Keeping Up Appearances

Rose Macaulay is a superb writer whose books are the very opposite of the “cozy” published by some women’s presses–the E. M. Delafields and Elizabeth Taylors we’ve all come to love.  Macaulay’s uneven novels of ideas have been rediscovered and boosted by Virago and NYBR, but overall she is a neglected writer.  In 1922 she won the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse Anglais for Dangerous Ages, a brilliant novel about the narrowing of choices for women in middle- and old age. In 1956 she won the James Tait Black Memorial Award for The Towers of Trebizond, a satiric novel centering on travel in the Middle East.  

Keeping up Appearances, published in 1928, is so stunning when looked at as a whole that one wants to send it to a friend and say, “Here is an underrated tour de force!”  It is not a perfect book, but its very imperfections suit it.  Macaulay’s protagonist, Daisy Simpson, is not what she seems, and it is this foggy identity that makes Keeping Up Appearances so surprising and fascinating.  On the surface Daisy is an unconfident, diffident journalist who hides her feelings of inferiority by tagging along with her worldly, charming half-sister, Daphne.  But on page 101 we discover Daisy’s secret:  she and Daphne are the same person;  she has invented Daphne as a nonchalant, witty personality that can cope with the vagaries of upper-class society. Daisy is the illegitimate daughter of a lower-middle-class woman of whom she is ashamed; she was educated by her upper-class father’s sister, a friend of the Folyots.  Presenting herself as Daphne instead of Daisy makes the prospect of marriage to Raymond Folyot, an upper-class scientist, almost impossible.  Daisy hides all her accomplishments: he does not know she is a journalist, nor that she writes middlebrow novels under the name Marjorie Wynn.

Daisy’s cowardice, shame, and triple life do not always make her a sympathetic character.  Yet at the same time her nervousness and complications make her far superior to the horrible Folyots.  Mrs. Folyot has a thousand causes, all of them vague; her husband is a secret snob; Raymond undistinguished and unimaginative; and Cary a sharp 12-year-old who seems to discover all Daisy/Daphne’s faults.  

A very enjoyable novel, discovered accidentally.

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Darkness, Light, & Staying with Relations

Because it’s dark at eight o’clock now I’m feeling depressed.  Not big depressed:  a little depressed. Summer is not officially over, but I’m imagining the winter. And although I accomplished a lot this summer–visited Bess Streeter Aldrich’s home, read Dickens, and took numerous bicycle trips–the darkness makes me think about all the things I didn’t do.

1.  I DIDN’T LOSE 20 POUNDS. Am I the only one out there who gains weight every time she takes a 40-mile bike ride?   But I did lose 10 pounds and at least my pants are loose now.  

A good place to take a bike break and eat M&Ms.

 

 2.  I didn’t read Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil.  I tried to get my Latin group to read this Austrian novel with me, but they’re really more interested in military history.  There’s nothing like Caesar or Tacitus if you’re a historian with no time for poetry.  Of course I push the Latin literature on them and did manage to get a couple of them to read Virgil, some of it in the original.   And I can’t really blame them for not reading Broch, because even though Virgil is the protagonist,  Broch’s writing is so bad…I should revive my German so I can judge properly.  It’s probably a lost novel because of the translation.  

3. I didn’t take that gardening class I’ve always intended to take.  Damn!  But we do have a lot of zucchini out there.  I actually saw a few bees among the flowers.  Yea!  They’re not all dead.

I want more light and time outdoors.  We have three more months of sun, don’t you think?  And then the snow falls.

WHAT I’M READING NOW:  I am completely absorbed in  Rose Macaulay’s Staying with Relations.  It is far from her best novel and I shouldn’t recommend it except to Macaulay aficionados, but this lovely entertaining hybrid of a novel is just so much fun!  Set in Guatemala, Mexico, and California, it combines family drama, witty dialogue, exotic descriptions of the jungle, adultery, a kidnapping, a theft, a satiric episode about American con-men in Central America that reads like a wild West adventure, and a crazy ship-and-car road trip in which Catherine and two of her step-cousins track the fattish little man who robbed the buried treasure on the hacienda.  Catherine, a novelist lecturing in Philadelphia, is invited by her aunt to come stay with the family on a hacienda in Guatemala.  The story begins from Catherine’s point-of-view, but Macaulay shifts viewpoints and evenly divides the narrative among Catherine’s relatives:  her high-strung young cousin, Isie, who looks like an empty-minded Juno but is actually nervous, demanding, and emotional; Isie’s shell-shocked husband, Adrian, who is having an affair with Isie’s stepsister;and three lounging languorous English step-cousins, the spinsterish Claudia, beautiful Julia, and witty Benet.   Catherine’s assumptions turn out to be mostly wrong about her relatives, and Macaulay has fun satirizing novelists’ observations.

Here is a passage from one of the serious parts of Macaulay’s novel, from the point of view of Isie, who recites poetry to herself as, escaped from kidnappers, she tries to find her way home through the jungle.

“It was gentle and consoling to be thus for a space withdrawn into poetry and tears. Drained at last of emotion, she lifted tired, swollen eyes and looked about her, and saw how the little plants and leaves grew out of the crevices in pillars and walls.  There, near by, was the fever grass, that one eats to cure malaria, and beneath it the nettle that one chews when one has inadvertently been spattered by the milky juice of the poison-wood tree.”

I have no idea whether Rose Macaulay traveled to Guatemala or not.  But the descriptive parts of her novel make me want to rush to Guatemala, though it’s not a vacation spot these days (is it?), and the beautiful passages about the jungle reminds me of the scenes in W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, which I love.

