Archives: Persephone Forum

Good fortune, and printers’ timetabling, has meant that August’s Forum book was discussed at July’s Thursday afternoon Reading Group. I love reading comments on the Forum, but this provided an excellent opportunity to get some live input from other Persephone readers before starting to write about Tell it to a Stranger.

Interestingly, several members of the group confessed to being reluctant readers of short stories, or to be more accurate, reluctant buyers of collections of short stories, a reluctance which I have to admit to sharing. Was it because we preferred the total immersion of a novel? Because of the difficulty of holding more than one or two stories in one’s memory? Read at a sitting, the first is either obliterated by the second and then the third. The solution, of course, is to read each individually and give it space. But then if we have enjoyed one, we want to taste the next. Perhaps short stories are best as the book in one’s bag, or on the bedside table – a short read before sleeping. We did not arrive at a conclusion, but all agreed that while we might not buy them for ourselves, we loved receiving them.

Some of us, and again I include myself, had opened Tell it to a Stranger, expecting, for no other reason apart from the wartime context, to find some of the sharp, wry humour of Molly Panter-Downes.  The material of the opening story – a coach load of heavily pregnant women arriving at a country house nursing home, to await the births of their babies – could well have been the inspiration for one of Molly’s Wartime Stories. How different it would have been.  Elizabeth Berridge’s stories are far darker. ‘Bleak’ was the adjective most used in the Reading Group, but while this catches the feel of the subject matter and many of the settings, it does not convey anything of the enigmatic quality of the characters, glimpsed at unexpected turning points in their lives, moments at which they are forced to reassess themselves, to confront change.  ‘Tiny, concentrated explosions’, was Berridge’s phrase for the essential ingredient of the short story.

What the stories do have in common with Molly Panter-Downes’ is that they take place in a predominantly female world, in which men are either absent in the forces, on leave, invalided out, or too old to fight, or simply ‘voices off’.  It is a woman’s world but one in which they have not found their place. Married women juggle the needs of children and husbands, the unmarried battle to get through the days.

Lady Hayley (‘Subject for a Sermon’) is not a sympathetic character, and one feels for her neglected son, home on leave, seeking maternal approbation, congratulation indeed, (where is his father?), but her speech to the assembled cake-bakers contains a germ of truth. War is testing for a woman who must ‘add to her usual roles of companion and mother, that of organizer … It was a struggle all the time, with no medals at the end.’  But her parting words, ‘I feel so much – so much at one with you all’, ring hollow. Lady H’s ‘minder’, poor Miss Pollett, can never be her friend.  War destroyed many things but not the barriers of class.

Elizabeth Berridge and her husband, may have been able, as she writes in her illuminating afterword, like Alice, to step effortlessly from square to square in the chessboard of social divides in their Welsh wartime retreat. It was unusual and she recognises that it was due to their position as ‘outsiders’ and to being writers and therefore classless. Social class is a given in her stories, challenged in some, shaken a little, but not radically.  In ‘To Tea With the Colonel’ it is Miss Morton who is forced, by the Colonel’s perfect manners, to reassess her angry indignation at a system which permits such inequality. Her words go unheard.  The Colonel may be deaf and helpless, but the moral victory goes to him, as it does to Captain Banks, boldly challenged by his ‘Chance Callers’, a young couple in search of a somewhere to live. The Johnsons demands are met in a way that they did not expect and which will rattle their prejudices. Another tiny explosion.

Rank, like class, is jealously guarded. The doctor (nameless, and timeless – a figure not unfamiliar to mothers of the sixties and seventies), and her nurses, expect acquiescence from ‘their’ mothers to be. ‘Snowstorm’ looks at what happens when one arrives who shakes the doctor’s certainties, stirs unsuspected jealousy, contesting her ability to control other women’s destinies, and questioning her very vocation.

