The subtitle of this collection is "The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes." Persephone has of course also published a collection of her war-time stories, Good Evening, Mrs. Craven (which I wrote about here).
I may have mentioned this before, but I don't read a lot of short stories. For me, the reason is right there in the name: they're too short. They often feel slight, insubstantial, unsatisfying. It seems like I hardly have time to get to know the characters before their story is over. I'm almost always left wanting to know more. I suspect this is partly because I grew up reading books rather than story collections, and books in long series with continuing characters to boot. There was always another book, more to their story. The short stories I did read were generally mysteries, like Encyclopedia Brown or The Three Investigators, where the resolution of the mystery brought closure to the story - and where the characters then went off to their next adventure. As I look at my shelves today, I find only a handful of short-story collections, generally by authors whose novels I treasure (Anthony Trollope, P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Canfield, Connie Willis). Kipling would be another exception, at least for The Just-So Stories and The Jungle Books (some of which I still have to read, with his adult stories).
I bought a copy of Minnie's Room because I enjoyed Mollie Panter-Downes's novel One Fine Day and the war-time stories - and also because I was ordering a copy of London War Notes (still unread). The Persephone "Publisher's Note" points out that these ten stories, published in The New Yorker between 1947 and 1965, "are acute descriptions of a class and a nation in decline." They "explore this theme of the English middle class struggling to live in the same way that it had enjoyed before the war."
All of the stories are of course well-written, and even in just a few pages Panter-Downes manages to make her characters come alive to the reader. The stories I found most compelling were the two written in the first person, "What Are the Wild Waves Saying?" and "Intimations of Mortality." The second is about a young child and her nurse, Kate, who "supplied me...with vast quantities of tender, uncritical love, for which I was never sufficiently grateful..." One day, the unnamed narrator accompanies Kate to a shabby apartment, where an old woman lies ill. We see the scene through the child's eyes, narrated by her older self, understanding more than the child and even the adult narrator. "Beside the Still Waters" concerns adult children with an elderly mother needing care, and having been through a similar situation with my mother, I found their story felt very real, and timeless.
It is possible of course that I just haven't met the right authors of short stories, so as always recommendations are welcome.
Showing posts with label Mollie Panter-Downes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mollie Panter-Downes. Show all posts
Sunday, February 14, 2016
Friday, May 2, 2014
The wartime stories of Mollie Panter-Downes
Good Evening, Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes
This was my first book-box draw of 2014, and as usual, the box gave me something that I didn't think I wanted to read. Given the choice, I'd have said that I'd read enough about World War II for a while, between Nevil Shute's secret mission and Agatha Christie's spies on the homefront, not to mention the quiet heroism of real-life war work in Jambusters. But once again the book box chose wisely, and I enjoyed this selection of Mollie Panter-Downes' stories, reprinted in a Persephone edition. I have to mention again that this is the only Persephone that I have ever found in the Houston bookstores. I'd almost have bought it just for that.
These stories were originally published, like her celebrated "Letters from London" column, in The New Yorker. Here the fiction is book-ended by two "Letters," the first dated October 14, 1939; and the second, June 11, 1944. I was struck by a detail in the 1939 column:
The stories that follow also date from the fall of 1939, through the winter of 1944. But they are not a chronicle of the war - that was for her columns, I suppose. And they are free from any sensationalism - no Fifth Columnists here. Most are set in the country, outside the bombing zones and day-to-day danger. On the surface they are quiet stories - an account of a sewing party, where members debate donating their clothing to Greek refugees; a couple who have nerved themselves to ask guests to leave; a mother worried about her children, evacuated to California, in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Through her stories, Mollie Panter-Downes explores the war's effects on ordinary people going about their daily lives. And their reactions seems very human, very psychologically and emotionally right. I could see a connection between these stories and her later book, One Fine Day, set in 1946, which feels like a natural sequel, where she considers one family's adjustment to peace.
