Archives: Persephone Forum

‘”Mr Burgess is musical too”.’ Mrs Blackwood is only telling the truth when she describes her son’s walking companion. Mr Burgess is a pianist, and Dennis, her son is a composer. The two young men enjoy opera. But ‘”Dennis has never cared at all about sport.”‘ Unwilling to play with soldiers or steamers or any of the usual toys, he has been a disappointment to his father, who always wanted his boys to be manly boys.

The Blackwoods are spending a holiday in a small hotel, where an amateur performance of a play is being rehearsed. Directed and written, also by amateurs, loosely (but ambitiously) based on the French Revolution, the play will star the ‘striking and vivid’ Antoinette de Courcy, who has refused to play her namesake, opting instead for the more interesting Charlotte Corday. It is hoped that Dennis might, uncharacteristically, arrive in time to provide the musical accompaniment. Even his young brother is sceptical, and ‘”anyway, if he did, he’d play mouldy sort of stuff. He always does.”‘  Dennis is flaky, and clearly the odd-one-out in the family. We are, initially, comfortably in the zone of social comedy.

‘”More his mother’s son than his father’s, perhaps?”‘knowingly suggests an enigmatic fellow guest. Hester Cawthorn eats alone, sits alone and, ‘armed with a masculine-looking walking stick and the brim of her felt hat turned down to shade her thin sombre face’ likes to ‘stalk off’ into the hills’. It’s not only her walking-stick which is masculine. The hat, the gait, and the brusqueness are all Edwardian (and later) Sapphic tropes: no mention of keyboard skills, or taste for opera. Even the great composer, suffragette, and well-known lesbian, Ethel Smyth would not have been called ‘musical’, an Edwardian euphemism, reserved for men, and described by the novelist Philip Hensher as ‘charming, but in practice rather confusing’.

 

 

Dennis’s ‘secret’ is clear to the twenty-first century reader by page 8. Improbably the first publisher in 1918 claimed that he had not realised ‘the sexual implications of Allatini’s book’ and (allegedly) failed to spot that certain passages were ‘open to an immoral interpretation’. Reviews were not favourable. The Manchester Guardian critic described Dennis ‘as a hopeless victim of neurasthenia’ – another euphemism that has happily largely been forgotten – adding that he has ‘no intention of disclosing in what lies his abnormality’. The London Opinion was similarly tight-lipped, ‘of its hideous immoralities the less said the better’, but their reviewer didn’t hold back regarding Allatini’s sympathetic presentation of Conscientious Objectors, urging that this ‘literary fungus’ be put before the authorities. In October 1918 Despised and Rejected was banned under the Defence of the Realm Act, being ‘likely to prejudice the recruiting, training and discipline of persons in His Majesty’s Forces’, a judgment which covered all bases – sexual and military.

At a period where manliness, as embodied by the military caste, was hugely significant and admired, to be gay was derided even more than in peacetime. Homosexual men were seen as a particular threat in time of war, not only because a gun might prove useless in the hands of their limp wrists, good for nothing but sweeping the trenches, but because they wouldn’t be fathering future generations of soldiers. Rose Allatini who can write so wittily about bourgeois society, also eloquently pleads the causes of Conscientious Objection, and of a more understanding attitude towards homosexuality.

 

 

In three parts, Despised and Rejected is like a concerto:  the first part, Allegretto, light social comedy, the middle movement slow and dark, with some lyrical passages, and the final movement, mirroring the first, but nearer to tragedy than comedy, closing on a note of sorrowful resignation, and a faint suggestion of hope for the future.

In Part One Dennis Blackwood makes tentative moves to ‘come out’ to Antoinette, sensing in her a fellow soul, put more coarsely a fellow ‘deviant’. He describes himself as ‘a square peg in a round hole’, expecting her to concur, but she is baffled.  ‘“I just fit in anywhere. It’s fun, trying to fit into different sorts of places, it must be beastly if you can’t.”’ What he thinks is ‘a shared taint’, is no such thing. To Antoinette, ‘“it had seemed disappointing, but not in the least unnatural, that all her passionate longings should have been awakened by women, instead of by members of the opposite sex.”’ Unlike Dennis, she is entirely comfortable with her sexuality.

