This is a big thick example of one of my favourite middlebrow genres. It reminded me of South Riding and National Provincial – big books that take it on themselves to describe a whole community. The community in To All the Living is a new one, brought about by the emergencies of war: A huge industrial complex, built from scratch for the purpose of making ammunition – especially filling shells, mines and grenades with explosive.

The factory complex is at Blimpton, ‘so far away from anywhere as to be, for all practical purposes nowhere.’ It is fifteen miles from Dustborough, the county town of Dustshire, places whose names rather hammer home the Midlands dullness of the local environment.

This kind of novel has to include a wide variety of characters, and front of the book has a page-long list of the various people of the novel, in case the reader gets confused about who’s who. It’s a tribute to Monica Felton’s skill as a writer that I never had to consult it in the course of reading. All the chracters are clear and memorably defined. This is her only novel; during the war she was at the Minitry of Supply, and her only other publication seems to be an academic treatise: Civilian Supplies in Wartime Britain.

She knew all about the problems of Supply, and about bureaucratic tangles – they feature prominently in the novel. More importantly, though, she has a great eye for people and their idiosyncrasies, and has the most crucial talent for an English novelist, an acute sense of small but crucial class distinctions (I suspect that, despite her left-wing politics, she might have been a bit of a snob. She is very good at socially ‘placing’ people anyway.)

She also has a great sense of how bureaucracies work, and shows us the war effort being undermined by people following their own agendas, whether it is civil servants obsessed by precedence and promotion, or local councillors using the war to further their own financial prospects.

We follow the fortunes of a group of young women who have been recruited to the factory. There is a silly one, a bright and competent one, a frightened one, and a posh one with a secret. At first they are left I limbo, because there is no work for theto do yet. Norah, the bright one, persuades the others that they should go on a deputation to the management and complain.

The book’s hero, Tom Morgan, breaks the rules by talking to them rathr than insisting they go through the usual proper channels. He is an honest man among the bureaucrats, and one with the ability to inspire others. While the Superintendent is incompetent and possibly a crook, and various other bureaucrats are just out for themselves, he models the sprit that will get Britain through the war.

The book has plenty of the standard tropes of war fiction – disparate people coning together, the struggles of a new enterprise; wartime romanes; a war baby, an explosion in the filling factory. The explosion is very well handled; Monica Felton does not over-dramatise it, but clearly shows how it is the result of a perfect combinations of inadequacies, inefficiencies and dishonesties coming together to produce an event that kills two people.

This is a book of 1945, and presumably written before the war was over. The end is indeterminate – but it does have a warning about peacetime. The news comes unexpectedly that this huge public enterprise is set ,as the war is ending, to be sold to a private company. This is Morgan’s final challenge, that he is preparing to fight as the book ends.

This is one of a number of novels reprinted as The Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics series. The series contains books about fighting and books about the Home Front. If all the books are as good as this one, it’s a series worth looking out for.

The novel flashes back through their lives. The children (variously) of a celebrated singer and a famous dancer, they spent much of their childhood rather neglected, brought up by servants while their parents were touring. They were thrown so much into each other’s company that they became a unit, a clique from which the rest of the world was excluded. Others often found them difficult company:

When people play the game ‘Name three or four persons whom you would choose to have with you on a desert island,’ they never choose the Delaneys. They don’t even choose us one by one as individuals. We have earned, not always fairly we consider, the reputation of being difficult guests.

That ‘we’ is interesting; the novel gets inside the thoughts of each of the siblings in turn, telling their thoughts in the third person, but every so often, as here, the authorial voice becomes ‘we’, speaking for all three.

All three are artistic, but they have different talents. Maria is an actress, from childhood imitating the gestures of others, sinking herself into characters. Making an effect, wallowing in illusion, though occasionally terrified that there was nothing but illusion. Niall has a musical talent, but it is a flimsy one. Sent to school, he finds the music teachers despairing of him because he will not learn music their way. He plays and composes by ear, and can’t write his melodies down. He becomes obsessed while composing a tune, but one he is made it he is dismissive of it as just a silly tune, not proper music. Celia’s talent is a more private one, for drawing pictures.

Maria goes onto the professional stage without proper training,, and is aware that initially jobs only come easily for her because she is her father’s daughter. (She’s what these days is scornfully called ‘a nepo baby’) She is insecure of her talent, but becomes a great success. She marries Charles, who has seen her in Barrie’s ‘Mary Rose’ and assumes that she must be as ‘ethereal’ as the character she plays. Maria finds real life difficult – especially later in the book, when she has children.

Niall unexpectedly truants from school and goes to live in Paris with an older woman, an ex-flame of his father’s. She is the first person to take a real interest in his music. She writes his tune down, and it becomes a great popular hit – though Niall despises ‘dance music’.

Celia gets no education to speak of. After her mother’s death she accompanies her father on his tours, looking after him, nursing him, and dealing with his increasing alcoholism. She slips past the age when marriage and children are a possibility. Through her father’s influence, a publisher takes an interest in her drawings, but she lets the chance slip.

The novel makes clear the egotism and self-obsession of Maria and Niall especially, but what makes this an excellent novel is that despite this we care for and sympathise with the characters, even when they are at their worst. The treatment of Celia is interesting. She is not an egotistical monster, as Maria and Niall can be, but her motives are anlysed perceptively, too:

Let Maria stand out upon the stage, with the glare upon her. The applause came, but she risked stony silence too; she risked failure. Let Niall write his tunes, and wait for criticism; the tunes might be praised, but they could be damned as well. Once a person gave his talent to the world, the world put a stamp upon it. The talent was not a personal possession any more. It was something to be traded, bought, and sold. It fetched a high price, or a low one. It was kicked in the common market. Always, for ever after, the possessor of the talent must keep a wary eye upon the purchaser. Therefore, if you were sensitive, if you were proud, you turned your back upon the market. You made excuses. Like Celia.

There is acute satire of the egotism and shallowness of artistic types. The character of Pappy (the children’s father) is especially well done. He is an instinctive artist, but one whose least gesture is exactly calculated. He is used to his whims over-riding other people’s wants or needs. The funniest section of the book is after Maria’s marriage, to the son of a stuffy county family, and the Delaneys descend for a weekend, spoiling all the routines and creating chaos. Another very funny scene occurs when Maria has had a baby, and neither she nor Niall has any idea how to cope with its crying. The real world often defeats the Delaneys.

Pappy seems to owe a lot to Daphne du Maurier’s father, Gerald du Maurier, an immensely popular matinee idol, who triumphed in the theatre through instinct and charm. Her grandfather, of course, was George du Maurier, who wrote Trulby, another novel about the strangeness of talent – the heroine’s singing can only work when she is under the hypnotic influence of the mysterious Svengali.

It has been suggested that the three step-siblings are each aspects of Daphne du Maurier’s own personality – and I can believe this. She too is a popular artist, whose great hit, Rebecca,seems more a work of instinct than planning. Each of the three has anxiety about where their talent comes from, what it is worth, and whether it will endure. Daphne du Maurier has made an excellent, utterly absorbing novel out of her own doubts and uncertainties about the nature of talent.

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The Forsytes are presented as the absolute embodiment of the Upper Middle classes and in the first books they are heavily satirised – especially Soames Forsyte, the ‘Man of Property’ who marries a beautiful woman and then treats her as his possession, totally failing to understand her. Several books and forty years after the events of The Man of Property, Soames is still recognisably the same man, but England had definitely changed.

The first section of Swan Song deals with the crisis of the General Strike – the biggest challenge since the war to English security. The book presents the Upper Middle class (and the Forsytes in particular) as responding to it brilliantly.

Michael Mont (a forward-looking Conservative M.P. explicitly connects this challenge to that of the War:

In the trenches, of course, […] sentiment and hate, advertisement and moonshine, had been ‘taboo,’ and with a grim humour the Briton had just ‘carried on,’ unornamental and sublime, in the mud and the blood, the stink and the racket, and the endless nightmare of being pitchforked into fire without rhyme or reason! the Briton’s defiant humour that grew better as things grew worse, would—he felt—get its chance again now.

Jon Forsyte comes back from abroad to volunteer as a strike-breaking stoker on the railway, saying : ‘Left his wife and mother in Paris—said he’d missed the war and couldn’t afford to miss this.

Soames Forsyte’s daughter, Fleur, does what women of her class hasd done during the war, and sets about organising a canteen for the volunteers. The strike is actually welcome, as giving these characters a positive purpose in life. Afterwards, Fleur says:“I feel at a bad loose end, Michael, without the canteen.”

There is little discussion of the politics or roots of the strike; even more than in Philip Gibbs’s Young Anarchy, the strike is taken for granted as something that must be defeated for England’s sake. The nearest anyone comes to analysis is:

Excellent fellow, the miner—but unfortunately cursed with leaders. the mine-owners are in the same case. Those precious leaders are going to grind the country’s nose before they’ve done.

Afterwards, the upper classes are very conscious of having won, but the strike remains something of a mystery to them. Soames reflects:

Good old England! We’re a great people when we’re up against it!’ he thought, driving his car slowly on into Trafalgar Square. a group of men, who had obviously been strikers, stood leaning against the parapet. he tried to read their faces. Glad, sorry, ashamed, resentful, relieved? For the life of him he could not tell.

The sense of the English as ‘a great people’ seems to me to link to Soames’s walk (when feeling low) to see the large Artillery Memorial in Hyde Park.

This has statues of gunners by the remarkable sculptor, Charles Sargeant Jagger. They are not symbolic figures, but large, tough competent men, and in Soames instil a sense of the ‘real’:

the Artillery Memorial. a great white thing which he had never yet taken in properly, and didn’t know that he wanted to. Yet somehow it was very real, and suited to his mood—faced things; nothing high-flown about that gun—short, barking brute of a thing; or those dark men—drawn and devoted under their steel hats! Nothing pretty-pretty about that memorial—no angels’ wings there! No Georges and no dragons, nor horses on the prance; no panoply, and no panache! There it ‘sot’—as they used to say—squatted like a great white toad on the nation’s life.

In the time of the Strike, Soames gains comfort from the realism of the Memorial, and its message (the war’s message?) about the the ability of the English to survive.

After the strike collapses, there are occasional references, without sympathy, to the coal-miners who are still carrying on with their fruitless strike, which is causing inconvenience to others.

In the first book of the Forsyte saga, Galsworthy deliberately gives us Soames Forsyte’s marital roubles through his eyes, As he wrote in a preface to the novel:

The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.

In Swan Song, the actual strikers are similarly absent. This is a novel about the impact of the Strike on a small section of the Upper classes – not an investigation into the Strike’s causes.

The strike ends about a third of the way through the book, but it still remains a condition of England novel. The main theme is the change in sexual morality, as Fleur is tempted to desert her husband in favour of her former lover Jon. Back in the 1888 of The Man of Property, the social taboos surrounding divorce were so strong that Irene is defeated, and comes back to her husband. Now things are far less certain

A sequence about horse-racing explores the theme of honesty. An upper-class crook gets away with theft and forgery because of his class connections, and seems a symbol of a less honest world.

Positively. The Conservative M.P. Michael Mond is recruited by his uncle, a vicar, into a slum clearance scheme. This is presented as positive, socially useful work. I’m not sure how aware Galsworthy expects us to be of the fact that this is the Upper Middles doing things for the working class, rather than working with them. It is very much top-down philanthropy. We are told a lot about the satisfaction the Forsytes and others get from doing it – not much about the reactions of those twho are the supposed beneficiaries

In his search for meaning in an unstable modern world, Soames goes in search of his ancestors, and finds a churchyard and parish register packed with yeoman Forsytes going back centuries – which bolsters his sense of permanence.

The novel climaxes with afire in Soames’s picture gallery, where he keeps the most delightful examples of his accumulated ‘property’. Fleur, anguished because of the end of her affair, throws a cigarette butt into a waste paper bin, where it smoulders and causes a fire. Soames fights heroically to save his precious paintings. When a fireman throws from above a Spanish painting of a woman who looks like Fleur, Fleur, suicidally, stands in its way as though welcoming destruction. Soames pushes her aside, and the painting hits and kills him. So he is killed by his property – but it’s an act of love.

He dies and it’s as though the age of the Forsytes is over. There is a huge change between the first novel of the series, where Soames is heavily satirised as the man of Property who loves his works of Art but can not understand human beings. In this novel he is still described as a ‘dry grey spirit’ and finds himans just as hard to understand – he can’t see why Fleur id possibly ruining herself by chasing after Jon – but he is viewed far more sympathetically, as a man – even though a limited man – who has retained his integrity through difficult years. Galsworthy now sees the Forsyte spirit as something able to survive difficulties – such as the General Strike.

Gibbs had been a journalist as well as a novelist since before 1914, and had achieved distinction as a war correspondent (His post-war collection of war reports, Realities of War, was a great success.) After the war he produced in very quick succession, novels dealing with all manner of social problems (A complete checklist of his books can be found here.} His most notable novel was The Middle of the Road (1922), wich is as much reporting as fiction. It takes its journalist hero on a journey to see what Gibbs himself had witnessed in damaged Europe – notably to Ireland disrupted by the Troubles, to Germany, suffering from post-war chaos, and to Russia,experiencing the horrors of the post-revolutionary period. It was his shock at seeing the suffering in Russia that made him, in novels like Young Anarchy, distrustful of doctrinaire socialism.

The title The Middle of the Road summarises Gibbs’s political attitude. He is a Liberal, with a horror both of the entitled attitudes of the privileged and of the doctrinaire eyhos of revolutionaries. In his books, there is always a sense that if only men of goodwill on both sides could talk to each other, the worst could be averted. This attitude informs Young Anarchy.

It begins as a book about modern youth (like his earlier Heirs Apparent). Gibbs’s narrator finds himself involved, sometimes willingly and sometimes not, with the family of the reactionary Bishop of Burpham. The Bishop’s son, Jocelyn, goes to Oxford and meets an ex-miner from Ruskin College, who converts him to socialism. The daughter, Nancy, writes a best-selling novel (compared with The Constant Nymph) that controversially sums up the spirit of the age. The Bishop disowns them both, and can do nothing but fulminate helplessly against what he sees as the decline of civilisation.
The Bishop’s sister, Elizabeth, is more positive about Youth. During the war she had successfully run a canteen, and in the twenties organises a night refuge for don-and-outs (many of them ex-soldiers, of course). She sees the potential in Youth, and so tries to organise a League of Youth that would work together for the good of the country. There is a set-piece description of the inaugural meeting that is one of the best bits in the book (Gibbs was good at describing public meetings. In his Intellectual Mansions, S.W. (1910) there is a terrific account of the Prime Minister being heckled by suffragettes). For a start, most of the people who have come to the join the League of Youth are grey-haired. Then, when the Bishop starts to speak, the Communists begin heckling, the Hooray Henries attack them, and everything fragments into chaos.

The main concern of the first half of the novel is with this upper-middle class family, but Gibbs inserts reminders of wider sociaal problems, especially those resulting from the war.

…it was the war itself which was the cause of all this. It brought down more than the crowns and the kingdoms. It killed more than the millions of dead. It smashed something in the minds of men – age-old traditions of thought, the foundations of faith, many hopes and illusions in the soul of humanity, the ancient discipline of social life. Its heritage of misery and ruin left a cynicism which has been bequeathed to the very children of the years that followed.

But though the war was disruptive and unsettling, it provides a standard by which the post-war world can be judged. The novel’s narrative traces the story of privileged young people exploring the possibilities of a new and freer world, but on the edges of the picture there are shabby men wearing service medals, ex-sergeants proud of their war service, and men blinded on the Somme, now begging in the streets.
We follow Jocelyn’s campaign as a Labour candidate, a disillusioning experience for all, and the novel seems set for utter pessimism about the prospects for England. But then the National Strike occurs.

When the Strike begins, the narrator expects the worst: “It was impossible to believe that there would not be rioting, mob violence, looting, lawlessness.” But what is expected to be the most disruptive and negative event of the book turns out to be unifying and almost entirely positive. For a start, the hedonistic Glad Young Things buckle to and do their bit. They drive buses, wearing their plus fours and tasselled socks, show good humour when they do hard work unloading food at the docks. “The post-war youth of England,” the narrator decides, were “as like as peas in a pod to another crowd of youth I had known, twelve years ago, when the country was in danger.”
The wartime spirit is demonstrated not only by the undergraduates and public-school boys who step in to keep the country going. The office workers and shop-girls who ride on the unofficial buses develop a community spirit that was not there before. The working men, too, show that they have not been corrupted by militants. They show solidarity with the miners by striking, but they are not violent. The only clashes are marginal and minor. What Gibbs sees as the dogged, essentially peaceful spirit of England wins out against extremists of all sort – whether the fanatical Communists who are represented as taking their orders from Moscow, or those on the Conservative side who would like to bring things to a crisis. Churchill is seen as a divisive figure (“that fat brat” one character calls him.)

Some later General Strike novels, like Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929) would position thmeselves as sympathetic to the miners’ cause. In this one, Gibbs’s ‘plain man’ hero hears a large variety of points of view, and it is not without sympathy for those fighting for a living wage, but Gibbs’s feelings are very strongly against those who want to use the Genaral Strike as a political weapon, to disrupt the country’s stability, and to use industrial force against the legitimate rulers chosen by the electorate. I suspect that in this book he spoke for much of England. I remember my (lower-middle-class) parents in the 1950s looking back on the Strike as a victory for right-thinking, because after it had been broken and the revolutionaries had been put in their place, nothing like that would ever happen again. My mother especially had happy memories of the strike. In 1926 she was seventeen, and just starting an office job in London. She remembered how exciting it was when the buses were taken over by Oxford undergraduates who treated it as a lark and an adventure (and, I suspect, flirted outrageously with teenage female passengers.)

His memoir, written in 1974, was an easy read and very enjoyable.

It records his early life in Madras, living with his uncle, a photographer, and his grandmother, whilst his mother and his siblings lived in Chennapatna where his father was headmaster. He had a succession of pets, a peacock, a mischievous monkey, a kitten and finally a puppy but they all died. On visits to his family in the holidays, his brother taught him how to trap and train grasshoppers:

“We…tried to teach them tricks but invariably found them dead two mornings later”

He attended a series of schools- initially the Lutheran Mission School. Here the teachers were Christian converts who were hostile to teaching non-Christian pupils especially a Brahmin like him. However, his grandmother noted his lessons and taught him herself. He was not especially academic: he was not interested in learning:

“Going to school seemed to be a never-ending nuisance each day”

He preferred writing his stories, exploring, playing football with his friends. After attending two other schools, he transferred to his father’s school in Mysore. During the holidays he read the library’s magazines: The Strand, The Manchester Guardian & the Times Literary Supplement. Fascinated by Walter Scott after reading The Bride of Lammermoor, he read six more of his novels and moved on to Dickens, Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, Pope, Marlowe: “An indiscriminate jumble.”

He loved tragic endings:

“Thus, Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne left me shedding bitter tears and read it again and again”

He passed the university entrance exam at the second attempt and studied History, Economics & Politics. His father tried through his contacts to get him a job: in banking and on the railways. After a short- lived career in teaching, he turned to writing fulltime. His most famous novels include Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937), The Dark Room (1938), The English Teacher (1945), Mr Sampath (1949) as well as collections of short stories. These took place in his fictional village of Malgudi. The publication of these books was helped considerably by the friendship of Graham Greene who had been given the manuscript of Swami & Friends by a friend of Narayan.

The memoir recounts details of his love life too; after a few adolescent crushes, he met his future wife, Rajam. Despite the objections of her father on the grounds of an unfavourable horoscope, they were married. She sadly died on typhoid in 1939 at which point, he went to pieces, stopping writing. After a spiritualist experiment, involving automatic writing, he became convinced that he could be in touch with his dead wife.

His writing career was interrupted by World War Two and the shortage of paper. To make money, he wrote for The Hindu newspaper and started a short-lived magazine of his own: Indian Thought.

In 1956 he obtained a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship and spent time travelling in the USA where he wrote The Guide (published 1958).

The book ends with Naryan living in Mysore, trying his hand at farming a plot of land, listening to radio programmes,worrying about municipal shortcomings and discussing the state of the world with his brother.

His writings often include details of his own life. Swami encounters hostility from his Christian teachers. In The Bachelor of Arts, the most autobiographical of his works, the lead character falls for a 15-year-old girl but her parents oppose the match on the grounds of an unfavourable horoscope. The eponymous English Teacher marries but his wife dies of typhoid. Like Narayan, he is consoled by messages from his wife received via automatic writing. And his experience of writing for film is reflected in Mr Sampath.

As others have noted, there is a Dickensian feel to his writing. The recall of his childhood through the eyes of an adult reminded me of Pip in Great Expectations looking back at his first meeting with Miss Havisham, and David Copperfield’s recalling his experiences in the blacking factory. Moreover, as in the works of the Dickens, there is a series of memorable characters who appear only briefly in his recollections.

As he said: “Life offered enough material to keep him continuously busy”

He creates characters who feature once and then are never heard of again, such as the lamp lighter and Kokandam, the fuel merchant. The latter, fierce and an expert with the bamboo pole, inspires such fear in Narayan that he hides himself for hours, driving his family to distraction, who eventually call in the police. He finally emerges but refuses to answer any questions. As he says:

“In childhood, fears and secrecies and furtive acts happen to be the natural state of life, adopted instinctively for survival in a world dominated by adults.”

His uncle is a member of the university drama group and entertains the boy with his re-telling of The Tempest. This reminds me of Mr Wopsle in Great Expectations who has theatrical ambitions.

At school he drifts through his classes and remembers few of his teachers, apart from Professor Rollo who taught Shakespeare, the Indian history teacher, Professor Venkateswara and Professor Toby. The last never read the roll call as he could not pronounce the Indian names and never looked at his class:

“For many years it was rumoured that he [Toby] thought he was teaching at a women’s college, mistaking the men’s dhotis for skirts and their tufts for braids.”

After graduation, his father’s attempts to get him a job provide some of the most comical incidents. When Narayan goes to meet the Chief Auditor od Railways, he is met by a comical sight:

“The gentleman was bare-bodied and glistening with an oil-coating as he prepared himself for a massage; he blinked several times to make me out, as the oil had dripped over his eyes and blurred his vision.”

A visit to a banker friend of his father conjures up an equally amusing scene:

“This man, though not oily, was also bare-bodied (everyone seemed to be shirtless in Madras) … He was …sitting on a swing, while I kept standing. It was difficult to carry on a conversation with him as he approached and receded…I had to adjust my voices to two pitches to explain my mission and also step back when the swing came for me.”

There is little that is overtly political which is surprising considering the campaigns for Indian independence in the 1920s and 1930s. His recollection of his time as a scout does touch on the subject. When he was at high school, he was a keen scout and was a member of the B.S.A – the Annie Besant Scouts of India. (She was its president and a champion of Home Rule for India.)

“I… proudly revelled in an exclusive world of parades in khaki shorts, double pocket shirt, green turban, gaudy scarf and bamboo staff in hand; we saluted each other with the left hand… Our three fingers …. Were supposed to symbolise this triple loyalty to God, Crown and Country. But alas what a miscalculation… our uplifted fingers indicate an oath to serve not God, Crown and Country but God, Freedom and India.”

I enjoyed this memoir especially his descriptions of his childhood and the evocation of the landscapes of Madras and Mysore. His writing is fluent and full of humour and humanity; his descriptions of people and place are vivid and convincing.

See Reading Group Topics by Year .

Enjoy! Chris.

Oh, I read a lot of Michael Innes novels as a teenager. He was recommended by my English teacher, I think, and I remember tidying a row of bright yellow Gollancz hardbacks when I worked in my local library. I’m pretty sure I found them difficult, and that I thought this was my fault. Now, much older, I’m not so sure I was to blame.

Michael Innes was the penname of the academic J I M Stewart (1906-1994). He was born and grew up in Edinburgh, graduated from Oriel College, Oxford and taught in Leeds, Belfast and Adelaide before returning to Oxford and a professorship. His list of publications, as Stewart and Innes, is long: studies of Joyce, Conrad, Hardy and more; over 20 novels and short story collections in his own name; and, as Innes, about 50 crime novels and collections of short stories. Most of his crime fiction features John Appleby, who rises in the novels from police inspector to Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Titles such as Hamlet, Revenge! (1937), There Came Both Mist and Snow (1940), From London Far (1946) and The Journeying Boy (1949) often appear in discussions of 20^th century crime fiction. Stewart – Innes, rather – was good at titles. They’re mostly quotations, of course, and you can look them up after you finish this.

Death at the President’s Lodging (a prosaic title) is Stewart’s first book, Innes’ first novel, Appleby’s first appearance. Gollancz described it on the dust jacket as the ‘best “first” Detective Story that has ever come our way’. Reviewers generally liked it too:

Look out for Mr. Innes! Unless I am mistaken, he Is a safe tip for Double First in the Final Schools of Detective Fiction. (Yorkshire Post – 23 September 1936, p.6)

It is a splendid piece of writing, and those who are seeking something more exacting in the way of murders should not miss it. The author has a very delicate sense of humour, and he also has an uncanny gift of being able to portray the reaction of murder to more sensitive beings. (Evening News London – 6 October 1936, p. 2)

Like many a new novelist, Innes chose what he knew, setting the crime in a university college, St Anthony’s. (He explored forms of the Establishment, in which he was of course a respected resident, throughout his writing career.) St. Anthony’s is neither Oxford nor Cambridge, but a combination of the two, appropriately located near Bletchley, halfway along what was known as the ‘Varsity Line’ between the two cities. It’s a very convincing creation: chapels, libraries, sets and halls built around gardens, courts and quadrangles, all leading in and out of each other. In the tradition of the day, a helpful plan is provided.

Dusk was falling and the trim college orchard seemed to hold all the mystery of a forest. Only close to him on the right, breaking the illusion, was the grey line of hall and library, stone upon buttressed stone, fading, far above, into the darkness of stained-glass windows. Directly in front, in uncertain silhouette against a lustreless eastern sky, loomed the boldly arabesqued gables of the Caroline chapel. An exhalation neither wholly mist nor wholly fog was beginning to glide over the immemorial turf, to curl round the trees, to dissolve in insubstantial pageantry the fading lines of archway and wall. And echoing over the college and the city, muted as if in requiem for what lay within, was the age-old melody of vesper bells. (pp. 18-9)

Until the murder of the college president, Dr Josiah Umpleby (Innes is as good at names as he is at titles), the outside world is kept outside. The dons peer at their books and manuscripts and do a little teaching, but their main occupation is squabbling, often malevolent. The students are hardly there. A few thrust themselves (tiresomely, I think) into the investigation but the majority stay in their rooms, the library or, risking the wrath of the Proctor, Dr Gott, local pubs. The college servants – more splendid names like Slotwiner, the President’s butler, and Tantripp, the head porter – do their work, closely observing their, er, betters. This, you might notice, is a community without women, although there may be an occasional wife in a far suburb and, just glimpsed, ‘a female student, […] in that zealous pursuit of early morning instruction proper to her kind’ (p. 84). It is obvious from the start that the chief suspects must be the senior academics resident in the college. Into this closed world – the plot relies heavily on keys – come Inspector Dodd of the local police and Inspector Appleby, bizarrely delivered by Scotland Yard in a ‘great yellow Bentley … the Yard’s most resplendent vehicle’ (p. 9). Only a clever chap from the Met has a hope of solving this locked room mystery, the authorities feel.

Remember my saying at the beginning that I found Michael Innes difficult when I first read him? It turns out I still do.

Appleby’s investigation is in some ways like a ‘police procedural’. The President is found dead in his study, clues around him and motives a-plenty. Who did what where and when is painstakingly uncovered. But Appleby is hardly the typical copper. Statements are gathered, and alibis checked, by Dodd and his officers. Appleby observes, asks the odd, elliptical question and ruminates as he roams the college at night or broods in his room or the pub. This is a very cerebral investigation. The suspects lay false trails, wittingly and unwittingly, and the students scatter confusion. The solution, when it comes, is complex, presented in layers scrupulously lifted away until the last one is revealed as the truth. The detective story as archaeological dig or bibliographical enquiry.

The denouement, in classic form, with suspects gathered before Appleby, reveals everyone running backwards and forwards across the ground, barely missing one another in their eagerness to disguise their actions or motives. Think muddy field with hundreds of boot prints. Now I can appreciate that this is funny. It’s a farce, with every character in an academic gown. There’s even a car chase of sorts, involving the students in a De Dion-Bouton. I imagine Innes in his study, chuckling as he worked it all out, the college plan with each suspect’s actions in different coloured inks, crossing and criss-crossing the scene. Murder plots in Golden Age fiction are usually improbable, even ludicrous, but we suspend our disbelief for the pleasure of the puzzle. Here, however, I’m unwilling to do that. It’s all too complicated, and as I frankly can’t remember which suspect is which, I get frustrated.

Yes, that’s the thing. The suspects are indistinguishable. They all have a story to tell, as first one and then another does something to obscure the truth. Is their lack of definition deliberate, to add to the confusion? Perhaps, but it is irritating. Even when the guilty one is unmasked, I’m not sure I can work out which one he is, why he does murder or how. It’s not that Innes can’t ‘do’ character. Dodd the streetwise copper, Umpleby the brilliant but devious victim, Slotwiner and Tantripp who make the academic life possible. These all convince within the context of the novel. But Pownall, Titlow, Haveland and the rest? If I can’t keep the suspects separate in my mind, why should I care which one is the murderer, and why? Another reviewer, who thought nevertheless that this was ‘one of the best detective novels’, noted:

There is, however, some straining of probabilities. […] The reader, when he has finished with this book, may also feel that there has been a little too much of the round game of ‘passing the corpse’. (The Scotsman, 1 October 1936, p. 13)

The prose doesn’t help, reminding me of the passages I was made to translate in Latin at university.

And Appleby, with that effect of intuitive awareness that experience and training bring, knew that [he] knew that he had made a mistake. […]And in doing so he has landed himself in simply psychological impossibility. He might simply to have put up the story that he was scared by what had happened and acted out of mere indefinite, massive sense of danger. He has made a mistake which no talk about inference and induction can cover – and he knows it. (p. 104)

He could prove he didn’t do it here and now. He couldn’t prove he didn’t do it there and in twenty minutes’ time – were some indication left that he was guilty. (p. 188)

We are clerks, medieval clerks leading this mental life that is natural and healthy only to men serving a transcendental idea. But have we that now? And what then does all this thinking, poring, analysing, arguing become – what but so much agony of pent-up and thwarted action? The ceaseless driving of natural physiological energy into narrow channels of mentation and intellection… (p. 80)

As if this weren’t enough, the prose is larded with literary allusions. The Oxbridge college of 1936 could presumably cope with an anecdote about Kant quoted in De Quincey’s Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts presented as a clue (pp. 82-3) but almost a hundred years later I can’t. I could Google it, I suppose.

I suspect that Innes got carried away with his own cleverness in Death at the President’s Lodging. It is after all a first novel. (I’m re-reading Hamlet, Revenge! (1937) to test my theory.) There have been comparisons with Dorothy L Sayers’ Gaudy Night, pubIished a year earlier, in 1935. Both have the elite Oxbridge setting. Both have literary allusions on every other page. Both consider the academic life, upset by violence and set right by an outsider. Well, I can see the comparison, but Gaudy Night, with its debate about the role of women and its emotional weight, has worn much better.

The abbreviation of the conflict a year earlier than actuality is due to one man, Henry Berrington Duncan. After a grammar-school education and a ‘successful enough without being distinguished’ time at Cambridge, he had become a colonial administrator. When the war began, he was ‘in charge of an enormous territory in British East Africa,’ where he raised a force to fight against the German colonists in East Africa, and achieved spectacular results by unorthodox tactics.

The novel begins when he and his colonial force arrive in Britain. Randomly dressed, wearing beards that broke regulations, and not following standard drills or procedures, they are looked on with distaste by the conventional military. They are, however, a very well-trained elite force – and above all a thinking army, where each man is encouraged to think for himself, strategically. Their attitudes are the reverse of those found in the conventional, hierarchical Army, with its rigid top-down command structure.

When these men are placed on the Western front, results are immediate. They straight away take control of contested Hill 70, using the tactics that will be Duncan’s hallmarks – surprise, a night infiltration, and then attack from the rear. ‘Noone can survive a night attack from the rear’, is a repeated mantra,

Duncan goes on to bigger and bigger achievements, and Newman imagines an alternative Battle of Amiens where the new tactics are used on a larger scale on a larger scale. These tactics are, of course, the opposite of the established procedures of the Great War, which involved using a mass attack of infantry to try to force a gap in the enemy’s lines – a procedure highly expensive in human lives. Duncan uses small-scale forces making surprise attacks, leaving the enemy confused and vulnerable.

Duncan’s tactics are therefore the opposite of Douglas Haig’s – but in this book Sir John Douglas, a thinly disguised version of Haig, is so impressed by Duncan’s successes that he gives him a free hand. Newman’s novel is implicitly critical of Haig’s tactics, but describes Sir John Douglas admiringly as:

representing the finest type of British regular officer. His grey hair and moustache matched his clean-cut features.

When he and Duncan meet for the first time:

After the formal salute they stood for a moment with hands locked: it seemed as if each instinctively recognised the greatness of the other.

Half way throuigh the book, Douglas conveniently suffers an illness, which means there is no obstacle to Duncan taking over the whole British Army.

Bernard Newman, the author, is rather carried away by Duncan’s brilliance – I’ve never read a novel where the author so clearly hero-worships his main character. Newman sends him on a short interlude eastwards. Using surprise, cunning and diversions, the British take the Gallipoli peninsula in twenty-four hours. (The actual Gallipoli campaign in 1915 had, of course, been a protracted and painful disaster.) After this, they push on to take Constantinople and force Turkey out of the war. It’s all made to seem very simple.

Then it’s back to the Western Front, and a campaign that saves the French who are defending Verdun and drives the Germans back to their borders. Duncan refuses German pleas for an Armistice and insists on Germany’s unconditional surrender, which is forthcoming. This decisive result has other consequences. Because the war is over before November, the Russian Revolution never happens; the Americans have not played a big enough part in the War to play a decisive role in the Peace conference. Britain comes out very much on top.

The book is written as the memoir of a staff officer called Newman. (Bernard Newman had a taste for this; his later spy novels are also the first-person accounts of someone called newman – and were sometimes taken as factual.) He gives us the effect of authenticity by adding footnotes rather enjoyably directing us towards further details of military campaigns in totally imaginary historical works.

The book is a fantasy of what might have been. As a novel it has flaws – an utterly perfect hero who is never wrong and always successful. But it is very grippingly written, with a narrative drive that carries you along.

Bernard Newman (born 1897) had fought in the Great War as a young man, and his ability to speak and understand French had actually involved him in some undercover work. In this book he assumes the authority of a tactician, and some contemporaries thought the book’s author must be a distinguished soldier or military theorist. The novel had distinguished fans; Liddell Hart, for example, a critic of Haig’s methods on the Western Front, prescribed it to students at Sandhurst (He also prescibed Georgette Heyer’s The Infamous Army for its detailed depiction of Waterloo)

Newman was not he only author thinking along these lines at the time. In 1929, John Buchan had published The Courts of the Morning, in which his hero Sandy Arbuthnot (an intellectual soldier) is involved in a Soith American war. The enemy general is well-versed in the most effective tactics of the Great War, but Arbuthnot uses lateral thinking to defeat him.

When we think of the war books boom of 1928-30, ten years after the armistice, we generally think of the disillusioned novels and memoirs, like All Quiet on the Western Front, Goodbye to All That, and so on. But there were also books like this that never suggested the war’s futility, but questioned the war differently, thinking about alternative tactics. In the Second World War, the kind of thinking that this book typifies is found in the creation of special units like the SAS, whose tactics were very much Duncan’s – surprise tactical attacks on crucial targets behind enemy lines. Such units played a significant part in the war – but whether a whole army could be organised on Ducan’s principles is more dubious.

This was Evelyn Waugh’s third novel, after the brilliant farce of Decline and Fall, and Vile Bodies, which segues from a satire on the Bright Young Things to a fantasy of future war. This book was inspired byb his experience as a journalist; Waugh had been to the coronation of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, where he had been impressed by the spectacle and the sometimes ridiculous mismatch between African and European ways.

In Black Mischief he invents Azania, a fictional island off East Africa, where young Oxford-educated Emperor Seth has just inherited the throne. The first chapter is a brilliant depiction of a capital in disarray.Expecting conquest by the rebels, all officials and prominent citizens are deserting Seth in expectation of disaster. Unexpectedly, Seth’s general wins the battle (mostly because he ditched the tank in which progressive Seth had placed great faith, and relied on the blood-thirstiness of his troops.) Seth is thereby in a position to introduce a great programme of modernisation, in which he is helped by an Oxford contemporary, Basil Seal.

Basil Seal is one of the great Waugh characters, who recurs in other novels. He is utterly amoral. At the start of the book he decides that Azania is the country where the future of the world will be decided, and is determined to go there. He steals his mother’s emeralds to finance his passage. Once he gets there he makes it his mission to help Seth in his modernisation mission.

The book has a reputation as expressing prejudice against Africans, and there are phrases that a modern publisher’s sensitivity reader would definitely cut, but the villains of the book are the Europeans, all pursuing their own ends in Azania, with no thought for the natives. The diplomatic community is presented as utterly self-absorbed and self-interested. The French are depicted as especially resentful and scheming, the English as inefficient and trivial. or example. Some of the liveliest satire is directed at two middle-aged English ladies, Dame Mildred Porch and Miss Sarah Tin, who have come to Azania with concern about the treatment of animals, who show no concern for humans: Dame Mildred writes a letter home:

Fed doggies in market-place. Children tried to take food from doggies. Greedy little wretches.

The main butt of the satire, though, is Seth’s modernisation scheme, which allows Waugh to point outwhat he sees as the incompatibility of progrerssive ideas with actual human nature. Whenever he reads about a progressive scheme in Europe, Seth wants to import it. One of his main obsessions is family planning. He gets Basil Seal to organise a publicity campaign, and he produces a poster:

“It portrayed two contrasted scenes. On one side a native hut of hideous squalor, overrun with children of every age, suffering from every physical incapacity—crippled, deformed, blind, spotted and insane; the father prematurely aged with paternity squatted by an empty cook-pot; through the door could be seen his wife, withered and bowed with child-bearing, desperately hoeing at their inadequate crop. On the other side a bright parlour furnished with chairs and table; the mother, young and beautiful, sat at her ease eating a huge slice of raw meat; her husband smoked a long Arab hubble-bubble (still a caste mark of leisure throughout the land), while a single healthy child sat between them reading a newspaper. Inset between the two pictures was a detailed drawing of some up-to-date contraceptive apparatus and the words in Sakuyu: WHICH HOME DO YOU CHOOSE?

The message is read in a quite unintended way by the Africans:

Interest in the pictures was unbounded; all over the island woolly heads were nodding, black hands pointing, tongues clicking against filed teeth in unsyntactical dialects. Nowhere was there any doubt about the meaning of the beautiful new pictures. See: on right hand: there is rich man: smoke pipe like big chief: but his wife she no good: sit eating meat: and rich man no good: he only one son. See: on left hand: poor man: not much to eat: but his wife she very good, work hard in field: man he good too: eleven children: one very mad, very holy. And in the middle: Emperor’s juju. Make you like that good man with eleven children. And as a result, despite admonitions from squire and vicar, the peasantry began pouring into town for the gala, eagerly awaiting initiation to the fine new magic of virility and fecundity.”

The novel ends with war and the capital in chaos, with Basil fleeing for his life. He finds rescue among an African faction of loyalists, who are celebrating an unexpected triumph. His is invited to a feast where Waugh gets his culminating darkest joke from one of the oldest of stereotypes – African cannibalism. This book is maybe not for everybody.

After greatly enjoying it, though, I decided to re-read Waugh’s 1942 novel Put Out More Flags, which also features Basil Seal – a bit older, no more respectable, just as devious. It is set during the ‘phoney war’ the period between September 1939 and the Battle of Britain in June 1940, when the country was officially at war, but nothing much seemed to be happening.

Much is made of the culture clash between the inhabitants of a country village and evacuees from Birmingham. Basil makes a good living from bribes as he threatens to impose the most awful of the evacuee children on households. The book is even better than Black Mischief.

and Henry Leek was Priam Farll’s bad habit. While somewhat of a rascal (as his master guessed), Leek was a very perfect valet. Like you and me, he was never shy. He always did the natural thing naturally. He had become, little by little, indispensable to Priam Farll, the sole means of living communication between Priam Farll and the universe of men.

The novel opens when the pair have returned to London after a long period abroad. Henry Leek is sick upstairs in Farll’s Kensington house. The doctor arrives and assumes that the quietly obsequious man who lets him in must be the servant. The sick man, therefore, must be the master. Farll does not disabuse him.He is reluctant to face life’s responsibilities by himself, and therefore hides the truth, even when the invalid dies. He assumes the identity of Henry Leek because of its anonymity- and partly, it is suggested, becausea woman has designs on marrying him, and he cannot face that.

The idea is an ridiculously implausible one, and Bennett seems to be acknowledging this by writing in a more playful style than usual. The situation gives him scope for a lot of farcical developments. The most important comes when Farll discovers a letter addressed to Henry Leek from a lady introduced by a marriage bureau. He meets her, and is impressed by her immense practicality. lLater in the bok she is described as:

the widow of a builder in a small way of business, well known in Putney and also in Wandsworth. This was obviously true. She could have been nothing but the widow of a builder in a small way of business well known in Putney and also in Wandsworth. She was every inch that.

She is Alice Challis, and is a remarkable woman. Once she has decided that the two of them would suit each other, she is tremendously strong, utterly unshockable by the book’s wilder developments, and as utterly dependable as Leek had been.

Priam Farll’s death causes a sensation. Beforehand his had been a name that meant something only in the art world, but he suddenly becomes a national treasure, and he (or rather Henry Leek) is given the privilege of burial in Westminster Abbey. Bennett gets good comedy out of Priam Farll’s nervous witnessing of his own state funeral. Of course, it’s the sevant who is being interred in the Abbey, a fact which will cause national outrage when it comes out.

Complications ensue. Farll and Alice go and live at Putney,

“The room was ugly in a pleasant Putneyish way, with a couple of engravings after B.W. Leader, R.A., a too realistic wall-paper, hot brown furniture with ribbed legs, a carpet with the characteristics of a retired governess who has taken to drink, and a black cloud on the ceiling over the incandescent burners.”

Yet Putney is presented as a sort of paradise – and it’s one where a woman like Alice has no need of servants:

“You did not keep a servant, because servants were so complicated, and because they could do nothing whatever as well as you could do it yourself. You had a charwoman when you felt idle or when you chose to put the house into the back-yard for an airing.”

A long-lost cousin has appeared to inherit Priam Farll’s estate, including the paintings, whose value has rocketed since the artist’s death. he has now become immensely rich, but Priam and Alice couple become short of money, so Farll, who is becoming nostalgic for paint, decides that he will make money by painting again, and selling the pictures. Alice looks at the what he paints and is unimpressed; his pictures are impressionist, without the detailed natruralism that is to her untutored eye the mark of good painting. Still,she humours him. The paintings are sold for ten pounds each to a local dealer, who finds a customer willing to pay fifty pounds each for them. He is a connoisseur who recognises the style, and sells them to a collector as authentic Priam Farlls, for two thousand each.

Farcical complications ensue. The wife and children that Henry Leek long ago deserted turn up, and Priam Farll is threatened with prosecution for bigamy. Alice sees the intruders off, brilliantly.

A more threatening problem emerges happen when the authenticity of the new pictures (which have been passed off as genuine Priam Farlls) is questioned. There is a court case, whose pomposity and self-importance Bennett clearly relishes describing.

This is one of the novels that Arnold Bennett seems to be writing just for the fun of the thing. He enjoys satirising the art world, and gets a lot of comic mileage out of Alice Challis, who protects her man through thick and thin, with complete disregard for truth and honesty.

One thought strikes me. Very often Bennett’s novels have a hero that is not quite a self-portrait, but exaggerates one aspect of Bennett’s own personality. This novel was written just as Bennett was finding real success and a literary reputation. He was a man with a stammer, and sometimes uncertain in public situations. I suspect that this book expresses some of his qualms and ambivalence about fame and becoming a public figure.

The book sold well, and Bennett adapted it into a play The Great Adventure; first produced in London in March 1913, it ran for 674 performances. This was filmed in 1921 with Lionel Barrymore as Priam Farll; a sound version in 1933 was called His Double Life, and starred Roland Young and Lilian Gish.

In 1943 a version called Holy Matrimony starred Monty Woolley and Gracie Fields.

Gracie is just rightas Alice Challis; you can see the whole movie here:

Darling of the Day, a musical based on the book, with songs by Yip Harburg and Jule Styne opened on Broadway in 1968. It starred Vincent Price and Patricia Routledge, and was a resounding flop, despite some pleasant songs. The devastating New York Times review of it can be read here: https://www.nytimes.com/1968/01/29/archives/vincent-price-and-patricia-routledge-in-darling-of-the-day.html

Arnold Bennett, by Max Beerbohm