DOROTHY WHIPPLE, Random Commentary (1966)

From a blogger's perspective, memoirs and diaries are usually the easiest of books to write about. A quick summary of the situation and time period, with perhaps a bit of attention paid to summarizing the author's particular strengths, are really all that's required. Once that's accomplished, you can gleefully abandon yourself to self-indulgent sharing of a few of your favorite passages. Piece of cake.

But Dorothy Whipple's Random Commentary is a little bit of an exception.

I'm surprised that so little attention has been paid to this wonderful little book, which was—according to its subtitle—"Compiled from note-books and journals kept from 1925 onwards." Whipple is one of my favorite authors and one of Persephone's greatest literary reclamations (in my humble opinion, of course), and she's also a favorite of many other bloggers. But not very many bloggers seem to have discussed this book, which is the closest thing we have to a full-fledged memoir of Whipple's adult life (her The Other Day deals only with her childhood). It's also unclear whether Persephone, who are just about finished reprinting Whipple's fiction (only her debut, Young Anne, and a second story collection, including her novella Every Good Deed, left for them to release), will move on to this book and The Other Day, though I very, very much hope that they will.

It's an odd little book. Whipple apparently began keeping a sporadic diary in 1925, but she never bothered with dates, or even subdivisions between entries, so that 20 years or so of her life runs together in a sort of autobiographical stream-of-consciousness. Some readers might find this a bit irritating (not to mention confusing), but if you can get into the flow it's actually quite entertaining and addictive.

Somehow, for me, the book also seemed more personal for its idiosyncrasies—as if Whipple were just making periodic small talk with me, sharing the bits and pieces of her life, without either of us ever feeling the need to nail down exactly what happened when and instead just enjoying the friendly flow of conversation. As such, I found the book to be a wonderful evocation of Whipple's personality, and it only made me wish—as I have every time I've read one of her novels—that I could have her as my next-door neighbor. (I've mentioned this fantasy before, and I think Rumer Godden would have to live on the opposite side, though I'd certainly like D. E. Stevenson and Agatha Christie to live on the same block as well. Virginia Woolf and Ivy Compton-Burnett could live a bit further away, convenient for more formal visits but not close enough to just happen in when I'm not at my best...)

Add to this that, since the diary begins in 1925, a couple of years before her first novel appeared, Random Commentary allows us to trace Whipple's charming reactions to her growing success as an author, on through the usual difficulties of being a middle-class woman trying to find time (and inspiration) to write, until, by the end of the diary, she is more or less an old hand, working with two different movie studios at once, each adapting one of her novels for the screen. Factoring that in, you can perhaps see why this is a more difficult book to write about than most diaries or memoirs: There are so many passages I marked and would love to share with you that I am quite overwhelmed and practically paralyzed by the thought of selecting just a handful.

It's wonderful reading about Whipple's literary triumphs, especially when they are just beginning, first with an initial disappointment and a self-critique that we soon learn to expect from Whipple:

My book has come back from Heinemann. I feel chastened and emptied of dreams and prospects. Only last night I felt bouncingly hopeful, and all the time it was lying in the post, coming back. Now that I read the book again, it reads poorly. I wonder if I am any good at all? One thing I know, and that is, I don't work hard enough. I don't dig deep enough.

And then, on the very next page of the diary, things turn around:

This is the proudest day of my life! My first book is accepted by Jonathan Cape. When, staying with Mother in London, I got the wire from Henry saying that Cape wanted to see me, my knees gave under me. I felt sick with excitement.

The insecurity into which Whipple fell with the completion of each novel is irresistible (though it must have been gruelling to go through), and is somewhat reminiscent of, though thankfully less extreme than, that suffered by Woolf:

Today I finished my second novel, called at present High Wages. What a relief to be done with it! I don't think much of it—diffuse, no unity, too light-weight altogether.

…

I cannot get on with Greenbanks. Shall I ever have done with it? It is about nothing—stale, flat—a hopeless failure, I feel. This book has not been properly thought out. Never begin another time without thinking the thing out. When will I learn?