With this book, I particularly enjoyed Helen Ramsay, who appears in several of the stories (the editor, Gregory LeStage, suggests that she is a stand-in for Panter-Downes). She copes in part through an acerbic interior monologue. In "Mrs. Ramsay's War," she is living in a small country cottage with her daughter Susan, as well as a friend's two children, their nurse and their grandmother, evacuées from London. The grandmother, Mrs. Parmenter, has also brought her two darling Pekinese with her.
Given how prolific a writer Mollie Panter-Downes was, with five novels and all those New Yorker pieces, fact and fiction, it is surprising how little of her work is available today. The editor of my Persephone edition says that she "disowned" four of her five published novels. I haven't been able to discover yet if that means she suppressed them, as Georgette Heyer did her early books. I suppose I could use my New Yorker subscription to access their archives and track down her pieces - all 852 of them. That could be a long-term project. Maybe I'll look for Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories... first.
This was my first book-box draw of 2014, and as usual, the box gave me something that I didn't think I wanted to read. Given the choice, I'd have said that I'd read enough about World War II for a while, between Nevil Shute's secret mission and Agatha Christie's spies on the homefront, not to mention the quiet heroism of real-life war work in Jambusters. But once again the book box chose wisely, and I enjoyed this selection of Mollie Panter-Downes' stories, reprinted in a Persephone edition. I have to mention again that this is the only Persephone that I have ever found in the Houston bookstores. I'd almost have bought it just for that.
These stories were originally published, like her celebrated "Letters from London" column, in The New Yorker. Here the fiction is book-ended by two "Letters," the first dated October 14, 1939; and the second, June 11, 1944. I was struck by a detail in the 1939 column:
Posting a letter has acquired a new interest, too, since His Majesty's tubby scarlet pillar boxes have been done up in squares of yellow detector paint, which changes colour if there is poison gas in the air and is said to be as sensitive as a chameleon.In all that I have read about the Second World War in Britain, I had never come across that before. Somehow that little detail - squares of gas-detecting paint - brought the war very close for a moment, perhaps because I could picture those red pillars so clearly, and myself dropping a note or card into them.
The stories that follow also date from the fall of 1939, through the winter of 1944. But they are not a chronicle of the war - that was for her columns, I suppose. And they are free from any sensationalism - no Fifth Columnists here. Most are set in the country, outside the bombing zones and day-to-day danger. On the surface they are quiet stories - an account of a sewing party, where members debate donating their clothing to Greek refugees; a couple who have nerved themselves to ask guests to leave; a mother worried about her children, evacuated to California, in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Through her stories, Mollie Panter-Downes explores the war's effects on ordinary people going about their daily lives. And their reactions seems very human, very psychologically and emotionally right. I could see a connection between these stories and her later book, One Fine Day, set in 1946, which feels like a natural sequel, where she considers one family's adjustment to peace.
With this book, I particularly enjoyed Helen Ramsay, who appears in several of the stories (the editor, Gregory LeStage, suggests that she is a stand-in for Panter-Downes). She copes in part through an acerbic interior monologue. In "Mrs. Ramsay's War," she is living in a small country cottage with her daughter Susan, as well as a friend's two children, their nurse and their grandmother, evacuées from London. The grandmother, Mrs. Parmenter, has also brought her two darling Pekinese with her.
That evening Susan, saying good night, remarked that she didn't want Camilla and Alan to go, ever. Mrs. Ramsay felt impelled to hit her smartly over the head but instead went downstairs to the living room, where Mrs. Parmenter was knitting under the good light and listening to the wireless . . . Mrs. Ramsay, picking her way among suspiciously growling Pekinese, remembered with a good deal of wistfulness the poet's assurance that the grave was a fine and private place.It doesn't take a war to make me feel like that - just a vacation with too much "family time" can do it.
