Hopeless No More Part 2: RICHMAL CROMPTON, Mrs Frensham Describes a Circle (1942)

I'm completely embarrassed by how long it has taken me to get back around to the five "no longer hopeless" WWII novels generously made available to me by Grant Hurlock. I reported on the first of them—Ruth Adam's highly entertaining mystery novel Murder in the Home Guard—way back in November, and I promised to keep reporting on them "soon."

Um, yeah. Well, who's to say that I didn't intend for "soon" to mean "nearly two months from now"? But as it turns out, I was darn near too late to refer to this one as any kind of hopeless, as Greyladies happily announced a few weeks ago that they will be reprinting it in February. For now, though, it still counts, as I defy you to find a copy of it anywhere until the Greyladies version is released. (Here's hoping that I'll have to race against time to post on the other three before they get reprinted as well—but somehow I doubt if that will happen.)

Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle is a distinctly odd novel—as odd as its name, in fact, which is meant to imply that the title character comes full circle in the course of Crompton's story (though details of how it applies would give away a bit too much of the plot). In some ways, it's very much a cozy read, with an array of entertaining, quirky, likeable (or pleasantly unlikeable) characters, amusing and interesting situations, and—for the most part—ultimate happy endings. And with a wartime home front setting, no less.

On the other hand, there is some very real darkness lurking around the edges, which perhaps qualifies it as the first "uncozy" I've talked about in a while. I've used that concept a few times before to describe novels that have unexpected depths within what at first appears to be pure ice cream for the brain. In fact, although Crompton's style is quite different from that of Elizabeth Goudge, on a couple of occasions Mrs. Frensham reminded me of Goudge's The Castle on the Hill, one of my favorite World War II novels and one which also has considerable unexpected depth.

This was particularly true in Crompton's descriptions of Mrs. Frensham's relationship with her husband. As the novel opens, Mrs. Frensham is more or less completely isolated from friends and even from her daughter Anice, due to her husband Philip's severe mental illness following a breakdown several years before. He is unable to bear the anxiety caused by visitors, even his own daughter, but Mrs. Frensham refuses to allow him to be hospitalized, which would cause him still more trauma. So they live isolated together, and Mrs. Frensham can only make occasional forays into the life of the village.

Clearly, something will happen to change this situation, and there is an air of inevitability, only a short while later, to the random bomb which falls on their cottage, injuring Mrs. Frensham and killing Philip outright. And Mrs. Frensham's reaction to this loss, when she awakes in hospital, is perhaps a bit surprising:

Mrs. Frensham relaxed against the pillow, and a wave of exultant triumph swept through her. Philip was safe. Life couldn't hurt him any more. Life couldn't hurt her any more, either, for it had only been able to hurt her through him. … Her mind was becoming clearer every moment, so clear that she could face the fears that had preyed on her for so long, the fear that she might die before Philip, that they might take him from her again.

…

The feeling of freedom that uplifted her was strange and unexpected. It was as if she had been carrying a heavy burden and were suddenly relieved of it. Her very soul felt lightened. It didn't even seem to matter who won the war, now that Philip wasn't here to be hurt or frightened. Cruelty and evil and suffering could fill the whole world, for all she cared, now that they couldn't touch Philip. …

I was taken aback at first by such a reaction, but having given it some thought I find it an entirely plausible reaction to the intense stress she has dealt with in trying to protect Philip from reality. Possibly even more surprising, though, is that it's not long until she begins to feel Philip as a sort of phantasmatic presence inside her head, one which even occasionally guides her behavior—even encouraging her to intervene in the lives of other characters, or offer advice she wouldn't have thought of giving herself. A rather interesting twist which, of course, has the result of bringing her out of her isolation.

And the other characters are certainly able to use her and her phantom husband's help. After Philip's death, she stays for a time with her daughter, Anice, whose husband is away in the military, and re-acquaints herself with her grandchildren—Peter, who's yearning to join the R.A.F.; Ellen, who is jealous of her younger sister and bitter because she thinks the boy the likes loves someone else; and Pam, who is happy enough apart from Ellen's constant sniping. And then there are the in-laws, led off by Mrs. Tylney, a domestic dominatrix par excellence (a character type I haven't had a chance to mention lately, though it appears to have been quite common in middlebrow women's fiction), and her poor, beaten-down, manipulated husband, Edmund, and two daughters—Paula, who is devastated and even suicidal following a romance with a married man, and Beryl, neurotically phobic about confrontation but engaged to a man Mrs. Tylney feels is unworthy of the family, a combination that obviously spells trouble. Oh, and let's not forget Miss Fraser, Anice's live-in "mother's help," obsessed with an array of petty grievances against all and sundry, who finds an outlet in her war work at the local A.R.P. headquarters.

When I wrote a while back about Crompton's earlier novel, Leadon Hill, I expressed some frustration with how few of the characters were likeable and how (it seemed to me) self-righteous the main character often seemed toward them. By the time she wrote Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle, however, Crompton had obviously improved her technique considerably, and here a good many of the characters are amusing and likeable even in their imperfections, and those who aren't are, for the most part, presented as having reasons for being what they are. We learn that even Mrs. Tylney, the darkest character of all, is haunted by the death of her youngest son, and may be dominating everyone else around her as a result of her feeling of helplessness at his loss. As a result, this seems like a far more mature novel to me, almost as satisfying as Family Roundabout, the novel Persephone chose to reprint, or Crompton's even later novel, Matty and the Dearingroydes, which was also a Greyladies reprint and which I enthusiastically reviewed a while back.

As with most wartime novels, some of my favorite parts of Mrs. Frensham are the glimpses it offers of home front life. I love the notion (mentioned in other books of the time as well) that folks would brag about their brushes with danger:

Anice, going into Medleigh every day to do her shopping, brought back a report of the gossip and doings of the little town. Everyone seemed to take a pride in being exposed, as they thought, to special danger.

"It's the railway they're after. It runs right at the bottom of our garden."

"They're trying to get that gun encampment on the common. We're practically next door to it."

"They're aiming at the gas-works, you know. It's only a stone's-throw from our house."

While a W.A.A.F. girl, travelling in the same bus as Anice, told her with gloomy satisfaction that whenever she and her friend moved to a fresh billet a bomb seemed to fall in the immediate neighbourhood. " Well, it looks as if someone was giving us away," she said. " I mean, a thing like that can't always be chance."

Later on, there's a mention of "bomb snobs" that I found amusing:

"There were two in the Tube when I was going home last night." … "They were each going all-out and it was a case of Greek meets Greek, because one had been through the Coventry raids and the other through the Plymouth raids. The atmosphere became more and more strained and by the end they were barely on speaking terms."

And I always enjoy references to the clever responses of business-owners whose businesses have been damaged:

A bomb had exploded recently in the middle of High Street and most of the shop windows had been broken. Some shopkeepers had had fresh glass put in, others, less optimistic, had had them boarded up, leaving small holes in the middle through which the contents could be seen. There was a certain fascination about these little peepholes, and more passers-by seemed to look into them than at the fuller displays. A hairdresser's window, not yet mended, bore a notice "We are blasted well open"; and a dyer's and cleaner's, "We are still alive and ready to dye for you''.

That last one might even replace "More open than usual" as my favorite sign on a bomb-damaged retail shop.

All in all, then, I'm so glad this novel will be commercially available again and that others won't find it hopeless at all to get their hands on. I hope some of you check it out, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

RICHMAL CROMPTON, Matty and the Dearingroydes (1956)

I recently discussed Richmal Crompton’s Leadon Hill (1927) here, and although I was a bit lukewarm on it, there were plenty of examples of good writing and genuinely interesting themes to make it clear I had to read this one—the only other of Crompton’s novels that seems to be fairly readily available in the U.S.  Leadon Hill and Matty and the Dearingroydes are the two Crompton books that have been reprinted by Greyladies.  But I happened to look on Amazon and found a really lovely little hardcover edition with an intact dustcover for a reasonable price.  I had to grab it up—sorry, Greyladies, I promise to order something else soon, and if you reprint more Cromptons, I’m guaranteed to order those too, since all her other titles are at least $100 in the U.S.!

At first, I thought I might have the same problem with Matty that I had with Leadon Hill.  Crompton seems to like plots about more or less bohemian characters loosening up strait-laced folks, or at least mocking and condemning their hypocrisies.  Always a popular plotline, and that's fine with me (it works well in reverse too, as Miss Pettigrew has shown).  But in Leadon Hill, I felt Crompton was a bit heavy-handed about it, with a full cast of truly loathsome characters observed by a rather annoyingly self-righteous main character (but I still liked it, even if it doesn’t sound like I did!). 

In Matty and the Dearingroydes, however, written nearly three decades after Leadon Hill (and about a decade after Family Roundabout, an excellent Crompton novel reprinted by Persephone), it’s clear that a more subtle and thoughtful writer is at work.

The story begins with Matty Dearingroyde, the sixty-ish owner of a shop dedicated to used clothing, books, and other odds and ends, approaching a chi-chi suburban London house in search of used clothing to buy.  In a nutshell, the house turns out to belong to the rather loathsome Matthew & Marion Dearingroyde, who discover that Matty is actually their cousin—daughter of Matthew’s disowned artist/bohemian/ne’er-do-well brother.  No doubt they would quickly forget this fact if it weren't that Matthew is planning to run for Parliament and doesn’t want it known that he has an eccentric poor relation running a seedy little shop.  So he suggests that she give up the shop and become properly one of the family, spending a month each in his home and the homes of two of his other siblings.

That pretty much sets the stage for a "Boudu Saved from Drowning" type plot that rollicks along in a compulsively readable way.  I stayed up way too late two nights in a row because I couldn't break away.

Obviously, the compulsiveness of the novel is not due to its startling originality of plot.  Rather, it's in strong, clever writing.  Although plotwise it would be hard not to know what's coming, you never know how cleverly Crompton is going to present it, and in some ways that's almost better, to me, than a surprising or original plot.

There are plenty of humorous passages.  For example, when Matty is first considering Matthew's offer to come and live with them, she finds herself talking it over with the dresses in her shop, including the “crushed-looking garment, resigned and innocent, that did not, Matty felt, know much about life” and the one with “an air of worldly wisdom” that “had seen things, been places, known people, wasn’t to be bamboozled.”

And later, when Matty spends her month with Matthew's sister Flora, who runs a (wannabe) high-class boarding house, we meet the two "lady" tenants who are Flora's pride and joy (as well as her albatross).  When the two women—Lady Purlock and Mrs. Borrowdale—return from a society wedding, we see them in their full pretentious glory:

For a few days they were inclined to be more critical than usual of the domestic arrangements of Shottery Place and blossomed out into more elaborate evening toilettes—Lady Purlock even appearing one evening with an ornament in her hair that closely resembled a tiara—then gradually they resigned themselves once more to an atmosphere that Lady Purlock described in her more gloomy moments as “incurably middle class.”

This reminded me a great deal of the Painton sisters in Leadon Hill, who hilariously "never could quite conquer the idea that there was something vulgar about deck chairs."

The other boarding-house guests are also funny and worth getting to know—Miss Hastings, a busybody involved with every local organization; Miss Winterton, a gruff, manly dominator who can't get enough of hiking all over England (and whom possibly we are to see as lesbian) and Miss Tenby, her passive but increasing bored and exhausted companion; the Redbrooks, whose young daughter died five years ago and who are still engaged in full-time mourning more out of habit than real sentiment; Mr. Appleby, an attorney who spends his time obsessively researching a book he will likely never write; and Colonel & Mrs. Knighton, whose hobby is shopping for houses they have no intention of buying.

Unsurprisingly, Matty is able to help many of them with her no-nonsense, no-pretense, tell-it-as-it-is approach.  But meanwhile Matty herself is interestingly conflicted.  She is trying to be a lady, because her mother wanted her to be, but she has always been "bilingual":

And Matty, who had inherited Jasper’s buoyancy and lightness of heart, adapted herself easily to the situation.  Within doors, under her mother’s anxious eye, she played her part as Matilda Dearingroyde of gentle speech and irreproachable manners.  Out of doors, with the children who went to school with her and used the street as their playground, she was wild and reckless as the best of them, with a shrill cockney voice and the manners of her comrades.  She assimilated both parts with a sort of monkey-like quickness and with no conscious deception.  She was bilingual and came to have a sort of dual personality, accommodating herself to her company automatically and instinctively.

And now that she's trying to acknowledge only the Matilda side of her personality, she keeps having little "break-outs":

Matty was demure and precise-looking in her plain black dress, her hair brushed straight back from her forehead, her feet encased in neat, low-heeled shoes.  She had had a slight “break-out” yesterday and had bought a vulgar scarf depicting the efforts of a fat man to swat a bluebottle, but her courage had failed her at the last minute and she had not put it on.

Sometimes, the return of the repressed Matty is fairly subdued, as when she befriends Matthew & Marion's poor victimized daughter by commenting on the strict running of the Dearingroyde home:

“It’s been running itself on the same lines for so long.  It does rather make one want to clean the brass on Wednesday instead of Tuesday just to give it a shock.”

And sometimes, as it emerges later, the break-outs can be a bit more extreme (but I'll leave that for the reader to discover)…

The final month of Matty's family tour is spent with the truly loathsome Olivia, her doormat of a son, and her daughter-in-law.  Olivia is a prime example of the maleficent malingerer I've started really noticing in a lot of the novels I read.  I think it was a character type I just took for granted for a long time, but it seems to have been a real theme for a lot of writers, and one that they felt strongly about and were eager to explore.

In this case, as with some of the other characters I've commented on, the maleficent Olivia is not actually ill in any apparent way, but merely uses threats of heart attack or total despair to manipulate her son.

After one of Olivia's melodramatic scenes, Matty observes her closely:

Matty’s eyes followed her as she bustled about the room, getting out the cards and card table.  The scene had left no traces.  Her face was not ravaged by her tears.  There was, on the other hand, a sort of bloom and sleekness about her, as if she had derived some sensual satisfaction from it.

Although Olivia is the kind of completely unsympathetic character whose prevalence in Leadon Hill grated on me, in this novel Matty's response is more practical and less about feeling superior than Marcia's in the earlier novel, which makes the scenes more entertaining.  That approach, too, along with the presence of a fair number of likeable characters (and a few realistically believable annoying ones), meant that, for me, the seriousness of the Olivia scenes actually added to the depth of the novel.

The final outcome of the novel, to the extent that it's not fairly obvious from the beginning, I'll leave to you to enjoy for yourself!

Having read two of Crompton's novels in the past couple of weeks, I might not add her to the top tier of my very favorite writers.  But I do have to say that I always seem to find interesting and sometimes surprising depth in her work.  For example, midway through the book Matthew and Marion throw a party, supposedly for their daughter Christine (whom they use as a pawn in their ongoing power struggle), but really to promote Matthew's run for Parliament.  Matty observes Christine actually enjoying herself, forgetting about her parents manipulations of her.  Matty comments:

“Forgetting only puts off remembering, but it gives one a sort of respite.  And it’s all so new to her.  It helps her to grow up.  Unhappy children take a long time to grow up because they build an imaginary world for themselves that’s more real to them than the real world and they can’t find their way out.”

I thought a lot about this quote, and I think it's a strikingly perceptive observation.  I've certainly known people to whom it would seem to apply. 

So if Crompton is not always the most polished of writers, or her characters are not always perfectly rounded or believable, I find myself forgiving those faults, because her sense of humor, her originality in rounding out her plots (if not the plots themselves are not so original), and her sharp understanding of human nature help—for me—to sand off her rough edges.

One last note: On the D. E. Stevenson discussion list, there was a recent discussion about the habit, in the early to mid 20th century, of mothers allowing small babies to sleep outside in their prams.  We noted that it was obviously a safer time, with fewer threats to the child's safety and perhaps a stronger sense of community keeping them safer, but we also realized that there must have been practical considerations, as for example the prevalence of cigarette smoking and coal-burning, that might have given fresh air an extra advantage. There was an example in Stevenson's The Young Mrs. Savage, and, for those keeping track, there is another example here!

RICHMAL CROMPTON, Leadon Hill (1927)

I was excited a few weeks ago to score a used copy of this book (and for cheap, no less!) from Awesome Books, as I read Crompton's Family Roundabout (1948) a year or two ago and enjoyed it a lot.  Leadon Hill is back in print now thanks to Greyladies in the U.K., whom I love on principle for making hard-to-find books like this available again (they’ve also reprinted several newly-discovered D. E. Stevenson books and many of the novels Noel Streatfeild wrote as “Susan Scarlett,” among others).  Since most of Crompton's many novels for grownups (as opposed to her numerous William books, for which she is far better known) are out-of-print and difficult to find in libraries, I'm happy that this book—along with one of Crompton's late novels, Matty and the Dearingroydes (1956)—has been reprinted by Greyladies.

I was so excited, in fact, that when Leadon Hill arrived I bypassed my “to read” stack (more like a “to read” bookcase these days) and jumped right in. 

From the Greyladies description of Leadon Hill, I was expecting a sort of D. E. Stevenson-ish village social comedy, having to do with a wife and mother left alone for four months while her husband goes on a fishing trip.  And at first, this seemed to be the case. 

Marcia’s husband is a bit needy and helpless (Marcia refers at one point to his “fussiness”), and Marcia is looking forward to some alone time—though they do apparently have a good relationship.  Perhaps they just get on each other's nerves now and again.

A large cast of eccentric villagers are also introduced: the judgmental Miss Mitcham, who lives (symbolically?) on a dead-end road (“Miss Mitcham from her drawing-room window used to watch the return of the baffled motorists and cyclists with a malicious little smile"); the vicar, who plans his sermons to “bring out the deep thrilling notes of his voice,”; his wife, who used to be a kitchenmaid and lives in terror of this being revealed; the elderly Painton sisters, slowly starving to death but too proud to admit their poverty; stern Miss Martyn and her ditzy sister Miss Dulcie, plus their self-righteous niece Olive; superficial Mrs. Croombs, her superficial daughter Freda, and her only slightly less superficial son, Gerald, who bonds with Olive over their mutual feelings of superiority over everyone else; and playboy and sadist Sir Geoffrey, son of the local gentry, who is trying to seduce Freda.  Plus, there’s a local writer (of novels disapproved of in the village) and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, who appear sporadically to share Marcia’s dislike of the villagers’ attitudes.

So far so good.  Although there are more dark motivations and unsympathetic characters than D. E. Stevenson would likely have incorporated, a satirical perspective and dark sense of humor could have make much of such a prudish, hypocritical, and/or just plain nasty cast.  Especially when an attractive young woman, Miss West, raised in an artistic household in Itay, moves to the village and stirs everything up with her carefree wholesomeness.  (Wholesomeness in spades, I might add—she’s like a very slightly bohemian Doris Day.)

And indeed, Crompton’s turns of phrase are often brilliant, summing up her characters in clever and original nutshells.  I laughed out loud at the Painton sisters declining to be seated in Marcia’s garden because “[t]hey never could quite conquer the idea that there was something vulgar about deck chairs."  Sweet but confused Miss Dulcie knits unusable garments “which she called 'vests,' and imagined as clothing a large class of unfortunates known vaguely and generally as 'the poor.'  She felt a thrill of joy on a cold morning when she thought of the 'poor' warmly clothed in her 'vests.'"  And the vicar’s wife obsesses over hiding the secret of her past: “The day arranged for the garden party was fine.  Minnie felt that even the weather had forgotten that she had ever been a housemaid.”

Richmal Crompton

But although there are these wonderful bits of humor and sharp characterization, Crompton unfortunately made the decision to focus relentlessly on the villagers, who ultimately come to seem like mere straw figures—inhuman, utterly unsympathetic, and deserving of all the condemnation they get from Marcia and the Elliotts, who, along with the pristine Miss West, are the only characters allowed any glimmer of humanity.  Mrs. Coombs pushes Freda into the arms of the reprehensible Geoffrey (who prides himself on killing chickens with his car as much as on seducing young girls) because she yearns for the wealth and prestige he offers; Gerald loves first the ice princess Olive ("It was as if she were always conscious of some invisible audience to whom she feared to betray any emotion") and then Miss West, whom he finds not icy enough; Olive subtly terrorizes her ditzy aunt; the vicar’s wife protects him from all responsibility (including visiting the deathbeds of his flock) and feels that her lack of charity reveals that she has become a true lady; and all the while Miss Mitcham keeps everyone in strict check.  There is literally no point at which it is possible to like (or even sympathize with) any of them.  They are just one big B-movie villain.

And for me, this made the novel rather disappointing.  It ultimately seemed more pontification than satire.  Satire requires some emotional distance in a writer, some coolness and reflection on the characteristics being satirized, but for whatever reason Crompton here seems genuinely, well, pissed off.  About two-thirds of the way through, when Mr. Elliott visits Marcia to tell her of yet another scandal Miss West has caused, analyzing the villagers’ behavior from the lofty viewpoint of intellectual superiority, I started to feel a bit annoyed by the judge and jury as well as the criminals.  Mr. Elliott's holier-than-thou enlightenment and Marcia's gleeful approval of his critiques started to grate on me.  After all, surely unquestioning self-righteousness is an unattractive characteristic regardless of which side you're on?

That said, though, I actually did enjoy this novel—even if (and yes, maybe even to some extent because) I sometimes wanted to throw it across the room.  I think that’s a testament both to Crompton’s writing, which even in its early, raw form already shows signs of how much better she will become, and to her insight into character.  Although for me she ultimately struck out here due to flat characters and a mean-spirited tone, Leadon Hill just makes me want to track down more of her work.  Her World War II novel, Mrs. Frensham Describes a Circle, has been on my Hopeless Wish List for a while now, but I’ll have to see what other titles I can find.

As a brief addendum (and a SLIGHT SPOILER):

I found the very end of the novel intriguing.  It's not a big dramatic climactic finale with highkicking showgirls or anything, and there's nothing surprising about it, but if you really don't want to know, stop reading now.

Marcia’s husband arrives back home when the major events of the novel are over—after the smoke has cleared, as it were—and Marcia finds it impossible to convince him that the villagers were in the wrong.  He immediately believes that Miss West really was an undesirable type, an “adventuress,” and that Marcia’s sympathy for her stemmed from her foolish good-heartedness and lack of judgment.  She attempts to argue with him, but realizes it is hopeless, and anyway he is more interested in the state of his garden, in which the asters have bloomed unexpectedly:

"I believe you think that that's the most important thing that's happened in Leadon Hill since you went away?"

He laughed.

"Well, isn't it?" he said.

So, I did wonder: Does this ending suggest that Marcia’s husband, who instantly and irrevocably accepts the verdict of the villagers, is really “one of them” and therefore perhaps not well-suited to Marcia herself?  Or does his ultimate indifference to all the drama—his fundamental lack of concern with all the self-righteousness and hairpulling—indicate just the opposite? 

Either way, though, a blithe indifference to self-righteousness would certainly be a handy characteristic for anyone married to Marcia!