Dave's Book Blog: "South Riding" by Winifred Holtby

My heart sank when I approached this book. It's big, it's about local government in Yorkshire in the 1930s, and it has a cast list stretching to five pages.

But I enjoyed it. And it won the James Tait Black memorial prize in 1936.

It's an ensemble novel with several protagonists whose stories, told from their perspective by an omniscient narrator in the past tense (so stylistically a very conventional 'Victorian English' novel) interweave. There is Sarah Burton, the new headmistress of the local girls' school, who is determined to shake things up. There is Alderman Mrs Beddows the wise old woman who has seen it all before and who sympathises with the plights of her fellow humans. There is Councillor Carne, a conservative farmer, who married the daughter of a Lord and whose punishment is impending bankruptcy. There is Lydia, a clever girl who dreams of university but who is doomed to look after her little brothers and sisters in the railway carriage in a field in which they squat. There is Alderman Snaith, the lonely rich man who plots and schemes and pulls the strings. There is Huggins the councillor and Methodist minister whose sexual adventures leave him open to blackmail and whose money-making schemes make him corruptible. There is Lily Sawdon, dying of cancer, unable to tell her husband. These are the flawed materials through which, somehow, the county must find a way out of the harsh economic depression towards a promising future.

It has been called a 'blatant socialist tract' and some characters, especially at the end, are given speeches which call for progress, for change, even for revolution. But the minutely detailed descriptions of some of the poverty endured by the poor members of this society, some of whom have been disabled through their service in the trenches during the First World War, put these things in context. This is the England of the essays of Orwell, of The Road to Wigan Pier, an England of deprivation and social injustice. This is the world of Love on the Dole, and of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, an England of cocktails for some and misery for many. Furthermore, the arguments are balanced. Carne, the face of the old Squirearchy, is a hugely sympathetic character. The new housing estate is built through the machinations of Snaith whose intentions are a fine blend of self-interest and altruism. Huggins, forever preaching of God, is hugely flawed. There is, at the end, a final showdown between Sarah Burton and Mrs Beddows in which the idealistic headteacher, in despair and racked with guilt, has things put in perspective by the old lady: none of us are perfect but we all have a part to play, but remember to cherish not just the glittering successes but also those who will always fail in the race of life. This is a superbly balanced novel, full of empathy. But yes. It breaks with what it calls "The Shakespearean tradition of finding the lower classes funny, whatever tragedy touched the kings and nobles, outraged his humanity." (5.6) And thank goodness. There aren't enough stories written from the perspective of a working man.

There are a number of characters who embody alternative positions. For example:

Snaith is depicted as sterile and rational and calculating, a sort of Apollonian Satan; he is the chief adversary of Huggins the womaniser
Huggins himself is the man of god who is at war with his own earthy lusts
Modernisers such as Sarah Burton are against the forces of conservatism such as Carne and Mrs Beddows
The generosity of Mrs Beddows conflicts with the parsimony of her husband
Snaith wants to build: he is the force of the town against carne the traditional famer, the voice of the country

Is this a feminist book? In many ways it is anti-male. Male characters are either evil or feckless. Thus, Snaith is a manipulator, Huggins is a hypocrite whose one attempt to make money by fraud is a failure, moreover he can't keep his trousers on, nor can the virtually unemployable Mr Holly who literally kills his wife by foisting yet another pregnancy on her, Carne is sliding into bankruptcy, as is his extravagant younger brother, Mr Mitchell can't make any money from his job. Mr Beddows is a skinflint, and Tom Sawdon drinks heavily as his wife wastes away from cancer and his pub heads for failure. On the other hand, the female characters are either talented (Sarah and Lydia) or long-suffering (Mrs Beddows, Lily Sawdon, Mrs Holly). Madame Hubbard's dancing school keeps the Hubbards afloat as her husband's drapery shop fails. The only negative female characters are Agnes Sigglesthwaite, the keen scientist who can't hack it as a teacher, and Mrs Carne, the flighty wife who goes mad.

But is it feminist? Although, in the final pages, it imagines a world in which married women won't have to give up their jobs, it has spent most of the novel is apparently passive acceptance of this fact. When Mrs Holly dies there is no suggestion that Mr Holly might care for his children: the caregiver must be Lydia, in the first instance, and then the widowed Mrs Brimsley. Mrs Beddows can carve a joint better than her husband and she knows it but she lets him carve because, as she says' "I prefer to see a cock crow on his own dunghill." (5.2)

Furthermore, Holtby is very prepared to emphasise the physical beauty or otherwise of her female characters (although you could argue that she is seeing them through the eyes of male characters, and that she also emphasises the physical beauty of Mr Carne).

One of the main themes of this novel is the love that Sarah Burton feels for Mr Carne. This seems to come straight from the pages of Jane Eyre. Sarah is, like Jane, a strong-minded (some might say stubborn) intelligent woman whose profession is education; she teaches Carne's wayward daughter. Carne is a local landowner of great physical beauty, just like Mr Rochester, with a mad wife who has been locked away (though in a nursing home rather than the attic). In their second (though effectively the first) encounter he is on a horse and Sarah explicitly thinks of "the memory of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester". The climax of the affair is an aborted night of passion, resembling the aborted wedding in the Bronte novel. It is only the ending of the two stories that differs.

A Spanish proverb is much quoted, in the dedication and several times throughout the book. "'Take what you want,' said God. 'Take it - and pay for it'." This is what Sarah says to the senior girls at her school (3.6) But when Sarah quotes this to Mrs Beddows (4.2) this lady's response is "But who pays?" This is repeated again at the end of chapter 4.2 (more or less exactly half way through the book) with the subtle change that instead of God saying 'take and pay. this is now Sarah saying it (and Mrs Beddows asking, again, 'who pays?'. And, in the Epilogue, Sarah remembers what Mrs Beddows asked and realises: "And suddenly she felt that she had found the answer. We all pay, she thought; we all take; we are members one of another. We cannot escape this partnership. This is what it means — to belong to a community; this is what it means, to be a people."

I think that what lifts this novel above others is the compassion and empathy shown by the author to all her characters, even when they are improvident or foolish or downright wicked. This feeling permeates the text. For example, when Sarah meets her arch-enemy Carne and helps him with a difficult calving (a necessary prelude to falling in love with him) she sees the portrait of his wife and has an epiphany; "She had thought of Carne's story as an entertaining and rather cruel fable of snobbery punished by its own achievement. She realised now that it was something more." (3.6)

It also knows the lives of its characters from the inside. Here is a description of Lydia's days of drudgery:"Quarter to five, wake father. Put on the kettle, get his breakfast, the cocoa, the margarine, r the bread. Tidy the living-room; go and wake the children; get their break- fast. (Why isn’t there no bacon? Lyddie, can’t we have treacle?) See them off to school; look after Lennie and baby; tidy the bedroom, peel the potatoes, get the dinner ready, feed the hens, the pig — if they could keep one; give the children their dinner when they came home from school, noisy and ravenous. Lennie still needed his food shovelling in with a spoon; he was a slow eater; the baby would want a bottle. Wash up the dinner things; then do the shopping, pushing the pram along the dull road into Maythorpe; get the tea ready, the children are coming shouting across the fields; Daisy has fallen and cut her knee; Gertie is sick again. Bert back. Lyd, what’s for tea, old girl? Bacon cake? I’m sick of bacon cake. Can’t we have sausages? Washing the children. The heavy shallow tubs, the tepid water. Where’s the flannel gone? Don’t let Lennie eat the soap now! The tap stood up two feet from the ground on a twisted pipe twenty yards from the door. The slops were thrown out on to the ground behind the caravans and railway coaches. Rough weeds grew there; darnel and dock and nettle soaked up the dingy water, drinking grossly. Broken pots splashed in it. Rimlets of mud seeped down from it. The rusting tubs were heavy. Lydia’s strong arms ached from lifting, carrying, coping with the clamorous, wriggling children." (4.1)

Selected quotes:

