The hand that first held mine: am I the last person here to read this book?

Mystery, family secrets and bohemian London are three of my favourite things and I am fairly well chuffed to have discovered them, in combination in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand that First Held Mine. I know that everyone else in the English speaking world read this ages ago, but there you are.

This is a story of two halves with elements of interplay and a last minute link that I will not spoil for those who have not yet had the pleasure. The first half is the story of Lexie Sinclair, convention-challenger and independent spirit of the 1950s. The second half belongs to Elina, young artist and new mother, and her boyfriend Ted who live in modern day Hampstead.

Books are often described as “cinematic” and most of the time I find myself thinking “well, feels more like a story in a book to me…” but not this time. The Hand that First Held Mine feels quite a lot like a film. The hoving in on the subject at the beginning swoops accurately like a camera: “Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and its almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen”. There are strange and unexpected flashes forward and flashes back. Very early in the book we are instructed to visualise the following: “Watch. Innes sucks in a nimbus of smoke, lifts a cigarette stub from the ashtray, appears to envelop Lexie in a shirt and push her across the room, the pillows jump on to the bed and they are both naked and, goodness, doesn’t sex look oddly the same in reverse”. Geddit? O’Farrell has a wonderful sense of people as actors, of life as reel.

There is a family mystery in this book which is not explained until then
end although I suspect that most readers will guess and get it roughly right. It is not an impenetrable puzzle but that makes it all the better. It speaks to me of how many little mysteries there must be, not all as dramatic as this one, in all families and under all noses. It also speaks of something that I for one find rather tantalising – the idea that places somehow “remember” events and that people can retrieve the long buried treasure of their memories by visiting them. This happens to Ted, subtly at first, and then dramatically. I wonder whether O’Farrell is suggesting that it is the place, or the action that has left the mark on the individual memory?

The book could easily be sub-titled “a disquisition on motherhood”, although this may not have encouraged sales. The actual title is a reference to the overwhelming power of the mother-child connection – a theme which is amply developed in the novel itself, and which I can readily recognise myself. A splendid read.

There are other opinions to be found at Harriet Devine’s Blog, Leafing through Life and The Sleepless Reader. Pictures are the book cover, the author and a random picture taken in Soho in the 1950s. If you feel a sense of recognition, there might just be a reason…

Anne Chisholm’s Frances Partridge: A Woman who surely loved in a straight line

I hesitate to commence a review by saying “it makes you think” but actually, Anne Chisholm’s biography of Frances Partridge really does. For those who have not overdosed as I have on the annals of the Bloomsbury group, a little introduction may be useful. Frances Partridge was a woman whose life spanned the twentieth century. She was a pacifist and a diarist and a graduate of Newnham College. She is most famous for having been the second wife of Ralph Partridge and the “fly in the ointment” of his delicate manage a trois with his first wife Dora Carrington, always known as Carrington, and the love of her life, Lytton Strachey. Somebody once commented of the Bloomsbury group that they “lived in squares and loved in triangles”, and that was certainly true of the situation in which Frances became embroiled in the mid 1920s.

What is wonderful about Anne Chisholm’s biography is that it skilfully extracts Frances from the welter of Bloomsbury-abilia whilst also recognising how important that set of ideas was in the shaping of her life. Of course, the book covers the uncommon arrangement at the Strachey/Carrington/Partridge home Ham Spray; the passionate and abiding love of the artist Carrington for the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey; the powerful love that he in turn felt for the man that they both called “the Major” – Ralph Partridge; Ralph’s own place in the jigsaw where he is married to Carrington, but seems to love his housemates in equal measure and knows himself to be the lynchpin that holds them together; the entrance of the beautiful young baggage-less Frances who, despite other offers, throws her lot in with Ralph and by extension his strange compromise of a household; the sudden death of Lytton Strachey and the horrific suicide of Carrington. It would be a strange biography of Frances Partridge if it did not take its reader through these aspects of her story. But, it does not feel to dwell on them too much and it always looks to them as a means of learning about Frances. Its focus is always bringing Frances to the centre of the stage.