Given how prolific a writer Mollie Panter-Downes was, with five novels and all those New Yorker pieces, fact and fiction, it is surprising how little of her work is available today. The editor of my Persephone edition says that she "disowned" four of her five published novels. I haven't been able to discover yet if that means she suppressed them, as Georgette Heyer did her early books. I suppose I could use my New Yorker subscription to access their archives and track down her pieces - all 852 of them. That could be a long-term project. Maybe I'll look for Minnie's Room: The Peacetime Stories... first.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
A day in the life of Laura Marshall
One Fine Day, Mollie Panter-Downes
I haven't been lucky enough yet to find an affordable copy of Mollie Panter-Downes's celebrated London War Notes, a collection of her weekly columns written from England for The New Yorker during World War II. I was able to borrow a copy through inter-library loan last year, but I couldn't finish it in time, and I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is for requesting a book again. I've had better luck with her fiction. In fact, I was stunned to find the Persephone edition of Good Evening, Mrs. Craven last year, since Persephones are even rarer than Viragoes in Houston bookstores. And while One Fine Day was re-printed by Virago, I was very happy to find an American first edition on-line.
It seems fitting that this book is dedicated to William Shawn, the long-time editor of The New Yorker, where her fiction as well as the war pieces were published for so many years. I didn't realize until I read her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that she continued to write her column after the war ended, up until 1984. In all she wrote an astounding 852 pieces for the magazine, which has to be some kind of record!
To me, she seems to have brought something of the journalist's observant eye to this novel, which chronicles a single day in the summer of 1946. The central character is Laura Marshall, who lives in a country village with her husband Stephen, a veteran of the war, and their ten-year-old daughter Victoria. Stephen commutes into London every day from their house in Wealding (which seems to be somewhere on the south coast, not too far from the sea). Laura and Victoria stayed in their home during the war, joined by displaced friends, women like Laura on their own with children. Now, without the servants they rather took for granted, the Marshalls are finding the house and garden almost too much for them, yet they continue to cling to pre-war standards and expectations.
This hot summer day is not a special one in any way. Stephen goes off to work, Victoria to school. Laura is at home when her daily cleaner arrives, but then she leaves to shop and run other errands. She speaks to her mother on the phone, she inquires about hiring a gardener, she stops in a tea room, she goes after an idiotic dog that has run away (and who is likely to return in the family way). As Laura moves through the day, the story moves back and forth in time, giving us a glimpse of life during wartime, or her introduction to Stephen, or a dinner party with friends who are leaving for Ireland. With Laura we meet people in the village, including the owner of the manor house, forced to let it go to the National Trust. Buying sweets, Laura chats with the young woman minding the shop, a war widow, whose announcement of a second marriage rather shocks Laura. The story also briefly shifts to Victoria and Stephen, in their very different days.
I am a comparative reader. As I read a book, I'm usually reminded of others, and I tend to compare and contrast. The most obvious comparison here for me is with the post-war novels of Angela Thirkell. This felt like a much more realistic account of life in peace-time, still recovering from the effects of the war, surrounded by reminders of it, including German prisoners working in the fields. It is also an account of a marriage and a family, coping with the strains imposed by war and long years of separation, reunited but still divided. This is of course an important theme in Thirkell's novels of the 1940s, though her Barsetshire families have managed to hang on their servants. None of her heroines is forced like Laura into doing her own cooking, none of her heroes after a hard day's work in London joins his wife in the washing-up, as Stephen does (however reluctantly and crankily). Thirkell's stories are leavened with comedy, like the running jokes over Mixo-Lydian refugees (available for kitchen work) and the constant warfare with the Bishop of Barchester and his wife. Panter-Downes's story is more straight-forward and serious, though that isn't to say it is humorless. I particularly enjoyed her description of the garden, which is proving too much for Stephen and Old Voller, who comes twice a week to potter around helping him:
The DNB calls this "one of the great British novels of the twentieth century." I don't know enough about the literature of the period to agree or disagree, but it's one of the best novels I've read about life after World War II. And as all good novels do, it left me wanting to know what happened next, particularly for Laura and Victoria.