"Like most of her generation and locality, Elsie was trilingual. She talked B.B.C. English to her employer, Cinema American to her companions, and Yorkshire dialect to old milkmen like Eli Dickson." (1.1)
"The Mitchells, a young couple from Kingsport, had married on hope and found small substance for it." (1.3)
"She sympathised with his reverence for the aristocracy. She herself set great store by breeding. She, was far from 44 thinking Jack good as his master and explained failure in plebeian upstarts by saying with suave contempt: 'Well, what can you expect? Wasn’t bred to power.' " (1.4)
"Some people ... are so full of the milk of human kindness that it slops over and messes everything." (1.4)
"Pretty little painted sluts minced on high tilted heels off to the pictures or dogs or dirt-track race-course." (1.5)
"Sixteen of them, there were — all plain as cod-Ssh, and thirteen out of the sixteen wearing spectacles. Adenoids, curvature of the spine, anaemia and acne afflicted them — no, they were not afflicted; they simpered like beauty queens and patted soiled puffs against their pinched pink noses, quite complacent." (1.6)
"It occurred to Sarah that the songs about drunken home-comers and bullying wives which she had found so gross dealt after all with commonplaces in the lives of these young singers. Was it not perhaps more wholesome to be taught to laugh at them ... Jokes about ripe cheese and personal hygiene — (“Take your feet off the table, Father, and give the cheese a chance!”), about child-birth and deformity and deafness — were not these perhaps necessary armaments for defence in. a world besieged by poverty, ugliness, squalor and misfortune?" (1.7)
"She knew that the dead are most needed, not when they are mourned, but in a world robbed of their stabilising presence." (1.7)
"Fear is a fire which burns without consuming." (2.2)
"White bedstraw sprinkled the grass like fallen powder. A field of rye grass brushed lightly by the wind wore the bloom of half-ripe peach." (5.2)
"The one commodity with which he was prepared to be completely generous was his unasked opinion." (5.2)
“Sacrifices? Champagne lunch? Two shillings for car park, half a crown for the grand stand? Don’t talk to me of sacrifices. Do you know what we did yesterday? Cut down one chap’s benefit from thirty-three and three- pence — for man, wife and five children, mark you — to ten shillings — because he had a disability pension of two pounds a week. He lost his leg in the war." (5.2)
"These rumours of Hitler’s Nazi movement in Germany? There swam before her tired mind the memory of that summer holiday in the Black Forest, of tables outside a vine- wreathed inn, and Ernst, lean, brown and eager, in the khaki shirt and shorts worn by hundreds of young Communists — drinking her health in beer after a long strenuous walk. Ernst, who wanted peace and comradeship and a mystical unity of like-minded youth — Ernst whose mother had been a Jewess . . . Ernst, who had disappeared, and who had, some said, been beaten to death at the Dachan concentration camp. These things happened to one’s friends." (5.3)
"As an estate agent Arthur Thomas Drew did business round about Kiplington jn a small way, but he did moral censorship in quite a large one. He was on the Kiplington Watch Committee, and he watched indeed." (5.4)
"his lean rapacious wife, trained like a greyhound for the vigorous athletics of social climbing" (5.5)
"committees to cut down the meagre grants by which society staved off the scandal of coroner’s verdicts: Death from malnutrition" (5.6)
"cake cut in bits no bigger than a tit’s arse-hole" (6.5)
"It was Christmas Eve. Once she had really thought that the angels came and, singing, announced the birth of the Son of God. As if any birth could be a matter for rejoicing!" (7.2)
"And I? thought Snaith. Between Came who lived by instinct and Astell who lived by an idea, he felt that he was nothing— -a stream of water, cold, metallic, barren, without colour or form, moving along its self-chosen channel till the sand sucked it up and it disappeared. Unfecund, flavourless, formless — a direction — a flow — a nothing.’ Here lieth one whose life was lived as water. It has evaporated; it no longer exists." (8.1)
"He was showing off with the splendid self-assurance following three whiskies" (8.2)
"The strongest things in life are without triumph. The costliest things you buy are those for which you can’t even pay yourself." (8.6)