What she can’t bear are the constraints, not of the law, which, though not mentioned, must be assumed to have haunted Dennis, but of her family’s expectations. Alone among her many cousins in not contributing to the ‘orgy of cross stitch and crochet’ – embroidered mats and doyleys and cushion covers – cluttering her French grandmother’s Chelsea drawing-room, she delights in feeding the old woman’s hunger for news of potential husbands.

 

‘“He lives in the country, that one? He has estates? He has asked you to visit his family?”

Antoinette immediately robbed Mr Griggs of his vast country estates, by saying that alas, owing to the innate nobility of his character, he had renounced them in favour of a consumptive younger brother … Grand’mère lost interest, until it struck her that the consumptive brother might die.’

 

From Cadogan Square to commuter village, the trivialities of middle-class life are a rich source of comic material, few more trivial or more comic than an elaborately planned and much discussed fancy dress dance. Dennis is glumly resigned: ‘A fancy dress dance – well, why not? Since the whole of his life henceforth must be a masquerade …’. The date on the invitation is 24th July 1914. The comedy is about to come to an end.

The clowns and the pierrots and the highwaymen enlist, but not Dennis. He joins a group of Conscientious Objectors. The ‘slow movement’, Part Two, centres on the habitués of a pacifist tea-room in London’s Soho.

 

 

The government recognised three categories of conscientious objectors: Non-Combatants who would join the army, but not bear arms, Alternativists who would accept civilian work that might support the war away from the front, and Absolutists, pacifists who refused to do anything to aid the war effort, including freeing up other men to become soldiers. Military Tribunals rarely granted complete exemption, and the majority of appeals were dismissed, the unsuccessful appellants, if they persisted in objecting, being giving lengthy and harsh prison sentences. Allatini vividly portrays a motley representative group of COs, all planning to appeal on different grounds. One must care for his mother, another refuses to fight on religious grounds, another, Jewish is determined not to attack fellow Jews of whatever nationality. Dennis, an Absolutist, will appeal on humanitarian grounds.

His friend and librettist (Dennis has been composing an opera), Barnaby, the voice perhaps of Allatini, crippled from birth and spared conscription of any sort, makes a case for exempting artists, writers and musicians:

 

They won’t let them stay at home and do what they can do, but must send them out to do incompetently things against which their whole nature rises in revolt. From the general utility standpoint: in which capacity is the artist of more value to the nation? As a creator of a work that may live, or as a mass of shattered nerves, totally incapable either of fulfilling the requirements of the army or carrying out his own ideas.

 

An interesting argument, but one unlikely to carry weight with a Tribunal jury of men too old to serve. Dennis’s enraged description of a broken Europe strikes a chord today, but would have fallen at the time on similarly deaf ears:

 

He thought of all the roads and railways that had been made throughout Europe to connect one country with another; of how these same roads and railways had been torn up or blocked and barred to form frontiers and sever connection between one country and another. And he thought of the rivers that flowed through one country and another, some of which ran red now with the mingled blood of nations … all fighting blindly against each other for the same abstract principles.

 

He cannot bear the thought of being ‘sent out to inflict death or wounds on others … deliberately to maim and shatter the bodies of men as young as himself, the bodies of men as young as Alan.’ Dennis is fighting his own demons. He is in love, not with Antoinette (that was never to be) but with the son of a wealthy mine owner, first seen stripped to the waist, hammering at an anvil, rippling muscles lit by the leaping flames. Alan Rutherford has ‘feverish dark eyes and sensitive well-cut mouth … he seemed to possess all the fascination of her own sex as well as of his’ (these are Antoinette’s words).

 

 

Despised and Rejected is Dennis’s story, but Antoinette is the true heroine, whose place in the Persephone canon is well-deserved.  Callously used by Dennis, she remains loyal, understanding, and forgiving. Barnaby, side-lined militarily and sexually by his crippled body, who has a vision for the future of a time ‘“when we shall recognise in the best of our intermediate types the leaders and masters of the race”’, warns that she is doomed to be ‘the symbol of what has to be sacrificed to the love between man and man.’ Her immediate future seems bleak, a string of suitable husbands presented to her, until she becomes too old and is given up as a hopeless case.

But what Allatini didn’t know in 1918, was how much easier, in many ways, life was to become for women like Antoinette. One among many, many thousands of so-called ‘superfluous women’ left single by the war, we would wish her to know that she will be free to find love where she prefers, to live, if she chooses, quite openly with another woman, and not an eyebrow raised; while Dennis and Alan must remain for decades ‘in the closet’.

 

This multi-faceted, fundamentally dark novel, struck me at first, I confess, as a mixture of Enid Blyton and Ivy Compton-Burnett. In an amusingly unconventional family, four sisters, a fifth having married and left home, are left to their own devices in a large country house, which has seen better days. They cope with kitchen disasters, enjoy sisterly chats after dark, unsanctioned trips to the cinema, and the local tea-shop, while lightly supervised by their writer father, with occasional interference from their beautiful, remote, mildly dotty mother. A cosy read, until we remind ourselves that bright dialogue can masquerade as communication, and veil troubling secrets. Eccentricity can be the acceptable face of borderline insanity.

Guard Your Daughters opens some time after the sisters have gone their separate ways. Morgan, the middle daughter, narrates the months leading to the break-up of a once seemingly tight-knit family. Defensively describing the Harveys to her London friends, Morgan says, ‘We were queer, I suppose, and restricted, and we used to fret and grumble, but the one thing our sort of family doesn’t suffer from is boredom.’ Every unhappy family is, as we know,  unhappy in its own way. That the closeness was pathological only gradually emerges. Morgan, her sisters and their father have contrived to maintain a semblance of normal family life against lengthening odds, holding together a fissured unit, their mother’s fragility being the glue. Her account is personal, partial and full of gaps. It is also frequently very amusing.

 

 

The Harvey sisters are not children. Pandora, the eldest and the only ‘grown up’ is twenty-one. Teresa, the youngest, is fifteen. Inbetween are Thisbe, the ‘poetess’, Morgan the ‘pianist’, Cassandra, cook and kitchen-gardener.  Governesses have come and gone in the past, but Teresa has relied on her own eclectic and age-inappropriate reading, with some erratic  musical and literary input from her sisters and, even more erratically from her mother. The children of lovers, according to the proverb, are orphans. Though Mrs Harvey’s emotions are unclear, Ted Harvey’s love for his wife is beyond measure. He has done his best for his daughters, but his wife has always come first. His daughters have had to fend not only for themselves but also for him, and for their mother:  grazing round the pantry for themselves, putting soup on a tray for her, tea on a tray for him. So many trays, so many lonely meals. Years of fending haven’t honed their culinary skills. The girls share the chores, but none seems to be rostered to shop.

Our suspicions that the Harveys have known far better days are confirmed. Describing a comically irregular game of French cricket, arranged to give young Teresa a taste of team games, such as she might have enjoyed were she ever to have been to school, Morgan recalls a time when the tennis lawn was a well-kept court, where Father and Mother, in white flannels and pleated skirt, would entertain friends on Sunday afternoons,  home-made lemonade was served from little pink tumblers, and the children were called in at six-o’clock by Nanny. There were three servants then, a car and a telephone. Now plantains and daisies have taken over the lawn, the few remaining tumblers gather dust on a high pantry shelf, nanny, the servants, the car and the telephone all gone, and no friends visit.

 

 

What is going on? Post-war changes in life style were common to all, and to an extent disguise what is happening behind the Harveys’ rusty gates, where wartime shortages have segued into prolonged belt-tightening: for reasons which become clear only towards the end of the novel, although their father is a successful writer, money is short. Retreating further and further into a comfortable eccentricity, the family have come close to isolating themselves almost completely from their neighbours. When on separate occasions two young men make it past the gates, let in the light, and disturb the peculiar equilibrium, a kind of spell is broken.

