A Bluestocking Knits

Margery Sharp is on my list of "writers I think I would probably like but haven't read yet," and so when I saw The Nutmeg Tree on the list of books published in 1937, I said to myself, "Well, the time is now!"

The story begins in medias bathtub, as it were, with Julia Packett, a former chorus-girl and would-be theatrical producer of a somewhat certain age, defending herself — by way of the bathroom door — from creditors waiting to either be paid the £5 she owes them or to take her last possessions.  Julia, however, is re-reading the letter from the daughter she has not seen in sixteen years, who is now twenty and wishes to marry someone of whom her grandmother (the mother of Julia's late husband, killed long ago in the War) disapproves.  Susan, out of the blue, has written to Julia to invite her to come and stay with them while on holiday in the French countryside, in hopes that Julia will be able to convince Susan's grandmother to relent.  Deeply and somewhat unexpectedly flattered at this filial appeal, and not one to pass up a good opportunity when it arises, Julia decides — while still in the bath, and after she has sent a telegram (using up something like her last few pennies) in the affirmative — that the thing to do is sell everything she owns for the fare to France.

Complications obviously ensue, beginning during the trip across the Channel, and ramping up once Julia has reached the house in Haute-Seine and met Susan's fiancé, since rather to her surprise Julia agrees with her mother-in-law that the young man Susan has determined to marry, is while quite charming to be sure, Not the Right Sort — being, Julia recognizes, just like herself. 

Julia does not seem the typical 1930s heroine — she is plump and curvaceous, rapidly approaching forty, and has had a string of lovers, only one of whom — Susan's father, then a somewhat grim first lieutenant on a ten-day-leave in 1916 — was willing or able to marry her, and he had done so only, though honorably, when Julia had informed him that she was pregnant, after a brief affair that had begun with dancing in a nightclub, merely sentimentally on Julia's part.  Her Micawberish optimism, too, is sometimes "helped along" by what might be unkindly, if truthfully, called con games.  But somehow, despite this lack of respectability, Julia is an appealing heroine because of her warm-hearted, innocent generosity.

It was not her nature to deny: if she took lovers more freely than most women it was largely because she could not bear to see men sad when it was so easy to make them happy.

She might easily be described as "vibrant and delightful," but this does not seem at all formulaic because instead of telling us that Julia is vibrant and delightful, Sharp simply lets Julia show us, by being herself.  We go along with all of Julia's escapades — and there are many! — and we still like her because her heart is in the right place.

I think that of all the new-to-me writers I've come across in my choices for the 1937 Club, Margery Sharp is the clear favorite.  I enjoyed The Nutmeg Tree so much that I have actually read it again, not long after the first time!

Links to other readers' reviews of books published in 1937 can be found by starting here.

Not for nothing are the 1930s called the "Golden Age" of detective fiction, and there were plenty to choose from when filling out my list of books for the 1937 Club!  I decided to go with authors I had not yet read, though I admit that when it came down to the wire, I ended up rather sentimentally plumping for ones I'm already somewhat familiar with through television series, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham.  Vintage Murder is the fifth of Marsh's Inspector Roderick Alleyn mysteries, and it finds Alleyn on holiday in New Zealand, traveling by train.  With him, as it happens, is a touring theatrical-comedy company, headed by Carolyn Dacres, and managed by her husband Alfred Meyer and his business partner.  The company consists of eight actors as well as a handful of behind-the-scenes members, offering Alleyn a variety of personalities to observe during a mostly-sleepless night.  Once set up in their temporary home at the Theatre Royal, Meyer has planned a surprise for his wife's birthday party after a performance, in which a jeroboam of champagne will descend from above the stage into a basket held in Meyer's waiting arms — and although this has been rehearsed repeatedly throughout the day, it goes horribly wrong during the party.  Alleyn is more-or-less incognito as a visitor, but of course being on the scene naturally brings out the detective-inspector in him.

(I did not know, as it happens, how big a jeroboam of champagne is — it is, depending on who you ask, either three liters or four and a half, thus about four times the size of a standard bottle.  I had the impression from the events leading up to it and from the party itself that it was much bigger — "a fabulous, a monstrous bottle" — but I suppose that even one merely as long as my arm (!) would be pretty deadly if dropped from a great height.)

Marsh's writing style is easy and fluid, with touches of humor more often from dialogue than in description.  She clearly knows her way around a theatre — in fact, it was one of her greatest passions, having in her early twenties joined a New Zealand touring company, the start of a lifelong association with theatre, producing and directing especially in New Zealand.  All of her books, over thirty in the course of her career, feature Alleyn.  I admit that I haven't particularly warmed to him — of the television series, I've seen a few episodes of Patrick Malahide's version and Simon Williams' single outing (in that order, and I rather prefer Williams) — but I think this is actually the first book Alleyn I've read.  Vintage Murder does not in fact appear on at least two "best of Ngaio Marsh" lists (Murder & Mayhem's and Novel Suspect's), so I will definitely add some of those to my list of potential reads!

(This book, by the way, wins the prize for the most-boring first-edition dust jacket of my 1937 Club week.  How it annoys me that the bottle isn't even centered below the title!)

Links to other readers' reviews of books published in 1937 can be found here.

I chose The White Stag by Kate Seredy for my next read for the 1937 Club partly because I've actually read very few Newbery Medal winners, and here was a chance to amend that, at least by one!

The White Stag is the mythical retelling of the origins of a real people, a group which eventually split to become the Huns, whose most famous leader was Attila (a central character in this book), and the Magyars, the latter being the ancestors of modern Hungarians.  It is a slight book physically, less than a hundred pages, with perhaps almost half of those being illustrations, so that its cover description as "epic" seems to me to fall a little flat. I didn't find the prose especially beautiful or rhythmic, either, but then I was put off, after the end of the first chapter and the death of the wise Nimrod, by what seemed to me simply nationalistic self-justification. "Looking for the promised land" is a weak excuse for plundering and killing those who are in one's way, especially when said promised land is Hungary and the pillaging and slaughter spreads across an entire continent, as far as Rome, Constantinople, and even Gaul. The Wikipedia article on Attila points out that "the Hungarian writers of the 12th century wished to portray the Huns in a positive light as their glorious ancestors, and so repressed certain historical elements and added their own legends" — certainly most cultures are not immune to whitewashing their history, but in Attila’s case this is a mind-boggling, appalling repression. Seredy herself — who was Hungarian-born, and moved to the United States in her early twenties — admits in her foreword that her version is essentially the fabulous and haunting story that her father told her as a child — "Those who want to hear the voice of pagan gods in wind and thunder, who want to see fairies dance in the moonlight, who can believe that faith can move mountains, can follow the thread on the pages of this book. It is a fragile thread; it cannot bear the weight of facts and dates." But even if the goal of a story-teller is to make "dry" history vivid and memorable, there is still an obligation to truth, and Seredy herself literally ignores it.

My eyes fell on a paragraph [she writes in the foreword, referring to the concrete-hard, “very modern book” on Hungarian history that prompted her to write down her father's version]: "The early history of the Hungarian (Magyar) race is a matter of learned dispute. Their own traditions declare them to be descendants of the horde which sent forth the Huns from Asia in the fourth century. Our present knowledge of the history and distribution of the Huns tends to disprove this theory."

Disappointed with this "unending chain of FACTS, FACTS, FACTS," she closes the history book and begins instead to write down her father's version.  The omission of biographical details such as Attila's early leadership being jointly held with his elder brother — who is never mentioned in Seredy's version — leaves one with the unfortunate conclusion that facts are inconvenient here.

If a goal of The White Stag is to show children, as one study guide has it, that "adults may be harsh because they have been hurt and disappointed by life," then there needs to be much more context, for although Seredy points out how deprived of affection Attila has been since his birth and how emotionally hardened he is by that, he is still clearly in her mind the ideal of his people – "greatest of all leaders," there is "no one among [them] … who would not have died a thousand deaths for him". (The same study guide says blithely that Seredy's story "also features many children, as well as romantic figures such as the Moonmaidens and the princess Alleeta, so that young readers will not grow bored with a steady diet of adult politics and warmongering" (mostly the latter, by the way), when in fact the "romantic figures" of the women are, while beautiful, also flat and unconvincing stereotypes, who disappear almost immediately — after producing virile male babies — and the few children in the story are essentially small versions of the adults.)

