The Searching Light by Martha Dodd (1956)

I haven't read many propagandist novels before. Or novels with a strongly particular political point to make. So reading this has been a lesson in what the costs are, and what can be achieved. Dodd, it needs to be said, is a strong writer without being extraordinary. But she's no klutz, stuffing nonsense down our necks badly. The writing here is sometimes very sensitive and human and quietly moving. This is the story of a university professor on a small but prestigious campus in the Appalachians, and his fight against a loyalty oath at the time of McCarthy. It's also the story of his demanding wife, who has a heart condition; she believes in him, but doesn't want to lose her comfortable life. He is also deeply in love with her, and worries about the effects of his fight with the authorities on her peace of mind and therefore her fragile health. Several times in periods of tension her health fails almost fatally, and the lurch toward disaster is deftly pictured. It's also about their daughter, an aspiring artist living mainly in New York, who comes down to them from time to time, falls for one of his younger colleagues, struggles to get her work off the ground, and supports him in defying the regents of the university who are pressing for the signing of the oath. Their tense family relationship is one half of the action, and the different groups of staff at the university, their views, conflicts, alliances and tactics are the other. The limitation imposed by being so in thrall to a particular political angle works its way mainly in terms of a sense that all relating to it needs to be explained clearly and reinforced often. So discussions are very well explicated by all; the sense of messiness in humanity is somewhat absent. There is a feeling of all of it occurring under a glass dome - or as a diorama. It's a tribute to Dodd that even though this is the case it is not a dull book at all. She's done the best job that she could at what she was after; what she was after is a limited thing. Limited, but with quite a bit of entertaining space in it all the same.

Commonplace Book

'...Men, she had always found, were such a clumsy piece of work compared with animals. They were so flawed, so pitted with pores and discolorations, so smoky, so hot, so shiny bald or sticky-haired - like a child's stitching on canvas, whereas any animal was like Chinese embroidery on silk. One had only to compare the face of a Korean beggar-dog - crawling with ticks, yet honest, finished and sinless - with that of a Korean beggar-man - rotted away with mean and complex depravity...one had only to compare the fine eager beam of a thirsty horse bending to drink from a pool, with the leer of a Russian approaching his glass of beer - to see the essential golden rightness in an animal's face and to admit the spoiled spotted thing man is...'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter X)

Challenge by V. Sackville-West (1923)

What a peculiar book - in one sense. But a familiar one in another - which is the author's singlemindedness in pursuing the story. There's no sense here of cynical manipulation. Her previous three books of fiction have included two Hardyesque novels and then a collection of stories which seemed to indicate a move toward the more immediate and intimate in terms of style. How wrong I was! This novel is a throwback to begin with - to the Ruritanian stylings of Anthony Hope and even E. F. Benson. It is set in a fictional tiny republic in or around the Greek coastline given the confusing name Herakleion - which is actually a town in northern Crete. Off the coast of Herakleion are the Zachary Islands which have an on-again-off-again relationship with it in terms of belonging. There is a large thrust in the first two parts of this novel toward describing the diplomatic community in the tiny capital, partly at least in mildly humorous terms - the various emissaries and VIPs jostle for standing, feud, and have marked contrasts of character. Backgrounding this is the author's trademark hard earnestness, this time in relation to a small group of mainly English inmates and their families, circling around the Davenant family. Julian Davenant, the young, university educated, idealistic, impetuous son of the British ambassador has a complicated relationship with his beautiful cousin Eve, where he mistrusts her selfishness and imperiousness but adores her beauty and originality. In the third part, when Julian has been convinced that he should lead an uprising of the Islands against a newly-elected unsympathetic president of Herakleion (his family have a long history of connection with them), the narrative closes in on the relationship between Julian and Eve, whom he has taken there with him. Like her second novel, but with not quite the same strangeness, this is the point where there is a sense of overheating and superpassion. Suddenly we move from the urbane world to the passionate one, closing in on the machinations of their intense and contradictory feelings for one another, revealed in extremely heightened language. Then there is a plot twist, fuelled by jealousy, which brings about a violent conclusion, an escape and a death at sea. Storm in a teacup? Almost. True to its own design? Definitely.

Commonplace Book

'...Every inch of the earth is, after all, so dangerous. Here, where we stand, a minute or a million years ago, some heart failed. There, at that point to which our dear love is hurrying, the lightning struck, the germ of plague was born, the murderer will stab - a minute or a million years hence - a minute or a million years ago. Living is a matter of missing death by a hair's breadth or an aeon - it doesn't matter which - and dying is a matter of coincidence. If we knew the past and the future of every yard of every path we tread, or of every stone our dear love's foot turns over as he goes - where should we turn for peace? Once we have realised the billions of deaths and horrors that have been, the billions that will be, every inch of the world seems soaked in blood...'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter IX)

Commonplace Book

'...Men and women - especially women - had been judged too much by their capacity for love. This was because people who love, propagate, thought Varvara, and transmit their vulgar standard of love from generation to generation. Just as rabbits transmit their bobtails. Bobtails are a conventional rabbit standard. A rabbit with a long curly tail would be feared, shunned, trampled to death, so the innovation would die untried, unbequeathed, abortive. But its death didn't prove the essential wrongness of long curly tails for rabbits. Genius was probably often heartless. But genius did not often propagate. Strangeness meant physical mortality, so strangeness was rare - never re-born - always new in every manifestation. All the stupid things - cruelty - prostitution - womanly modesty - conventional religion - conventional morality - only survived so rampantly because of the excessive fertility of the stupid.'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'...She knew that he had killed himself by way of revenge on her - he had told her that he would - but she did not know why. What were two me's[sic] to each other, that one should be so necessary to another? A sort of accident, it seemed, happened in young men's blood that made them think that two me's could be kneaded together into an us. Most of them probably lived to find it a mistake. Only dear Sasha had incredibly thrown his me away - poured it out of a cut throat - because he could not double it into an us. Here in this generous world were a million million me's - a million million columns of lonely blood and bone. There was no such thing as a real us.'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'The water climbed up Seryozha's body as he waded deeper and deeper. The garment of delicious coldness, as it wrapped itself higher and higher about him, seemed to be piped by a wire of almost pain - a steel hair of ice or fire, climbing up his legs and his body. His thirsty skin gloried. He threw himself flat in the water, his open mouth just held above the surface. He felt strangely level with the world's floor. All perspective changed to fit eyes only six inches from world level instead of the usual six feet. He saw the darkening sandbanks like clouds, the bullock and the dog like giants, wild geese resting on far-distant sandbanks like tall electric grey ghosts.'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter VI)

Commonplace Book

'What was it, this bond of flesh? so material, yet so imperative, so compelling, as to become almost a spiritual, not a bodily, necessity? so transitory, yet so recurrent? dying down like a flame, to revive again? so unimportant, so grossly commonplace, yet creating so close and tremulous an intimacy? this magic that drew together their hands like fluttering butterflies in the hours of sunlight, and linked them in the abandonment of mastery and surrender in the hours of night? that swept aside the careful training, individual and hereditary, replacing pride by another pride? this unique and mutual secret? this fallacious yet fundamental and dominating bond? this force, hurling them together with such cosmic power that within the circle of frail human entity rushed furiously the tempest of an inexorable law of nature?'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part III, Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'...To be approached was entirely unbearable; a desiring or acute glance was in itself an assault; see she must, but to be seen was somehow insult. She loathed touch and always avoided it; the lightest accidental touch rasped her like a cat's tongue. Love of her neighbour was a thing felt stilly, thinly diffused among pitied lovers - puppies - parents - flowers - insects - even things - (she often felt guilty for disappointing things) - even invented things - blank pensioners of her compassionate fancy...'

from Tobit Transplanted by Stella Benson (Chapter IV)

Commonplace Book

'He insisted, -

"When did you really become aware of your own heartlessness?"

She sparkled with laughter.

"I think it began life as a sense of humour," she said, "and degenerated gradually into its present state of spasmodic infamy."'

from Challenge by V. Sackville-West (Part III, Chapter I)