…

I begin the second draft of my book [They Knew Mr. Knight]. The first is very scrappy. I don't see my way with the book yet. I thought I had a good plot, but when it is done out, it looks thin. I don't like having to concoct plots, I like doing people.

…

I am very unproductive at present. I suppose Newstead is too deeply interesting for me to occupy myself with anything else. Anyway, I hate my autobiography. How can I drivel on like this for 80,000 words?

In each case, it's nice to read, a few pages later, about her change of heart as each of the books is embraced by critics, book clubs, bestseller lists, and/or movie studios.

It was astonishing to me to learn that two of my favorite Whipples, High Wages and The Priory, each caused one of her current publishers to drop her—her British publisher in the first instance, her American publisher in the latter—though both surely regretted their decisions when the books went on to much success.

I also fell a little more deeply in love with Whipple every time she bemoaned the witlessness of people who stole her time away from writing:

A neighbour came and interrupted me all morning, by mending the wireless set. We didn't ask him to. I stood by in feminine politeness, but fuming. Women are too polite to men. They (including, alas! me) will put up with anything from them—endless supposedly funny stories, dull speeches, etc.

It's about halfway through the diary when World War II begins. Although Whipple mentions major events and the overall tone of the war at various periods, and although it's certainly a contributing factor to the fact that her wartime novel They Were Sisters seems to have the most difficult development of all her works, for the most part the war stays in the background. Work and people are always at the forefront of Whipple's life. At any rate, she seems to take air raids in her stride:

In the middle of this night, the air-raid siren went for the first time ever. A loud warbling screech. I heard it first, and woke Henry and Nelly. We scrambled into clothes, snatched Roddy, and went down into the dank, dark air-raid shelter. We were not in the least perturbed. The night was clear and still, with a glorious moon. We soon got tired of sitting in the shelter and went back to bed. About half an hour afterwards the All-Clear went. But about half-an-hour after that, the air-raid siren went again. We went back to the shelter, but soon re-emerged.

But it's really the touches of everyday life and of Whipple's sensitivity and observation that made the book so delightful for me, such as this observation on her marriage:

Marriage is funny. We sometimes part in the mornings, furious with each other. I quite hate Henry and he probably hates me with the same intensity. But if I go into town and see him in the street, I rush to him with the greatest joy, as if I hadn't seen him for weeks, and he beams at me as if no greater blessing could meet his eyes. I should think this is true for other married people everywhere, yet at every quarrel, one thinks it is the end and that no one else could possibly be so miserable, so unfortunate in one's partner.

And there is this echo of Woolf's endless troubles with servants, in which I found Whipple's decisiveness a nice tonic after Woolf's cowering terror:

Miss w. departs in an odour of sanctity and camphor balls. An embarrassing conversation at the end. "May I ask why I am leaving?" she said. I daren't say, "because I don't like you", so I reminded her she has said the work was killing her and that she didn't like the three steps down into the kitchen at the Nottingham house. She looked bitterly aggrieved.

You must see by now the difficulty of whittling down so many quotable moments to one blog post, but I will exercise some self control (a rare enough event for me!) and leave some of those moments for you to discover yourself, if it does become possible for you to read this lovely little book. And if it does, seize the day!

DOROTHY WHIPPLE, High Wages (1930)

How strange life was with its ebbings and flowings, its fluctuations, its inexplicable movements towards and away from…

This line, coming toward the end of High Wages, sums up rather neatly it’s elegant themes.  A page-turning sort of rags-to-riches story, but made unique and completely convincing by its strong dose of realism, this is the third Dorothy Whipple novel I’ve read, and the earliest (it was her second, after Young Anne in 1927).

As the novel opens, it’s 1912, and Jane Carter, who is still in her teens but has been working as a shopgirl for two years, arrives in Tidsley and manages, almost incidentally, to get a live-in job in a dress shop owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick.  I had a feeling right away that I was going to like Jane, because she has “moments”:

Jane lowered her beauty-dazed eyes to Tidsley market-place. Beneath that canopy, it was transfigured. The peaky roofs of shops and houses stood up darkly in the January air, the windows reflected a green-blue like the shell of a bird's egg. The lamplighter was going round, and now behind him shone a string of jewels, emeralds pale and effulgent. There was almost no one about. It was a moment. Jane sometimes had these moments. She stood still in them.

