Book report: ELIZABETH ELIOT (2 of 2)

Eliot's third novel, Mrs. Martell (1953), follows an utterly self-absorbed, superficial woman from her teens to her second marriage. But if that sounds unpleasant, in Eliot's hands it's not at all. Obsessed with money and class and all the appearances of a sophisticated life, but coming herself from genteel poverty, Cathie Martell rarely loses her focus on getting what she wants out of life, regardless of the feelings or happiness of those (her Aunt Violet, for example, who finances her education, or her first husband, or the man she's set her sights on to be her second—not to mention that man's current wife) who get in her way.

A critic's blurb about Mrs. Martell, from the back cover of Eliot's subsequent novel Starter's Orders (1955), says, "Only an artist in character study could make Cathie Martell tolerable; Miss Eliot goes further and makes her real." And it is indeed remarkable that the novel is so completely enjoyable despite having such an unlikeable main character. But I think it's Eliot's sharp eye for detail and her sense of humor that allow her to pull it off.

Another terrible photo, but the best I could
find for this book

The humor is a bit more muted here than in her first two novels (another critic notes that this is so "because wickedness is a sad business"), but it's still very much present. Sometimes it's that wonderful surprise ending to an otherwise innocuous observation, as here when Cathie is bored on a train and wishes for a handsome man to help her pass the time:

Even so, an encounter with a tall and handsome stranger would have been a pleasant interlude, but alas, he did not appear. Once, in the corridor, and right at the beginning of the journey, she thought she had found him; but later when he came into the dining-car he was surrounded by a gaggle of five or six bright adolescents all of whom addressed him as 'Daddy'; and they were accompanied by a depressed middle-aged woman who inevitably was Mother; impossible to imagine her as having ever been anything else.

One imagines the poor Mother must have sometimes had trouble imagining herself as anything else too! And here, in a dispute with Aunt Violet, a younger Cathie lets her propensity for drama get the best of her:

'As far as I am concerned, Aunt Violet, I don't want another penny of your money. I can go out and earn my bread,' and she saw a distinct picture of herself working her fingers to the bone and being seduced by goodness knows whom.

Blurbs from the back cover of Starter's Orders

And once or twice, even in this more serious novel, Eliot drops in an instance of pure silliness, as in this discussion at a ski lodge after one of Cathie's companions breaks a collar bone:

'Such a shame to break something at the beginning of the fortnight.' The elderly lady who had waylaid Laura in the hall of the hotel clicked anxiously over her knitting-needles.

'Yes,' Laura agreed, 'oh, yes.'

'When I was out here with my boys last year, we had two broken legs; but only on the very last day.'

'Even so, it must have been dreadful.'

'Of course they didn't both belong to us.'

Like most of Eliot's other novels, I think Mrs. Martell is a novel that will only improve on re-reading.

I did say "most," because, although it saddens me to admit that a new favorite author has her flaws, I'm not quite so sure that the same is true of Eliot's fourth novel, Starter's Orders (1955).

Front flap from
Starter's Orders

Now, if you're a big fan of horseracing, and are looking to read about it in fairly intimate detail—exploring the thoughts and feelings not only of the principle characters (a stable owner and the woman who may become his wife), but also of grooms and trainers and owners and bookies and gamblers, as well as several relatives and servants of the main characters—then you'll be happily in your element here. But those—like me—who can hardly tell the difference between a horserace and a game of croquet are likely to find less excitement here.

Starter's Orders seems to be in the nature of an experiment for Eliot—an attempt at a Dickensian variety of character with the budget-busting cast of thousands that a Hollywood extravaganza has on offer. And since Eliot is a polished and very talented author, I admit that even some of the scenes showing the care and handling of horses, or detailing the anxious preparations for a race, did pull me in and hold my interest, added to the fact that, when the focus is on the main characters and their slowly progressing relationship, Eliot produces more or less her usual sparkling, entertaining prose. Plus, even a not-entirely-successful novel can be interesting when examining a very good author's body of work, so perhaps I will revisit the novel someday and see what I come up with.

