Troy Chimneys, by Margaret Kennedy

If Margaret Kennedy were still with us, I would be strongly tempted to write her a letter about this book, to complain about how she pulled the wool over my eyes, and then the rug from under my feet. Only in the last couple of chapters did I begin to suspect where the story was heading. Still, the ending came as a painful shock, and I finished the book with a heavy heart. I wish that I'd thought to pick up Lucy Carmichael as a restorative. I badly needed a story with a happy ending, so I turned to Miss Silver instead (and she came through, as I knew she would).

All I knew about this book when I started reading it was that it involved a collection of family papers, centered around a Regency gentleman. I have noticed that Margaret Kennedy often used fictional letters or other documents in her stories. In those I have read, they serve to contrast how something happens with how it is remembered later - and to show how it is frequently mis-remembered and misunderstood. The documents also show that even those close to an event don't always know the full story. This tension is at the heart of two of my favorites, The Wild Swan and A Long Time Ago. She must have enjoyed creating her fictional documents, her stories within stories.

In Troy Chimneys, we have the reminiscences of Miles Lufton, written while he is recovering from a hunting accident, in the country rectory where he grew up. A Prologue dated 1879 tell us

     In letters and journals of the Regency occasional reference is made to a person called Pronto who is generally mentioned as a fellow guest in a country house.
     Conscientious researchers have identified him with a certain Miles Lufton, M.P.; he sat for West Malling, a borough in the pocket of the Earl of Amersham, and he held an important post at the Exchequer during the years 1809-1817. He spoke frequently and well in the House, in support of Vansittart's financial policy. Nothing else is known of him save that he could sing...

In the 1879 framing story, Miles's manuscript has been sent to someone who is researching a friend of his, Lord Chalfont, the heir to the Earl of Amersham. There are letters back and forth with the researcher, which give some information not found in the manuscript. It is an interesting device, to be reading about people reading about the main character. It would put him at a distance, except that we have his own words in his reminiscences, which bring him to life. We learn about his early life, how he came to a career in politics, and how his "Pronto" persona developed. I didn't like Pronto much. He does everything with calculation and an eye to its effect. He is an apple-polisher and brown-noser par excellence. Miles doesn't really like him either, and in fact he almost seems to have developed a split personality. Pronto is in charge most of the time, while Miles watches (and disapproves). Only with his accident and long recovery does Miles emerge. In writing his memoirs, Miles seems to be struggling toward an integration of the Miles-side of himself and the Pronto-side. It is very interesting to watch, and I thought Margaret Kennedy handled that story really well.

But how she chose to end the story is another matter. It's well done, but it's just wrong. It's her story of course, and she was free to end it as she pleased, as she felt it should end. But it's still wrong. And I just need to accept that, and let it go. Or maybe try writing my own ending. Meanwhile, I'm off to read Mary Stewart, because I still need happy endings (a dolphin has just been rescued, and that dolphin better live happily ever after).

Clipped wings and false feathers

The Wild Swan, Margaret Kennedy

When it came time for Jane's Margaret Kennedy Reading Week, I was spoiled for choice, since I had stockpiled some of her books in anticipation. While I'm glad to learn that Virago is reprinting a selection of her novels, it is also fun to find older copies still available (and reasonably priced).  I chose this one because I remembered it had something to do with a film production in a small town. As I discovered, that's true, but it's rather like saying War and Peace has something to do with a battle.

The film in production is a Victorian melodrama, about the life and loves of Dorothea Harding.

[In] her day [she] had been an immensely popular novelist.  She wrote very moral romances with historical or classical settings, but her vogue was long since over and all her books were out of print.  Her literary reputation, such as it was, now rested upon some poetry, discovered and published after her death, which had at one time created a considerable stir and which still commanded a few adherents.

I immediately pictured Charlotte M. Yonge, but with a whiff of scandal.

Dorothea Harding lived all her life near the coastal town of Beremouth.  There a production team from the Blech Bernstein British film company has gathered. Adelaide Lassiter, who wrote a successful play called The Wild Swan, wants to soak up local atmosphere as she adapts her play for the film.  The critic Alec Mundy has been brought in to ensure the accuracy of Miss Lassiter's screenplay.  He is considered an authority on Dorothea Harding, since he edited and published her poetry.  His work demolished her image as "this spinster lady, so very prim and proper, living in the dear Vicar's pocket and writing prissy books for kids."  Instead, he argued, the poetry proves she was a woman of deep passion.  Based on references to "G." in the poems, he identified her brother-in-law Grant Forrester as her lover.  The team also includes Roy Collins, a rising young man at B.B.B., brash and cynical, who will eventually turn Miss Lassiter's screenplay into a workable script.  Meanwhile, he is there to help the work along.