She befriends fellow shopgirl Maggie, and Wilfrid Thompson, a clerk at the local lending library and also the boy Maggie’s stepping out with—though Wilfrid is largely indifferent to Maggie and quickly becomes far more interested in Jane. We also meet some of Jane’s customers—including the tyrannical, wealthy Mrs. Greenwood and her spoiled daughter Sylvia, and the kind Mrs. Briggs, whose husband is what we would call “upwardly mobile,” has become Mr. Greenwood’s partner, and has moved Mrs. Briggs into a large, uncomfortable house and equally uncomfortable social circles.

Jane has her ups and downs—the loathsome Chadwicks stiff her on her commissions, short the girls on their meals, and later, during the war, actually steal from their rations, not to mention the fact that Jane gets off on the wrong foot with Mrs. Greenwood—but all the while she is making useful improvements in the shop, increasing its sales, and, most importantly, learning everything she can about the trade. 

As this is a plot-driven novel, and the way Whipple unfolds the plot is so compelling and enjoyable, I’m not going to give away much about it. The reader can hardly doubt that Jane will be successful in the end, and can hardly keep from cheering her small triumphs along the way. In large part, this is because Jane herself is so irresistible.  She’s a charming, smart, savvy, practical, tough young woman—all of which serves her well not only in the clothing business but later on when love puts a damper on her success…

For example, who could resist a character with this kind of joy in living, demonstrated as Jane is getting ready to attend her first real dance?:

She drew on her first pair of silk stockings, and in a passion of delight kissed her own knees.

Or this:

Mr. Chadwick saw her off with more fussy instructions. The wind was very high. Jane, a parcel hanging at the length of each arm, tried to keep her hat on by her eyebrows, raising them to incredible heights. But catching sight of herself in Fenwick's window mirror, she giggled and restored them to their natural level.

But what made High Wages so much fun for me—and you know how I love to overanalyze—was really some of the themes running quietly in the background. Jane has a budding social and political awareness that I would never somehow have associated with Whipple, as in this scene when Lily, the shop’s cleaner, tells Jane about her surly alcoholic husband:

‘Aren't you going to love me a bit I says to 'im this morning, and 'e says with such a nasty look, "To 'ell with you and your love." Just like that.'

And when she tried to kiss him good-bye, he'd thrown a plate at her.

'Whatever do you want to kiss him for?' asked Jane, squeezing out the wash-leather for the shopdoor glass. 'Throw a plate back at him, my goodness.'

She thought she herself would make short work of such a husband.

'No...' Lily shook her head as she dipped the bald brush into the blacklead. 'I couldn't do that. Bad as 'e is, I love 'im. Besides, it's me as 'as to pay for the plates.'

‘Ah,' said Jane, 'then there's nothing to be done.'

She would have liked to say something about the combination of love and economy. But she couldn't get it right in time. She often wanted to say things like that; get things neat; but they evaded her, until she was alone, in bed mostly, and then it was too late.

And when Wilfrid begins recommending socially conscious reading material to Jane, it rapidly bears dividends:

Jane went back to the shop, delighted at the unusual prospect of going out to tea. But the kindlier feelings towards the world in general, inspired by Mrs. Briggs, did not prevent her from asking Mr. Chadwick for a rise in wages. Mr. Chadwick was grudging and astonished, but Jane flung so many arguments, culled from H. G. Wells, at him that he was driven, in the end, to put up the screen of an extra half a crown a week between himself and this determined young woman.

Indeed, Whipple makes a great point of discussing her characters’ reading material. Wilfrid recommends Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Swinburne to Jane, but in his lending library he is always fetching the latest work of G. A. Henty and Charles Garvice for his customers (the former known for historical adventures, the latter for melodramatic romances). Maggie prefers Ethel M. Dell, and Wilfrid’s mother reads Augusta Jane Evans’s St. Elmo and Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur, both major 19th century American bestsellers. Sylvia Greenwood, on the other hand, sticks to Vogue and The Tatler. 