Frances Partridge outlived all of the most significant people in her life by a long way, but she was very much still alive when the biographers picked up their pens. It is perhaps to be expected that she was a woman of firm ideas when it came to life writing. Intellectually she believed in truthfulness and one of the reasons that as a young woman she was drawn to the slightly older Bloomsbury group was that they had a powerful commitment to living honestly. On the other hand, she was also fiercely loyal to the memory of her husband Ralph and there were times when assessments of his character, which appear reasonable based on all of the evidence, were unpalatable to her. She had an idea in her head of what he was like and what he was about and she found it hard to cope with conflicting views. One of Anne Chisholm’s achievements is that she holds in focus the opinions of Frances whilst also being kindly critical of them. Frances always maintained for example that Ralph’s love for Lytton was always purely platonic whilst Chisholm acknowledges the possibility that she may have been wrong. When Ralph was characterised after his death as a bullying, braying, bed-hopping parasite, it is easy to see why Frances was upset. Chisholm highlights how Ralph’s historical reputation has been unfairly tainted by the views of some of his influential contemporaries whilst also acknowledging that there is truth in the myth. In considering Frances’s view of life writing so carefully, Chisholm examines the very morality of biography and causes me to think, for the first time, how very strange it must be to be written about. It is of course impossible to know what Frances Partridge would have thought of this book because she died before it was published, but I can’t help but think that the balance and the slightly polite honesty would have been right up her street.

Life writing on the edge: Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia and other Julian Maclaren-Ross adventures

This week’s reading has been the seediest of double helpings. Having enjoyed the Collective Memoirs of Julian Maclaren-Ross, I felt that I could not leave the story uncompleted and picked up the wonderful Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia: the Bizarre Life of Writer, Actor, Soho Raconteur: Julian Maclaren-Ross by Paul Willetts. For those who are strangers to Maclaren-Ross, he was a gifted writer who came to represent the dissolute and chaotic life of London’s Soho in the middle of the last century. The sordid colours of his person and lifestyle evolved to overshadow his versatile and interesting work. He spawned numerous fictional characters of whom the most famous was the dreadful X Trapnel in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time. Long before his death in 1964 he had become part of the myth of Fitzrovia – that tiny pub lined area north of Oxford Street and west of the Tottenham Court Road.

Paul Willetts conveys an excellent sense of Maclaren-Ross; sharp suited; Malacca cane carrying; hard drinking; sharp tongued observer; whilst at the same time extracting his subject from a welter of myth and half truth. His biography looks under the carpet of the stories of generations and proves that truth really is stranger than fiction. In his short life Maclaren-Ross was a writer, door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, soldier, deserter, prisoner and regular at the Wheatsheaf pub. He was far from being the only deserter who washed up in Fitzrovia. During the course of the Second World War an estimated 80,000 men went “AWOL” from the armed forces and a healthy number drank out the war in a similar style to Maclaren-Ross. Willetts shows however that his desertion was far from stereotypical – he deserted having become frustrated to the point of madness that the army kept him behind a desk with a humdrum occupation rather than use his skills. Not the most self-sacrificing attitude maybe, but far from the plain cowardice suggested by mythology.

As well as looking under the carpet, Willetts has made a great achievement in even finding it. Maclaren-Ross wrote a series of memoirs (for which, read on....) but no biography can be credibly based purely on the words of the subject. His life was a mind-bending chaos of poverty, homelessness, hotel dwelling and psychosis. Women and friends came and went with speed and left little behind for the intrepid biographer. Willetts triumphed over disaster by seemingly following every tiny clue. A biographer who is willing to search telephone directories deserves a bit of credit in my view. This book shows what I have always suspected; that biography at the fringes of fame is by far the most worthwhile.

Maclaren-Ross’s own Collected Memoirs surprised me in their tone. I knew the myth of the man and was expecting his narrative voice to be far more abrasive and harsh than I found it to be. In fact, his memoirs are a series of keenly observed and sparely composed period pieces that display a grasp of character and a detachment from stereotype, which I found most impressive. Probably the most interesting are his Memoirs of the Forties in which he rubs shoulders with Graham Greene and Dylan Thomas (and of course many others) in hilarious circumstances. The stories are witty and revealing and far more self-deprecating than I suspected.