I haven't been lucky enough yet to find an affordable copy of Mollie Panter-Downes's celebrated London War Notes, a collection of her weekly columns written from England for The New Yorker during World War II. I was able to borrow a copy through inter-library loan last year, but I couldn't finish it in time, and I'm not sure what the statute of limitations is for requesting a book again. I've had better luck with her fiction. In fact, I was stunned to find the Persephone edition of Good Evening, Mrs. Craven last year, since Persephones are even rarer than Viragoes in Houston bookstores. And while One Fine Day was re-printed by Virago, I was very happy to find an American first edition on-line.
It seems fitting that this book is dedicated to William Shawn, the long-time editor of The New Yorker, where her fiction as well as the war pieces were published for so many years. I didn't realize until I read her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that she continued to write her column after the war ended, up until 1984. In all she wrote an astounding 852 pieces for the magazine, which has to be some kind of record!
To me, she seems to have brought something of the journalist's observant eye to this novel, which chronicles a single day in the summer of 1946. The central character is Laura Marshall, who lives in a country village with her husband Stephen, a veteran of the war, and their ten-year-old daughter Victoria. Stephen commutes into London every day from their house in Wealding (which seems to be somewhere on the south coast, not too far from the sea). Laura and Victoria stayed in their home during the war, joined by displaced friends, women like Laura on their own with children. Now, without the servants they rather took for granted, the Marshalls are finding the house and garden almost too much for them, yet they continue to cling to pre-war standards and expectations.
This hot summer day is not a special one in any way. Stephen goes off to work, Victoria to school. Laura is at home when her daily cleaner arrives, but then she leaves to shop and run other errands. She speaks to her mother on the phone, she inquires about hiring a gardener, she stops in a tea room, she goes after an idiotic dog that has run away (and who is likely to return in the family way). As Laura moves through the day, the story moves back and forth in time, giving us a glimpse of life during wartime, or her introduction to Stephen, or a dinner party with friends who are leaving for Ireland. With Laura we meet people in the village, including the owner of the manor house, forced to let it go to the National Trust. Buying sweets, Laura chats with the young woman minding the shop, a war widow, whose announcement of a second marriage rather shocks Laura. The story also briefly shifts to Victoria and Stephen, in their very different days.
I am a comparative reader. As I read a book, I'm usually reminded of others, and I tend to compare and contrast. The most obvious comparison here for me is with the post-war novels of Angela Thirkell. This felt like a much more realistic account of life in peace-time, still recovering from the effects of the war, surrounded by reminders of it, including German prisoners working in the fields. It is also an account of a marriage and a family, coping with the strains imposed by war and long years of separation, reunited but still divided. This is of course an important theme in Thirkell's novels of the 1940s, though her Barsetshire families have managed to hang on their servants. None of her heroines is forced like Laura into doing her own cooking, none of her heroes after a hard day's work in London joins his wife in the washing-up, as Stephen does (however reluctantly and crankily). Thirkell's stories are leavened with comedy, like the running jokes over Mixo-Lydian refugees (available for kitchen work) and the constant warfare with the Bishop of Barchester and his wife. Panter-Downes's story is more straight-forward and serious, though that isn't to say it is humorless. I particularly enjoyed her description of the garden, which is proving too much for Stephen and Old Voller, who comes twice a week to potter around helping him:
The garden's vitality was indeed monstrous and somehow alarming . . . The result was that a vegetable war to the death appeared to be on, green in tooth and claw. The flowers rampaged and ate each other, red-hot poker devouring lily, aster swallowing bergamot, rose gulping jasmine. Cannibals, assassins, they sat complacent with corners of green tendrils hanging from their jaws. The cutthroat bindweed slip up the hollyhock and neatly slipped the wire round its throat."Green in tooth and claw" - "complacent with with corners of green tendrils hanging from their jaws" - I am chuckling as I type this (and casting an uneasy eye over at my house plants).
The DNB calls this "one of the great British novels of the twentieth century." I don't know enough about the literature of the period to agree or disagree, but it's one of the best novels I've read about life after World War II. And as all good novels do, it left me wanting to know what happened next, particularly for Laura and Victoria.
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