BARBARA COMYNS, Out of the Red, Into the Blue (1960)

After reminding myself of the joys of reading Barbara Comyns with my recent foray into A Touch of Mistletoe, I determined to track down all the other books of hers that I hadn't yet read. Like her sixth novel, Birds in Tiny Cages (1964), which I'm planning to read soon, this book, a memoir of her family's time living on a Spanish island, has sadly never been reprinted and is becoming rather hard to find.

It's perhaps not impossible to see why this one, at least, was passed over by Virago when they were rediscovering Comyns' work in the 1980s. It's paced a bit slower than her novels, and it's a bit more muted in tone. Writing about things that really happened—even allowing for a writer's inevitable latitude with the truth—seems to have restrained Comyns' wilder impulses much of the time. Add to that that the circumstances in which the family moves to Ciriaco (presumably a fictional name, as Google finds no trace, and I don't know enough about Spanish islands—alas!—to recognize it), and the conditions in which they live there, aren't terribly festive, and you have a more mundane book than you might expect from Comyns. But odd events undoubtedly followed Comyns and her family wherever they went, and there are enough of those here, coupled with Comyns' quirky perspectives on life, to make it an interesting read.

Near the beginning of the book, Comyns sums up her home life:

We are a small family: my husband Raymond, myself, and two grown-up children—Nicholas and Caroline. Raymond had been working in a government office as a temporary Civil Servant for the last fifteen years, which suited him very well because his salary was slightly higher than it would have been if he had been permanent. I wrote a bit, and had had some novels published, although only one had been successful. Still, the little money I earned was most useful because, whatever economies we made, we were always living beyond our income. Our children lived at home, and at last there were no more school fees, although this did not seem to make much difference, with the cost of living going up all the time.

Presumably, the one successful novel would have been her first, Sisters by a River, which came to fame because the publisher chose, somewhat embarrassingly, to leave her work unedited, spelling and grammar errors intact. Though another of her most famous works, The Vet's Daughter, appeared only a year before Out of the Red, and seems to have earned significant acclaim as well, so perhaps Comyns was merely be modest about her success.

Oddly, in this passage she changes the names of her second husband (Richard) and son (Julian), but not her daughter, whose name really was Caroline. She also glosses over her husband's job a bit—Richard Comyns Carr was an official in the Foreign Office, working under no lesser figure than Kim Philby, whose exposure as a Russian spy was actually the reason for the family's move to Spain. There is considerable discussion of "Raymond's" search for other jobs once his Civil Service position comes to an end, but needless to say no details about the nature of his jobs.

It is particularly when discussing the conditions of the island more generally, or the personalities of its natives, that Comyns is able to really let herself go. For example, the deadly effects of her first winter on Ciriaco might have been lifted from Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead:

It had been the coldest winter Europe had perhaps ever known. On the whole the island had fared better than most places; but the houses were built to keep out the heat, and mostly had no form of artificial heating, and the old and ailing had died off like flies. Every day the black-plumed horses drew the bodies through the streets to the lonely cemetery among the cypress trees. The worst of the winter was over when I arrived because the sun had become stronger, but, as soon as it set, the damp and cold would come creeping back. I thought of it as some malignant enemy, and the lack of proper lighting made it harder to bear. But when the morning came, the horrors of the night were forgotten, and I faced my floppy bun and cool weak coffee with calm happiness.

And then there are the harrowing stories told by the family's first housekeeper on the island, which could surely have made a novel unto themselves:

The idea of having a regular job seems not to have occurred to her until she had Paul, and then she had sometimes worked on farms as a dairy maid. At one time she had been cruelly treated in a home for  girls and separated from Paul; and another time she had lost her memory and wandered round the country in a red cloak with straw in her hair, and  eventually found herself in a nursing home. Soon after she recovered, she obtained a job on a farm; but the farmer died with his face in a plate of tomato soup soon after she arrived, so she had to leave. She had lived in a place in Chelsea called Squalor Court, where no one was expected to pay any rent, and, if the house was full, you could always sleep in an abandoned bath in the yard. Once a policeman who had the key of a house let her sleep the night there, and she slept in a golden bed with golden hangings, in a room with golden walls, and the policeman brought her a cup of tea in the morning. Every day there was a new story stranger than the last. It was rather like the Arabian Nights, but it did hold up the cleaning quite a lot.

This book is perhaps a bit like having tea with a sorceress, rather than watching her perform. She might, over a warm scone, demonstrate an amazing spell or two, but for the most part she is merely chatting about the oddities of life, with the odd perspective you would expect from someone with her powers. It might not be as dramatic as the tempests in Comyns' best novels, but it's still quite fascinating.

There's not a lot of indication of the passage of time in the book, and I confess to being bewildered by trying to make the book and Comyns' ODNB entry line up. Out of the Red was published in 1960, and ends with Raymond being offered a new job back in England, and the breaking up of the home the family has made on the island. That relatively little time has passed is suggested by the fact that she mentions that only one of her sisters has made time to visit them in Spain, so they have a lot to talk about when they're all reunited. But according to ODNB, Comyns and her husband in fact spent eighteen years in Spain—no small span of time—and seem to have only returned to England in the early 1980s. Now, mathematics has never been my strong suit, but I do know the early 1980s are more than 18 years after 1960, at which time their time in Spain was, according to this book, already ending, so either they moved to Spain more than once or something is a bit wonky in the state of ODNB.

At any rate, it seems that Birds in Tiny Cages may also make use of this period of Comyns' life (she several times mentions that women in Spain liked to keep pet birds in cages, so I assume she drew inspiration from this), and I'm looking forward to seeing what other events and concerns overlap there.

Finally, I just have to quote a single line from a scene in which Comyns is helping a fellow resident set up his things in a new house. It's a self-explanatory line, and one which all readers will understand perfectly:

I helped him arrange books and clothes, which resulted in our taking the books on to the balcony and reading.

BARBARA COMYNS, A Touch of Mistletoe (1967)

I've recently been swept up in another of my periodic orgies of interlibrary loan requests, somewhat to Andy's and the SF Public Library's chagrin probably. But this time I have been to some extent getting "back to my roots," trying to read some of the previously unread books by my favorite authors. This one, the seventh novel by an author best known for her first five, has been one of my favorites so far, and I can't believe I waited so long to read it.

I had already, long ago, read those first five novels by Barbara Comyns—Sisters by a River (1947), Our Spoons Came from Woolworths (1950), Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1955), The Vet's Daughter (1959), and The Skin Chairs (1962)—which were all reprinted by Virago in the 1980s. Some (though sadly not all) of those remain in print today. I liked them all, particularly Who Was Changed, which is one of my all-time favorites (and which I made my Comyns selection on my Middlebrow Syllabus). Virago also reprinted Mistletoe, judging by the Virago cover I found online, but perhaps in a smaller print run, since, unlike the earlier novels, their edition of this one seems to have become distinctly hard to find.

And indeed Mistletoe might have been a slightly harder sell. Comyns' books in general are hardly "cozy" reading in any traditional sense. Several of those early novels deal with the sometimes joyful, sometimes macabre details of country life as seen from the viewpoints of children. The children's cheerfully deadpan acceptance of both the pleasures and horrors of life lends those novels either a delightfully morbid humor or a very dark sensibility indeed, depending how dark the reader's own sense of humor is. But A Touch of Mistletoe applies the same sort of stark, matter-of-fact narrative voice to the adulthood and early middle age of its heroine and her younger sister, from just after the end of World War I until after World War II. During which time, the two women face, in unequal proportions, the vicissitudes of life, including an alcoholic mother, the struggle for independence, poverty, various more or less degrading jobs, marriage, madness, wealth, childrearing, artistic expression, widowhood, more poverty, abortion, borderline prostitution, and Blitz, among other things.

Not the stuff of cozy novels, for sure. In some ways, it's a bleaker (and apparently more autobiographical) scene than in Comyns' earlier works. And yet, as with the earlier works, Comyns' wonderful voice, calmly—even monotonously at times—intoning both the good and the bad, becomes hypnotic, hilarious, and devastating by turn (or, frequently, all at the same time). And if you're in the right frame of mind, all the tragedy and darkness is somehow as cheerful and life-affirming as a more traditionally cozy tale.

But then, bear in mind that I find Samuel Beckett cheerful and life-affirming as well (and come to think of it, Comyns' books may well deserve to sit on a shelf next to Beckett's)…

At first, the style of Mistletoe seemed a bit dense, but 20-30 pages in it all somehow clicked into place and I was hooked, hopelessly addicted to Comyns' incomparably wonky universe. Mind you, it's still a bit densely packed, but I urge you to persevere, because the density is part of Comyns' brilliance—how she transitions from one subject to another, even more disturbing one, in one seamless paragraph.

Take this longish passage starting on page 2, for example, about how Victoria, Blanche, their stodgy older brother Edward, and their widowed mother came to live with Grandfather:

Grandfather had been a Civil Servant in India and had returned to his family house when he retired on a comfortable pension, and he must have been very contented there surrounded by the things he knew and loved. His wife had been mislaid years earlier. I think she had run away with a young officer and was never mentioned. For years we thought her dead. But Grandfather had his son and when the son became an architect with an office in Cheltenham, he frequently visited his home and after he had married and had us children, we all used to come along too. Then our father was killed during the second year of the 1914-18 war and Mother brought us all to stay with Grandfather. At first this was a temporary arrangement while she looked round, but, as she only had an army pension to look round on, we stayed on and on until Grandfather's house became our permanent home.

The house was large and he seemed quite pleased to have us. It was Mother who hated living there. At first she eased her boredom by organizing a committee to deal with Belgian refugees, and for several years there were fêtes in the garden in aid of some good cause and a great white bundle called the Maternity Bag which provided linen for the village women's lyings in. But gradually she became thirsty and almost retired from village life. Grandfather's dreamy pink face began to wear a bewildered look and he shut himself up in the billiard-room as much as possible. 'I'm afraid my daughter-in-law is poorly' or 'Your mother isn't quite herself today, poorly, you know' were words that frequently crossed his lips, and when we children heard the word 'poorly' applied to anyone who was ill, perhaps an innocent child suffering with measles, we took it for granted that they had been drinking bottles of port or sherry. Our mother rather lost interest in us after the thirst got hold of her and, although our grandfather was vaguely fond of us, he certainly wasn't interested. Edward was sent to a second or perhaps third-rate school recommended by the vicar and Blanche and I had to make do with ever-changing governesses who seemed to know they were doomed as soon as they arrived and hardly bothered to unpack their boxes. The last one was a Miss Baggot, who was old and finding it difficult to get work; although she was frequently in tears, she stayed for nearly a year. Mother finally hit her with a parasol and she left after that.

Quite a lot of ground to cover in a couple of paragraphs (and poor Miss Baggot might deserve a novel of her own)!

If you're a fan of Comyns' earlier work, don't make the mistake I made—jump onto this dark little jewel as soon as you have a chance. Sadly, following an unenthusiastic response to this novel (philistines!), Comyns fell silent for nearly 20 years—until, in fact, Virago began reprinting her work and she was inspired to approach the typewriter again. Her 1985 comeback novel, The Juniper Tree, has recently been reprinted in the U.S. by New York Review Books Classics, but her two subsequent novels, Mr Fox (1987) (reviewed by Simon at Stuck in a Book here) and The House of Dolls (1989), as well as Mistletoe and its precursor, Birds in Tiny Cages (1964) (and indeed, the wonderful earlier novel The Skin Chairs) seem to remain unavailable on both sides of the pond.

I have to confess that I've already put in interlibrary loan requests for Birds and for Comyns' memoir/travel book about her time in Spain, Out of the Red and Into the Blue (1960). And I'm suppressing (for now, with difficulty) the urge to go back and re-read all the earlier novels.

If my raves aren't enough to tempt you, however, here are links to two tempting articles:

First, Camilla Grudova's selection of A Touch of Mistletoe as her "Best Book of 1967" on Granta's website—see here—not only made me feel more confident of my belief that it's one of Comyns's best books, but it also reinforced a rudimentary sense I had in reading it that few writers (and certainly few women writers of this time period) have written about poverty, death, pregnancy, childbirth, illness, and heartbreak as starkly and yet somehow entertainingly as Comyns.

And then, be sure to check out this marvelous piece by Lucy Scholes, which similarly convinced me that I had had many of its insights without realizing it (and which also makes me pine to read Comyns' diaries as Scholes clearly has—I'd consider selling a kidney to do likewise…).