Following the success of Simon and Harriet‘s Muriel Spark Reading Week in April and the anouncement of a Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week to be hosted by Annabel/Gaskella in June, I thought I’d add another log to the fire and hold a Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week this summer.

     I first discovered Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) six years ago, when I was looking for something new to read and picked up Dusty Answer. Quite unexpectedly – for my reading tastes at the time favoured the Victorian – I was engrossed. I had never thought a twentieth-century writer could be so intensely readable. The discovery re-shaped the entire course of my studies, for my Masters dissertations, and now my P.h.D., have been devoted to Lehmann’s work.

     I have naturally been keen to share my enthusiasm. But to my disapppointment, even in academic circles, there are few who have heard her name, let alone read her books. Yet this has not always been the case. Her first novel was a succès de scandale and made her famous practically overnight, and each of her subsequent books was greeted with warm praise both in her native UK and in the States, but also in France, where the first translation of her work appeared as early as 1929.

     Identified by her contemporaries as a member of the Bloomsbury Group, Rosamond Lehmann herself felt a bit of an outsider. She certainly wasn’t as obsessed with Cézanne as Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, as eager as Virginia Woolf to deconstruct the workings of the Victorian plot, or even as keen on raucous drinking parties as the rest of the set, including her own husband. But her personal life was as unconventional, her work as experimental and innovative, as any of the better-known Bloomsberries.

     She is remembered best for her empathetic portrayal of women in love, but to reduce her to that is to overlook the many other wonderful aspects of her writing. She skillfully captures the pain and confusion of growing up in the wake of the Great War, and is an unparalleled chronicler of the changes affecting women’s lives between the wars, dealing with such delicate topics as education, divorce, and illegal abortion. She also paints a vivid portrait of the bohemian and artistic circles she moved in, and when Mayfair meets Bloomsbury, the situation is rife with social comedy. Lehmann’s constant experiments in style and technique make each book different from the last, but each reveals great dramatic power and lyricism, and is a unique and fascinating experience.

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Rosamond Lehmann Reading List:

Dusty Answer (1927)

A Note in Music (1930)

Invitation to the Waltz (1932)

The Weather in the Streets (1936)

The Ballad and the Source (1944)

The Gypsy’s Baby and Other Stories (1946)

The Echoing Grove (1953)

The Swan in the Evening: Fragments of an Inner Life (1967)

A Sea-Grape Tree (1976)

Rosamond Lehmann: A Life, by Selina Hastings (2002)

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     Any and all are welcome to participate in Rosamond Lehmann Reading Week. Those who have a blog and wish to post reviews or discussions, be sure to add your name to the comments box so that I will be able to link back to you when the time comes.

     And happy reading to you all!

© Florence Berlioz 2012

April sun shining on the pond garden at home.

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     Early this morning as I was Dancing for Degas, I stepped out of The Castle on the Hill into the garden and bent down to touch The Hermaphrodite.

As dawn broke and I took in my surroundings, I noticed several things: A Sea-Grape Tree was struggling due to Cocaine Blues, The Food of Love had been dug up in The Camomile Lawn under The Golden Bough, but with help from Madame Pamplemousse and her Incredible Edibles and knowledge gleaned from The Four Seasons, I was able to bury it with Songs of Blue and Gold.

     Later, The Real Katie Lavender popped in to take a cutting or two; she told me The Story of a Marriage, but she pointed out that it was a Summer of Love.

     Taking a well-earned rest from the weeding and chatting over the wall with The Uncommon Reader from next door, I mentioned The Peach Keeper and remarked on Anecdotes of Destiny, but then after The Matisse Stories, we said A Little Love Song and I went back to do a little light pruning.

     My garden was once The Lost Garden but tending it is a joy and part of the History of a Pleasure Seeker.

© Florence Berlioz 2012

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     London. The Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, indistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. 

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     Tomorrow, we had originally planned a large family picnic. But if it is as I expect, I will be quoting Steinbeck’s description of a post-deluge world at the end of The Grapes of Wrath instead…

© Florence Berlioz 2012

     On my way back home several hours later, I decided that, what the hell, I deserved a treat, so I stopped off at the fancy florist’s near my bus stop and splurged on a bunch of pink and white lisianthus. There’s nothing like buying flowers to put me in a good mood! I paid the exorbitant price without batting an eyelash and, dodging raindrops, I dashed across the street to catch my bus. Juggling three bags of groceries, my umbrella, and the flowers wasn’t easy but I managed to make it home without dropping anything…

     As I returned my little dog’s enthusiastic greeting (and demands for dinner!) and unpacked my purchases, a ray of evening sun struggled through the clouds and illumined my bouquet, sending me rushing for the camera:

     Despite the weather, it seems spring crept into my kitchen after all. My rose-patterned teacup is filled with Dammann’s “Thé Bulgare”, a delectable blend of China and Ceylon teas flavoured with raspberry, sanguinello orange, orange peel, and red rose petals. And near at hand is my book of the week, Helen Humphreys’ The Lost Garden: set in Devon in spring 1941, it features Land Girls, the Royal Horticultural Society, roses, and Virginia Woolf – a combination guaranteed to attract my attention, even without the lovely dust-jacket!

© Florence Berlioz 2012

     I met Lauren at a conference in London last November and was much taken with her friendly, vivacious manner and fascinating take on Elizabeth Bowen. She was a reassuring figure among the older, more intimidating, academics. Delighted to find in her a fellow writer and Parisian, I was most impressed (and maybe also a trifle envious!) when she mentioned her first book was being published. Here is her own take on this important day, as well as an interview she gave on Bookslut  earlier this month. 

     Saturday night, I was reading Yeats in bed when I came across another mention of apples – which was hardly surprising, for the figure of the apple-bearing temptress is a recurrent one in Irish Celtic mythology. My favourite instance is the tale of Prince Conle, who was out on the Hill of Usnech one day with his father and attendants when a fairy appeared to him. She spoke to him of a land where there was neither death nor want, sorrow nor sin, and promised him love and eternal youth if he would follow her there. Alarmed for his son, the king commanded his druid to sing so as to drown out the fairy’s voice. Before leaving, however, she threw Conle a magical apple, each bite of which increased his longing for the fairy and the land she had spoken of. A month later, the fairy reappeared, and this time Conle followed her onto her ship of crystal and the two sailed away, never to be seen again.

     “The Song of Wandering Aengus”, from Yeats’s 1899 collection of poems The Wind Among the Reeds, features not Conle, but another hero of Irish mythology, the eponymous Aengus. One night, a maiden called Caer appears to Aengus in a dream and, sick with love for her, Aengus travels for many years in search of her. When at last he finds her on the edge of a lake, it is only to discover that she is under an enchantment, forced to live every other year as a swan. (I wonder, could this be the origin of Swan Lake?) Undeterred, Aengus jumps into the lake after her and is also transformed into a swan. Together they sing songs of such beauty that those who hear them are lulled to sleep. For a year they live thus, before regaining their human shape.

     Yeats’ Aengus has not found Caer yet. Like Conle, he is consumed with desire for a woman he has glimpsed only once. Unlike Conle, however, he is condemned to wander eternally in search of the lovely vision, which flits tantalizingly before him, ever just out of reach. The magical apple Conle is given is echoed by the apple-blossom Aengus’ vision wears in her hair, as well as by the last line of the poem. While the Irish apple is far from embodying sin, the way the Christian apple does, it nevertheless does share with it a certain transgressive quality, in that it gives the eater a glimpse of something beyond mortal experience and stirs up within him a deep unrest, an unappeasable dissatisfaction with his lot in life. This longing to transcend human experience will shape his destiny: for ever after, Conle, Aengus, and I would argue, the poet himself, will strain towards that elusive vision of loveliness, whether this last stands for love, immortality, or the poetic ideal. Here too, the apple has a fatal power.

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The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

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When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

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Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

© Florence Berlioz 2012

     “But what about Eve’s apple?” one boy was saying. “I thought it was her apple, not Adam’s!” The group got off before I could hear what explanation his comrades would offer up, which was probably just as well, as the incongruity of the situation was threatening to overcome me entirely.

