Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (1934)

This is Mitchison's account in diary form of travelling to Vienna in the immediate aftermath of the civil war of early 1934. Social Democrats had been attempting an uprising against Dollfuss' increasingly right wing and authoritarian government. As far as I can understand, the fledgling Nazi party was as poorly thought of as the Social Democrats. There was a state of affairs where many cultural currents overlapped, either actually or notionally. The Nazis were still seen, as their name implied, as socialist. The Dollfuss government itself was anti-Jewish, seemingly 'owning' that standpoint; Nazi agreement with it being virtually a side issue. In this web of unclarity, the uprising had been crushed, initially by gun power, though to be fair the uprisers were armed and their socialist housing complexes, newly built post-war, became gun emplacements of their own. But subsequently, the crushing took a less obvious aspect. Known Social Democratic sympathisers were jailed without trial, some were 'quietly' shot in small altercations. Women and children, left behind in virtually mortar-bombed non-functioning flats and houses, were given no aid, no food, no medicine. Jobs, particularly in the government sector, were lost. Lawyers and solicitors were intimidated into not providing assistance in the few cases which actually came to court. There was an entire portion of the population left in a kind of non-belonging limbo, and struggling to get even the most basic necessaries for life. Into this desperately frightened and dangerous situation came a number of foreign activists and journalists, seeming to be simply travellers or harmlessly interested onlookers; Mitchison was one of them. As recorded in the diary she travels around surreptitiously examining conditions. The plan is to show solidarity with her fellow socialists and distribute assistance from Britain where it isn't forthcoming from anywhere else - the Quakers have a good operation already in place, but it's missing people it doesn't know about. Because this activity is necessarily on the quiet, the diary must be quite carefully written, just in case it is ever confiscated. So names are replaced, or become simple initials, or even just dashes. Lists of names needing help are passed from one activist to another in various forms - sewn into knickers for safekeeping, for example! The main thrust is quite clear; this diary is meant as a revelation of desperation. But she also allows it to be subjectively humanised - gives herself time out to record happy alcohol-soaked dinners at one or another of the journalists' hotels, or shows the picture of herself staring lovingly into shop windows at clothes she likes. The best way to explain the effect this book has is I think to call it a muddy mosaic - it has an impressionistic feel in many instances of particular knife-edge situations being represented, with travel or lighter feeling following, and then another heartbreak looked forcefully into. The writing is typically toughly straightforward, with contrarily redolent belief in a brighter future punctuating the darkness. So, between the passion and the straightness, the misery and the inconsequential lightness, a shifting picture appears of life and death in frightening times.

Commonplace Book

'Now, and it may be for another generation or fifty years, the old savage morality and the old forces of greed and possession and violence are trying to kill the new morality and the new idea of brotherhood and equality. Do not let us delude ourselves; the old forces still have the power; they are not any longer dressed up as kings and barons with gold on their necks and swords in their hands; they are dressed respectably, and their gold is in banks, and they pay other people to do the killing. And because, deep down, they have no faith in the future, and instead of loving mankind they despise and distrust it, they are becoming more and more vile and brutal. For cruelty is always caused by fear, and grows with it. More and more desperately they are trying to kill the idea of equality and love and freedom, more and more violently and forcibly they are trying to crush it out of the minds and spirits of men and women and children...'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 23rd)

Commonplace Book

'What I want to explain, if I can, is that these people's basic ideas of the universe have been shattered. And, when an idea is broken, that's much worse for the people concerned than death or pain. You see, she believed in justice; it was an apparently practical ideal. It was the thing she and her husband had been working for since they were young - the basis of their marriage, and of their bringing children into the world. They had been good people. And now this had happened. It had happened to her husband who was a good man - that was what she couldn't understand. She stood there by her kitchen stove - and it didn't look as if she had much to cook on it. And she was going to be turned out of her house, and she had no money, and she could do nothing. Nothing at all. She had to stand there with her neck bowed. I don't think I've ever understood about oppression before. I've written about it, and imagined it, but here it was [...] And, for thousands and thousands of years, men and women have had to stand under the whip, not even answering back. And they've really been people, not a kind of animal, not something different, or romantic or picturesque. It's all real. The damned thing's been going on all this time. And now I've seen it, and I will not accept it in my world.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 21st)

Commonplace Book

'...It seemed to me then how simple and easily attainable the elements are that make up human happiness, the thing which makes our years of living valid. Bright sun, mountains in the distance, and in the foreground scrubby fields of vine-stocks, and here and there a willow coming into bud; going somewhere on a job - the pause and gathering up of the spirit before work starts; the rush of air; above all the Solidaritaet, the comradeship. It seemed to me that any civilisation which was worth the price of its existence ought to be able to give us that. We were travelling third, wearing oldish clothes; we had a couple of oranges, and a bit of chocolate - that was all in the way of amenities. But it was spring all right. I hope I shall die when I stop feeling the spring.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 21st)

Commonplace Book

'"...Our citizenship is another occasion for pride! For the poor it consists in supporting and maintaining the rich in their power and their idleness. At this task they must labour in the face of the majestic equality of the laws, which forbid rich and poor alike to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread. This equality is one of the benefits of the Revolution. Why, that revolution was effected by madmen and idiots for the benefit of those who had acquired the wealth of the crown. It resulted in the enrichment of cunning peasants and money-lending bourgeois. In the name of equality it founded the empire of wealth. It delivered France to those moneyed classes who have been devouring her for a century. Now they are our lords and masters. The so-called government, composed of poor creatures, pitiable, miserable, impoverished, and complaining, is in the pay of financiers. Throughout the last hundred years any one caring for the poor in this plague-stricken country has been held a traitor to society. And you are considered dangerous if you assert that there are those who suffer poverty..."'

from The Red Lily by Anatole France (Chapter VII)

Commonplace Book

'...He gnawed his nails moodily as he lay staring at her. He felt justified in despising her, since he thought of himself as a reasonable-looking and still young man, in spite of the fact that he was older than she was, that his nose was a little crooked, and that baldness ran up like a boulevard to the crown of his head between two thinned thickets of fair curly hair. Still, he felt himself a man - what a man ought to be - and knew her to be absurdly faded and virgin - exactly what a woman ought not to be. Of course, he was an assiduous reader of Mr. Aldous Huxley.'

from Hope Against Hope, a piece in Hope Against Hope and other stories by Stella Benson

Prancing Nigger by Ronald Firbank (1925)

The obvious first comment is about the title. This was originally called Sorrow in Sunlight in the UK, but when it came to be published in America the title was changed. And somehow this, I guess because it was seen as snappier, was the title which stuck, and which Duckworth used for their 'Rainbow edition' after Firbank died, and which has been used, more often than not, subsequently. The title is one thing, but the contents need examination from the point of view of racism, too. It's a complex question. Firbank uses the word authorially on a few occasions, and puts it into the mouths of his characters, too. His depictions are very much of the era in one sense; his central characters are rustic villagers from a Caribbean island, coming into contact with the more sophisticated scene of the capital, so they have an inbuilt and quite deliberate simplicity. This is Firbank, so they also have social-climbing at the core of their being. This novel is remembered, I guess mostly, as an emanation of that first popular emergence of the jazz era in the 1920s. Firbank was friendly with Carl Van Vechten, whose own Nigger Heaven is still in print under that title, I think honorifically, as he was such a supporter of the Harlem Renaissance, and Firbank is allowed perhaps a little leeway by association. Prancing Nigger is definitely aged and unacceptable via one angle, and yet it's also a delightful, complex portrait by a relatively sympathetic white writer via another. The Mouth family of the paradisial village of Mediavilla in the countryside of a mythical Caribbean island, are made up of a patient, concerned but relaxed father, an energetic, society-obsessed mother, an eldest sister, Miami (Mimi), who is very happy with her lover and the simple village life, a younger sister, Edna, who is much more excitable and loving of luxury, and can't wait to leave for higher places, and a young brother Charlie, who has a mutable, undetermined, slightly secretive character which hints, in typical Firbankian veiledness, at homosexuality. Mrs Mouth is absolutely determined that the family will move to the capital, Cuna-Cuna, and 'make their way' into far greater things. Mr Mouth is very concerned about his daughters particularly coming into contact with wild city ways, but is resigned to his wife's aspirations, so constantly expressed. (Prancing Nigger is her fond name for him). Miami is distressed to leave her local lover - they make plans that he will follow surreptitiously in time. The family rent a lovely villa in the capital from one of its greatest society hostesses, Mrs Ruiz, and immediately begin their halting progress into this golden world, alternatively shocked by things they weren't expecting, thrilled with the opportunities that are presented, and tasting the various options available. Mrs Ruiz's elegant wide-boy gentleman son Vittorio is smitten by Edna, and she by him; she agrees to become his mistress, outraging her family and causing a rift. Charlie explores the city, while Miami pines for her lover, who hasn't left Mediavilla yet. This is all set akimbo by an earthquake, which devastates great swathes of the island. All of society is gripped by the idea of penance, and parades and pilgrimages are all anyone can think about, in supplication. Miami hears that her lover has been killed, and is disconsolate. As Miami sets out on a pilgrimage parade, shunned Edna, kept by Vittorio in velvet languid comfort in a flat he owns, leans from her balcony over the moving file of citizens with banners, calling out to Miami to notice her and forgive, but is devastated when Miami doesn't even hear her and carries on. The story is related in classic Firbank prose, punctuated with short, poetically concise clauses, outrageous hints, surprised humour, and with an absolute economy of saucy description. It's an emissary of its age, but an awfully entertaining one.

Commonplace Book

'"Every false idea is dangerous. Dreamers are thought to be harmless; it is a mistake; they do a great deal of harm. Utopias, apparently the most inoffensive[,] are really injurious. They tend to make one disgusted with reality."

"But," said Paul Vence, "perhaps reality is not so perfect, after all."'

from The Red Lily by Anatole France (Chapter III)

Commonplace Book

'...As for me, I have the Kirk a generation back - further back still, John Knox, beaten up in the galleys - and Glyndwr was Chapel till three years ago, and now neither of us are even vaguely deists. But the forms and the words are familiar to us. A century ago, in the dark times after the Napoleonic wars, the hungry 'forties, this man and I would have prayed together. As it was, we discussed Marxism ; but there's nothing in that but a difference of time. No, there is a difference. One way is looking out at a reflection of oneself in the empty skies ; the other way is looking inward at mankind, and the laws that govern the thoughts and action of men. But the intensity of looking, though not the same way, has the same effect on the soul.'

from Naomi Mitchison's Vienna Diary (March 14th)

Grey Wethers by V. Sackville-West (1923)

This is the author's third 'Hardyesque' novel, and is intriguing from another point of view also - it's the only piece of fiction I've read set in and around Avebury (the Grey Wethers are a random group of unfinished sarcen stones in a nature reserve nearby). In terms of Sackville-West's catalogue, it's an ignored book, and I'm trying to work out why, because it's a lot more successful on the whole than her previous efforts. It manages to largely avoid the traps that caught her earlier novels: the first, Heritage, was fine but stiff; the second, The Dragon in Shallow Waters, was very fine but overheated for a while at the culminating point of passion; the third, Challenge, was oddly mixed in its style and intentions and also overheated. But this manages, on the whole, to restrain the passion within sane bounds, and to richly tell a notable story. In other words, it's a more uniform, controlled effort, and also lively. Set in the 1860s in King's Avon, which is Avebury thinly disguised, and on the high downs between it and Marlborough, it tells the story of the passion of Clare Warrener and Nicholas Lovel. She is the daughter of the big house, quite level-headed but inexperienced, still a looker-on at life. He is of gypsy extraction, a jack of all trades who has no truck with the society of the village - he is a figure of respectful suspicion; very few have ever seen the inside of his cottage, where he lives with his harridan bedbound mother and his slightly mis-shapen, intellectually disabled, lanky brother, Olver. Nicholas has always spent as much of his life as he can up on the downs, shepherding if at all possible, but takes on other work in the winter. Clare and he slowly form a bond which has surprising strength given their difference of background. A problem soon arises via Daisy Morland, a frowzy village girl who has set her heart on Lovel. Pregnant with another man's child, and seeing that Clare is desired by Calladine, a friend of Clare's father, who is dithering, scholarly, much older and lives in a Wuthering Heights-ish barren farm up near the downs, Daisy decides to claim that Olver is her child's father and that Nicholas must marry her to save her from disrepute and to atone for his brother's sins. Nicholas can see no way out, and as well is troubled by what he sees as the 'bad blood' in his family which he thinks caused Olver's disability. He decides at that moment that he must have no more to do with Clare. She, momentarily frozen out from him, and still the victim of her own inexperience, accepts a proposal of marriage from Calladine. This has strong echoes of Middlemarch and the relationship between Dorothea Brooke and Edward Casaubon. The marriage is doomed to awkwardness and sniping contest. Nicholas' to Daisy is doomed to suspicion and frostiness. Both Calladine and Daisy are interrogative and frustratedly stymied, while Clare and Nicholas are quiet and determinedly self-sufficient. Of course, Clare and Nicholas, reconciled, eventually run away onto the downs together, and our last view of them is running off into the silent snow at night after a pursuing Calladine has surprised them at Nicholas' shepherd's hut. This one has a limited but strong colour-pallette and a concentration of controlled energy which mark it as a major signpost of progress in the author's development.