By contrast, however, Eliot's fifth and final novel, Cecil (1962), which appeared after an uncharacteristic seven year gap in publication, tops off her too-short literary career in style. Here, Eliot tries to get at something very subtle and elusive—portraying a dysfunctional (to say the least) mother/son relationship from the perspective of an in-law who only sees them now and again over the course of several years. Anne, the narrator, is the sister-in-law of the title character, and although she develops strong feelings about Henry and his mother, Lady Guthrie, one is also aware that her knowledge and perception is limited.

In lieu of a cover image of
Cecil, the back flap of Starter's
Orders, with enthusiastic praise
for Alice

Eliot's intent is clearly not to make the relationship obvious, but to show it only as it can be wrestled with and perceived in glimmers and fragments and suspicions. It's an ambitious project, and one that fans of Henry James, for example, may happily sink their teeth into, but it's also always a fascinating and entertaining project. Just as I recently wrote about Rachel Ferguson's Evenfield, Eliot too manages to create genuinely serious literature without making the reader's experience feel like serious work. The shades of meaning and possible interpretations are there if you want to sample them, but you'll have fun even if you don't.

What's more, Cecil is an excellent portrayal of a theme I haven't commented on here for a while—that of the maleficent malingerer, here encapsulated in Lady Guthrie, who (if Anne's observations are to be believed) ruins the life of her son as thoroughly as if she set out to do so meticulously and calculatedly (but wait, perhaps she did?). Yet even as loathsome as she seems, I found Lady Guthrie completely believable, not just a comic book villain, and there are no easy answers for her or any of Eliot's other characters. And perhaps even Lady Guthrie's loathsomeness, as observed by Anne, is placed in some doubt, for one may wonder how much of it is real and how much is built up in Anne's own mind:

Lady Guthrie and Cecil arrived, as threatened, on the sixth of August. I had not, as I have said, seen Cecil for nearly three years or Lady Guthrie for seven. In the interval my feelings towards her, mainly, naturally, owing to the circumstances which had surrounded the breaking off of the engagement, had undergone a considerable change. As I waited for the carriage I realized that whereas before I had been accustomed to think of her as a selfish and often foolish woman I now regarded her as a veritable ogress. In my imagination, untouched by any sight of the reality, the soft features had become witchlike; the embonpoint had turned to layers of repulsive flesh. My first sight of Lady Guthrie, not very surprisingly, proved me to have been completely wrong. The appearance of the woman who was ushered into the drawing-room differed very little from that of the one who had last left it in 1887.

I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure, even now, what to think of Cecil's relationship with his mother, and I can't decide if this is because Eliot handled her ending with just a bit too much subtlety, or if this impression—that one almost perceives the truth, that if one just strains a bit more, re-reads earlier passages, seeks the clues a bit more aggressively, then one will see it all—is precisely the point Eliot wanted to make—that we can never see all of the clues, never perceive all the truth about other people and their motivations. And this is not to mention the ways in which the narrator's speculations sometimes reflect upon her own relationships with her husband and children—and perhaps the ways in which her ability to understand Cecil and his mother are limited by her own experiences as a mother.

Certainly, some dark secret about Cecil is implied here and there, but it is kept as vague as the misbehavior of schoolboy Miles in James's The Turn of the Screw, of which Cecil's implied but vague crimes reminded me.

But even feeling not completely sure about the ending, this is one of my favorite Eliot novels (though it's true I've felt that about all of her novels as I've finished them, except for the aforementioned Starter's Orders). More serious than the others, and somewhat inexplicably set in the late Victorian period—though its tone feels just the same as the others which are set in the 1950s—it nevertheless sparkles with Eliot's sharp observations and charming prose. It's less laugh-out-loud funny than her earliest works, though it does still have its moments, and I can't resist sharing one longish dialogue between Anne and Lady Guthrie, from very early on, as they discuss Lady Guthrie's current interest in spiritualism:

'If it hadn't been for the poltergeists,' idly Lady Guthrie picked up the silver trumpet used for blowing out the little spirit lamp under the kettle, 'I am convinced that my private hour with him would not have ended as it did.'

Exactly how the hour had ended she had not told us but apparently she and Mr Jackson had failed to communicate with the spirit of her sister Marion.'

I nodded sympathetically, thinking what a pity it was that of all Lady Guthrie's sisters, Marion, the only one who had died, should also be the only one in whose advice, if only it could be obtained, she seemed to place any confidence.

'Perhaps,' I said, 'if you were to try again on your way back through London?'

'I shall certainly attempt it but sometimes with so many wishing to speak to us it can be very difficult. On Sunday at the public meeting there were a great many messages; most of them I'm bound to say rather silly.'

Abruptly Lady Guthrie, without attempting to do anything supernatural with it, which is what I'd been vaguely afraid of, replaced the trumpet on the tea-table. 'Half of them might just as well have been written on the back of picture postcards of Brighton, "All well here, everything very beautiful, don't worry."'

What a shame that Eliot didn't continue to write fiction after 1962. As wonderful as Alice and Henry are, she evolved tremendously as an author by 1962, and I would have loved to see where she might have got to if she had gone on. From the beginning, she was a very smart, sophisticated, and clever author, and by 1962 she had become a very subtle one as well. She certainly deserves to be more widely read…

Book report: ELIZABETH ELIOT (1 of 2)

'As soon as you're born,' Alice said, 'they dress you and say it's a dear little girl, and when you die they talk about the corpse, and in between you lead this extraordinary life and pretend that things are important and are going to go on for ever.'

Now, if I say that this rather alarming statement from the eponymous Alice effectively sums up Alice (1950), the first of five novels written by Elizabeth Eliot—better known by the time of her death in 1991 for the non-fiction Heiresses and Coronets (1959, published in the U.K. as They All Married Well), about prominent Edwardian European/American marriages—then you may not believe me when I also say that it's one of the funniest, strangest, and most addictive novels I've read in a long time.

The delightfully morbid story of—well, very little in fact beyond the strange and often woeful domestic lives of Margaret, the narrator, and her friend Alice from their final year at boarding school in the late 1920s to their mid-20s or so with the Spanish Civil War in the background and global war on the horizon, Alice shares a family resemblance with several of my favorite novels, from Barbara Comyns' Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead to Rachel Ferguson's The Brontës Went to Woolworth's. And yet it's also completely its own thing.

The book was apparently a Book Society choice, not bad for a debut novel.

Alice and Margaret love nothing so much as imagining the pain and suffering of others, or even the pain and suffering that might be their own lot in the future. But their existential ponderings (and indeed there is a surprising amount of philosophical depth here, and an ongoing trope about fear as a primary motivator, which lends a somewhat eerie seriousness to the characters' otherwise often superficial and odd behavior) are both hilarious and tragic, witty and melancholy, a delicate balance that Eliot manages to maintain in a rather extraordinary way throughout. Even when imagining the labor of servants long retired or dead, their loopy imaginings are rather dark:

The next day Alice showed me over the house. We walked for miles up and down staircases and through deserted rooms. We paused in the front hall with its pillars and its white marble floor. Alice opened the shutters of one of the windows.

'It's lucky we don't use this as a hall now, isn't it?' she asked.

'Imagine if it had to be scrubbed every day. It would take hours. Nanny says that when she was a young girl housemaids used to get up at four in the morning. It's not surprising when one thinks what they had to do.'

We contemplated the floor, thinking with sympathy of the Victorian housemaids who had scrubbed it.

'Though perhaps it was the odd man,' Alice said more brightly, and for the sake of the housemaids we were glad.

In fact, in an ironic way, the servants come to symbolize freedom for Eliot's young women, trapped inside their regimented high-class lives:

Personally I never found anything about the servants squalid, but always most interesting. Besides, one learnt so much more about people when one was disagreeing with them, and compared with us the servants had unbelievably exciting lives. Their world was boundless, while ours was contained within such narrow limits.

…

But the servants! Anything might happen to them. They might go in a train to Woolwich and meet the love of their lives, or be murdered almost for the asking. Not that one wanted to be murdered exactly, but there was frustration in being denied the possibility.

…

Then another thing, the servants could give notice and a month later they would be living in a different house surrounded with quite different people, and the love of their lives lurking round the corner perhaps, or beside the bandstand on a summer evening.

Alice marries, unhappily, and faces many other adventures and hardships, involving Margaret in most of them, until she suddenly decides—with fabulous success—to become an actress. Other characters come and go, but one feels that the point is not so much the events themselves as the quirky ways in which Margaret and Alice handle and discuss the events. And a good deal of the morbidity of their thinking seems to stem in part from an underlying sense of radical instability in their world. The narrator's grandmother's maid, for example, fears that a boat they're travelling in will suddenly stop floating—"Not because anything had gone wrong with it, you know, but because the rules about what could float and what couldn't had suddenly altered." These are anxious characters who feel marooned in the world without any safe harbor—a tragic circumstance, no doubt, and one probably based in class changes in postwar Britain, but, in Eliot's hands, it's an absolutely hilarious one.

One case where the American cover
is definitely inferior to the British edition

She also has a wonderful flare with metaphor, which adds to the humor of her tale. Here's one of my favorite examples:

'Darling! and how do you feel?' Mrs. Norton, in her usual flowered evening dress, rushed at her daughter and kissed her. One was reminded of a black and white hen hurrying across a farmyard with its wings outstretched.

And then there's just a fair amount of giddy silliness, as in this one final quotation, which doesn't even require any setup or scene-setting:

Felix turned on the waiter, who still stood in the doorway.

'Who's responsible for this food, what?'

'It's sent up from the kitchens, sir.' Williams remained imperturbable, disinterested. One felt that had the kitchens chosen to send up nothing but potato peelings he would have served them with detachment and without comment.

I loved Alice so much that I had to find another of Eliot's books, and, rather astonishingly, it turned out that our local public library had a copy of her second novel, Henry, published later the same year as Alice.

And here's a case of the American edition
being superior (see below)

Henry has quite a lot of similarities to Alice—a first person narrator observing and admiring a problematic character (in this case, her brother), and making marvelous daft/brilliant observations of the events and people around them. I already mentioned Barbara Comyns and Rachel Ferguson among the authors Eliot has reminded me of. I don't know if Henry's tone was actually darker and more disturbing than Alice, or if I merely started to notice the subtexts a bit more, but while reading this one I found myself thinking of writers such as Shirley Jackson and J. D. Salinger, with perhaps a little Sylvia Plath thrown in (I wonder why I thought of American authors this time around?).

I made a note, too, that the wit in Henry reveals more uncomfortably familiar truths about love and dysfunctional families, and about what gets called love though it's really composed most of fear or power or weakness. What can be better than a hilariously entertaining novel that also makes you think and realize things about yourself?

Admittedly a terrible photo, but I think
the cover in general is a little bland

This exchange between Anne and her mother, after Anne has threatened to go out to work in order to gain her independence, makes relatively explicit the instability of the characters' social world:

I told her that I had done quite a lot of typing in the W.R.N.S., when I wasn't driving a lorry, and that I would learn shorthand in the evenings.

'The papers are full of advertisements for secretaries and junior typists. So I don't expect people will be as particular as they used to be.'

Mother said that standards were certainly going down, and that 'they' were forcing 'us' out of existence.

And my mother had looked mournfully round the drawing room. 'They' had prevented her renewing the faded chintz covers, and also, presumably, buying a new castor for one of the armchairs.

Here, I think, is an absolute truth about human relations placed into a tidy nutshell:

'I'm sure he's charming,' Gerald said politely.

I hoped that when he did meet him Gerald really would find that Henry was charming or, at any rate, interesting. Of course, Henry was a human being and human beings were always interesting.

People were quite different. They overcrowded the buses and they created queues.

And here is a memorable summing-up of a core principle of Plato's philosophy:

I heard the word, 'Plato,' and remembered that Plato had said that human souls had once been round and that at a given moment they had broken into two and spent the rest of their existence looking for their other half; like in a cotillion.

I'm giggling again just inserting the quote here, and you can bet I'm already planning to move on to Eliot's three other novels—Mrs. Martell (1953), Starter's Orders (1955), and Cecil (1962). In fact, I'll leave you with this evocative image of my Eliot-related interlibrary loan and purchasing excesses: