreign flirtation, and we’re not surprised when she rapidly embarks on another. When Philip Dwight leaves a party with another man’s wife (‘A Hopeless Case’), and dinner segues into bed, we are lulled into believing that he is a habitually wronged husband, finally reacting to his wife’s blatant intimacy with a fellow guest. What a surprise when we read that ‘neither of Philip’s two other infidelities had been so simple’. So he too has form. But there is something touching about the ‘two’. Such a short sentence and so much information.

The Dwights have been married for eight years. Philip is unsurprised that his wife should want another man. ‘They no longer had much to talk about, he was only mildly interested in her pottery classes and her beagle puppies, and she wasn’t interested at all in his work.’ Rose has been escaping an alcoholic, suicidal husband whose letters she barely opens: ‘What was in the letters, Rose knew, was that if she left Neville he would throw up his job, start drinking again and (in the twelve-page letter, probably) put his head in the gas oven.’ How flatly comedic is that ‘probably’, and what a depressing summary of a relationship. Reflecting on the (few) advantages of marriage, Rose lists house, money, friends, and reminds herself of the nursery exhortation to ‘think of all the little boys and girls who haven’t got any rice pudding … lucky little bastards, thought Rose, as always…’ The Beestons (‘For Rain It Hath a Friendly Sound’) have made twelve years, but only thanks to Kate Beeston’s outward submission, sending ‘many of her inclinations underground rather than contend with him as he settled in ways she had not expected.’ Clearly, negotiation is not an option, if it ever was. Midsummer Night in the Workhouse doesn’t make much of a case for marriage. Only one appears to be satisfactory, that of the doctor with whom Kate falls in love, who allows his wife all the freedom she wants, while enjoying his own to the full. ‘It was simply that he loved his wife with generosity,’ reflects Kate. The more cynical view, not Athill’s, is that the couple, more or less, put up with their respective infidelities, or it may be – we are invited to see things only from the husband’s point of view – that her holidays away are the price he is more than willing to pay for his extramarital affairs.

Describing marriage as ‘living somebody else’s life’, Athill has made no secret of the fact that what suited her was being ‘the other woman’, comparing it to enjoying the plums without having to munch too much through the pudding. She is not ungrateful to those women who munch the pudding, washing the socks and shirts and dealing with illness. Without wives after all there can be no ‘other women’. She leaves us in no doubt that, long-term, women are stronger without men. Maybe men too are stronger alone. Lovers are better enjoyed as guests rather than live-in lodgers.

 

 

In ‘The Island’ the cracks are showing after just three years in a match based, unreliably, on the fact that ‘the parts of each of them which had not changed since childhood happened to be at home together’. The ease of shared childhood experience is a lure, but one to be resisted. Elizabeth slips back easily, too easily, into the familiar environment of a large country house (‘A Weekend in the Country’), similar (like the writer’s retreat  in ‘Midsummer Night in the Workhouse’ and the family home in the final story)  to Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, where Diana Athill, happily, spent much of her childhood with her grandparents. Elizabeth wisely turns down an offer of marriage, Cecilia returns to her own awkward flat, and in ‘Burial’ Mrs Klein , who has long ago cast off the trappings of her conventional upper-middle-class upbringing to marry a Jewish Socialist (an outsider of the kind to whom the author might herself have been attracted) resists the needs of her unhappy brother. A secure childhood is important, but it cannot usefully be revisited.

Athill says of herself that she is one of those people who are hardly ever totally involved in an emotion, ‘there’s always a beady-eyed watcher at the back of my mind.’ Clinically observing emotions, she grounds her characters, often humorously, in practicalities. Preparing to lose her virginity to her boyfriend, Jane (‘No Laughing Matter’) plans to borrow a friend’s suitcase for the weekend, ‘because Nora’s surname, like Stephen’s, began with M’. Having dealt with the likely disapprobation of the hotel receptionist, her next problem is contraception: she knows that Charing Cross Road is the place to go, ‘because there they put them in the windows and on the counters even, you could point – but on her way back at the end of the vacation she would only just have time enough to make her connection and Charing Cross Road was in the wrong direction.’ How absurd if the awkwardness of the train timetable were to be the cause of a pregnancy.

A panoply of material details enriches every story. A Greek fisherman, is ‘scraggy at the table over his plate of beans in oil’; toffee papers and husks of monkey nuts lie under a park bench; strawberries are picked into a punnet ‘lined with a cabbage leaf’ (a detail from her own childhood). The Soho street described in the opening paragraph of ‘An Afternoon Off’ glows with life: ‘a string of onions hung above a wicker basket of red peppers, two copper moulds in the shape of fish crowned an arrangement of wooden pepper-mills, and an old man with one arm played a small concertina strapped to his chest and a Negro or half-Negro prostitute with blonde hair wore a sugar-pink duffel coat.’ Only one determined to ‘get it like it was’ (Jean Rhys’s dictum) would bother to specify the possible racial mix of the young woman, or the exact pink of her coat, details which are both superfluous and brilliant. Only a ‘beady eye’ would pick out the sad comedy of the one-armed musician.

Like a lot of lives, hers, says Athill, has contained unhappy things, the essence of it being that it has been lucky. ‘Funny, nice and lucky.’ We know that Diana Athill herself suffered a cruel humiliation during her time at Oxford similar to Jane’s in ‘No Laughing Matter’, and was greatly hurt by it, but that story too ends on an up-beat, ‘I’ll get over this one day. I’m only nineteen so I’ll probably get over it quite soon, and I’ll love someone else.’ That little phrase ‘quite soon’ has such a young, almost childlike, confident ring. Her short stories contain unhappy things, but we would be wrong to conclude that they are sad. Relationships end for the right reasons. Good sense prevails. The clouds we sense will clear.

 

 

Near the end of Alive, Alive Oh!, her most recent book (in Diana Athill’s case one hesitates to use the word ‘last’) she writes: ‘The things life teaches you are not always valuable. Many people learn not to trust, not to hope, not to give. But if you are lucky in your circumstances – have loving parents, are spared extreme poverty or early exposure to loss, violence or frustration – and if you are equipped with a reasonable amount of natural wit, the chances are what it teaches will be useful.’ The message is already humming in these stories, written more than fifty years ago, none of them planned, ‘little outbreaks like those small hot springs that bubble up here and there in volcanic territory’ (Somewhere Towards The End), which, when she was already in her forties and considering herself a failure, unexpectedly revealed to her that she could write; and that made all the difference.

 

 

Late in the afternoon of 16^th April 2011, after a 1930s’ tea with musical accompaniment, a commemorative plaque was unveiled at 2 North Park, Moffat, Dumfriesshire, at the house that Dorothy E. Stevenson shared for thirty years with her husband James Reid Peploe. Her fans, DESsies, had gathered earlier in the day for the inaugural Moffat Book Event (MBE is a community group founded in 2010) which opened with the launch of Persephone’s reissue of Miss Buncle Married, introduced by a DESsy from Arkansaw. Officially ‘founded’ only in 1998, DESsies are widespread, and numerous, though not as vociferous as the devoted readers who pleaded in 1934 for the return of Miss Buncle.

 

 

‘Barbara Buncle had gone.’ How could Dorothy Stevenson have “written off” the enchanting heroine of Miss Buncle’s Book? Some of the often maligned though far from misunderstood residents of Silverstream had been mightily relieved to see the For Sale notice outside Tanglewood Cottage, only passingly curious as to who ‘Mrs Abbott’ might be, to whom potential purchasers were asked to apply. Not so Stevenson’s readers, eager to know how Miss Buncle would morph into Mrs Abbott. Would Barbara take up her pen again? Where?

But Miss Buncle Married is not another novel about a woman writing a novel about a woman writing … Wandlebury, the commuter belt village to which Barbara and Arthur Abbott move to escape the tedium of Hampstead dinners and bridge, is not Silverstream revisited. Wandlebury has its ‘characters’. The baker’s boy on his rounds introduced us to Silverstream: significantly in view of the plot (such as it is), the deed boxes piled on the office shelves of the local solicitors provide the cast list for this novel. But this is not a fresh  exposé of the hidden truths of village life, the seam so brilliantly mined in Miss Buncle’s Book. Miss Buncle Married is a more reflective novel, about growing up; in a very different way from the prequel, it’s a novel about the process of writing; and, primarily, as the title suggests, it’s a novel about marriage, gently humorous, perceptive and generous in its appreciation that there is more than one recipe for a happy marriage; and that for an outsider to understand what binds one person to another is close to impossible.

The Rasts who ‘did’ for Arthur Abbott in his bachelor days are an extreme example, held together by regular bickering (sometimes worse), keeping a slate and a squeaky pencil ready on the kitchen dresser for lengthy periods of no-speaks, but they do not make the move to commuter-land. New house, new brooms, new servants:  new maids, new cook, new gardener, new rose-beds, and to Arthur’s particular delight, a new Vauxhall car with a smart new chauffeur at the wheel.

 

 

 

A trifle smug, sartorially more than a little vain, well into middle age at forty-three (he considers himself to be ‘getting old’), and thoroughly set in his ways, Arthur Abbott plainly adores his new wife. There is ‘a tinge of heavenly foolishness in his Barbara’, which delights him. He loves her ‘dear funny innocent ways’, and relishes her garrulous moods, ‘it was rubbish, he supposed, if you really analysed it, but what amusing rubbish it was!’. Not at first sight a marriage of equals, but this is the 1930s.  DES notes, without further comment, Arthur‘sinking gratefully into the larger (my italics) of the two leather chairs arranged, by his wife, before the fire’. He does greatly respect her appetite for crumpets: ‘Nothing ever gives you indigestion,’ said Arthur proudly; it was one of those things that had drawn him to Barbara Buncle – her amazing digestion – he admired her for it all the more because his own digestion was poor.’ Who could have thought of that?

There is another side to this marriage. Although at meetings with the solicitor, ‘it was Arthur, of course, who did most of the talking,’ he fully acknowledges not only her role in finding their new house and her decorative input, but her very significant financial contribution. His thirty-five year-old (so old then, so young now) ‘child-bride’ is a rich woman, thanks to her literary earnings. Arthur Abbott of Abbott & Spicer (publishers) is in no doubt about her talent, which both fascinates and puzzles him – a chance for DES to examine, in his voice, very briefly but interestingly, the difference between talent and genius. He finds ‘her power of getting under people’s skins’ extraordinary; he is baffled by the gap between her everyday use of language, unsophisticated, banal even, and the piquant fluency of her writing. ‘ …the strangest thing about this strange woman who as now his lawful wedded wife, was that although she understood practically nothing, yet she understood everything’, but he is no hurry to unravel the mystery of Barbara.

Early in their marriage he had sometimes thought he knew her ‘through and through, and sometimes he thought he didn’t know the first thing about her – theirs was a most satisfactory marriage.’ A few months on, he senses he may be beginning to know her, but most importantly he is ‘tremendously interested’ in her. As they approach their second wedding anniversary, comparing them to their bohemian neighbours, the Marvells, Stevenson writes of the Abbotts: ‘They were delighted with each other, not so much because they understood each other better than the other couple but because they misunderstood each other differently.’ This is their secret.

 

 

Similar in age to the Abbotts, the Marvells have been married far longer – in the eyes of her contemporaries Barbara at 35 would have been reckoned a fixture on the shelf. They have three children, the eldest, handsome,  sickly and largely absent, the younger two delightfully wild, an unmanageable handful for their mousey overworked governess (Stevenson does not minimise the plight of the unmarried) , and fascinating to Barbara.  James Marvell is an Artist, his wife an extremely short-sighted beauty, for obvious reasons not a discerning critic of her husband’s work, but ideal as a model, for which role she must massage, exercise, diet and manicure her body, ‘fully aware that, when her body was no longer beautiful, James would insist (with perfect right) upon having a model in the house – and once that started, where were you?’ Where indeed? Arthur considers her ‘either mad or bad’, but DES is clear: ‘Mrs Marvell was a good wife, and perfectly sane and respectable, she had merely been brought up differently from Mr Abbott’s friends.’ James, he reckons ‘a bounder of the first water’ (wonderful thirties slang), but this is in no small measure down to jealousy: his wife and James Marvell spend too long in the studio discussing the difference between the artist, a creature of moods, and the writer, more hunter than builder, very interesting but wholly innocent. With more worldly wisdom than Mr Abbott, Mrs Marvell understands that Barbara ‘could not appeal to, nor satisfy, the physical side of her husband, and, as that was the only side of her husband that Mrs Marvell appreciated, Mrs Abbott could not take anything that was hers.’ DES takes a measured view of the Marvells’ unconventional marriage, not ideal, perhaps but workable: ‘There are quite a number of people in the world who limit their jealousy in this particular manner.’

 

 

There is a third match in the air, on which the slender plot hinges – I think I can risk a tiny spoiler here. Arthur’s nephew Sam, twenty-four and with sacks of wild oats still to sow in London, will meet Jeronima Cobbe, niece of Lady Chevis Cobbe the elderly, widowed, ailing, childless, owner of Wandlebury’s ‘big house’, very rich and firmly set against marriage, ‘won’t even have a married butler’.  Sam thinks of his uncle as ‘a crusty old beast’, considers that he and his newly acquired aunt have one foot in the grave but can’t help admitting that ‘it really is rather nice’ to see the two of them together.  ‘Pretty uncommon’, he thinks, ‘to see old people like Uncle Arthur and Barbara so frightfully gone on each other’. Not that this marriage business is for him, he protests, too much. He will learn. Jerry is a lovely, energetic country girl, not permitted by her father to go to school, but successfully running her own livery business, and her own awkwardly large house (two maids and no electricity), while keeping her wayward brother in check. More restrained, and more clear-sighted than Sam, Jerry recognises that what the Abbotts have is ‘real, friendly love’, to be envied, something to be looked forward too, perhaps in the future.

The Abbotts have married late, both with what we would now call baggage. Arthur’s is most brilliantly and movingly summarised in the history of his morning dress, which he is so pleased still be wearing twenty-three years after it collecting it from the tailor’s. The tiny pen portrait tells his story, and the story of a generation and a class of Englishmen. It is a gem and deserves to be quoted in full.

These garments of Mr Abbott’s were old and valued friends, they had helped him through his first luncheon party, they had given him confidence at his first board meeting, they had accompanied him to weddings galore, and, on two occasions, had aided and upheld him in the discharge of the responsible and onerous duties of Best Man. He had worn them at Lords, year by year when he attended the Eton and Harrow match. They had accompanied him to Ascot and had shared with him the joy of winning a good deal of money and the sorrow of losing considerably more. The morning coat and the topper (but not the other more festive accompaniments) had seen him through a good many funerals, and had helped to conceal too much feeling – or too little.

For five years these, almost sacred, garments had been laid away, guarded by blue paper and a superfluity of moth balls, while Mr Abbott waged war for his country, attired – very differently but almost as becomingly – in a khaki tunic and a Sam Browne belt …

 

While the War was making a man of Arthur (his words), Barbara was a child in rural Silverstream, living in Tanglewood Cottage, cared for by her nurse, Dorcas. When they meet twenty years later, she is still living in the house where she was born, still cared for by Dorcas, now her maid, and still, in her own eyes, a plain, gawky child, pretending to be grown-up. Arthur is not wrong about her. She is ill at ease with things like late dinner and wine, and ordering commodities, frightened of big dogs and dentists, more in tune with the childish games of little Trivvie Marvell and her brother, whose chatter (absolutely convincing) fascinates her, whose strange, sometimes oddly precocious, questions she treats with utter seriousness, whose misdemeanours she is able to forgive, and whose troubling anxieties she understands.

 

 

Almost imperceptibly – Arthur doesn’t notice it – marriage changes her. She settles into Wandelbury,  meets the neighbours, chatting with them in the butcher’s or the grocer’s, or in ‘the ice-bound fastness of the fishmongers.’ Eventually the rituals lose their mystery. And she finds a friend in Jerry, not so far removed in age from Barbara, barely more than ten years, and blessed with similar courage and independence of spirit.  Barbara offers tea and crumpets and a sympathetic ear, and ‘Jerry enlarged Barbara enormously. In a new friend we start life anew, for we create a new edition of ourselves …’. Surrounded by people who had known her all her life, the older woman had been trapped in her Silverstream self. Jerry Cobbe offers her the chance to create a new facet of herself. Finding and furnishing her own house, a proper two-storey seven-bay house, with a pillared hall, and a graceful winding stair had been the first step. Two years on, the prospect of motherhood has drawn Barbara into ‘the vast regiment of Married Woman’. She ‘feels herself, at last, to be a full grown citizen.’

Mrs Arthur Abbott is no longer ‘an imposter in the adult world’, and yet it’s quite impossible to believe that her own inner child is not still alive and kicking. Has Barbara Buncle quite gone?