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Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages

Rose Macaulay (1881-1958) is a neglected, sharp & versatile writer once so popular she was created Dame of the British Empire. Small publishers occasionally revive her novels only to let them fall out-of- print again.  Why does she not catch on?  Although her serious middlebrow novels are of the same quality as E. M. Delafield’s, she has not achieved Delafield’s popularity in the 21st century.  Delafield, of course,  is beloved mainly for her charming, inimitable Diary of a Provincial Lady series.  

Yet I love Macaulay best. Best known for The Towers of Trebizond (NYBR), a superb, humorous autobiographical novel which won the James Tait Black Award in 1956, she is a brilliant satirist and accomplished writer. The Towers of Trebizond, a masterpiece of wit, encompasses travelers in the Middle East, camels, religion, and adulterous love.  

 But I also like her more serious novels like Dangerous Ages (my personal favorite, available at Gutenberg and also in a Bibliobazaar editions) and Non-Combatants and Others (Capuchin Classics).  And you can also find some of her other novels in Virago editions, among them Told by an Idiot and The World My Wilderness.

I just spent several refreshing hours reading Dangerous Ages, an overlooked novel that perhaps cannot be appreciated till middle age.  I remember starting it some years ago and thinking it wasn’t for me.   Now it is.  This gently humorous, sometimes very painful examination of three generations of women charts the sad sense of loss as choices narrow for women in middle- and old age,  contrasted with the confidence and sense of immortality of youth.    Despite the fact that some of the characters are unlikable, I feel sympathetic to their very different plights.   Macaulay’s writing here is plain and unadorned, not nearly as perfect as in The Towers of Trebizond, but her ideas are first-rate.

The novel, set after World War I,  begins with Neville, a charming, brilliant, competent mother of two grown children, who, on her 43rd birthday, awakens early and goes to ttake a swim.  Strong and athletic, she is a better swimmer than her children.  But on the shore afterwards, she ponders the rapidity of the years and the feeling of waste:  as a woman of 20, she had been a star medical student, but dropped out to marry and have children.  Now she is determined to return to medical school.

As she sits in the woods, she muses:

“To think suddenly of Rodney, of Gerda and of Kay, sleeping in the still house beyond the singing wood and silver garden, was to founder swiftly in the cold, dark seas, to be hurt again with the stabbing envy of the night.  Not jealousy, for she loved them all too well for that.  But envy of their chances, of their contacts with life….  Conscious, as one is on birthdays, of intense life hurrying swifly to annihilation, she strove desperately to dam it.”

Because she is sensible and considerate, she hides her gloom and spends an enjoyable day with her husband, children, mother, Grandmama, and  cynical, brilliant younger sister, Nan, a writer.  After all, Neville has medical school to look forward to.  But her mother, surgeon brother, and politician husband are not wholly supportive.  Her mother and brother think it’s ridiculous to return to school after all these years; her husband is lukewarm.  And Neville gradually finds that she can no longer study as she used to.  This is extremely disturbing.

Their mother, Mrs. Hilary, has the next birthday.  At 63 she is bored, lonely, and jealous of her serene 84-year-old mother, who has everyone’s respect.  The once pretty Mrs. Hilary tried living in London after she was widowed:  but she was considered too ” stupid”–a word frequently used of Mrs. Hilary, even by Mrs. Hilary herself– to keep up with her sophisticated friends and social contacts, all of whom were informed about the issues of the day.  Now she lives in a backwater where her strong personal opinions, formed completely without information, are tolerated.  But on her birthday when her favorite son doesn’t show up, she has to make do with Neville, the oldest daughter who soothes her and tries to understand her.  Sadly, Mrs. Hilary knows that no one really likes to talk to her.  And when she tries to read “difficult” books, they are beyond her.

Perhaps Mrs. Hilary’s character can best by understood by a swimming incident.  On Mrs. Hilary’s birthday, the children go out swimming far beyond her. Mrs. Hilary is furious that they are “neglecting” her.  She sulks, refuses to get out of the sea, hoping to make them feel guilty, and gets sick with rheumatism.  She is triumphant because she has their attention again.  Of course the children know exactly what kind of person she is and don’t feel guilty.  

Nan, a 33-year-old writer, is independent, strong-willed, narcissistic, and Bohemian.  We don’t get to know her as well as Neville and Mrs. Hilary, and she is difficult to like, perhaps because she doesn’t need anyone.  Barry, a friend who works for a political organization that forms education programs for the working class, among other innovations, is in love with her.  Nan privately decides she will marry him, but she will not tell him before she’s had a month’s vacation.  The reader’s apprehension about this procrastination out to be apt.

The youngest woman, Gerda, Neville’s 20ish daughter, is earnest, beautiful, humorless, and unimaginative.  A liberal without an education (she refused to go to Oxford), a writer of  bad verse and ignorant of punctuation, she belongs to a radical group and suspects that those who have condemned Bolshevism are propagandists.  She is also a young woman who doesn’t believe in marriage: she loves Barry and persuades herself that she can “share” him with her aunt.  (Actually, doesn’t this sound like the ’60s and ’70s?  Except for the rather disgusting “aunt” factor.)

Neville and Nan both experience much emotional pain, due to their vulnerability and age.  In some ways Gerda reminds me of Mrs. Hilary.  Both are selfish; neither imagines the consequences of her actions.

All the women are at dangerous ages; and the strange thing is that Mrs. Hilary and Gerda are  dangerous in their ages. 

Although I readily agree that it is not a classic, it is a novel that speaks to me over time.

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