All posts tagged Irene

Miss Mapp by E.F. Benson (1922)

Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil.
(Miss Mapp’s spiteful character, Chapter 1)

If there was a quality – and, indeed, there were many – on which Tilling prided itself, it was on its immunity from snobbishness.
(Comic irony, Chapter 2)

The correct attitude in Tilling was profound indifference to anybody of whatever degree who did not live at Tilling, and to anything that did not happen there.
(Chapter 2)

As far as she [Diva] was aware, passion, except in the sense of temper, did not exist in Tilling. Tilling was far too respectable.
(Chapter 6)

All semblance of manners was invariably thrown to the winds by the ladies of Tilling when once bridge began; primeval hatred took their place. The winners of any hand were exasperatingly condescending to the losers, and the losers correspondingly bitter and tremulous.
(Chapter 2)

Diva had ‘popped’ into the grocer’s. She always popped everywhere just now; she popped across to see a friend, and she popped home again; she popped into church on Sunday, and occasionally popped up to town, and Miss Mapp was beginning to feel that somebody ought to let her know, directly or by insinuation, that she popped too much.
(Chapter 2)

‘Our fair friends, you know, have a pretty sharp eye for each other’s little failings. They’ve no sooner finished one squabble than they begin another, the pert little fairies.’
(Major Flint on Tilling’s womenfolk)

There were smiles and smiles, respectful smiles, sympathetic smiles, envious and admiring smiles, but there were also smiles of hilarious and mocking incredulity. [Miss Mapp] concluded that she had to deal with the latter variety.
(Managing the malice behind social conventions, Chapter 7)

‘You wish to see me, Major Flint?’ she said, in such a voice as icebergs might be supposed to use when passing each other by night in the Arctic seas.
(Chapter 7)

When he first conceived of Miss Mapp, Benson was obviously following up the success of its predecessor comic novel, ‘Queen Lucia’. Only slowly did it dawn on him that these humorous books about monstrously snobbish women in English provincial towns offered a whole new subject. According to his biographer, Brian Masters, he realised that ‘his financial future might very well depend thenceforth upon his creation of monstrous women’ and that is indeed what happened, as he developed the Mapp and Lucia characters into a series which eventually consisted of six books and two short stories.

In the first novel, Emmeline Lucas aka Lucia lords it over the fictional village of Riseholme with its population of arty provincial ladies. Benson situated his new creation, Miss Elizabeth Mapp, in Tillingham, which is an only lightly fictionalised version of the twee tourist town of Rye, on the Kent coast.

Rye already had a reputation as being a bit of a writer’s resort, having played host to Joseph Conrad, Henry James and H.G. Wells among other luminaries. Obviously none of these appear in the book which is, instead, about the same kind of rivalrous, gossipy, bitchy women as ‘Queen Lucia’. With this difference: they’re poorer and nastier.

In the first couple of chapters Benson goes out of his way to describe how ‘straitened’ the circumstances of his little crew are. Lucia’s Risenholme set have dinner parties and evenings’ entertainments, they include an international opera singer and the local Lady of the manor. Elizabeth Mapp’s Tillingham circle is distinctly poorer and more constrained. Benson gives a detailed explanation why:

Dinner-parties entailed a higher scale of living; Miss Mapp, for one, had accurately counted the cost of having three hungry people to dinner, and found that one such dinner-party was not nearly compensated for, in the way of expense, by being invited to three subsequent dinner-parties by your guests. Voluptuous teas were the rule, after which you really wanted no more than little bits of things, a cup of soup, a slice of cold tart, or a dished-up piece of fish and some toasted cheese. Then, after the excitement of bridge (and bridge was very exciting in Tilling), a jig-saw puzzle or Patience cooled your brain and composed your nerves. In winter, however, with its scarcity of daylight, Tilling commonly gave evening bridge-parties, and asked the requisite number of friends to drop in after dinner, though everybody knew that everybody else had only partaken of bits of things. Probably the ruinous price of coal had something to do with these evening bridge-parties, for the fire that warmed your room when you were alone would warm all your guests as well, and then, when your hospitality was returned, you could let your sitting-room fire go out.