Julian Maclaren-Ross had an almost pathological dislike of being photographed and so there are limited images of him available. I have included what I can find together with a still of Sean Baker as one of his fictional alter egos X Trapnel in the 1997 adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time.

Mirror to a million teenagers: Monica Dickens’ Mariana

Oh no! I am feeling like a book blogger who has slept through her alarm, turned her face down into the warm pillow and lazily allowed for the languishing of good books. I have many excuses, but I won’t bore you with them: I am just late in posting. As many of you know Persephone Reading Week is a lovely event co-hosted by Claire at Paperback Reader and Verity at The B Files. Despite the fact that it technically ended yesterday, this review of the Persephone Classic Mariana by Monica Dickens is my contribution.

Mariana is an enchanting read. It is a between-the-wars coming-of-age tale that has been rightly compared to I Capture the Castle by Dodi Smith. Mary Shannon is first introduced to the reader as a young married woman tucked away in a remote cottage in the Second World War. The weather outside is dreadful, the telephone lines are down and she does not know whether her husband, who is serving in the war, is alive or dead. At night, tossing and turning, and hopeless of sleep she begins to remember the events of her life from childhood through adolescence and into marriage. This act of remembrance is the subject of the book – it is a recollection story, much like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. We learn swiftly that the young woman who fears that her husband may have been lost in the second world war, lost the father whom she never really knew in the first. Her character and her life seem poised between two great tragedies but her mind is preoccupied with concerns that we all share – love; marriage; family; home.

Mary is a middle class English girl with a good eye for observation and no exceptional talents. She grows up in London with her vivacious and enterprising mother Lily and her louche and charming Uncle Geoff. Her late father’s side of the family are rather more upper class and live on the income from a chain of expensive restaurants. Their country home, the pastoral Charbury is the scene of Mary’s summers, her first brushes with romance, her early adventures and the source of her not inconsiderable sense of social superiority. The dominant love of her early years is her cousin Denys. Denys is handsome, arrogant, bullying and most undeserving of his cousin’s adoration. Like many girls of her class and period, Mary did not quite know what to do with herself in that uncomfortable interlude between school and marriage. As a result of this the reader is treated to her account of her hilariously unsuccessful spell in a drama school, followed by a year of dress making and romancing in Paris, and the events which ultimately lead to her marriage.

The first part of Mariana is far more successful than the second. Mary as a child and young teenager is a character so familiar and so real as to be almost settled on the sofa and reading the book alongside one. Every teenage girl, or woman who has been a teenage girl will recognise her unholy combination of certainty and ignorance, her desperation to be loved by some and her offhandedness with the love granted to her. The unintended humour in her story telling is a tick of growing up that all of us can recognise. Her adventures with her cousin Denys which run the gambit of worship, partnership, conspiracy and disillusion were, for me, the most successful part of the book. It is in developing Mary’s awareness of Denys, that Monica Dickens comes closest to the kind of magic that Dodi Smith achieved in I Capture the Castle. This is rather in contrast to the second half of the book, which I found rather disappointing. I felt that Mary’s later adventures did not ring true and in particular, the ending is hurried and underdeveloped. The “perfect man” when he arrives, moves so fast that one might be tempted to think that he had a train to catch. Many readers have found Mary an unsympathetic girl to share a book with. She is a little snobby, rather insensitive sometimes and displays the casual anti Semitism and class based contempt that was common in the period. However, for me, the imperfections of the girl rather added to the book. Monica Dickens is by no means uncritical of her heroine – part of the message of the book is that she is ordinary, she is of her age, she is not heroic and that is one of Mariana’s great charms.