 

 

These clashing encounters take place during and largely because of the war, which shifts people out of familiar physical, emotional, psychological surroundings.  Relationships must be newly forged, or reassessed. A husband comes home on leave demanding a night out: time together is short, the baby will be fine alone, soothed by his mother’s recorded voice. ‘Lullaby’ is the most shocking example, but several other stories turn on the urgency imposed by the timetable of war. With unlimited time together Lady Hayley would not have had to choose between her son and her perceived duty.  The cracks in the relationship could have remained safely papered over. At home, with the father of her child, Theresa Jenkins (in ‘Snowstorm’) might have had a proper, even a loving conversation. Instead she must listen to a voice on the telephone and act alone, in a remote nursing home, among strangers.

War displaces people. Men go off to fight, women are rehoused. Miss Morton (‘Tea With the Colonel’), bombed out of her Bayswater room and still nursing the leg injury, has made a sort of home for herself in a tiny rural cottage. Mrs Hatfield, in the title story, has chosen to leave her lonely flat for the companionship of a seaside guest-house. And war sets up strange meetings. A German prisoner of war provides unexpected companionship for an elderly spinster, bringing back memories of youth and a loved brother.  But the tide of wartime manoeuvres removes him as suddenly as it delivered him.

Elizabeth Berridge, perhaps not yet a mistress of the short story – some at the book group felt that some were over long, while others could have benefited from a few more pages – shows extraordinary skill in taking a detail, a snippet of conversation, and allowing it to grow in her imagination. The new technique of recording a tender message onto plastic is taken to a chilling conclusion. Bombs, it seems, can reach even the quiet seaside boarding house. She plays narrative games of the ‘what if’ variety – what if a man set out from home to get a job and on a whim decided not to return to his miserable wife? She teases the reader: a man is holding gun at the start of a story. Will it be fired, or put away in a cupboard by the end?  Perhaps because the atmosphere of one story infects others, an innocent visit by a museum curator looking for manuscripts, is oddly unsettling.

Characters are drawn in swift, defining strokes. Mrs Munday, ‘whose breathing even in sleep was mean and tearful’; Aunt Doris, whose ‘teeth flashed frantically in the sun as she shouted fresh abjurations’ after Ruby; Sister Matthew’s actions are ‘repellent – impersonal as a brothel keeper’s, partially undressing a girl for a client’s appraisal’.  Back-stories are told in a few words, ‘Miss Morton had often mentioned Miss Lumley in letters to her half-brother George, who had made it possible for her to go away when the ceiling came down on to the blue carpet of her Bayswater room’ – a sentence that speaks volumes. When Miss Everton asks her prisoner of war, Erich about his family she ‘learnt that his father was dead, that he sent his mother parcels when he could, that on the whole he was disappointed with England, finding it dirty and unfriendly’. The voice is perfect and not a word is wasted: the insertion of that little phrase ‘on the whole’ is bold and brilliant.  Her mastery of the throwaway phrase makes it too easy to miss a telling, witty or grim detail. Lady Hayley judges war-time recipes ‘cakes, puddings, biscuits, all containing some measure of soya flour’.  In her afterword to this collection Elizabeth Berridge describes her cottage in Montgomeryshire, ‘We had three-quarters of an acre of land, an outside privy in which the previous owner had shot himself, no electricity, and a pump outside the front door.’ The cottage, its history, and the daily life of the young couple are all there.

 

 

Incidentally I have just received an alert from the Society of Authors warning that ‘the BBC has reduced the number of short stories it broadcast from to five, to three, and now to one a week’, as part of the reorganisation of the BBC Radio 4 schedule.  Lovers of, or maybe even just occasional enthusiastic dippers in to, short stories can sign an online petition on the National Short Story Week website.

 

Questions

A.N. Wilson considers these stories to be ‘much more than period pieces’. Do you agree? How do they compare in that respect to the stories of Mollie Panter-Downes?

Is it fair to describe these stories as ‘bleak’?

Do you agree with the Reading Group comments about the length of the stories – too short, too long?