So their timid and limited social activities are in part determined by the price of coal. ‘Shabby genteel’ is, I think, the phrase. Google AI defines it as:

‘Shabby genteel’ describes a state of being where someone or something appears shabby or impoverished but still strives to maintain the appearance or manners of gentility.

Their limited circumstances explain why everyone in Miss Mapp’s little set cordially hates Mrs Poppit, who is richer than them, and does hold rather grand gatherings. She has a butler! And a car!! Everyone smiles and curtseys to her face but whispers all kinds of malicious gossip behind her back, because she doesn’t share what they consider their ‘good breeding and narrow incomes‘.

Although Isabel [Poppit] conformed to the manners of Tilling in doing household shopping every morning with her wicker basket, and buying damaged fruit for fool, and in dressing in the original home-made manner indicated by good breeding and narrow incomes, Miss Mapp was sadly afraid that these habits were not the outcome of chaste and instinctive simplicity, but of the ambition to be received by the old families of Tilling as one of them.

Accompanying the financial constraints is a similar restriction of horizons. Miss Mapp’s world is tiny, bounded by the view from her front room window from where she can keep an eye on people going to or from Tillingham church, on the front doors of the two retired military men, Major Flint and Captain Puffin, and see down the hill to the high street. She is a classic curtain twitcher, glued to her window and spying on everyone’s comings and goings.

There was little that concerned the social movements of Tilling that could not be proved, or at least reasonably conjectured, from Miss Mapp’s eyrie.

The microscopic parochialism of this tiny-minded community is very amusingly mocked by Benson:

The correct attitude in Tilling was profound indifference to anybody of whatever degree who did not live at Tilling, and to anything that did not happen there. In particular, any manifestation of interest in kings or other distinguished people was held to be a very miserable failing.

This is what makes a person ‘Tillingite to the marrow’.

Direct link with Lucia

Incidentally, early on the narrative makes an explicit link between Miss Mapp’s Tilling and Lucia’s Riseholme:

She [Miss Mapp] had heard it last month when on a visit to a friend at that sweet and refined village called Riseholme. It was rather looked down on there, as not being sufficiently intellectual. But within a week of Miss Mapp’s return, Tilling rang with it, and she let it be understood that she was the original humourist…

The ‘it’ in question is a jokey way of saying goodbye Miss Mapp has introduced into Tilling, substituting not the French au revoir but a jokey expansion of it to au reservoir. All the characters jokily say ‘Au reservoir’ on ending their countless little encounters in the street or at bridge parties throughout the novel. Just this one fleeting reference is enough to confirm your sense that Miss Mapp’s Tilling set is a distinct notch down the social and cultural scale from Lucia’s Riseholm set.

Miss Mapp

She’s a nasty piece of work, this Miss Elizabeth Mapp, 40, single and spiteful.

The Major cast an apprehensive eye on Miss Mapp seated just opposite, whose acuteness of hearing was one of the terrors of Tilling…

She presents a beaming smile to the world and has a friendly word for everyone, but behind her mask she is endlessly hatching new ways to catch out and humiliate her ‘friends’, a mind devoted to ‘distilling all sorts of acidities’.

In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about all her friends, in spite, too, of her restless activities, Miss Mapp was not, as might have been expected, a lady of lean and emaciated appearance. She was tall and portly, with plump hands, a broad, benignant face and dimpled, well-nourished cheeks. An acute observer might have detected a danger warning in the sidelong glances of her rather bulgy eyes, and in a certain tightness at the corners of her expansive mouth, which boded ill for any who came within snapping distance…

She is well known to all the shopkeepers of Tilling as a tight-pursed, cantankerous customer. She terrifies Major Flint:

‘A powerful woman she is, with a powerful tongue, and able to be powerful nasty…’ (p.197)

The comedy starts, as it were, with being amazed at just how much devious malice can fill the breast of one malevolent, hypocritical spinster woman. It is then elaborated as we (rather inevitably) see so many of her clever plans to humiliate her enemies blow up in her own face. In this, the basic structure of the comedy (malevolent schemer’s plans backfire) she is identical to Queen Lucia in the first book.

