Archive for the ‘Elspeth Davie’ Category

Lost Books – Providings

May 2, 2024

The cover of the John Calder edition of Elspeth Davie’s 1965 debut novel, Providings, features a photograph of jars of homemade marmalade and raspberry jam, provisions (which the title deconstructs into a verb before adding an ‘s’ to create a noun again, focusing on the action rather than the object) that the novel will, indeed, focus on with the same unhealthy fixation as its protagonist, Peter Beck. Beck is a young man who has recently left home and is lodging with a Mrs Tullit and her family, who finds himself inundated with packages of homemade jam sent by his mother. The accumulation of jars has already put on hold his plan to change his lodgings frequently in an attempt to escape the constraints of the life he led at home:

“When two of his cupboard shelves were filled, he knew that he would not realise his freedom by moving in six weeks or so to other rooms.”

Davie even manages to make his mother’s gifts feel threatening by describing the occasional broken jar and Beck’s attempts to pick out the shards of glass from the jam. Beck’s efforts to rid himself of this burden (as he tells anyone who will listen, he does not particularly like jam) begin with his landlady (who already makes her own jam), and his work colleagues at the furniture shop, who each receive a jar. These exchanges are described at length as Beck’s connections with others become increasing centred on ridding himself of the jars:

“He left the shop as soon as he could, lightened of the heavy load he had brought with him in the morning, but at the same time a little oppressed by the contacts he had made through his gifts.”

Next, he offloads further jars by donating them to a jumble sale, only to turn up and be disappointed not to see them for sale but being used in the tearoom. His inquiries discomfit the woman he is asking – “Uneasiness had gradually stiffened the plump woman’s still kindly smile.” This is one of a number of examples of Beck’s awkwardness in conversation and reluctance to develop friendships. He often accidentally offends others, as when, on a rare day off at the seaside, he points out to the landlady of a guesthouse that the sea cannot be seen when the tide is out, or when he asks Mrs Tullit what “the essentials… of a room which you yourself would enjoy living in” are, which she interprets as an insult. In fact, Beck has been tasked at work with fitting out model rooms for the furniture shop. He is eventually inspired by a young woman, Clara, who comes to the shop, in which he perhaps finds a kindred spirit, showing interest in the rooms:

“Simply to get away. To escape up any flight of stairs, down any side lane. It’s all the same – a way out, even for a moment or two.”

Both Beck and Clara are searching for a freedom that remains elusive, but for Clara this lies outside a house:

“When I’m finished she’ll have given up any idea she’s ever had about tents, caravans, ships’ cabins and the like. What’s more, my place will have an air of freedom those other hideouts could never even touch!”

A house represents constraint for Clara in the way the jam jars do for Beck. “Walls are an anathema to her at the moment,” Beck tells the liftboy, Lukin, who is helping him construct his rooms, “To her four walls are a prison.” The jam continues to cause him anxiety as barrier to his, and her, freedom:

“Her mind is set on all the usual ideas of freedom. She wants to travel light… How will she manage that attached to a chap weighed down by dozens and dozens of pots of jam.”

She, too, has objects which weigh her down – a rug made out of the skin of dog, a wardrobe filled with the shoes of the dead. Davie is a very physical writer – though the question here is metaphysical – how can we be free? – in her novel it is acted out using the most deliberately banal objects – so banal, in fact, the novel almost veers into the absurd at times (for example when Beck spots a missing letter on a caravan’s sign which reads ‘Pearly hell’ instead of ‘Pearly Shell’ and he goes to a hardware store to buy a letter ‘S’, paint and brush). Providings is an early example of Davie’s skill at synthesising character and environment, where it feels as if the physical landscape the characters inhabit is as important as anything we discover of their internal life.

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The Spark

May 5, 2023

The Spark and Other Stories was Elspeth Davie’s first collection of short stories, originally published in 1968. To say her work concentrates on the ordinary is almost an understatement – even the titles indicate as much: ‘Oven Gloves’, ‘The Eyelash’, ‘A Loaded Bag’. Photographs and film, perhaps still a novelty for many, feature in a number, beginning with the first story, ‘A Room of Photos’. Two young men wait for their photos to be developed, passing the time by looking at those displayed on the walls of the shop:

“Have you noticed this is how everyone looks at photos – this minute inspection that’s seldom given to paintings or even to flesh and blood persons…”

Such is Davie’s art – to look more closely at what is around us. In the story, the results are not uplifting as the men find only “the prevailing look – blank and glassy… Impenetrable boredom!” In the final story, ‘Camera’, there is a similar inability to reflect reality as Paxton attempts to film the elderly Mr Fendell, futilely instructing him to “Just be natural.” Only when he collapses and dies (in a way that also seems over-acted) can he be said to be ‘relaxed’. A photograph also features in ‘Removal’ where the central charter had developed a habit – an obsession even – of being present when a removal is taking place:

“The boy had to be there when the stuff spilled out. He liked to look through the uncurtained windows at the rooms emptying and whitening.”

As he wanders round one such house, he picks up a photograph of a young girl and, when he goes outside, is mistaken for a relative sent to close up the place. When an old woman criticises the family for spoiling the girl (“…the girl was actually given a harp!”) he defends her as if he knows her well, and soon develops a story of camping with her in the mountains of Switzerland. The boy’s imagination becomes somehow truer than the photograph.

Painting also features as an amateur artform in more than one story. In ‘Promise’ Carter is an “amateur of promise” whose success comes when he has the idea of sticking scraps of paper lying around his room onto his paintings. (Again, it feels as if Davie is hinting at her own process here as the discarded scraps of life are mixed with art). Only when he starts using banknotes, especially in a painting for his old school, does he encounter objections: “It’s a question of temptation.” Davie’s object does not seem to be satire; rather the ways in which art and reality coincide. ‘Space’ also features an artist and a meeting with an old school friend, Mullen, who notices the empty spaces in his paintings and considers them unfinished:

“I must beg your pardon. I was simply judging by man-in-the-street standards. Of course, it was the large spaces of untouched paper – those white patches, which led to the mistake.”

Mullen cannot unsee the white spaces (“The white spaces had expanded enormously”) and insists on buying the painting. Only once he has it in his possession, he “began to feel safe, and the fearful hollow inside him began to fill up as though he had already started on his solid meal.” (The juxtaposition of the existential ‘hollow’ with the prosaic ‘meal’ is very Davie). ‘Space’ is one of many examples of Davie using an object to reveal character. We see this again in ‘Oven Gloves’ when a husband fails to notice his wife’s new outfit. When he eventually spots her gloves (“Something different about them?”) she replies, “Different from the oven gloves you usually see me in?” Oven gloves, it transpires, was the annual Christmas gift from her mother-in-law. Eventually she goes to a neighbour to have her new outfit admired. In ‘The Eyelash’ the offending object is found on the edge if a plate in a restaurant: “I feel rather disgusted,” the diner, a young woman, declares. A conversation ensues between her and her boyfriend which soon ranges beyond the incident:

“I think the disgust or disappointment or whatever it was came a long, long time before that.”

Soon the couple have left their friends behind to finish their meal, underlying tensions revealed though nothing you might call an argument taking place. ‘The Eyelash’ is one of the shorter stories, and Davie can observe and reveal over a few pages as skilfully as she does on the longer pieces. On the one hand the very ordinariness of her charters and situations demonstrate why she has been largely forgotten, yet they are her great strength rather than a weakness.

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Climbers on a Stair

June 1, 2022

Though the most famous example of a novel centred on characters living in the same block is undoubtedly French (Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual), a tradition of ‘tenement’ novels also exists in Scotland, from Iain Crichton Smith’s The Tenement (1985) to Jenni Fagan’s Luckenbooth (2021). Another example is Elspeth Davie’s Climbers on a Stair from 1978. Although Davie is best known, if known at all, for her short stories, this was her third novel. As with most tenement novels, it deliberately avoids a central character, and, in fact, goes out of its way to characterise the building itself as the focal point in a Prelude:

“It is a tenement stair with eight houses on it – a building which probably in the 120 years of its life have never been cut off from the outside world for more than an hour or two.”

It is the stair that connects the building’s homes and, potentially, those who live in them. As the opening sentence suggests it is also connected to history, but equally to the contemporary world outside the front door. It has a permanence (“a single, sculptured spiral of solid stone worn into deep, smooth moon-curves at its foot”) but is also mutable (“there is a cycle of change on the stair like the organic cycle in an organism”).

The inhabitants of Davie’s tenement are a similar mixture of characters – those in the process of change and those who fiercely remain the same. Davie cleverly makes one of her characters, Neilson, a town planner, thus introducing the topic of buildings into the narrative. He feels himself blamed for every disliked concrete construction, of which, in the seventies, there were a few, and yet he is also aware that planners like himself have produced imperfect results:

“It was Neilson’s luck to have found a flat which… had a magnificent view of the city for miles around. He had also the ill luck to see for the first time what he and his kind had done to the horizon over the years.”

Other inhabitants of the tenement include Thomas Baird who, since heart problems caused him to give up his job, now spends his time weaving, a passion he discovered by chance when recuperating. Art is also represented by the aptly named Miss Winterfield, a retired music teacher, who can, indeed appear frosty in conversation. Both represent the possibilities of new beginnings: Baird because he has found the craft which he loves late in life; Miss Winterfield because she sees age as no barrier to learning:

“I think I can say that some of my greatest achievements have been with my older pupils.”

Yet they are two characters who have no intention of leaving the tenement. In contrast, Neilson is planning to go down south, and Steven Singer, a student of orthoptics, similarly does not intend to be a permanent resident. Miss Winterfield is perhaps the most developed character, never short of an opinion, and verging on a Muriel Spark creation, as, for example, when we are told that once she would have hidden her bottle of wine from prying eyes but now:

“She took a certain pride in leaving the bottle standing on the hearthrug like an unruly friend who was not to be dismissed simply because other visitors had arrived.”

Singer’s back story is revealed thanks to a remark of Miss Winterfield’s when she comments he is too young to think about death. He makes a point of visiting her later to tell her:

“I knew this boy… He was nineteen. He was killed. Hit by a lorry. Knew him well. We’d done endless walks together. And we had talked. We had talked a great deal.”

These few short sentences suggest the depth of the relationship, perhaps even something more than friendship, and it will be returned to throughout the novel though without adding much in the way of detail. Miss Winterfield is also influential when it comes to Clara Kirk, who is introduced as follows:

“Though Clara Kirk had never crossed a border there was a great deal of luggage in the cupboards and wardrobes of her first floor flat.”

Clara seems to belong to those who are in permanent residence. Though she talks knowledgeably about “a remote mountain village in Bavaria” or St Peter’s gallery in Rome, that knowledge comes for guidebooks and travel brochures. Her desire to travel is one of the small dreams that inhabit the tenement alongside its residents.

Climbers on a Stair is an unassuming novel much like the tenement itself, but Davie not only brings its characters to life, revealing dreams and passions, hopes and regrets, as powerful as any protagonist, but also illuminates their lives with small moments – for example when they observe a man struggling to raise a kite on a windless day. Its stories (and its storeys) are to be cherished.

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