"Invitation to the Waltz" by Rosamund Lehmann

A coming-of-age novel about a romantic young girl going to her first ball.

Seventeen-year-old Olivia is the younger daughter of a well-to-do middle-class family in the depths of the English countryside shortly after the end of the First World War. She has been invited to her first dance at the nearby stately home. The first half of this novel explores her preparations for this coming-of-age event, her hopes and her dreams; the second half chronicles the big night itself.

There's not really any plot. Instead, we experience Olivia's inner monologue in an almost stream of consciousness way as she encounters a strong of eccentric characters including poor relative Uncle Oswald, name-calling village children, a lady who makes dresses (poorly), a potentially lascivious colonel, a wannabe curate and, at the dance itself, a self-obsessed radical poet, a blinded ex-soldier, another lascivious old man, and the man of the house with whom she discusses literature. It's almost a picaresque. Meantime her sister falls in love.

The characterisation of the protagonist, Olivia, seen from inside, is faultless; despite the fact that the timeline is compressed into just over a week, her character learns and develops. The elder sister, Kate, is a more mature counterpoint. Most of the other characters are eccentric caricatures, unimportant in themselves, but each one teaches Olivia something about life.

It is set firmly in its social class, a world of big houses run by servants (one described as having "the flat strong heels of service"; 3.15), of mostly subservient villagers, and of the patronage of genteel persons less fortunate than oneself. Olivia has a moment of realisation about the plight of the woman in the village who makes dresses for her: "For the first time, Mrs Robinson's life rose up objectively and faced her. Olivia saw it with dismay, with guilt. She made frocks for other girls to dance in." (1.3) On the other hand the tribe of sweep's children are experienced as if they are from another species: "Their eyes were sharp, bright, hard, rats' eyes above high sharp cheekbones, their lips long, thin and flat, their skulls narrowed and curiously knobbed. They didn't look like other people's children. They had hardly any hair; and undersized frames with square high shoulders, almost like hunchbacks, and frail legs." (1.5) But there is no thought at the ball that all these people are fundamentally parasites, living on the backs of those who labour on the land they own.

The prose is beautiful. The social setting and the writing style reminded me strongly of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway which was published seven years earlier so may well have been an influence. Another story with a similar heroine, set in the world of genteel impoverishment (but much funnier) is Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. 

Selected quotes:

• "She felt the quiver of the warm sun-drained air like the swim and beat of pulses in soft nervous agitation. Roses and leaves breathed in the window; and the evening bird voices seemed to circle with exultant serenity down the sky." (1.2) Beautiful? Or over-ornamented, trying too hard? I rather like evening as 'sun-drained' but I am not sure if pulses 'swim' or leaves 'breathe'.
• "Bournemouth was a gay place in those days. I dare say it still is." (1.2)
• "She wouldn't get a husband; she hadn't a chance now. She was thirty. Letting I dare not wait upon I would, youth had gone by." (1.3) In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Lady M says to the eponymous antihero "Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'. Like the poor cat i' the adage?" (Act One Scene 7) in order to encourage him to commit murder and treason.
• "Custom could never stale the Brighton gentleman" (1.3) Hard on the heels of one Shakespearean quote comes another, this time from Antony and Cleopatra, in which Enobarbus, describing Cleopatra, says: "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety"
• "He died of softening. I'm sorry for anyone who has to nurse softening. Dreadful - so disgusting." (1.3)
• "There in the distance was Mrs Wells-Straker, widow of widows, flowing, streaming towards the church in all her crepe." (1.4)
• "The camel face of Mr Blenskinsop (university coach), his mingling of subacidity, sawdust wit and cowering defensive bachelor ceremony." (1.4)
• "Boys and girls had dropped ink on the faded carpet, puppies had contributed yellowish maps." (1.9)
• "It was a certain sign of growing up that one no longer loved the snow; no longer wished to rush out and stamp in it and throw it about." (1.10)
• "He was not exactly ugly, they thought; but one might be alone with him on a desert island for ten years without ever being able to bear to kiss him." (2.1)
• "Fumble about a bit, I expect - you know, feel your muscle and mess about with your hands pretending he's a fortune-teller, and meaure how tall you were against him - that sort of feeble pawing. It's a sort of disease old men get." (3.14) Almost every old man in this novel, as seen through a young girl's eyes, is inappropriate and lascivious.
• "Everything's going to begin. A hare sitting up in the grass took fright, darting ahead of her into the ploughed land. The rooks flew up in a swirl from the furrows. All the landscape as far as the horizon seemed to begin to move. Wind was chasing cloud, and sun flew behind them. A winged gigantic runner with a torch was running from a great distance to meet her, swooping over the low hills, skimming from them veil after veil of shadow, touching them to instant ethereal shapes of light. On it came, over ploughed field and fallow. The rooks flashed sharply, the hare and his shadow swerved in sudden sunlight. In a moment it would be everywhere. Here it was. She ran into it." (3.25; last sentences).

July 2024; 232 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Too Dear for my Possessing" by Pamela Hansford Johnson

The first of a trilogy, this book is a bildungsroman following Claud, whom we first encounter as a young English boy living in Bruges just after the first world war with his father, an author of cheap detective fiction and his father's mistress, the wonderful Helena. In four almost equally long parts, he moves to London, then to Paris and finally to Bruges again, falling in unrequited and requited love.

It is written in the past tense till the last chapter which is framed by the present tense.

The story is a chronicle of the time, It reflects on the roaring 20s and the ominous 30s: Claud is a part-time art critic for fringe and later more mainstream magazines: as such he is on the fringes of an artistic set whilst being firmly grounded by his full-time occupation as an officer of an insurance and banking company. This semi-outsider status is tweaked by his being the childhood friend of a singer and dancer who becomes a star. It is an interesting perspective, the middle-class lad who needs to work for his living: he has a degree of independent income thanks to his legacy, his schooling moves from independent school to grammar school, he has to work for his living but in a respectable job, he lives in London flats. 

I think its fundamental purpose is as a portrait of a society in which divorce was essentially unacceptable forcing some people to live unconventional lives and others to be unhappy. 

The plot is conventional and predictable. Unlike Claud's father's books there is little excitement. The saving grace is the wonderful character of Helena: a passionate mistress and temperamental step-mother but even she matures and mellows into a something quite conventional.

It is well written and there are some great moments.

Selected quotes:

• "I had possessed one of those frightening sopranos that most people admire and I detest, a voice pure enough, high enough, inhuman enough to crack a tumbler." (1.1)
• "There was one girl without eyebrows who looked as if she would dance, were she not at death’s door" (1.4)
• "Sometimes I hungered for her as I hungered for rich foods certain to make me sick." (2.1)
• "I longed for Helena, who had treated me like dirt, because she was unsolid, unloving and rich, and because she made me laugh." (2.1)
• "She walked as if in contempt of alien soil" (2.1)
• "It was plain that Hampstead was too small for Helena. A sudden move and she would put her head through the roof of the sky, knock down a police-station or a public baths with her elbow, demolish the tube station with her foot." (2.1)
• “'I’m glad to do anything for Richard’s wife,' said Uncle as if it were a one-line part in a play and he were having difficulty with it." (2.1)
• "By the time we had finished the tea, the toast, and a raspberry sponge with cream spread over the jam, I was as settled as a cat let in out of the rain." (2.1)
• "I thought how odd it was that to nearly every pair of girls there was one pretty and one plain, one leader and one led, one the voice and one the echo." (2.1)
• "He liked to lay the board flat on his knees and to bend right over it so that his nose nearly touched the paper; a trick, I have always thought, that accounts for the curious effect of foreshortening noticeable in all his work." (2.3)
• "We can close our eyes as we like to the world, but the world will touch us, for as much as we shut our doors to the winter the wind freezes, and as much as we draw our blinds against the summer the sun bleaches and burns, and as much as we draw our curtains to the night the darkness is about us." (2.4)
• "Till 1930 people talked about the last war; after 1930 they talked about the next." (3.1)
• "Waking suddenly from sleep to find dawn like a watching ghost in the room, I slid delicately from the sheets and went to the window." (3.3)
• "Coming out into a morning clean after rain, we walked along pavements full of the bright sky." (4.1)
• "Think of a blinded ghost! It would bump into you." (4.3)
• "It seems to me absurd that we should expect another life, for that expectation insists that we have no purpose in this one. We change the world for a new generation and we die. Isn’t that a big enough thing to do, to change the world a little?" (4.3)
• "We may say that we are not wasted utterly, because our flesh and bones fertilize new soil; but good God, is that all man is fitted for? To be manure?" (4.3)
• "Yet I wish I believed, I wish I had the confidence of Helena, who has planned precisely what she will say to Father when she meets him in Heaven." (4.3)
• "It seems a vain task, like putting In Memoriam notices in the newspapers; for whom are those notices meant? The dead, we presume, have no morning papers and it is no business of the living how much we may or may not remember. " (4.4)

I suppose it is valuable as a picture of the interwar years but this novel didn't enthral and I doubt I shall attempt the others in the trilogy. If you want to read PHJ at her best, try The Unspeakable Skipton, a much livelier story. 

April 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Defying Hitler" by Sebastian Haffner

Haffner was born in 1907 in Germany. He fled to England in 1939. This is a memoir.

It is stunning. Beautifully written, it describes the development of Germany from about 1914 until 1933 when the book breaks off, with the author still in Germany. The wonderful thing about it is that it is told from the point of view of one German who instinctively felt that what the Nazis were doing was wrong but who, like everyone else, was obliged to go along with it all. Incredible horrors become part of everyday life. Evil is re-evaluated:

• "People began to join in - at first mostly from fear. After they had participated, they no longer wanted to do so just from fear. That would have been mean and contemptible. So the necessary ideology was also supplied. That was the spiritual basis of the victory of the National Socialist revolution." (p 129)

It shows how things such as the brutal persecution of the Jews became 'the Jewish question' so that the the status quo became persecution and any deviation from that had to be justified. This put the persecuted minority into the position of having to defend themselves.

This is history from the inside. The First World War is told from a child's perspective, all exciting victories and maps with armies moving around.

Then comes the revolution, as seen by a schoolboy:

• "Our school was the headquarters of the government troops, and the adjacent elementray school was used as a base by the Reds. ... For days the battle raged for possession of these two buildings. Our headmaster, who had remained in his school's quarters, was shot dead. When we saw it again, the facade of the building was pockmarked with bullet holes. A large bloodstain that could not be removed remained under my desk for many weeks." (p 36)
• "There was something not quite right about a revolution when the next day schoolboys were beaten for playing at it." (p 25)

I was fascinated that the hyperinflation of 1923 had winners as well as losers.

• Shares "were the only form of investment that kept pace - not all the time, and not all shares, yet on the whole they managed to keep up, So everyone dealt in shares." (p 55)
• "The old and unworldly had the worst of it. Many were driven to begging, many to suicide. The young and quickwitted did well. Overnight they became free, rich, and independent. It was a situation in which mental inertia and reliance on past experience were punished by starvation and death, but rapid appraisal of new situations and speed of reaction were rewarded with sudden, vast riches. The twenty-one-year-old bank director appeared on the scene, and also the high school senior who earned his living from the stock-market tips of his slightly older friends. He wore Oscar Wilde ties, organized champagne parties, and supported his embarrassed father." (p 56)
• "Unromantic love was the fashion: carefree, restless, light-hearted promiscuity." (p 57)

Then the Nazis take over. Right from the start evil happens. But people live on. Even the narrator has to find a way to accommodate himself to the persecutions. His friends begin to go into exile. One of his girlfriends (he seems to have many) goes abroad, another is a Jewess, another is trapped because she has no nationality having been born in a country that, since the First World War ended, no longer exists. 

And then he is called up. 