One of his tasks is to arrange a visit to Dorothea's home at Bramstock, where a later generation of the family still lives.  Along the way, Roy sees swans flying overhead, and in the beat of their wings he hears the word "Never," just as Dorothea described them in one of her poems.

The fact that she must have been here took him so much by surprise that he paused and stood still. Hitherto he had always seen her as Kitty Fletcher [the actress who will play her], capering in a crinoline.  But now he perceived her as a real person, and wondered, for the first time, what kind of person that was.

Roy's curiosity about the real Dorothy becomes almost an obsession.  He feels for her "a kind of wondering sympathy," and later he channels a "helpless, hopeless despair."  In the second section of the book, we the readers are given many of the answers Roy is seeking, as the story moves back in time.  We meet Dorothea at age twenty, just as her older sister Mary is preparing to marry Grant Forrester.  It is immediately clear how wrong both Adelaide Lassiter and Alec Mundy are about her.  I suspected from the start that Miss Lassiter was completely off base, once I read that "She always referred to Dorothea as Doda, insisting, upon no evidence at all, that this had been her family nickname."  (It was Thea.)

But if the 20th-century characters misjudge Thea, so too do those around her in the 1850s and 1860s.  Here I think is a common thread in Margaret Kennedy's stories, at least those I have read: how we can misunderstand what is happening to us at the time, blinded by our own prejudices and interests.  But the past can equally be misrepresented and misinterpreted, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately.  Memories are fallible, documents are lost.  The poems that Alec Mundy discovered profoundly changed how people saw Dorothea Harding, but his interpretation created a false image of her.  At the same time, there is a packet of Thea's letters and manuscripts floating around, which could upend everything and wreck the film project (I do love books that turn on archival documents).  The British title of the book, The Heroes of Clone, alludes to the manuscripts, lost for a century.

This aspect of the story reminded me of A.S. Byatt's Possession, another story of Victorian poets revealed.  But it is only one aspect of Kennedy's complex story.  There is Dorothea herself, who is told far too many times that women cannot write poetry.  She does not accept that verdict, yet she gives up poetry for her own reasons (and takes up prose for someone else's).  Through Roy and his co-workers at B.B.B., Kennedy explores the work of a film studio, which she also knew from her own experience as a screenwriter.  Based on this book, I'd say she didn't have a high opinion of the films of late 1950s, when this book was published.  Yet Roy has written a short feature, an avant-garde work that shows real promise.  This delights his aunt May Turner, a retired school teacher living near Beremouth (a lovely character).  It confounds Cecilia Harding, the great-great-grandniece of Dorothea Harding.  Her family needs the £500 they have been offered for the use of their house in the film, but they resent and dislike the project and the team.  Cecilia, planning to go up to Oxford on the proceeds, initially snubs Roy, in part because he looks like "the plumber's mate" and also because he openly admits his lack of education.  She believes that only "people with a cultivated background" are able to appreciate literature or its creators.  Yet they unexpectedly find some common ground in Roy's quest.

I enjoyed this book very much, both Dorothea's story and the 20th century adaptations of it.  Dorothea and Roy are in their different ways very sympathetic characters, struggling to make their voices heard, to realize their visions.  Both in their own way are held back by a system that discounts their talents, though Roy will have opportunities Dorothy never did, as a man in the 20th century.  I am glad that Jane's reading week led me to this.  Now I'm off to read her review, and to consider which of Margaret Kennedy's books I will be reading next.

A summer in Ireland, a long time ago

A Long Time Ago, Margaret Kennedy

After seeing this described as "a hilarious evocation of an Edwardian houseparty invaded by an amorous prima donna," I put in an inter-library loan request for it, and a copy arrived just before Christmas.  I read it over the weekend, and while I enjoyed it very much, I found it anything but hilarious.  That isn't to say there aren't lighter moments - there are, quite a few - but this is a much more serious story than I was expecting.