Although burdened with a dodgy second half, I can well understand why Persephone re-printed this novel and why it has become rather a classic. The fact is that Mariana is a wonderful period piece, full of the sounds and smells and sights of an era. When the rackety Uncle Geoff takes young Mary for dinner at the Cafe Royale at some point in the early 1930s, she provides one of the best descriptions that I have read of this, the most famous of London’s “Bohemian” hang-outs. Similarly, the description of Mary’s ill-fated attendance at Denys’ Oxford College Ball, is quite lovely and reminded me of the description of Eights Week in Brideshead Revisited – it somehow manages to almost burst with unobtrusive period detail.

I am certainly not the only blogger who has enjoyed reading Mariana. I have enjoyed reading reviews by Claire at The Captive Reader, Becky Holmes at A Book A Week, Uncertain Principles at Another Cookie Crumbles, Katherine at A Girl Walks Into A Bookstore, Nicola at Vintage Reads, Carolyn at A Few Of My Favourite Books and Miranda at A Skirmish of Wit.

I have included a picture of the beautiful Persephone cover, as well as a few pictures of Monica Dickens herself.

Experiments in Bohemia – the collective laundry of the last century’s writers and artists

I have always thought that the word “Bohemian” has got something infuriatingly bourgeois about it. Some how it is a glib and inadequate classification for some of the most interesting people in modern cultural history. But there it is and here we are. That is the word that has been bestowed by history – and for those who are interested I would heartily recommend Virginia Nicholson’s masterly survey Among the Bohemians – experiments in living 1900 – 1939.

This is a rich and warm-hearted survey of people who in the early part of the twentieth century were linked together by art and eccentricity. It knits together lives entangled and divergent but all of its characters are colourful. They are for the most part artists and writers and Nicholson looks at how their daily lives differed from the norm. She unashamedly and very successfully takes a “laundry list view of history” and her compelling conclusion is that this motley crew of drinkers, dancers, talkers and painters were behind a minor cultural revolution.

So how might a bohemian of the period have been recognised by his or her countrymen? These were people who, in an age of economic uncertainty, prioritised art and beauty a long way above money. Whilst there were a few rich bohemians – they were for the most part, almost comically poor – living on a diet of black coffee and boiled eggs in freezing garret flats. In addition to this and probably most famously, they advocated rather more freedom in sexual relations that was otherwise accepted in their era. It was on this basis that Augustus John’s household came to consist of his wife, his mistress, at times, her other lover – and the collective children of the ensemble. Speaking of children – the raising of the young to be fearful of authority was another Victorian stricture which the bohemians had no truck with. Their children knew upbringings quite different from the rest of the population. Nicholson also shows how the bohemian was marked out by his dress, his (or rather, her) housekeeping, his willingness to travel, and even his dinner.

This patchwork of daily life is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it clearly shows an historical parting of the ways – with the age of Victoria receding into the past and the modern age of individualism opening up before us. Secondly, it shines a light upon the domestic circumstances, the everyday paraphernalia from which some of the most interesting British art and literature of the 20th century emerged. I am fascinated to learn that Dylan Thomas – whose poems I love – was so poor that he habitually stole clothes from his friends and wracked up colossal bar and hotel bills on their behalf. I have always loved Augustus John’s portrait of the Marchesa Casati (for more on the Marchesa Casati see my earlier post) – and this is enriched by the knowledge of the personal drama that sat behind its production.

I have called Nicholson’s work “warm hearted”. This is because she manages to catalogue her “laundry list” of bohemia humorously, keeping in balance sympathy and admiration for the bohemians and also an awareness of how ill a life without boundaries could sometimes treat them. For all of the colour and drama and notable work produced, for many, poverty, ill education and a chaotic home life were in fact the enemies of promise. Nicholson manages to show this without a trace of self-righteousness and her work is all the richer for it.

I have included a few illustrations of notable bohemians. The images are of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Augustus John and Nina Hamnett.

As much as the name annoys me, I must admit to being a bit of a “bohemia” junkie in my book collection. For those who are interested, I have loved reading the following first hand accounts of this community:

- The Life of Dylan Thomas by Constantine Fitzgibbon
- Two Flamboyant Fathers by Nicolette Devas
- Laughing Torso by Nina Hamnett
- Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns.