"The boned corsets of the mind": KATHLEEN FARRELL, The Common Touch (1959)

Perhaps it was the Marc, or the cherries flambées, or both, or merely a selfish desire to hear my own voice, which urged me to try to explain: suddenly I wanted to share my bewildering realisation that no one is set in a mould, that each of us is capable of behaving wildly, temporarily out of character: that occasionally the limiting constrictions move away. All the reasons why this or that cannot be considered are no longer present, or no longer relevant. The railings, the boned corsets of the mind which keep the body in check may be replaced tomorrow, or the day after, but just now and again, miraculously, the strings are slack.

The trouble for Marianne, the narrator of Kathleen Farrell's rather brilliant fourth novel (of five), is that the boned corsets seem to snap back into place too quickly for her wild behavior to have a lasting impact. Marianne is in her late thirties and has seemingly led a rather ordinary, uneventful life. When the novel opens, she is in an attic room in a Paris hotel, wondering if she has missed her chance. 

We then flash back to a few weeks before. Marianne is traveling in Switzerland as companion to Lucy and Arnold, an older pair of siblings who might be her aunt and uncle (she says she was told to call them that as a child, but the relationship is never made explicit). No other relatives seem to be mentioned, which may explain the sense of isolation around these characters. 

Lucy and Arnold have spent their lives together, in what can only be called a codependent relationship, snarking and nagging at one another, each complaining that the other has stunted their life but simultaneously relying on and enabling each other. We only learn the truth of their situation (if truth it is) late in the novel, though a careful reader is likely to guess some of it well before Marianne learns of it, but their secrets, such as they are, aren't really the point of the novel. It's more the way that their suppressions and damage, the ways that they have limited their lives, cause Marianne to reflect on her own and the decisions she makes in the novel, as she engages in a mild fling with a distinctly unglamorous Swiss tour guide.

It's really very much as if a Jean Rhys character, in rather less disrepair than usual, has ventured into an Anita Brookner novel, haunted by shades of biting Barbara Pym wit. And despite the fact that very little happens except a lot of conversation and some melancholy mulling of the past and present, I was more or less engrossed throughout. Farrell's prose is elegant and funny even as it makes clear that the characters and situations are not elegant at all, at times even sordid.

There are some breathtaking (if sometimes harsh) insights into life and the way folks live it, including the quotation at the beginning of this post and this doozy spoken by Lucy, which made me stop and ponder a bit:

'When I said that Arnold "stopped" my marriage, it was not quite in the way you think. Apart from that it is all very well,' she said, 'to make other people an excuse for what one has not done, but that is seldom true. We are all selfish, if one considers precisely—although I know I am contradicting myself—and if we are certain of what we want we shall try to get it, no matter who stands in the way.'

There are some wonderful exchanges, particularly between Marianne and Lucy, and even when they're about the most trivial things, they're often laced with deeper implications, as in their discussion of Marianne's unaccountable liking for "Marc" (always capitalized here, but according to Google, which explains that it is much like grappa, generally written "marc"):

She took such a small sip of the liquid that there was none for her to swallow. 'It's so bitter and hot,' she said. 'Where did you learn to like such stuff?'

I reminded her that at my age one does not remember learning; that I had lived years enough to happen to acquire a taste for many things—and Marc was one of them.

'It has never happened to me'—Lucy wiped her mouth with a scrap of handkerchief—'and I must say that I am glad it has not, and I can't see how it could. And when I think how you were brought up, it seems so ... so out-of-the-way.'

But that was a long time ago.

'Surely those are the formative years? When one is a child, I mean—and then at school—and the convent you used to attend—no, it does not fit.'

Fortunately, or unfortunately, one seldom knows which, those were not the formative years for me.

Which reminds me, readers who are particularly hung up about quotation marks might be annoyed by Farrell's use of them for other characters but not for her narrator. I found it interesting, though, because it forces the reader at times to question whether the words are spoken or only thought, which in turn forces the reader deeper inside Marianne's consciousness. On the other hand, who can say what is portrayed accurately here, in view of this crème de la crème sample of Marianne's quotable moments:

No doubt I said something, but what I cannot recall. All these conversations are more or less what was said, although much I have forgotten, and more misinterpreted, perhaps.

I first read, and wrote about, Kathleen Farrell so much longer ago than I thought—back in 2013 not long after starting this blog (see here). I reviewed her third novel, The Cost of Living (1956), and enjoyed it quite a lot (and I see I compared her to Barbara Pym there too!), so it's shocking I've only now followed up with reading another of her novels. I'll have to make time for another one a little sooner this time!

As an aside, Farrell's "longtime companion", Kay Dick, has seen a bit of a revival this year, with the reprinting of her 1977 novel They by Faber in February. Perhaps the same sort of revival will soon follow for Farrell?

KATHLEEN FARRELL, The Cost of Living (1956)

In lieu of a dust cover...

I came across Kathleen Farrell, a now almost completely forgotten writer who published five novels in the 1950s and early 1960s, via Nicola Beauman's The Other Elizabeth Taylor.  Beauman mentions Farrell as a member of "The Lady Novelists' Anti-Elizabeth League," a group of writers including Olivia Manning, Kate O'Brien, Pamela Hansford Johnson, and Kay Dick, Farrell's partner of many years, who all, according to Beauman, systematically disparaged Taylor in their reviews of her work.

If this is true, it may have been all for the best for Taylor's eventual literary standing, since she is probably more widely and seriously read today than any of the anti-Elizabeth writers, but that's neither here nor there.  The point, for me, was that here was a writer I'd never heard of.  Ah, the joy of discovery!  And the fact that one of the only tidbits of information I could find online was that her novels were compared to Barbara Pym's only made the find more tantalizing.

Farrell's five novels were Mistletoe Malice (1951), which apparently uses a Christie-esque country house setting for a dark comedy of dysfunctionality, Take It to Heart (1953), The Cost of Living (1956), The Common Touch (1959), and Limitations of Love (1962).  The Guardian's obituary of Farrell also refers to an earlier work, Johnny's Not Home from the Fair (1942), saying intriguingly that "it hovers somewhere between a memory and a ghost story."

Happily, the San Francisco Public Library had The Cost of Living waiting patiently on the shelf (it had probably been waiting for a good many years...), so I picked it up—and had a surprising amount of trouble putting it down.

It's premise is simple: Two single women friends who live in the same apartment building—Marianne, an impoverished freelance typist in her mid-thirties with a perhaps somewhat uncertain sexuality, and Alexandra, 26, a similarly impoverished freelance portrait painter—decide to have a party to meet new men.  The party itself occupies the short first chapter, and the remainder of the novel deals with its aftermath, as the two women deal with the new people they've met. 

All of which is probably more a convenient frame on which to hang a lot of wonderfully cynical dialogue and Marianne's jaded commentary than it is a "plot" per se.  And that's okay by me—readers of this blog know that "finding out what happens" is not a major motivation in my reading most of the time—but it's something to keep in mind if you don't happen to feel the same.

The party is really Alexandra's idea.  She is younger and more innocent than Marianne, and certainly more romantic.  Marianne's thoughts on the party, meanwhile, give us an idea of where she's at emotionally:

It was useless to explain to Alexandra that I had long ago decided that I did not particularly wish to get married, and that I would just as soon remain in a state of spinsterish discomfort as scheme to embark upon another state which might turn out to be just as uncomfortable, with the added disadvantages of being unfamiliar.

But the party goes forward and the two women do indeed meet new people, including Donald, a bus conductor who has propositioned Alexandra on his bus (and who takes his cultural self-improvement with deadly middlebrow seriousness); Marius, a ghost writer, and his “Mummy,” a flamboyant middle-aged woman whom Marianne and Alexandra seem to see as their possible future; Bernhardt whom Alexandra invites as a possible match for Marianne, but who is only interested in analyzing her for his reductive study on women, and who at any rate brings the lovely Pisa with him—who, in one of the party's repercussions, will wind up as Marianne's roommate; and a group of Peters, who, it is suggested, may be gay, but one of whom Alexandra becomes involved with anyway.

The complications resulting from the effort to meet new people and engage with life—the "cost of living" of the title—are too complex to describe in detail and would spoil some of the fun anyway.  Of course, when I say "fun," it is perhaps a relative term, as The Cost of Living is, though very funny, anything but cozy reading, and if you don't enjoy very dark humor, the fun may be mitigated a bit.

There are certainly examples of very Pym-like humor.  Farrell even uses the "as if" technique I talked about in relation to Pym's A Glass of Blessings:

Bernhardt took my hand absent-mindedly, held it as though it were a pig’s trotter which he had not made up his mind whether he would buy, then, sighing noisily, kissed my fingers three times—damp, cold little pushes—after which he dropped my hand unceremoniously…

Or this example, featuring the almost stereotypically down-to-earth cleaning woman who helps out now and then:

Almost before I had reached the kitchen, Mrs. Aitch stepped heavily and swiftly in by the back door, which either Pisa or I had forgotten to lock the night before, making my scalp tingle with the sudden horror of her forceful entrance. She always came in as though she were taking the flat by storm and had been lying in wait for the crucial moment.

But even some of the novel's funniest moments have a darker edge than we would be likely to see in Pym:

Mummy, regardless, was dancing the Charleston. She certainly had remarkably beautiful legs, and I wondered whether she spent hours with her legs straight in the air, holding in her stomach muscles, or whatever one is advised to do. I decided that she just had beautiful legs, which nothing and no one could take from her. Only death. It was almost a consolation to envisage the possibility of my having perhaps twenty years of walking about on most ungainly legs, while Mummy and her slim, slim ankles decomposed.

And ultimately Marianne's relentlessly cynical observations of the life around her—especially Alexandra's, with whom Marianne may be a bit obsessed—give a glimpse of a genuinely sad, disappointed woman, used to missing opportunities and to shrugging it off with humor:

‘I get to the state when I actually recall the days or months, or ever years, the whole divisions of life, by what hasn’t been done. I find myself thinking: yes, that was the summer I didn’t get to Italy; or that was the Christmas I didn’t send any cards. Then there are always the books I mean to read, and the friends I mean to get in touch with—all adding up to a monstrous chase where the hare’s always a different one, but always gets away.’

Perhaps most revealing of all is Marianne's fantasy of a peaceful escape from the complications of life:

Then, as often before, I dreamed myself to sleep with remembrances of a summer life in the country: the scent of grass, new-cut, and warm, soft-aired evenings; watering and clipping and planning for the future—a future which has already gone. The hot, bright mornings, spent weeding the strawberry beds, picking raspberries, tasting the summer all the time, every hour of the day. Being part of a garden, part of a wood, part of a meadow; part of the all the thriving busyness around, of growth and decay, and building up to begin again.

In the final sentence, a fantasy of life in the country, peacefully gardening, seems—perhaps even subliminally for Marianne—to have become a fantasy of death in the country, quietly moldering away in the hope of a new beginning.

The Cost of Living is certainly a novel that can amply repay the effort of a second—or even third—reading.  There are complications in the two women's relationship that could be developed much more fully than I can do here, and meanings to be teased out of the variety of useless men who appear.  And Marianne's seemingly determined spinsterhood could be productively compared to the treatment of spinsters in Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, or in the work of Edith Olivier or Rachel Ferguson.

There may even be depths of meaning about the plight of women writers, suggested by Marianne's work as a typist (or perhaps I'm just saying that as an excuse to share one more favorite quote…).  Her hilarious comments on a devastatingly bad novel manuscript by a male writer, with its ludicrous female lead, perhaps imply a critique of how men view women (when they bother to view them at all):

By that time I had nearly finished the novel. It seemed to get longer and longer towards the end; and sadder, too, and much sillier. There was only one woman in it, and she spent most of her life retching and clinging to park railings; and when she wasn’t doing that she was leaning her forehead against the wall in some dark alleyway. Leaning her forehead against the wall was to stop her being completely overcome by nausea. I can’t remember that it ever did. I wondered how such young men managed to make women feel so sick, so often. And I thought, poor young men, how they suffer.

Regardless, there is plenty of both depth and fun in this novel to warrant its reprinting.  It might perhaps even find more of an audience today than it did at its first publication, and it's rather surprising that no savvy publisher has set its sights on Farrell.  Persephone?  Faber?  Capuchin? 

Anyone?