Morgan struggles to see her mother ‘with stranger’s eyes’ … ‘but I loved her so much that it was difficult. There was a little smile on her beautiful, drawn face, and she was singing a very sad Hebridean song, quietly, and rather flat … Mother didn’t see us at first, and she was so graceful and aristocratic in her funny old clothes that I hated to disturb her.’ Morgan’s love is both tender and protective, but she doesn’t demur when Pandora describes the family as ‘odd’, nor question Thisbe’s explanation for their unusual names, ‘“Mother chose them all except Teresa, and by then she’d got tired, so father had a go.”’ Tired is an odd word to use. What is Thisbe saying? When her Mother is taken up to bed by Father, distressed by discussion of Teresa’s education, Morgan is certain that she will ‘take one of her tablets and go to sleep’. We begin to understand that this is their ‘normal’.

 

 

Pandora who has dared to raise the question of schooling, urges Morgan to leave home. ‘”You know, I couldn’t possibly … it would be – well, almost murder.”’ Morgan does not speak openly of the problem, but she does not minimise it, and seems relieved when  Pandora confides that before marrying she had consulted a doctor and been assured that ‘”there was absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t all marry and have lots of children.”’ Although neither sister refers directly to their mother’s ‘condition’ – not even mentioning the word eugenics (fashionable at the time), we understand what they are talking about. ‘“Did you tell him everything?”’ asks Morgan. ‘Everything’? Perhaps the conversations in the steamy bathroom have not always been as light-hearted as Morgan implied. Or have the sisters always carefully and deliberately avoided talking about their mother? Whatever information they shared, or supressed, it becomes clear to the reader that for a long time, since Teresa was born, maybe longer, the family has been quietly adapting not to their mother’s whims, but to her needs.

‘“You’ve known for years what very serious consequences might come of an upset to her. You know what Doctor Gerard has said about her.”‘  Ted Harvey’s argument against sending his youngest daughter to school is firm but gentle, until pressed by Pandora:’“dear Doctor G. isn’t a mental specialist.”’ Then he pushes the genie firmly back in the bottle and stoppers it: ‘“Are you seriously suggesting that I should call in specialists to pry into her private thoughts and feelings? This is a humiliation to which I will not have her subjected. They might even – they might even want to take her away to some sort of Home, so-called.”’ So sad, when what he wants, and works for is that the house they all share should be home.

Morgan shares his hope, and his delusion. Confidently (or blindly optimistically) she affirms that Mother will ‘get better some day’. If we assume her account to be true, which is not beyond doubt, her love for her mother is second only to her father’s. She recognises Mrs Harvey’s ‘clouds’, when others don’t.  Reminiscing, long after the family has split apart, she poignantly describes her memories and regrets: ‘Sometimes, too, she would walk for a few yards with her eyes shut, and her lovely tragic face turned up to the air, as though its touch upon her brought peace. Oh, darling, Mother! If only I could have come near to her, could have understood her sorrowful isolation and relieved it with my love.’

I have to disagree with the comment quoted in the afterword that she is ‘a remarkably dull narrator’. Morgan’s insight into the family is as clear as it could be given the constraints of secrecy imposed by their father, and by their class. She is not unaware of the oddities of home life with the Harveys, never self-pitying, and her eye is as keen as her ear for the social comedy she observes on rare forays beyond the rusty gates, whether it be the local Sunday School, or the cocktail party at the house of local grandees.

 

 

All the sisters, are strong and resilient, finding a sort of solace and escape in things that they are not especially good at: poetry, music, cooking and veg growing. They look out for each other.  But Morgan more than any of them is a true Persephone heroine. ‘We’re all frightfully happy,’ she lies stoically. She may overestimate her looks and her musical talent, but she never dwells on her undoubted courage or her ability to laugh through tears. And we sense in her the strength in the end to move on: ‘… we shall never really be a family again. That part is done, and it was everything while it lasted.’ The future lies ahead, more ordinary perhaps, but easier to navigate.