Dorothy Whipple

Clearly such a wealth of information about her characters’ reading matter is not coincidental, and Whipple’s position here is intriguing. She was certainly herself considered a rather “light,” popular writer—the very type of writer she associates with the lower class or less intellectual characters in her novel.  Meanwhile, her main character—with whom her readers would have identified so strongly—is rather highbrow.  This seems to be a textbook example of the strategies that middlebrow authors used (as discussed by Nicola Beauman and Nicola Humble) to satisfy their readers’ need to distance themselves from the lowbrow and flirt with (if not actually read) the highbrow.

The other element that I enjoyed about this novel is its striking awareness (as mentioned by Jane Brocket in her introduction) of the power of marketing and the problem of shopping as a way of compensating for what is lacking in one’s life.  Early on, we see Jane examining the window of a competing shop:

‘All that pink together, now. You'd come across the road to see what it was making such a lovely glow. A pink lampshade, a pink silk eiderdown, a fluffy pink blanket—a pink blanket—a crepe-de-Chine night-gown—and a little net cap with pink ribbons even—and pink bedroom slippers. It makes you feel luxurious and extravagant. As if you could spend all your money and never care. Goodness, I wish I could buy that little cap. But it wouldn't go with the bedroom at Chadwick's, and no one would see me in it, and I should never have time to wear it. But it is a darling.'

She even opened her purse to finger her money, but snapped it shut again and laughed.

‘That's a clever window!'

Would that most people now had that kind of self-awareness about being made to feel they need the latest iPhone, DVR, or laptop! (Though I suppose the fact that I personally despise shopping—except for books, obviously—and that I had the same cell phone for six years and only replaced it recently because Andy upgraded and gave me his old one—does make me rather curmudgeonly on the joys of shopping. I must be missing a gene or something…)

And later on, Jane mulls over the compulsive shopping of one of her customers:

There was pathos in this urge for clothes. Mrs. Mallett, for instance, with some secret flame burning in her slender body and dark eyes-what did she keep dressing up for? All those clothes she bought—red, silver, black, white—what for? To play bridge in the afternoons with the same women in the same drawing-rooms? To dine with these same women plus husbands, talk a little on singularly unstartling topics, play more bridge and so home to sleep and a husband to whom her beauty was a commonplace? Was it for that Mrs. Mallett clothed herself so radiantly? It couldn't be. She, in her secret self, held some excitement, some desire or search. She waited—but for what? She herself probably did not know. Ah, illusion! Nothing would come. But Mrs. Mallett would go on dressing up to be ready for it.

It’s striking to find such a passage in a novel from 1930, long before today’s hand-wringing about rampant consumerism and the insidious power of advertising, and I was even more surprised to find it in a Dorothy Whipple novel. Apparently, even after falling in love last year with Whipple’s final novel, Someone at a Distance, I have still tended to sell her short, to approach her sort of condescendingly as merely a good storyteller with a strong sense of character but little depth. Not that that’s a small thing—would that some of the canonical highbrow authors had been better at storytelling and characterization. But Whipple is clearly more than that.

Most people know (and I love that Persephone even mentions it on their website) that Virago founder Carmen Callil once described the selection process for the Virago Modern Classics this way: “We had a limit known as the Whipple line, below which we would not sink. Dorothy Whipple was a popular novelist of the 1930s and 1940s whose prose and content absolutely defeated us. A considerable body of women novelists, who wrote like the very devil, bit the Virago dust when Alexandra, Lynn and I exchanged books and reports, on which I would scrawl a brief rejection: ‘Below the Whipple line.’”

I wonder if Callil has ever revisited Whipple and revised her opinion of her in light of her becoming Persephone’s bestselling author and receiving the respect and adoration of a whole slew of new readers and bloggers? Of course, every reader has their own biases and preferences, and Callil surely remains one of the most brilliant and impactful publishers, really, of all time.

But still, I rather think that Whipple line she talked about has shifted a bit. It might be starting to look a bit more like a high water mark.

The lovely endpapers of the Persephone edition

DOROTHY WHIPPLE, Someone at a Distance (1953) (and a wee bit on The Priory [1939])

A few years ago, in my early giddy delight at having discovered Persephone Books, I got around to dipping my toe into the waters of Dorothy Whipple's work.  Sadly, the book I started with (I was also in the grip of a major obsession with World War II novels) was They Were Sisters (1943), a bleak little novel about sisters coping with the domestic violence suffered by one of them.  I read about half of it, decided it was just a little TOO soap-opera-ish for me, and quietly returned it to the library.  It wasn't until we were in London late last year and I came across Someone at a Distance in an Oxfam shop for the equivalent of about $4 that I decided to give Whipple another whirl.  (And even at that, you can see it's taken me some months to get around to it.)

In this case, I'm thankful that I always torment myself when I dislike a writer so many kindred spirits are reading and enjoying (Elizabeth Jenkins, for example, on whom I've now, after much self-flagellation, given up...).  I always assume there must be something wrong with ME if I don't like them.

True, this novel, too, might almost be seen as a bleak, soap opera-ish little novel.  It follows the breakup of a happy marriage--a happy family, in fact--as a result of the husband/father's infidelity with a loathsome young French girl who has been his elderly mother's companion, and on his wife's efforts to rebuild her life in the aftermath.  It could easily have been a soap opera, but for the astonishing perceptiveness of Whipple's insights into the characters and their motivations, which are so startling and so true-to-life that I started feeling like I must never have really read about infidelity and heartbreak before.  Ridiculous, of course, and yet that's how fresh the entire novel seemed to me.

Looking at some of the passages I marked in the book, it's hard to find a short quote that really sums up Whipple's subtlety.  Her prose is simple and forthright.  It's not as though she flies off into eloquent reveries. Her power is in the mundane details, the revealing observations tossed out as if they are nothing, such as this one early on, when Ellen is driving:

‘Why will they ride four abreast?’ she asked, avoiding the bare legs of a girl-cyclist, who wobbled, then bit her lip with such smiling apology that Ellen’s irritation vanished and, with perfect good humour, she smiled back.

We get a genuine glimpse of Ellen's character in just a couple of lines--she is perhaps easily annoyed, at least when under stress, but is also easily forgiving.  And a short while later we get a similar sketch of the loathsome young French girl (sorry, but I do enjoy calling her that!), whose name is Louise:

The sight of other people’s happiness irritated her.  Happy people were so boring.  It was unintelligent to be happy, Louise considered.

Although even with the loathsome French girl, we are given a way to understand her behavior.  She has had her heart broken by a wealthier boy who flirted with her and perhaps seduced her, before sauntering off to marry a woman of his own class. Loathsome she may be, but Whipple doesn't neglect to show us why and how she came to be that.

In fact, another thing that fascinated me with Whipple in this novel is her ability to bring so many characters to life.  My favorite example of a brilliantly overinclusive and overly generous novel has always been Elizabeth Taylor's A Game of Hide-and-Seek, in which, at one point, even a young couple waiting for a few minutes on a park bench near the heroine are sketched out in vivid detail, as if Taylor can't bear to neglect even the extras in her scenes, but must carefully give them all their dignity and their moment to shine.

Something similar happens in Someone at a Distance, in which we meet and seem to get to know Avery and Ellen; their children Hugh and Anne; Avery's mother and her devoted housekeeper Miss Daley, who is intentionally humiliated by Louise; Miss Beasley and Miss Pretty, Ellen's own "help," who really aren't terribly helpful; Louise's parents Monsieur and Madame Lanier, attempting to love their daughter but obviously happier when she leaves them; Louise's former lover who broke her heart and his charming and likeable wife, who knows nothing of the affair; and Avery's partner in his publishing business, whose wife left him but whom he never divorced--not to mention a full cast of elderly women at Somerton House, a sort of hotel/retirement home where Ellen stayed sometimes during the war, and the gruffly dominating Miss Beard, who runs it ("Mrs. Beard was a middle-aged Gibson girl, built-up hair, large busy, curved hips and that thrown-forward look which may have been due to her stays or to the fact that she wore high-heeled court shoes which tired her and made her cross, but which she thought necessary to her appearance"), plus one or two of Anne's teachers at school thrown in for good measure.

It's almost dizzying at times, and yet it's totally appropriate and fitting, because this is the story of a family's world, of all the people who come into it and influence it, and all the repercussions that their tragedy has on those around them--even a neighbor we only glimpse once, who is annoyed when Ellen, her world crumbling, refuses an invitation to coffee!

The breakup of Avery and Ellen's happy marriage--and Whipple shows us enough, in her subtle way, for us to know just how enduringly happy it has been--is almost unbearable at times.  I'm not a particularly weepy reader, I'll tell you, but there were times...  By focusing on the mundane effects, the daily details and habits, the impacts the turmoil has on the most basic day-to-day activities, Whipple creates so much more power and depth, and the sense of aching loss her characters feel, than if she had focused on screaming matches or sobbing fits.

Occasionally, Whipple manages to work in some bittersweet humor.  Here, Miss Beasley has confessed to being an abandoned wife herself:

‘Look at me,’ said Miss Beasley, throwing out both hands, potato in one, knife in the other, and standing proudly for inspection with her stringy neck and sparse hair.  ‘Look at me.  I’ve not done so bad, have I?’

It's not easy to create this kind of humor, I don't think, which at the same time makes a bit of fun of Miss Beasley's appearance and makes clear to the reader the pain she has experienced and perhaps a bit of self-deceiving triumph that she needs to maintain.

Ellen's healing and rebuilding of her life forms much of the second half of the novel, and I was honestly riveted by it, though I won't go into it here for fear of spoiling it.  So, just one more quote of a beautiful passage.  This is just before Avery's infidelity occurs, when Ellen, sensing Louise's fundamental loathsomeness, ponders how to ship her off (she has already attempted and failed to seduce Hugh, their son).  Ellen's uncertainties seem to me to contain striking observations about marriage:

A happily married woman acquires the habit of referring everything to, discussing everything with, her husband.  Even the smallest things.  Like bad coal, for instance.

…

For twenty years, Ellen had been so used to acting with Avery, never without him, that she had waited for him to agree that something must be done about Louise.  Suddenly, she knew that if it was to be done, she must do it herself and without telling him.

It was a momentous decision for her to come to.  She didn’t like making it at all.  She felt she was breaking one of the countless Lilliputian bonds that bound her.

Rather poetically, here, just pages before Hugh's betrayal, it is Ellen who is beginning to learn to break away.


Addendum--The Priory:

After falling in love with Someone at a Distance, I had to go ahead and nab a library copy of the other Whipple novel I always meant to read, The Priory (1939).  I've had in my notes for ages that the Provincial Lady recommends it to a friend as the perfect wartime comfort reading.

I have to admit that I found The Priory to be completely compulsive reading too.  It was perhaps not quite, for me, up to a comparison with Someone at a Distance, but then it drives me crazy when other people compare one of an author's books to another, since whichever one you read first, and with which you have your first "wow I love this writer" kind of epiphany, will probably always stand as a "best" for you.  So that may be all it was in this case too.  I just recall thinking on a couple of occasions, in Whipple's portrayal of another happy marriage (apparently a favorite theme for her), "Okay, enough with the handwringing melodrama."

But anyway, it's a great read, handwringing melodrama or not, and I have just one particularly wonderful quote to share (probably this passage jumps out at everyone who reads it--particularly anyone who's read Ruth Adam's A Woman's Place, with its discussions of the shifting roles and conflicts facing women in the shift from peacetime to wartime):

People say: “Oh, it’s not like that for girls now.”  But it is, and it’s going to be more like it than ever, it seems to me.  According to these papers it is.  Women are being pushed back into homes and told to have more babies.  They’re being told to make themselves helpless.  Men are arming like mad, but women are expected to disarm, and make themselves move vulnerable than they already are by nature.  No women is going to choose a time like this to have a baby in.  You can’t run very fast for a bomb-proof shelter if you have a baby inside you, and a bomb-proof shelter is not the place you would choose to deliver it in.  No protection against gas is provided for children under three, this paper says, so presumably the baby you have laboured to bring into the world must die if there is a gas attack.