Summer of Love: Will she? Won’t she? in Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

Who remembers the moment in Four Weddings and a Funeral when Hugh Grant rolls over in bed and asks “who is it this week?” Because as we enter this, the end of the summer, that is how we feel. In a good way, of course. I love weddings. Which is just as well, because we have been to one almost every weekend of the summer and still have one to go. We have been to Serbia (twice), Russia, the Lebanon, Hampshire, London (more than twice) and Oxford. Honourable mention must also be made of one further “not married party” which was no less a meeting of old friends and a celebration of love and commitment (you know who you are)...

And so it was as a self appointed expert, a connoisseur of nuptials, that I picked up the Persephone Classic, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding is short, funny and worth-it. It is the narrative of a single day – the wedding day – of Dolly, a middle-class girl of the early 1930s. The action takes place entirely in her family home, which one presumes to be a medium sized manor house or something of that sort. The house is teeming with comic characters – the status conscious, conventionally minded mother of the bride, Mrs Thatcham, to whom appearances mean a lot; The Bridesmaids – clumsy Kitty who is beset with adolescent insecurities and elegant Evelyn who is worried about being cold in church; School boy cousins Tom and Robert, who are locked into a ceaseless argument about emerald green socks (“Go and put your head in a bag” sticks in the mind); The dour anthropologist Joseph Patten, who moons about the house having tense conversations with everyone and trying to find the bride, for what purpose, the reader must enquire on their own account.... There are numerous others; mad old aunts; domestic helps; a Canon, and they all rumble around the place in a sort of country house comedy way – with people walking out of rooms just as others walk in looking for them and so on.

At the heart of this novella there is a rich and slightly painful vein of social satire. Some characters seem to care more about what things look like than how they really are. Others respond to such hypocrisy with savagery - saying things which are designed to shock and upset. This seems to me to be not just the age old clash between the old and the young but also the clash between the conservative, the traditional and the more socially liberated approaches to life which were emerging in the 1920s and 30s. There is a thick layer of repression veiling most of the main characters and there is a lot of swigging from the bottle in dark corners as well.

Which brings me to another theme which seemed to sing out loud and clear, one to which any wedding goer is familiar: continuity. When Dolly fortifies herself with a bottle of rum and faces the music, she does what many women, possibly even her much maligned mother, have done before her. There were times when I felt that Cheerful Weather for the Wedding was like a form of social archaeology. If you remove the top soil of propriety the first layer you come to is rebellion but underneath that runs a thick course of convention and a willingness to do things the way that they have always been done.

The characters are not as whole or as touching as they could be and I did not find myself rooting for anyone but the book is thought provoking. Other opinions can be found at Stuck in a Book, Vintage Reads, Fernham, Nonsuch Book, Novel Insights, The Green Room, My Porch and the marvellously named What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate.

I have included pictures of the (predictably lovely) Persephone cover and end paper and a portrait of the author by Dora Carrington.

A brilliant way to treat entangled lives: "A Crisis of Brilliance" by David Boyd Haycock

I am standing in our kitchen wondering why I chose David Boyd Haycock’s A Crisis of Brilliance as the first book I read at our new home in France. Only tiny traces of the massive snowfall that greeted our arrival remain in the garden and half remembered schoolgirl French is slowly coming back to me. I do still feel like a bit of a newbie – a student on an exchange trip rather than a permanent resident. So maybe that is the reason behind choosing such a quintessentially English book for my first read.

A Crisis of Brilliance is that rare and excellent thing: a collective biography. It traces the lives of five British artists of the early twentieth century – Stanley Spencer, Dora Carrington, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler and Richard Nevinson. These artists all entered the Slade School of Art by wildly divergent routes at approximately the same time. They met, fought, loved and formed there and they are rightly associated with one another. When Britain went to war in 1914 they would be shattered apart – never to be reunited – never to recapture the glory days of their youth. For each of them the war would mean something different – alienation; disintegration; fear; grief; development; fame. For all of them their best work would emerge from the horror of conflict. The images that they produced, of landscapes torn asunder and men treated like machines have become standard ways of looking at the Great War – but at the time they were groundbreaking.

There are too few collective biographies in the world. Thinking about people in groups makes so much sense – we all live love and work in groups and the traditional format of the cradle to grave individual biography is often limiting. The subjects of Haycock’s book were drawn inexorably together and so Haycock has treated them together. They were all brilliant subversives who rejected the ordinary and the respectable. Individually and collectively, they lived for their art. In some cases they are already well known. Anyone who has seen “Carrington” will know the tragedy of Dora Carrington’s end as well as the unlikely subject of her most abiding love. Visitors to Cookham will know of the gentle, gauche Stanley Spencer whose paintings have come to represent so much of English identity. The brilliance of Haycock’s book is that he shows the staggering level of entanglement between these people.
This tale is a whirlwind of passion, repression, love, intelligence and alienation. Although it is non-fiction, Haycock’s prose reads effortlessly and often has the power of a novel – it moves from one scene to another, taking in a vast array of colourful characters. In many respects the beguiling, enchanting, often dishonest Dora Carrington, or “Carrington” as she preferred to be known stands at its centre. Crop haired, charming, confused, deceitful, she attracts almost everyone but struggles to respond to their affections. Mark Gertler, the Jewish émigré artist is the brooding, difficult heathcliffe – tormented by his visceral love for Carrington. Paul Nash stands aloof: courteous, urbane and thoughtful. Stanley Spencer, that genius of the English countryside is locked into a world where the verge of Jordan meets the Thames valley. Richard Nevinson is the angry, difficult young man who pushes away those whom he loves the most. Although we have all heard about them before, because Haycock has been brave with his format and approach, they come alive afresh on the page.