Sunday, November 24, 2013

Sandra Belloni by George Meredith (1864)

The dominating comic notion of this novel is Finer Shades and Nice Feelings, which add up in Meredith's mind to something called Sentiment. This is not sentimentality in the modern sense. It is rather an idea along the lines of what might be called 'received fancy' or 'cultivated emotion'. That this concept has no clear definition is indicative. It is not only the comedy in this piece which is riddled through with febrile searchings. A simplified summary might be: 'Complex People involved in a Complex Plot written about in a Complex Manner'. Meredith's many characters here are full of misguidance or secrecy or self-deception or double-mindedness. The plot revolves all of these (and there are a lot of directions of impulse, like a forest of arrows in multitudinous tangents) in a tempest of storylines. Of course, though, the big thing about Meredith is his style. So this melee of attributes and angles is presented on the page with no facile attention paid to clarity. One sees for example what might be a crucial matter at one remove, or behind a veil, hinted at by a couple of things someone else says, or only explicable once something else has been said (or uncovered) a chapter later. Other elements are even less clear - the reader is still not quite sure, even after the event is done and dusted. But Meredith is nothing if not fascinating; the decoding challenge is one I relish. Ostensibly, this book concerns the trials of Emilia (nickname Sandra) Belloni, as she is taken up by an upwardly mobile Surrey family. She is an Italian, and has the beginnings of a fine singing voice. The comedy is mainly housed with this family, the Poles, as they skirmish socially with a rival family, take on lovers, angle for good marriages, put up with socially awkward incomers with varying degrees of patience and puffed-upness. Around them is a set comprised mainly of the well-to-do whose lives they aim to emulate. When a Greek associate wants to take Emilia to Italy to study for a life in opera, a subtle series of events begin rolling, in which politics, the swings of fortune, love and love's shadow, revenge and Sentiment all play a part. If there is one major criticism that can be directed at this book it is the insubstantiality of its eponymous heroine. Emilia is a strange vacancy in many ways, almost a cipher, but of course a Meredithian one: a cipher saddled with endless mysterious implications.

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Commonplace Book

'"...Fortunately, I didn't go to any place of devotion, though I did get mixed up with a Salvation Army procession. It was quite interesting to be at close quarters with them, they're so absolutely different to what they used to be when I first remember them in the 'eighties. They used to go about then unkempt and dishevelled, in a sort of smiling rage with the world, and now they're spruce and jaunty and flamboyantly decorative, like a geranium bed with religious convictions..."'

from Louise, a piece in The Toys of Peace by Saki

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (1904)

This novel is a progression in two ways: it is written by Fowler with a collaborator (her new husband) for the first time; it is also her first novel not to have overtly Christian themes. The sense I get is that it was Felkin's idea and possibly also his first draft, which Fowler then 'improved' with her professional skills, particularly her sparkling wit. If so, it's seamless and a great success. Certainly its lack of overt Christianity would be an inducement toward reprinting nowadays, and I would say that this may even have applied back then. Were Hutchinson salivating at the idea that their 'hampered' author would finally break free of her beliefs and gain even more popularity than the significant reputation and sales she already had? The story is a tale of a fiery and difficult young aristocrat, Kate, whose father, the dufferish Lord Claverley, is rapidly losing control of their beloved family castle and estates. When a wealthy Scots relative dies, leaving Kate her estate, they wonder if all can be saved. But there is a catch: in order to inherit Kate must marry within six months. She isn't exactly amenable to the idea! Men have driven her mad in almost all instances. If she doesn't marry the money goes to other relatives, the Pettigrews, who are nasty unpleasant grasping people. Thereafter several suitors try their luck, encouraged by her parents in various stages of desperation. Living with them is Sapphira Lestrange, Lord Claverley's niece, whose father had been a louche reprobate who is not mentioned unless absolutely necessary. When he sneaks back onto the scene, Sapphira is entangled in a game of cat and mouse. Kate has finally, at the eleventh hour, accepted George Despard, a man she thought she hated even more than all the others for his seemingly insulting behaviour. He was the agent and personal assistant of the aunt who has provisionally left her her fortune. Sapphira's father, the wily and evil Aubrey Lestrange, decides that he wants a piece of the action, teams up with the Pettigrews, cons Sapphira into providing him with information, and is successful. The last minute marriage between George and Kate is prevented by foul means. Then comes an extraordinary conclusion. In the misery of the denouement, when the Claverleys believe all is lost, Despard reveals that because of vows made by he and Kate during play-acting in Scotland, vows which included them claiming each other as husband and wife, that under Scots law they are already genuinely married! Apparently as long as either or both want to claim such a state, having voiced these things among company, and been in Scotland more than three weeks, Scots law allows it. No idea whether or not this is true, or a Fowler and Felkin invention; nevertheless it simultaneously stretches credibility and lends theatrical charm to a bright and witty piece.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

Commonplace Book

'...He seemed to her as good as a circulating library: with him she would never lack something to interest her - something to instruct. She had not yet learnt that when a man is as good as literature to a woman, that is friendship: but when he is as good as music to her, that is love. It is not when he has the same effect as a library that he is dangerous, but when he has the same effect as an oratorio. Until then he is a luxury rather than a necessity: and it is a mistake for any woman to tie herself for life to a mere luxury...'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter XXII)

Commonplace Book

'"...I once knew a man who, in a moment of inadvertence, married a woman with convictions."

"And what happened?"

"The poor fellow hesitated for some time between the hangman's rope and a lunatic asylum, and finally decided in favour of the lunatic asylum."

Kate laughed. "I wonder he didn't decide on that at first as the least of two evils."

"He was so afraid of meeting his wife there."'

from Kate of Kate Hall by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler and Alfred Laurence Felkin (Chapter XXII)

Friday, November 1, 2013

Commonplace Book

'Often, in November, December and January, after dinner, Sebastien would put on two pullovers, a parka, an oilskin overcoat, a pair of wool gloves and another of leather, a hoodshaped hat and, armed against the cold, without notifying the others, as the Firebird's master, he would go up to the forecastle to see, to 'fore' see, to dream, to dream just a little. At 20 degrees below zero the cold, in order to take hold, sets about it warmly. You do not believe it but it invades you, filters in and flows quickly into the veins, ice like fire, if you do not move. Sebastien would feel the night sparkling from every part, on each side and in the depths of the fjord, the snow night suspended on the fir summits, the night of white ink...'

from Cronus' Children by Yves Navarre (Chapter 2)