The illustrations remind me not a little of Nazi graphic art, elongated and idealized, heroically glamorous — think a mid-1930s Wagner opera poster, even to the winged helmets. (And, yes, Hungary was part of the Axis during World War II.) There does not seem to be anything online about Seredy's politics — and admittedly, this is the only book of hers that I have read — but The White Stag does not, in my mind, bear up particularly well on its own, and even less so when one remembers the state of the world at the time of its publication in 1937, and what soon followed.

Links to other readers' reviews of books published in 1937 can be found here.

It was not difficult to find a copy of my next choice for the 1937 Club, as the public library down the street has a copy of Virginia Woolf's The Years.

One cannot, I feel, read a person's diary and letters without considering them a friend, even if only at a considerable remove of both place and time — and it is that way for me with Virginia Woolf — five volumes of diaries, six of letters!  Yes, she could be biting and sarcastic in conversation, and a terrible snob at times, but we all have flaws, and she could also be charming and sensitive and vulnerable.  But I'm afraid that I was deeply disappointed in The Years, and I hesitate, even almost dread saying so, as though I am somehow letting down an old and dear friend. I even considered, far too many times, not finishing the book. I could barely tell apart many of the characters, and about halfway through gave up and made a list of them with the help of study notes on the internet — while I was doing so, I read something that said that The Years was well-reviewed in its day but has fallen a bit out of favor since then, "not her best work" or something like that. I certainly would not have thought from The Years that Woolf is considered one of the greats of English literature, for the writing does not seem particularly facile — even the (short — too short?) descriptive passages that open each section — and although there isn't ever going to be much "plot" in a family saga ("I can make up situations but I cannot make up plots," she wrote once, partly facetiously but surely partly dismayed), The Years seems to have even less point than there might be. Perhaps it was an editing issue that quite a number of times, the pronouns get entangled — one person speaks, then another line of dialogue appears, as though it was the same person but it is in fact another, making the reader pause and try to sort it out, which never makes for a fluid read. It's also difficult to tell the characters apart because they seem all to be in some stream-of-consciousness daze at the same time, bored perhaps, or angry, or bored and angry, even to the point of these streams interweaving or colliding with each other, and so many of them more-or-less alike, each person being on the verge of some philosophical truth then losing it somehow — though I suppose, on reflection, that that is ultimately the truest thing about the human condition, that Woolf has put her finger on it exactly. We do so often seem to be on the verge of a great understanding of ourselves — war is hell so why don't we just stop? why are so many people not free to live their lives as their true selves? how can we know others if we do not know ourselves? &c. &c. &c. — then losing it or getting distracted. It is hard, too, as a reader — and I would like to think that even in 1937 I would be revolted, though, sadly, I can never know for certain — to read her casual and clearly-disgusted remarks about "greasy Jews" or servants: "Maids bothered Kitty with their demure politeness; with their inscrutable, pursed-up faces. But they were very useful." (Now, of course this is a character's thoughts, not an authorial observation, but it is only one instance of that particular kind of English upper-middle class superiority, still well in evidence in the 1930s, that appears here so complacently.) The only marginalized faction (for want of a better word) of society that seems to come off well in Woolf's opinion is homosexuals (who are, rather surprisingly, given Woolf's own experiences, exclusively male — though I did get the impression from her letters and diaries that she was tolerant of homosexuality but had mixed feelings about what she called "Sapphism"), but on the other hand, the homosexual character's foreignness is the "different" aspect of him most often pointed out, usually to his detriment. Someone called The Years a scathing indictment of British society, but so very many of these aspects are treated as natural that they come across simply as the way things are, not as things that must be changed if we are to survive as a humane civilization. I do know that this novel took Woolf a very long time to write, with much editing and polishing and revision and cutting — "I wonder if anyone has ever suffered so much from a book as I have from The Years," she wrote — and it just seems to me at the end that perhaps too much was cut, or the wrong things, for although the impressionistic feel of the novel shows the fragmentary nature of life as it so often really is, even in retrospect, it does not leave me with the ultimate cohesiveness of, say, a Monet landscape, but as though with the distinctly, sometimes violently separate pieces of a Cubist Picasso portrait.

Reviews are popping up all over the place, but the "main" page for the 1937 Club can be found here.

For the 1937 Club hosted by Simon of "Stuck in a Book" and Karen of "Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings", I made quite a decent-sized list of intriguing titles, then set out to see if I could find a copy of those, and of the ones I could on that rapidly-shrinking list, a considerable number were in fact children's books. I wasn't entirely sure about Eve Garnett's The Family from One End Street, but I'm glad that I didn't skip over it, as it turned out to be delightful.

It is essentially a series of adventures centering on the Ruggles family, in a (fictional) small town in south-east England. 

Mrs. Ruggles was a Washerwoman [the story begins,] and her husband was a Dustman. “Very suitable too,” she would say, though whether this referred to Mr. Ruggles himself, or the fact that they both, so to speak, cleaned up after other people, it was hard to decide.

With seven children, one would imagine — correctly — that a great many adventures ensue.  The general tone reminded me not a little of a more-realistic P.L. Travers, sort of quietly amused at the hijinks, though of course Mr. Banks is something or other in the City, while the Ruggles family are unapologetically working-class, often having difficulty making ends meet even in what we would now call a two-income family — apparently this was in fact one of the first children's novels centered on a working-class family.  Like Travers, too, there are often details that perhaps only an adult would appreciate — Mr. and Mrs. Ruggles at the Tate wanting to see pictures "more cheerful" (than "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose"!) so they go into the next room "and enjoy battle scenes and shipwrecks"! — or tea-cakes that have "a look of great breeding".  As I write this now, the story reminds me as well of "Life With Father", even of Wodehouse in ways, in that the adventures and mishaps arise from character, from the various family members' attempts to get out of the scrapes they have inadvertently found themselves in — a neighbor's green-silk petticoat ruined when oldest child Lily Rose is trying to be helpful, a school-uniform cap floating off on the waves during a visit to the seaside (a lost cap being disastrous for a working-class family whose children most likely don't all get to go to secondary school, not to mention that eleven-year-old Kate is extraordinarily proud of her "new velours hat with the beautiful striped school band"!), the irresistible appeal of Mickey Mouse at the cinema to a boy to whom the fourpence admission is a fortune.  Despite what some readers have seen as a patronising "buck up" attitude of superiority towards the working class — which might be interpreted as Garnett's aren't-the-working-class-amusing perspective — I found this a highly enjoyable story about a family who, despite a propensity for scrapes, and the occasional cross word, clearly are very fond of each other.

Perhaps needless to say — since I rate the Mary Poppins series, "Life With Father," and Wodehouse all among my personal classics! — I enjoyed this very much, and look forward to reading it again, along with the Ruggles family's further adventures!

(I read a copy online, by the way, that is dated 1917, which is clearly untrue — for one thing, the author was born in 1900, and while it is not impossible for her to have written this in her teens, she did not.  For another, the verso of the title page states that it was awarded the Carnegie Medal for 1917, and even if like me you don’t know what year the Carnegie Medal was established, it is a simple matter of looking it up — 1936. I suspect some copyright shenanigans going on, but suppose it is a moot point now.)

Links to other readers' reviews of books published in 1937 can be found here.

I came across The Far-Distant Oxus, as apparently many other readers have, by way of its appearance not only on Wikipedia's list of novels published in 1937 but on a number of if-you-like-"Swallows and Amazons"-you'll-like-this lists, and this plus the novelty that it was written by two schoolgirls, about the same age as the children they were writing about, was appealing enough for me to hunt down an early edition. 

It feels more than a bit churlish to say that I didn't like it much — I appreciate it for what it is, a full-length novel written by a pair of fifteen-year-old school friends, who were not only determined enough to plan it all out and write it (editing each other's chapters apparently without qualm or rancor!) but were also brave enough to send it to Arthur Ransome, who even in 1937 was quite famous.  Full marks there!  But it does read like the writing of schoolgirls — intelligent ones, well-read ones, to be sure, just very young.  (Did children in 1937 really say "Umm" so very often? and not in a pondering sort of way, but meaning simply "yes"?)

The plot is often pithily described as "Swallows-and-Amazons with horses instead of boats," which was not at all off-putting, since I was a horse-mad girl myself, though alas mostly from a distance, and obviously I love the "Swallows and Amazons" series deeply.  But I actually found myself wishing that this book had more horses in it –there are horses around quite a lot, and the main adventure is a week-long ride across the Devon moors to a particular lake (parentless, as are the Swallows' and Amazons' adventures).  But while sailing is an integral part of many of the latter's adventures, the horses seem much less integral in the former, almost as though they are simply the means of getting to the lake, not characters in their own right, as often "Swallow" and "Amazon" almost seem to be.  Whether by accident or design, one of the advantages of having youngest-brother Roger or new friends Dorothea and Dick Callum is that much technical detail can be supplied without it being dull authorial exposition — this is very similar to one of Stephen Maturin's functions in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, or Hastings' to Poirot and Watson's to Sherlock Holmes — and I think this story could have benefited from one of those.  (And more horses.)  The Oxus children are all somewhat interchangeable, except for the almost absurdly-perfect schoolgirl-fantasy boy Maurice — darkly good-looking, superbly capable and resourceful, and mysterious! — and don’t really hold up well in comparison to Ransome's deft characterizations of the four Walker children and the two Blackett girls, and re-reading Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy family series recently reminded me of the same thing, that Ransome and Enright both have characters which are not just physically different from each other but in character as well, which comes out in both their actions and their conversation.

All things considered, I appreciated reading this — horses (though not enough!), some beautiful descriptive passages — but I daresay that if I'd read The Far-Distant Oxus when I was ten, I would have loved it —

(For those of us who have not read much Matthew Arnold, the title refers to the river in Central Asia — the Amu Darya, classically the Oxus — featured in Arnold's narrative poem "Sohrab and Rustum," which so enchanted these young authors that their characters re-christen numerous landmarks along their journey with names from the poem.)

Links to other readers' reviews of books published in 1937 can be found here.

The 1937 Club is the latest iteration of an online book club hosted by Simon of "Stuck in a Book" — the only requirement is that the book one reads is published in the year in the current club's title!

Not being able to produce off the top of my head a list of novels published in 1937, I went to Wikipedia's list thereof as a starting place.  I decided, with some regret, not to read books I have already read — and so out went The Hobbit, On the Banks of Plum Creek, Summer Moonshine, and The Broken Ear, although it would be interesting to re-read them in the light of having been published in 1937, and their respective reflections (or not …) of that year.  But when I saw Baby Island by Carol Ryrie Brink, you could have knocked me over with a feather — 1937?! impossible!  Why, I bought a copy from the Scholastic classroom book orders service when I was in, what, fifth or sixth grade, and read it literally umpteen times, and it wasn't that old then!

But it was, of course.

It's not a little surprising — and luckily, amusing — to me now that I can still almost recite whole passages of Baby Island from memory, and yet some of it — I suppose the dated bits — simply went over my head at age ten.  I had completely forgotten that the ship on which the Wallace sisters sailed was bound for Australia to meet their missionary parents.  I do remember that in times of trouble the girls sing, loudly if possible, "Scots Wha Hae" — to stir themselves up, as it were, to give themselves courage.  (The song, like "The Star-Spangled Banner," has a now-rather-unpleasant martial aggressiveness to it, possibly as lost on the young Wallace girls as it was on me at the same age.)

But I deeply admired the sisters' resourcefulness, their situation — who hasn't dreamed of being shipwrecked on a desert island, especially when you've read both Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson?! — and the novelty of being shipwrecked with no less than four babies under toddling age.  The characters of both the two Wallace girls and the babies are distinctly drawn and while their predicament is pretty serious the overall tone of the book is humorous, and although the appearance of their own Man Friday and the outcome of the plot might be more than a bit predictable, it is a story for young readers, after all, and, impressively, perhaps apart from elder sister Mary's old-fashioned sense of decorum, it doesn't seem impossible that it could all be happening now.

(The cover art of the paperback edition has gone through at least three iterations since then, a similar assortment of girls and babies, though looking more au courant, as it were, each time.  It's interesting that the Aladdin paperback of 1983 is the only one that highlights the peril of the shipwreck.)

Links to other readers' reviews can be found here.