     Inevitably, as the metro rattled onwards, I ended up pondering the boy’s question myself. ‘Adam’s apple’ is such a part of everyday language that I do not think I had ever paused before to consider the Biblical meaning of the expression. Religious iconography and literature have focused almost exclusively on the figure of Eve in the Garden of Eden, on her outstretched arm, the bend of her wrist and the curve of her fingers about the apple as she proffers it to her companion. Then comes the well-known sequence of events: the fatal bite, the wrath of God, and the flaming sword barring the couple from Eden. The apple has become so linked with Eve that it requires a moment’s thought to remember how it wound up in Adam’s throat.

     The Bible gives only the bare facts: “[Eve] took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.” (Genesis 3:6, King James Version). The simplicity of the text inevitably leaves it open to interpretation. The forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, for example, is not identified as an apple: scholars have argued that it could just as well have been a pomegranate, an orange, or a fig. That early on it came to be assimilated with the apple is the result both of the confusion caused by the Latin word malum in the 4^th century Vulgate, which can be translated either as “evil” or as “apple”, and of the Renaissance conflation of the Biblical fruit and the golden apples of immortality in the Greek myth of the Garden of the Hesperides. The verb “eat” is similarly vague: nowhere does the text specify just how much of the fruit Adam ate – for all we know, he may have guzzled down a dozen of them before his conscience kicked in. However, the single bite and thunderclap version which has taken such firm root in the collective consciousness is infinitely more dramatic.

     So too is the popular addition that depicts Adam so overcome with remorse at that one bite that he actually chokes on it. It remains lodged in his throat, and the tell-tale bulge is passed on to his sons and down through the generations, as an eternal reminder of man’s weakness and guilt. However, one element at the heart of this fable strikes an ambivalent note, which allows for a less pessimistic reading – or, at any rate, enables a glimmer of hope to penetrate the pervading aura of guilt and gloom: whatever it is, something prevents Adam from swallowing that fateful bite; so that weak and sinful though he may be, he is perhaps not wholly corrupt. In this light, the piece of apple stuck in his throat stands not only as a punishment, but also as a promise of redemption – significantly, Christ, too, is often represented with an apple in his hand. The apple’s midway location in Adam’s throat reflects the duality of man’s nature – his “lying in the gutter but looking up at the stars” destiny, to misquote Wilde – and suggests the possibility of his one day being able to cough up the offending mouthful and thus save himself (hello Snow White!).

     The story of Adam’s apple certainly isn’t a scientific way of explaining this particularity of the male physique, yet it is interesting to note how it has persisted through the centuries, despite countless religious, political, and cultural upheavals, becoming an unquestioned fixture of the English (and French) language, to the exclusion of any other terminology. There is only one other way of referring to it, but somehow I cannot imagine anyone saying or writing (with a straight face, at least): “His prominentia laryngea bobbed up and down as he swallowed nervously”…  

© Florence Berlioz 2012

          The Story of a Marriage

     Ostensibly, it is a love story – or rather, the story of a love triangle. In the Sunset District of San Francisco, Pearlie Cook leads the quiet and uneventful life of a typical nineteen fifties housewife, caring for her husband and her young son. Pearlie believes she is happy, until the arrival of an old friend of her husband’s rocks the safety of her world. For Charles “Buzz” Drumer once had an affair with Holland Cook, and now he wants him back. And he wants Pearlie to help him. During the following six months, Pearlie struggles to come to terms with Buzz’s revelations and battles with her rival over who has the greater claim on Holland’s affections. With a shock, Pearlie realizes her life is a sham, her marriage an elaborate construction of delusions and lies.

     “We think we know the ones we love” Pearlie repeats with increasing bitterness throughout the novel. Significantly, the story is told from a one-sided – lop-sided – point of view. Like Pearlie, the reader is left to play a solitary game of narrative blind-man’s-buff, painstakingly trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together in order to understand. The deep-rooted belief that love and marriage create an unshakeable bond of shared understanding between two people is shattered by Holland’s impenetrable exterior as much as by Pearlie’s discoveries. The painful guesswork Pearlie is reduced to reveals the difficulty, the impossibility even, of knowing another person completely. For all that, Pearlie is not cast as a victim. On the contrary, her mistakes, her assumptions, her wilful blindness to certain tell-tale signs that all was not well in her marriage make her as responsible for the present crisis as her husband’s secretiveness and Buzz’s trouble-making. Over the years, the fiction she has created around her marriage, her own distorting version of the truth, is in itself a form of dishonesty towards her husband. Pearlie’s realization of her culpability makes this as much a novel about self-knowledge as about knowledge of another person.

     Indeed, lack of self-knowledge appears to be the core problem of Holland Cook’s life. Pearlie has always believed that her husband has a heart condition, the result of the injuries he suffered during the Second World War, and has used his medical condition to explain and excuse his behaviour. Buzz reveals that, like him, Holland was in fact hospitalized for having a nervous breakdown. Holland has never fully recovered from the trauma of the war and what Pearlie has taken for physical frailty is in fact emotional fragility. Somewhere along the way, amid the violence and bloodshed, Holland Cook lost himself. His relationship with Buzz, his flawed marriage to Pearlie, and his aborted affair with a neighbourhood girl, all bear witness to his deep-seated confusion and to his fumbling quest for a sense of identity. It is very telling that in Pearlie and Buzz’s battle of wills over who is going to get Holland, they never once stop to ask for his opinion, to consult his feelings and wishes. On the pretext of protecting Holland, they strip him of his voice and will. Throughout the novel he remains a central but nebulous figure. We almost never hear him speak and there are no explanations between him and Pearlie. Everything happens underground. Even the final confrontation between Holland and Buzz takes place while Pearlie is asleep and only the sight of her husband’s broken nose the following morning reveals that something untoward occurred. Typically, no mention will ever be made of the incident.

     In many ways, the America of the fifties reflects Holland’s identity crisis. Still haunted by the spectre of the Second World War, it is now in the grip of the Korean War. At the same time, the McCarthy witch hunt is in full swing: in the Sunset District, curtains twitch as people spy on their neighbours, and the air is thick with whispered denunciations. The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg unfolds parallel to the domestic war being waged in the Cook household, prompting a comparison between the two. The private issue of marital loyalty becomes a public concern from the moment it collides with the notion – sacred, in this time of national threat and intense patriotism – of loyalty to one’s country. Ethel Rosenberg chooses her spouse over her country, remaining loyal to him even in the face of death. Holland, for his part, has proven himself false to both, having refused to fight in the previous war until literally dragged out and forced to. But what incentive could there be for him to lay down his life fighting for America? He can feel no sense of duty because he feels no sense of belonging.

     Insidiously, the novel turns from the story of a love triangle into a story about exclusion: unexpectedly, at the end of Part I, the novel reveals to us that Pearlie and Holland Cook are “coloured”, a detail which goes a long way to explaining Pearlie’s initial diffidence when wealthy, white, Buzz Drumer appears on her doorstep. Not for nothing is Pearlie’s closest friend the only Jewish woman in the neighbourhood: part of their bond is their shared knowledge that they are both outcasts. In the same way, Buzz is isolated both by his homosexuality and by his having been a conscientious objector during the Second World War. Nineteen fifties America turns its back on cowards, Negroes, and perverts with the same implacable zeal as it displays in hounding out Communist traitors. From this point of view, the book can be read as a bitter indictment of the American Dream and its professed values of equality and integration.

     The Story of a Marriage is complex, subtle, and challenging, its moral landscape as shifting and ambiguous as the pervasive, oppressive, fog that creeps over the bay and disguises the city’s familiar landmarks. Thought-provoking to the very last, it is a truly remarkable work.   

© Florence Berlioz 2012

1. Dracula, by Bram Stoker (1897).  I have shied away from the black-clad, pointed-toothed villain for as long as I can remember, for horror stories are more likely to give me nightmares than delicious thrills, but the graduate course I am teaching this semester focuses on monsters in literature (c.f. my previous post) so at last I have succumbed. I must say, from what I have read so far, I am a little disappointed in the writing.