Do you share, and if so can you explain, the ambivalent attitude towards short stories as a genre that so many of us feel? Love them when we read them, but rarely buy them.

Quotes – some of my favourites, do share yours.

‘When you were old, you saw further than the spring of the year; in one pink opening of a bud there was fruitfulness and decay. Looking at the apple tree with its low unpruned branches, she saw the flowers fade and die, small apples form, grow big and lie in baskets; saw the solemn dropping of leaves, the bare tree.’

‘The cottages stood like buffeted heaps of stone and rubble and the church in the midst of them was just a larger heap strengthened with flint, still intact upon its Roman foundations, and bearing an elaborate gilt weathercock, given by a wealthy landowner in memory of his son.’

‘For a moment Miss Morton sat utterly still.  It was as if someone had lifted a weight of pain and degradation from her years of living nervously in rooms, of odd jobs that meant just enough food: hurrying, graceless crowds. Then, quite suddenly, she burst into tears.’

‘The Colonel would have spoken, but he was no longer in contact with the world. And he had never known what it was to doubt or bitterly regret a cruelty, for he had never been cruel. So he stood, concerned and helpless, while the sun flooded into the room, giving it the grace, polish and serenity of a discarded age.’

 

If you enjoyed this book you might also enjoy:

 

Good Evening, Mrs Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes (Persephone Book No.8)

Tea with Mr Rochester  by Frances Towers (Persephone Book No.44)

A Woman Novelist and Other Stories by  Diana Gardner  (Persephone Book No. 64)

The Closed Door and Other Stories by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No. 74)

At the end of Farewell Leicester Square, Alec Berman, an established and succcesful Jewish film-maker, reflects on the breakdown of his marriage: ‘The personal failure of himself and Catherine to live up to an ideal in no way invalidated that ideal … The ideal world, he thought (in which such marriages were as valid and desirable as any others) did not, of course, exist; if, indeed, it ever would: but it was incumbent upon certain people to behave as if it did …’ . The ideal world of which Alec dreams is one in which a ‘mixed’ marriage such has theirs would attract no comment, and in which race, and Jewishness, in particular, would no longer be an issue’.  But this was a long way off, and in 1930s Europe receding fast. Victor Gollancz, who had published Betty Miller’s first three books, was the son of a well-established Anglo-Jewish family, and may have been more acutely aware of the implications of the rise of fascism in Britain than the author. This could explain his reluctance to publish a book which the young novelist had announced to be about ‘the social and psychological conflicts of a Jew in the modern world.’

 

When Farewell Leicester Square was published in 1941 it was by Robert Hale, not by Gollancz. It had been completed in 1935. Betty Miller was born in 1910. It is almost beyond belief that such a mature novel should have been written by such a young woman. Not that she lacked what we would now call ‘life experience’: Ireland, Sweden, London by the time she was twelve, followed by a period at boarding school, a year in a French sanatorium, and then, having obtained a diploma in journalism at University College, marriage at 23 and motherhood at 24. Born into a Jewish family and acquainted with the tobacco trade (through her father), and the world of film (through her brother), she could be said to be writing about what she knew. But only up to a point. She goes well beyond her own experience in taking us inside the mind of a teenage boy, and then, just as convincingly, into the same masculine mind twenty years on. Betty Miller was the 25 year old Jewish wife of a Jewish husband, but could paint with understanding and sensitivity the excitement and the difficulties of a mixed marriage and its final breakdown, seeing it from both sides of a couple more than ten years older than herself.

Farewell Leicester Square has been compared to the picaresque novel in which the young hero journeys from innocence to wisdom, meeting and exposing the weaknesses and vices of society along the way – the young Jew faces the challenges of the modern world. But this is not a linear novel and we are shown only a limited number of stops along the journey and not all from the viewpoint of the hero. A central chapter describes in exquisitely evocative detail Catherine’s visit to her Harley Street gynaecologist, capturing both the daunting hauteur of the doctor, and her own nervous excitement, thrilling at the movement of the baby inside her.