This book did what all great books do: it made me see things from a fresh perspective. This book reversed my own ideas time and time again:

• "One cannot overstate the childishness of the ideas that feed and stir the masses." (p 16)
• The shooting of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 "was the origin of 'shooting while attempting to escape'" (p 33)
• "I heard a former member of the Free Corps ... talk about ... the victims who had fallen or been 'shot while attempting to escape' in their hundreds. 'That was the cream of the working-class youth' he observed thoughtfully and sadly. This was simply how his mind had filed away these memories. 'Brave lads, some of them ... I felt really sorry for them. But they were so pigheaded. They left us no choice but to shoot them.'" (p 41)
• "What a wealth of simple joy and what an inexhaustible source of lifelong pleasure the Frenchman finds in eating and drinking, intellectual debate, and the artistic pursuit of love; and the Englishman in the cultivation of gardens, the companionship of animals, and the sports and hobbies he pursues with such childlike gravity." (p 70)
• "conscientious parents always educate their sons for the era that is just over." (p 102)
• "Foreign policy would probably be a matter of banging the table." (p 107)
• "A carnival ball in Berlin is like a large, colorful, well-organized love raffle, with winning tickets and duds. You take your chance, join up with a girl, kiss and cuddle her, and go through all the preparatory stages of a love affair in a single night. The usual end is a taxi drive at daybreak and the exchange of phone numbers. By then you usually know whether it is the start of something you would like to take further, or whether you have just earned yourself a hangover." (p 111)
• "Among the primitive, inarticulate, simpler souls there was a process that might have taken place in mythical times when a beaten tribe abandoned its faithless god and accepted the god of the victorious tribe as its patron. Saint Marx, in whom one had always believed, had not helped. Saint Hitler was obviously more powerful." (p 135)
• "It was as if the ground on which one stood was continually trickling away from under one's feet, or rather as if the air one breathed was steadily, inexorably being sucked away." (p 194)
• He discusses with a Nazi 'friend' an event in which a political enemy resisted arrest and shot two SA men; in retaliation he is hanged and hundreds of other men in the town are also shot by the SA. The Nazi defends the action of the SA in terms of them acting in the course of their duties. He replies: "'And that allows the state the justification of self-defense against any other citizens? Against me and you?' 'Not against me,' he said, 'but perhaps against you.'" (p 216)
• "Nationalism - that is, national self-reflection and self-worship - is certainly a dangerous mental illness wherever it appears, capable of distorting the character of a nation and making it ugly, just as vanity and egoism distort the character of a person and make it ugly." (p 224)
• "The first country to be occupied by the Nazis was not Austria or Czechoslovakia. It was Germany." (p 225)
• "Bankrupt stock ... You lose your value if you become a refugee." (p 231)
• "The more distant of two evils always seems the lesser. It may not be the lesser in reality." (p 234)
• "A man bedded in comradeship is relieved of all personal worries, and of the rigors of the struggle for life. He has his bed in the barracks, his meals, and his uniform. His daily life is prescribed from morning to night. He need nor concern himself with anything. He lives, not under the severe rule of 'each for himself' but in the generous softness of 'one for all and all for one'. It is one of the most unpleasant falsehoods that the laws of comradeship are harder than those of ordinary civilian life. On the contrary, they are of a debilitating softness, and they are justified only for soldiers in the field, for men facing death.  ... it is a familiar story that brave soldiers, who have been too long bedded on the soft cushions of comradeship, often find it impossible to cope with the harshness of civilian life." (p 286)
• "It was remarkable how comradeship actively decomposed all the elements of individuality and civilization. The most important part of individual life, which cannot be subsumed in communal life, is love. So comradeship has its special weapon against love: smut." (p 289)

This book made me wonder whether we are on the same trajectory as Germany was in the desperate interwar years.

Read it! January 2017, 309 pages

This was yet another brilliant book loaned to me by my friend Fred whose taste in superb non-fiction seems to be without fault. Others I have read thanks to him include:

• A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written
• The Mighty Dead: a superb analysis of the Iliad but an authro who writes like a dream
• Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland
• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

I recommend them all.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God