It is divided into three parts, two short sections framing the central part of the story.  In the first, "Sunday Morning," we are introduced to Ellen Napier at her home, Cary's End, in a small village.  Though she has been a widow for seven years, she is still sometimes overwhelmed at the loss of her husband Dick.  Staying with her for the week-end is her daughter Hope, who settles down with her library book while her mother goes out to garden.  The book Hope is reading is a memoir by the singer Elissa Koebel.  "It was only just published, and she had been longing to get hold of it for two reasons: because it was said to be very scandalous and because it revived an episode in her own past."  She finds one chapter, "A Summer, in Ireland," which she realizes, "must be about us!"  Kennedy includes this chapter in its entirety, and I think she had great fun writing it.  It shows Elissa Koebel to be shallow and self-absorbed, rather amoral, overtly sexual, self-dramatizing to the point of tedium, and a writer of very little talent.

Thirty years ago, Hope with her siblings and her parents spent a summer in Ireland, living in a small castle in the middle of a lough with aunts, uncles and cousins.  Elissa Koebel, staying in a cottage on the shore, invited herself to the island one day and became part of the group, fascinating more than just Hope with her unconventional behavior and her singing.  Hope never forgot that summer, but what she did not know until now was that during those days Koebel had an affair with her father, who left the castle for her cottage.  As Hope is reading this, her uncle Kerran is on his way over to Cary's End from his near-by home, to find out how Ellen is bearing up under the scandal of the book.  Their older sister Louise and sister-in-law Maude, who were on the island that summer, want to have the book suppressed.  Kerran is relieved to find that Ellen knows nothing of the book, but he is taken aback to find his niece brandishing it at him, demanding to know why no one ever told her any of this.  In trying to calm Hope down, Kerran lets it slip that he has a cache of letters written during that summer by the various family members to their own mother, discussing the situation (and each other) with sometimes brutal frankness.  He offers to let Hope read the letters, to give her a better understanding of what happened.

The second and longest section moves back in time to that summer (a reference to "the King's" appendicitis suggests it is set in 1903).  I won't say too much about what actually happens at the castle and the cottage, to avoid spoilers.  This section is told mostly in the third-person, shifting in point of view between the family members.  In addition, the group includes Muffy, the family's long-time nurse, and the only outsider other than Elissa: a guest actually invited (unlike Elissa), Guy Fletcher, an Oxford colleague of Louise's husband Gordon.  This section also includes the letters written to the absent Mrs. Annesley, which give sometimes very different perspectives on the events that occur, and also shed some interesting lights on the writers themselves.  At the same time, the reader can compare their version of events, and the narrator's, with Elissa's account from the first chapter.   Myself, I distrusted Elissa's from the start, and I was interested to see the differences, the contradictions, in the others'.

I think Margaret Kennedy is saying something here about the limited understanding we may have of events even as they happen to us, let alone as we look back on them over the years.  Neither the letters written at the time, nor the later memories of those present, are complete or free from error.  Each member of the family has preconceptions, prejudices, blind spots.  All of Ellen's siblings have settled opinions about her marriage and her husband, for example, but they see only from the outside and therefore they're all mistaken, to one degree or another.  Kennedy's story is also an exploration of marriage, the bonds that draw couples together, which ones hold and which don't.  Here she contrasts Ellen's marriage with that of Louise and Gordon, as well as Maude and their brother Barney - while the reader can't help remembering that it's Ellen's husband who has the affair with Elissa.

In the midst of all of this, Ellen is also struggling with a spiritual crisis - an aspect of the story that took me completely by surprise.  It isn't a major plot element, but its resolution does have an important and lasting impact on Ellen.  For one thing, it moves her beyond her rather confused understanding of God.

For she was a religious woman, a communicant, and she believed in four Gods, or rather four Persons who bore the same name.  She believed in the God of the Old Testament  . . .  He had nothing to do with the Presence lurking in the background of the Gospel story, an impersonal and unsatisfying Divinity  . . .  Nor could she identify either of Them with Jesus, the Man of Sorrows  . . .  And fourthly there was the Holy Ghost, a mere name  . . .  [She] could not escape from the feeling that her prayers were being heard by a committee . . . 

I found Ellen a very sympathetic character, in surprising ways, and as I said at the beginning, I did enjoy this book.  My only quibble is the tendency of many of the characters to launch into interior monologues of some length, which I found a bit unrealistic.  They tend to slow the story down, and even worse, sometimes they start to sound a bit like Elissa's memoir!

A family together & apart

Together and Apart, Margaret Kennedy

As I was finishing the second of two fantasy novels that I read recently, I had a sudden craving for a story about regular people, something mid-20th century, rooted in everyday life.  I have that kind of book on the TBR shelves, but then we had an early Christmas holiday on Friday afternoon, and what better way to celebrate it than with a visit to a bookstore?   After reading and loving Lucy Carmichael earlier this year, I have been meaning to look for more of Margaret Kennedy's books.  This Dial Press edition caught my eye, and the back-cover blurb intrigued me:

It is 1936, and in British society the decision to divorce still constitutes a major disgrace - an alternative to be considered only in cases of scandalous adultery. But Betsy Canning decides almost unconsciously to leave her husband . . . Together and Apart is a love story of a most unusual kind.  It reflects Margaret Kennedy's greatest talents as a novelist: an accurate yet humorous eye for the minutiae of daily living and a sympathetic understanding of its oddities and complexities.

A brief introduction by Kennedy's daughter Julia Birley notes that when her mother wrote the book, "she and my father were puzzled and distressed by what amounted to an epidemic of divorce among their acquaintance."

The story begins with a letter from Betsy to her mother, announcing her impending divorce from her husband Alec.  She gives several reasons, such as Alec's surprising success writing lyrics for musicals, and her discovery that he has been having an affair.  Betsy insists that their minds are made up, that the divorce is the best thing for everyone, including their three children.  In return she receives a telegram: "horrified letter am returning england immediately do nothing irrevocable till I see you . . ."  But it isn't her mother who arrives at their summer home in Wales. It is someone else, with a decided agenda, and this person's actions will set off a chain of reactions that have completely unintended - and ultimately unfortunate - consequences.

As the chain of events unfolds, the story shifts between Betsy and Alec, their three children, and Joy, a family friend acting as a mother's helper over the summer.  Sometimes we see events directly through their eyes, other times at second-hand, through news (or gossip).  One section consists of letters, in which we see reports of the Cannings' situation spreading through their friends and acquaintances, with stories shaded to favor one side or the other, and we watch people choose sides - and even switch allegiances.  As time passes, we also see the effects particularly on the children, who must make their own difficult choices.

For me this book lacked the warm heart of Lucy Carmichael, but I liked it very much.  I could understand each of the characters, why they spoke and acted as they did, and sympathize with most of them - in the end, even with the person whose self-righteous meddling was the catalyst.  It was painful watching them make choices that clearly would not lead to their happiness or good, but they acted and reacted in very human ways.  On the other hand, sometimes what seemed like a bad decision came right in the end, against my expectations.  Actually, much of the story took me by surprise, because I assumed too much from the back-cover description of a "love story."  (I'm still not sure whose love story that refers to.)  The opening also reminded me of the 1939 film The Women, a wonderful melodrama about a wife who forces a divorce from her husband over his affair, against the advice of her mother.  I think that set up some other expectations in my mind.  Instead, I found a very different story, of a family torn apart and re-made, of the different faces of love.  I wish there was a sequel, to see where these people are in ten years, but then those years from 1936 will bring even greater changes and challenges to them all.

The introduction also describes the book Margaret Kennedy wrote before this one, A Long Time Ago, as "a hilarious evocation of an Edwardian houseparty invaded by an amorous prima donna."  I've already put in an inter-library loan request for it!

At the Ravonsbridge Arts Institute

Lucy Carmichael, Margaret Kennedy

I first learned about Margaret Kennedy's books from blog reviews.  I didn't get very far with the first of her novels that I tried, The Ladies of Lyndon, but reading Jane's review of this book on Fleur in Her World, I had that immediate feeling of "I need to read that too."  Neither of our libraries has it, but I was able to get a copy through interlibrary loan.  I enjoyed it so much that I found a copy for myself, which arrived today, so I can give the library theirs back (that's the only drawback to libraries: they do want their books back, often all too soon).

We first meet the title character at second hand, through her friend Melissa Hallam.  I liked Melissa immediately, and for a while I thought she might be the central character.  She is newly-engaged to John Beauclerc, a rather serious young man, a research chemist, very different from her usual escorts.  There are hints of an unhappy family situation, but she assures John there are two people she loves very much: her brother Hump, currently studying cattle diseases in Africa, and her college friend Lucy.  Melissa gives John a vivid description of Lucy:

"Lucy's nose is aquiline, not retroussé, and her eyes are grey.  She has a very delicate skin, too pale, but that's easily remedied.  I wouldn't call her pretty.  When she is well and happy she is extremely beautiful.  When she is out of sorts or depressed she is all nose, and dashes about like an intelligent greyhound after an electric hare.  She has a natural tendency to vehemence which is unbecoming to one so tall, but under my influence she occasionally restrains it.  She believes me to be very sophisticated - a perfect woman of the world.  She admires my taste beyond anything and does her best to imitate me.  She is incautious and intrepid.  She will go to several wrong places, and arrive at the right one, while I am still making up my mind to cross the road.  She is my opposite in character.  She is cheerful and confident and expects to be happy.  She taught me how to enjoy myself.  Until I knew her I had always been convinced that I must be destined for misery.  I thought it safest to expect the worst.  I suppose it was because everything in my home has always been so stormy and insecure; I was brought up never to expect anything to go right.  Lucy forced me to believe that I might be happy.  I don't expect I'd have had the courage to marry you, to marry anybody, if it hadn't been for Lucy."

John says in reply, "I shall have no difficulty in loving her," and I felt exactly the same.  I was half in love with Lucy before I ever met her, just from that wonderful description.

But Melissa is not happy about Lucy just at the moment.  Lucy is also engaged, to Patrick Reilly, a practiced charmer with more than a touch of the blarney, an explorer who writes best-selling books about his adventures abroad.  Melissa distrusts him, not least because he has been seen around town with his former lover, and people are talking.  When she travels down to Lucy's home in Surrey, the day before the wedding, she has decided to say nothing about it.  She finds Lucy waiting feverishly for a call from Patrick, which never comes.  And the next day, Lucy waits, again in vain, for the groom to arrive.  She is left at the church, with no word.

Lucy is naturally devastated, by her private grief and by the public humiliation.  Trying to put her life back together, on a visit to Melissa she hears of a job at the Ravonsbridge Arts Institute. On impulse she applies for it, and gets it.  It takes her to the town of Ravonsbridge, in the Severn valley (I never quite worked out where that was meant to be).  The Institute was founded by Matthew Millwood, a local industrialist who made a fortune with his auto factory.  He wanted the people of the town, particularly the working people, to have "the best of everything in art and culture."  The Institute offers classes in art, music and theater, with regular performances and exhibits.  Millwood died soon after his project opened, and his wife Lady Frances and their children now lead the council that oversees its work.  When Lucy arrives, she finds the work a welcome distraction.  Equally distracting are the conflicts she soon discovers between faculty members and with the council.  Then there are those in the town who feel the Institute is too much under the control of the Millwoods, a drain on the town rather than a benefit.

There is so much to enjoy in this story.  Though my heart broke for Lucy, and it was difficult to watch her struggling with despair and loneliness, it was lovely to see her take the first steps back to life.  Even if they lead her sometimes to those wrong places that Melissa mentions, they bring her right in the end.  The Institute with its artists and actors is a fascinating place, even as factions and intrigues threaten to tear it apart.  I wouldn't want to work there, but I loved reading about it.  And there are such wonderful characters, particularly Lady Frances Millwood, whom Lucy expects to be a modern Lady Catherine de Bourgh, but instead turns out to be much more like Mrs. Croft and Lady Russell.  The book is full of Austen allusions, by the way, which made me love it even more (I learned from Simon's blog that Margaret Kennedy wrote a biography of Austen)..  At one point, on a visit to Ravonsbridge, Melissa asks, "Where are we? At Rosings? In the shades of Pemberly?"  The part of Fitzwilliam Darcy is played by Lady Frances's son Charles, handsome, rich, and inclined to sulkiness, who is drawn to Lucy in spite of himself.  But Melissa has other plans for her friend.

This is such a lovely book, which kept me wondering til the end where Lucy's life would take her.  I really hated to see it end, having grown very attached to Lucy and Melissa.  Any suggestions on which of Margaret Kennedy's books I should look for next?  I do plan to try The Ladies of Lyndon again.