In terms of worldly success, Alec has already arrived when we first meet him at the glittering London première of his latest film. Only later will we learn where his journey began: secure but uneasy in a Jewish family in Brighton. Throughout the novel, Betty Miller uses the techniques of film: long shots, close-ups, flashbacks, light and shade. Mr and Mrs Berman are almost straight out of central casting: the chicken soup mother, with her unquestioning devotion to her family, ‘she was very short-sighted: perhaps because the radius of her interests was utterly narrowed down to the confines of home’; the shop-keeper father, as a result of whose thrift the ‘home’ is bleak, cold, damp and ‘heterogeneously furnished’. Bargains are secured from sale rooms for their cheapness alone, ‘from an exquisitely carved mahogany music stand (they none of them played any musical instrument) to a huge wine-cooler that partially blocked up, below in the basement, one of the entrances to this teetotal household.’ Betty Miller is mistress of the telling, humorous detail.

It is not, initially, the Jewishness that makes the confines of his family unbearable to Alec, but his need to realise his passion for film. In a brilliant moment of dramatic irony, his racial sensibility is awakened as the first seeds of his future film career are sown. Engineering an encounter with an admired film magnate, and having more or less stalked him out, he catches sight of his two children: ‘it was at that precise moment, for the first time, that something new, the sense of racial distinctness, awoke in him… A sudden knowledge of the difference between these two, who could tread with careless assurance a land which in every sense was theirs; and himself, who was destined to live always on the fringe …’.  Neither Catherine nor Basil is remarkably good looking: Basil fair with grey eyes, Catherine red haired with an attenuated face. No more is their father. But like his daughter Richard has a lean face, and ‘no sensuousness, no mobility about those nostrils; they were correctly winged; narrow, firm. He was a man of a different race.’ Alec sees himself in Richard’s eyes – blunt head, prominent ears, black rough hair, features, which from that moment on, he will come to dislike in himself, and in other Jews.

But the world of film did not discriminate. Alec’s career is launched. In the first of a number of significant journeys Alec leaves Brighton station with a single ticket to London, and a virtual camera in his hand, recording the glass-ribbed spine of the station roof, the light suddenly flooding the carriage. The rhythm of the wheels, the shadow of the engine, the flying smoke – the film sequence is familiar: Betty Miller closes it with a still image, ‘upon a hoarding for Beecham’s Pills, a sign said ‘London 50 miles.’

 

 

She sees through Alec’s eyes, he through hers. From the first ‘shots’ of the arrivals at the film showing where ‘ shiny patent-leather feet, narrow feminine feet alternately sought the running board’, the reader’s inner eye is made to work. Sometimes the visual detail is purely incidental. As Alec waits outside the Niccols’ house, ‘two small boys sat on the edge of the grass beside a perambulator; over gaunt upraised knees they swapped cigarette cards and argued; while the baby sat upright, sucking its thumb, hair glinting like a nimbus of thistledown in the sunlight’. At others the picture tells the story. ‘The cuff of a grimy striped shirt protruded from a sleeve that with increasing plumpness had become too short for his arm’: this is what Alec sees when he meets his older brother Sydney after an absence of seventeen years. It is enough. Minor characters, for which Betty Miller has an almost Dickensian talent, are drawn with a minimum of lines, and a cool objectivity. A maid is ‘smart in her uniform, but wearing cheap broken-down shoes’, and later ‘baggily aproned; her fingers chapped and seamed with black’; the waiter is ‘sallow, incredibly concave within his toil-worn dress-suit’; the colonel bends forward with ‘a civilised crackle of starched linen’; while Alec’s friend, Lew, wears ‘a suit, as it were, subdued, trodden down by the routine of his own personality.’

Clothes speak. They set people apart. Even looking at his own son, Alec sees the clothes: ‘… cream silk shirt; brief knickers; and his slender bony ankles were encased in white socks’, a fashion which he and his brother had viewed with incredulity, derision mixed with envy, ‘immeasurable distance separating such children and themselves’. Alec’s success has paid for the silk shirt, but the distance remains. This frail little boy, whose conception Catherine believed, and maybe Alec hoped, ‘had inextricably and finally mingled temperament and personality and race and family’, cannot sustain or resolve the diverse and contradictory dreams of his parents. The marriage founders finally on little Dave’s predicament, called ‘a Jew’ at school, in spite of his Aryan features, so troubling to his father, but the union was fragile from the start. Society offered no support, Catherine was not strong enough, and Alec too unyielding.

Betty Miller tightens her focus on the ‘social and psychological problems of the Jew in society’.  The Berman marriage is the close-up shot. Catherine, who, with her increasingly sinister brother, had first made Alec aware of his Jewishness, is the ‘trophy wife’.  She attracts him, not because she is beautiful:  he is drawn to ‘her plainness, her freckles, her faded jumper’; to her ‘flat, nervous frame’, to her boniness and lack of make-up. He does not admire her art, which he dismisses as ‘school of Truby-King’; he hopes that her piano playing will not be too good (his hopes are fulfilled). He sees through her unconventionality. The studio is part of the pose. He calculates that, lacking roots, her meagre artistic impulse ‘might in time be gently extracted from her system’.  He knows that she will be more at home in a double fronted house, with a large garden and two uniformed maids.  And he knows that he can provide that. ‘The girl out of his own past, the girl from Rottingdean, a symbol, unforgotten’, is there for the taking.  For that he loves her.

For Catherine, Alec, in his way, is the ‘trophy husband’. Not because of his money, nor because of his success, but because of his Jewishness. He is different and, because of that he is exciting. He has ‘a certain mystery, a concealed power, lacking in the men of her own kind’.  She is fascinated by his ‘dark screened eyes: the matt, foreign skin’, ‘his beautiful mouth, firm and suave’. Does she love him? She is tender towards him, because she is ‘able to bring him happiness. He had given her that: rehabilitated her: in a few months, all the unhappy sterile years were forgotten …. She often found herself thinking ‘It is as though I were at home again’.

Both in their way yearn for home and family. When he first visits her studio, Alec for the first time in more than ten years experiences an agonising sense of regret for his mother, for the old life, ‘for the sense of being in a community again; for that protection, that solidarity, that oneness’.  But their marriage can never recreate that. Alec can never be the source of ‘the harmony that existed between father and daughter’, a harmony which excluded even the sinister, divisive Basil. Catherine can never give of herself as selflessly as Mrs Berman.  They chose a ‘mixed marriage’ for what they thought it could offer: social respectability for him, the thrill of the unconventional for her. But they were looking for the wrong things.  Alec’s dream of an ideal world is laudable, and he is right to say that it was ‘incumbent upon certain people to behave as if it did [exist].  They were not the right people.

Betty Miller places the conflicts of the Jew in the modern world within the confines of a marriage. Can we surmise that, in England in 1935, had the story continued, Catherine, would opt  for a more conventional path, taking the Aryan featured David with her? Alec, driven by ambition, will set out again on a new professional journey, this time with the backing of his family. The conflicts have been confronted but not resolved.

 

Betty Miller places the conflicts of the Jew in the modern world within the confines of a marriage. With what, reluctantly, one must call the ‘benefit’ of hindsight, the twenty-first century reader knows, as Betty Miller knew, when the novel was published in 1941, the conflicts were about to develop catastrophically on a scale beyond the scope of the widest angled lens.

Questions

Betty Miller makes very little reference to the wider issue of Jewishness in 1930s Britain: a man with a badge reading ˜Clear out the Jews” selling newspapers in Piccadilly Circus, but no mention of Black Shirts, or the rise of fascism in the rest of Europe. Do you find that a fault in the novel?

When Farewell Leicester Square was discussed at the Persephone reading group in February, the relationship between Catherine and her brother Basil was discussed. Incestuous or not?

Some found Catherine somewhat under-defined as a character. Do you agree?