For example in Chapter 2 Miss Mapp devotes an inordinate amount of mental energy to calculating how to ruin the bridge evening being held by Mrs Poppit, only herself to be worsted. When she cheats at bridge she is discovered and criticised. And so on. The biter bit.

Miss Mapp’s enemies

Difficult to know who she hates more. Is it Mrs Poppit or Miss Coles or Godiva ‘Diva’ Plaistow?

Mrs Poppit

Posh Mrs Poppit has a butler – the amusingly lugubrious Boon – an offensively grand car – which she offensively refers to as ‘the Royce’. She and her daughter go to Switzerland every winter and Scotland every summer. In other words, compared to everyone else, they’re loaded!

Towering over everything in triggering the malicious envy of the genteel set is that, horrible to say, she has recently been awarded an MBE! Member of the Order of the British Empire! Tillingham is outraged because all she did to earn this ridiculous honour was put ‘the Royce’ and its chauffeur at the disposal of Tillingham hospital during the war, she herself didn’t lift a finger. Miss Mapp and her set quietly seethe with resentment at the way their war work – the work of the Tilling Working Club, which had knitted its fingers to the bone and made enough seven-tailed bandages to reach to the moon – received precisely no recognition! Unfair world! After one particularly mortifying humiliation, Miss Mapp feels:

If she had had a naval fifteen-inch gun handy, and had known how to fire it, she would, with a sense of duty accomplished, have discharged it point-blank at the Order of the Member of the British Empire, and at anybody else who might be within range…

Miss Irene Coles

As far as I can tell, Irene Coles is a portrait of a cigarette-smoking, masculine kind of lesbian. In Miss Mapp’s outraged view she is:

The Disgrace of Tilling and her sex, the suffragette, post-impressionist artist (who painted from the nude, both male and female), the socialist and the Germanophile, Miss Coles.

Miss Mapp has tried her utmost ‘to poison the collective mind of Tilling against this Creature’ but ‘the bitterest part of it all was that if Miss Coles was amused at anybody, and she undoubtedly was, she was amused at Miss Mapp’.

Miss Mapp keeps trying to humiliate and genteelly mock Miss Coles and yet, somehow, the chunky mannish woman artist, dressed like a jockey and puffing on a gasper, always laughs her off. Time and again, Miss Mapp is left seething with toxic rage.

Part of it is that she’s scared of her. Miss Coles is clever:

Irene called her Mapp because she chose to, and Mapp (more bitterness) felt it wiser not to provoke Coles. She had a dreadful, humorous tongue, an indecent disregard of public or private opinion, and her gift of mimicry was as appalling as her opinion about the Germans. Sometimes Miss Mapp alluded to her as ‘quaint Irene,’ but that was as far as she got in the way of reprisals.

Mock heroic

Reprisals, bitterness, scheming, malice – it makes it sound like international diplomacy during a crisis this is Benson’s trick, the series’ USP: to invest the minutiae of small town life, and its myriad petty rivalries and jealousies, with astonishing complexity, scheming and strategy. It is a version of the mock heroic, applying the highest, most serious style and tone and intellectual rigour, to the most ludicrously trivial incidents.

Thus the war of the two dresses (which I explain below) is said to involve ‘treachery and low cunning’, ‘fiendish revenge’, ‘malice and envy’ such as never known in all human history, as well as ‘the joy of battle’ and the sweetness of revenge (Chapter 4) – and all the other silly incidents and little bickerings are raised to the level of, and given the detailed analysis worthy of, full-blown military campaigns, very amusingly and hyperbolically.

Whatever attack she made on this mystery, the garrison failed to march out and surrender but kept their flag flying, and her conjectures were woefully blasted by the forces of the most elementary reasons. (p.136)

To one of Miss Mapp’s experience, the first step of her new and delightful strategic campaign was obvious, and she spent hardly any time at all in the window of her garden-room after breakfast next morning, but set out with her shopping-basket at an unusually early hour.

And, as in Queen Lucia, Benson even throws in a few mock heroic similes to amuse his literate readers, signalled by the poetic inversion at the end of the sentence:

Even as Athene sprang full grown and panoplied from the brain of Zeus, so from Diva’s brain there sprang her plan complete.