2. A Sea-Grape Tree, by Rosamond Lehmann (1976). I am re-reading Lehmann’s final novel for a new article I am writing. Set in the 1930s on an island in the West Indies, A Sea-Grape Tree takes up the story of Rebecca Landon several years after it left off in Lehmann’s earlier novel, The Ballad and the Source. Bruised by the failure of a love affair, Rebecca has come to the island in search of rest and forgetfulness. She did not bargain on meeting an eccentric cast of British expatriates, the ghost of a former friend, and Johnny, a handsome and mysterious casualty of the Great War who now lives in a shell-encrusted hut on the beach, in the shade of a sea-grape tree…

3.  The Fountain Overflows, by Rebecca West (1957). I haven’t had occasion to read any Rebecca West so far, but as soon as I heard about this on Cornflower Books I knew I had to have it. A large and eccentric family, bohemianism, and music lend it an appeal I simply cannot resist! The beautiful mauve Virago jacket clinched the deal.

4. Madame Pamplemousse and her Incredible Edibles, by Rupert Kingfisher (2008). Last week, I met up with a friend for a late-afternoon tea and a stroll. Well, it was raining too hard to stroll in comfort, so – inevitably – we sought refuge in a bookshop, where my friend started hunting around for storybooks for her god-children. That was when I came across this slim novel and was instantly enchanted by Madame Pamplemousse, her cat Camembert, and her tiny Parisian shop, which is filled with strange and magical things to eat. There was no question of reading it in anything but the original English, however, so I jotted down the title and waited till later that evening to order it online.

5. Songs of Blue and Gold, by Deborah Lawrenson (2008). This, too, I discovered on Cornflower Books (which is turning into a veritable goldmine of good ideas!). Based on the life of Lawrence Durrell, the novel takes us from England to Corfu, as a young woman delves into her mother’s past and her connection with the writer Julian Adie. I started Songs of Blue and Gold this afternoon: the weather was so exceptionally fine that I took a chair out onto my small terrace to read. Below me, in the courtyard, Aria (my beagle harrier) and Dale (my neighbours’ golden retriever) lay basking in the sun. It was such a warm, golden afternoon that it was easy to imagine myself on the Corfiote coast, with the waves lapping at my feet and cicadas whirring in the cypresses, high up on the hills.

     May the rest of March be even half as delightful!

© Florence Berlioz 2012

     The first in a series of seventeen-odd mysteries set in the Roaring Twenties, Cocaine Blues introduces the Honourable Phryne Fisher, wealthy London socialite and talented amateur detective. Phryne is finding London horribly dull, so when a retired Colonel asks her to go to Melbourne to investigate the source of his daughter’s mysterious illness, she packs her pearl-handled pistol in her trunk along with her cloche hats and fashionable gowns and sets sail for Australia with something akin to relief. In Melbourne, Phryne’s inquisitiveness and unorthodox methods draw attention to her as surely as do her bobbed hair and diamante garters. Soon, she is busy tracking down both a barbaric abortionist known as Butcher George and the local cocaine king, as well as succumbing to the flattering attentions of Sasha, a Russian émigré turned dancer for the Compagnie des Ballets Masqués, whose own motives in seeking her acquaintance are not all they appear. But Phryne’s talent for getting into sticky situations is equalled by her talent for getting out of them once more, and the reader is never in any doubt that she will emerge unscathed and victorious.

     Cocaine Blues is definitely lightweight. Phryne is a walking cliché of a flapper, and her need to light a gasper and/or pour herself a restorative cocktail every other paragraph made me sigh a little. When I discovered that in addition to being an expert at handling race cars and flying aeroplanes, she was proficient in street-fighting, which she had learnt with Apache masters, my sigh turned to a groan. Some of the plot elements were also a little over familiar, from the unusual circumstances in which Phryne hires her devoted maid Dot, to her acquaintance with two rough but good-natured cabbies who have a knack for turning up at the opportune moment, all the way down to her habit of telling the police what to do (hello, Sherlock Holmes!). Last but not least, if I hadn’t expressly been told the story was set in Melbourne, I would have had no way of knowing the heroine was in Australia – not that I was actually expecting mentions of kangaroos and Ayer’s Rock, but still! The Honourable Phryne could just as well have stayed in London, for all the difference it made.   

     That said, I hadn’t had many illusions about the quality of the book before starting it. And facile though it was, it was none the less amusing – exactly the kind of undemanding read that I needed as I lay sick in bed a few weeks ago…

© Florence Berlioz 2012