Cast

Miss Elizabeth Mapp – spies on all Tilling’s comings and goings with ‘her light aluminium opera-glasses’ – ‘old Mappy’ to Flint and Puffin (p.107)
- Withers, her parlourmaid
Major Benjamin Flint – ‘was the more attractive to the feminine sense; for years Miss Mapp had tried to cajole him into marrying her, and had not nearly finished yet’ – when she feels soppy, Miss Mapp secretly calls him ‘Major Benjy’
- Mrs Dominic – his maid
Captain Puffin – ‘He was lame and short and meagre, with strings of peaceful beads and Papuan aprons in his hall instead of wild tiger-skins, and had a jerky, inattentive manner and a high-pitched voice. Yet to Miss Mapp’s mind there was something behind his unimpressiveness that had a mysterious quality’ – irritating falsetto laugh, limp
- housemaid
- Mrs Gashly – his cook
Mrs Godiva Plaistow aka ‘Diva’ – carrying her wicker basket, ‘a short, stout, breathless body’, peculiar way of walking as if she has wheels instead of legs – endless rivalrous scheming against Miss Mapp – stuffs her face with chocolates at every opportunity (p.141) – bitter enemy in ‘the dress war’ – speaks in telegraphese: ‘Lucky birds,’ she said. ‘No teeth. Beaks’ – guaranteed to cause an argument at every bridge session
- Janet – her parlourmaid
Mrs Susan Poppit – amazingly awarded an MBE, solely for lending her motor car to the local hospital – a social climber – has a butler, car and posh holidays – keeps a notebook of malapropisms and spoonerisms
Isabel Poppit – her adoring daughter
- Boon, her butler
Miss Irene Coles – ‘Irene lived in a very queer way with one gigantic maid, Lucy, who, but for her sex, might have been in the Guards’ – presumably a lesbian (?)
Mr Kenneth Bartlett – the vicar, good at cards – ‘Mr Bartlett was humorously archaic in speech. He interlarded archaisms with Highland expressions, and his face was knobby, like a chest of drawers’
Mrs Evie Bartlett – his wife, aka ‘wee wifey’, mousey, emits high-pitched squeaks and squeals
Mr Algernon Wyse – generally seen as posh, spends long summers with his sister, the Contessa di Faraglione, at Capri – declines most invitations, but invites everyone to his weekly Thursday luncheons
- Figgis – his valet
Amelia, the Contessa di Faraglione, when she arrives, fearlessly outspoken and flirtatious
Mr Dabnet – keeper of the Tilling toy shop
Mr Wootten – the coal merchant
Mr Twemlow – the grocer
Mr Hopkins – the fishmonger, who models for Irene Coles in the nude
Miss Greele – dressmaker
Mrs Brace – the doctor’s wife

Major incidents

The failed attempt to sabotage Mrs Poppit’s bridge

Mrs Poppit only casually invites Miss Mapp to a bridge afternoon, which Miss Mapp takes as an insult and triggers feverish calculations of how to screw up the occasion. During the course of the morning she casually introduces the topic with all the usual suspects in order to figure out precisely how many people have been invited. Eight is the ideal number, creating two tables of four. Miss Mapp decides she will ‘squeeze’ her visit in in such a way as to create too many guests and thus embarrass her hostess.

In the event, all these calculations are futile because she makes up the eighth guest with no confusion and so the party proceeds smoothly – exactly what she was hoping to prevent.

The abortive visit of the Prince of Wales

Because of her recent visit to Buckingham Palace to receive her MBE, Mrs Poppit lets slip her knowledge that the Prince of Wales will be passing through the town on Saturday, on his way to Ardingly Park. This is because Tilling is the nearest railway station for Ardingly.

Now the thing about all genteel Tillingites is they have this cult that absolutely nothing which happens outside Tilling, or anyone who comes from outside Tilling, is of the slightest interest. Except that, of course, a visit from royalty triggers their grossest snobberies.

So the comedy of this passage derives from the way all the seven or eight characters we’ve come to know all pretend to each other to not be giving the Prince’s fleeting visit the slightest thought, while secretly, of course, they are all buying the train timetable, getting our their best suits and frocks, even buying little Union Jack flags, and all plan to accidentally just ‘happen’ to be in the little square in front of the railway station.

Miss Mapp is among the most outstandingly hypocritical of the bunch, in conversations continually claiming to have forgotten all about it while, as the time of the most likely train approaches, she mounts to the roof window of her house and uses binoculars to identify that towards 4.15 (time of a train arrival) lots of others are assembling in the square. So she rushes downstairs, checks herself in the mirror and bustles along to the square. She arrives just as a swish car is pulling away and, deciding to show the hoi polloi what a proper curtsey looks like, stoops so low that she in fact loses her balance and clumsily sits down in the road just as the car sweeps by. Just in time to hear laughter coming from the people inside who saw her squat so clumsily into the street.

The others come up and crowingly tell her that wasn’t the Prince of Wales at all; he arrived on the one o’clock train so they all missed him, and has been happily playing golf all afternoon. Humiliation.

And there’s a comic coda. The next day is Sunday and the genteel set hope the prince might attend their church but he doesn’t show. The Major and the Captain go off to play golf and, given news of the Prince’s golf the day before, they are surprised to find every hole and bunker unusually populated with Tillingites, clearly hoping to catch a glimpse of Royalty, although all telling each other and themselves that they don’t care in the slightest. Miss Mapp is among them.

But the joke is that on the day that most of Tilling went out to the golf course to see the Prince, the Prince decided to go sightseeing in Tilling. When Miss Mapp returns exhausted from a day traipsing round the golf course, her servant tells her the Prince, had spent five minutes outside Miss Mapp’s very own garden room, and had even sat on the steps and smoked a cigarette. On her steps! Outside her house! She missed him. Again!

The humiliating battle of the decorated dresses

Miss Mapp discovers that Diva has taken down her shabby old chintz curtains and is carefully cutting out the roses from their pattern, with the aim of sewing the roses onto her blouse to jazz it up.

She was preparing, therefore, to take the light white jacket which she wore over her blouse, and cover the broad collar and cuffs of it with these pretty roses.

Miss Mapp is inspired by this discovery, not just to adapt it herself but – characteristically – to get one over on Diva and humiliate her, by doing the same kind of thing first! So she goes home, rummages around, finds a worn chintz cover that had once adorned the sofa in the garden-room and is covered with red poppies (very easy to cut out). She sets her maid, Withers, to cut out the poppy patterns and sew them onto one of her plain dresses, in a race to beat Diva.

By working her maid hard she has her poppy-strewn dress ready by the next day and goes swanking around Tilling, making sure to call into every shop (sometimes several times), swan up and down the high street, pop her head into all her friends’ front doors and generally demonstrate how fantastically original and creative she has been in creating such a wonderfully decorative dress!

This, when she sees it, of course, drives Diva wild with rage and mortification… until she has a brainwave, a drastic plan to get her own back. She will give the beautiful rose-decorated jacket she and her maid, Janet, are just getting to the end of creating to her maid. Janet is bowled over with gratitude. She doesn’t quite realise Diva has made this magnanimous gift solely to humiliate Miss Mapp.

Her plan works. When everyone sees Janet wearing the rose-studded dress they instantly associate it with the servant class and at a stroke Miss Mapp’s coup is turned into a public humiliation. Triumph for Diva!

Miss Mapp’s hoarding revealed

There are rumours of an impending coal strike. Since everyone’s homes and cookers are heated by coal this represents a real threat. The government gives out that nobody should hoard either coal or food. Miss Mapp genteelly warns Diva that there is a law against it and she might be prosecuted. But observing Miss M visiting the grocer every day, instead of every couple of days like normal folk, Diva starts to suspect that it’s old Mappy who’s hoarding.

She confirms the coal hoarding by cross-questioning the coal merchant, Mr Wootten. Then she racks her brains – she and Mapp are shown on pretty much every page, racking their brains and engaging in intense cerebration to puzzle out the secrets of each others’ behaviour, just as Miss Mapp devotes hours to speculating on what the Major and the Captain really get up to – to think where in Miss Mapp’s small house she could be hoarding food.

She has a brainwave when she realises that the big bookcase, against which the bridge table is usually pressed on tea dates, is fake – it’s just a facade of book covers with no depth. Next time she’s invited for bridge at Miss Mapp’s, Diva arrives early and while the maid is calling Miss M, she hurries to the bookcase in question, pushes the bridge table away, feels up and down it and locates the secret catch. Undoing it she confirms her suspicions for the whole facade of spines of books begins to open revealing a concealed larder.

Unfortunately, as she opens it a fraction she hears something fall off a shelf within and this means she can’t quite push it to enough to redo the catch. She hears Miss Mapp coming and squeezes it as shut as possible and wedges the bridge table back up against it, scooting away as Miss Mapp enters the room.

So far, so full of secrets and lies and hypocrisies and cunning plans for revenge and exposure and humiliation i.e. standard Tilling behaviour. What happens next turns comedy into farce. For before the bridge commences, Miss Mapp treats her guests to tea and chocolate cake and shows Mrs Poppit, whose first visit it is, round her house. Mrs Poppit closely inspects the fittings of the garden room and, when she comes to the bookshelf, innocently points out to her daughter that she thinks it looks fake and gives it a little tug and…

The fake frontage swings open and Miss Mapp’s entire illicit hoard of goodies comes tumbling forth, a sack of flour falling on the floor, followed by tins of corned beef, packets of Bath Oliver biscuits, jars of Bovril and a pack of dried apricots which promptly bursts and scatters numerous sticky fruits all over the floor where Miss Mapp’s astonished guests tread on them, getting them stuck to the soles of their shoes. Diva watches all this from a distance, absolutely delighted that she in no way can be blamed for the disaster:

The birthday of her life had come! (p.99)

Extremely typical of Miss Mapp and the whole world Benson has invented is the way Miss Mapp proceeds to cover herself by making up a cock-and-bull story about all these goodies, far from being hoarding – goodness me, no, dear Diva – was ‘my poor little Christmas presents for your needy parishioners, Padre’. Nobody believes her for a moment, but face is saved, a little.

The secret drinkers

A recurring comic theme is that both Major Flint and Captain Puffin are observed to stay up very late at night i.e. their bedroom lights are on till way past 11. They tell the town that they are ardently pursuing very serious studies, namely that the Major is editing the diaries of his imperial service in India while the Captain is carrying out in-depth researches into Roman roads and ruins. Miss Mapp, seeing herself in the role of a Guardian Angel, keeps a beady eye on their late lights and is always telling these old men (the Major is, in fact, only 54) that they should keep more regular hours and conduct their studies healthily, in the morning.

Except that half-way through the novel, after playing one of their rounds of golf, Flint and Puffin, hilariously confess to each other that neither of them are conducting these famous studies: Flint never kept a diary in India, Puffin knows next to nothing about Roman archaeology, they just stay up late drinking. So they resolve to henceforward do so in company, and take to visiting each other’s houses on alternate evenings. It becomes a schoolboyish private joke between them.

The Major said, ‘Well, I’ll step across, shall I, about half-past nine, and bring my diaries with me?
‘I’ll expect you. You’ll find me at my Roman roads.’
The humour of this joke never staled, and they parted with hoots and guffaws of laughter. (p.168)

This late-night drinking emerges as an unexpectedly major theme of the story. First of all, Miss Mapp, observing that at least one of their lights now goes off in the mid-evening on alternating evenings, is convinced that her words of advice are working half the time and the poor military men are getting early nights at least half the week. But the major outcome of these convivial nights together is the huge argument which leads to the duel!

The duel that never was

The argument On one particular night they are at Major Flint’s and the two men’s shabby genteel poverty triggers an argument about who is drinking most of the Captain’s bottle of whiskey. Like all their arguments it quickly escalates until the Captain drunkenly staggers out of Flint’s bedroom and across the street to his own house. He passes out on his bed. Early in the morning he hears the metallic clink of the flap of his letterbox, stumbles out of bed, and discovers the Major has hand delivered a challenge to a duel!

Sir,
My seconds will wait on you in the course of to-morrow morning.
Your faithful obedient servant.
Benjamin Flint

Captain Puffin panics He staggers back to bed and passes out but wakes up a few hours in the grip of fear, then panic. What if it’s literally true? The Major is a much better shot than him! It’s an invitation to certain death. In a hungover panic he packs his bags, leaves a note for the maid, and staggers out carrying a big Gladstone bag and along to the station to catch the first train to London, the 6.30am.

Meeting at Tilling train station Arriving 15 minutes early he undergoes agonies of anxiety when he hears heavy footsteps and… it is Major Flint, also carrying a big bag, arriving to catch the same train! Long story short, they both realise they are cowards and are running away from the duel which Flint so rashly threatened. After a few moments’ embarrassment they burst into laughter, agree never to be so silly again, and set off for the golf course where they go to play every day.

Word gets round However – Captain Puffin was silly enough to leave Major Flint’s note threatening the duel on his mantelpiece at home, where it is discovered later in the morning by Puffin’s maid, who promptly rings up Flint’s maid, they both discover their masters are absent, and word spreads like wildfire that the two men have gone off to the sand dunes near the gold course to fight a duel. When word spreads to the Mapp circle the vicar gets dragged in and ends up volunteering to rush off to the dunes to try and prevent a potentially tragic loss of life.

Vicar to the rescue He takes a taxi (agonising over the unwonted expense) and then spends the whole morning timidly peeping his head over the brow of every dune, half expecting to get it shot off by a stray bullet or, worse, coming across the bodies of one of the shot men. After an exhausting and anxious morning, hot and dirty and sweaty, the vicar arrives at the golf course proper, where he sees… Flint and Puffin just completing their morning game of golf in a jovial and merry way, and they invite him for drinks at the club. Comedy!

Anxious anticipation It doesn’t even end there because the good ladies of Tilling, now thoroughly alerted to news of the duel, are on tenterhooks back in town to find out what has happened. Miss Mapp carefully works out about ten possible scenarios and variations, which the text carefully numbers and describes, involving numbers of stretchers and bodies and doctors in attendance on the poor men etc. Imagine her disappointment when the after lunch tram arrives only for Major Flint, Captain Puffin and the vicar to all step off it large as life and obviously hale and hearty. More comedy!

Hippopotamus Incidentally, at the height of the squabble which started it all, Captain Puffin in his drunkenness struggled to pronounce the word ‘hippopotamus’ and they and the narrator all refer back to it as ‘the hippopotamus quarrel’ (p.165).

Was it for a woman? The duel gag continues for quite a long time, Benson stretches it out further than you’d think possible, which is itself an old comic trick but it’s also distinctively Bensonite to show how even trivial incidents have long, complex ramifications in such a closed, paranoid society of hyper-alert, hyper-curious people.

Was the duel for her? Because Miss Mapp can’t let this incident of the duel alone, and one aspect which dogs her is what was the duel about? She leaps to the sentimental conclusion that it must have been about a woman (instead of its banal real cause, which was squabbling about who’d drunk most whiskey from Captain Puffin’s bottle). And it’s only a small step from there to conclude that the pair must have been preparing to fight a duel… over her!

Spreading the word Yes, Miss Mapp leaps to the hilariously inapt conclusion that the two men must have been fighting a duel over her. It would be moderately comic if she just harboured this heroic misconception to herself and acted accordingly but instead, this being Tilling, and a Benson novel, she has to let everyone know and sets out on a campaign the next morning to accidentally-on-purpose bump into all the usual characters in the high street, and one by one take them into her confidence about the true nature of the duel i.e. her. This ramifies out for a bit before, with comic inevitability, she discovers she most definitely was not the subject of their argument and undergoes yet another self-inflicted humiliation.

Realisation Which triggers more intensive speculation about the real reason both men were seen at Tilling railway station at 6.30 on that fateful morning. And then she has the breakthrough and realises they were both running away. Far from being the heroic men of action she had painted them in her ‘duelling over her’ narrative, now they appear as two lily-livered weaklings. Once again she sallies forth to spread the gossip, buttonholing everyone she meets.

Daily gossip For the nature of Tilling gossip (or of this narrative) is that the best way to quash a rumour or news which humiliates you (the clashing dresses, the secret hoarding, the ‘they were fighting over me’ fiasco) is to replace it with an even juicier piece of gossip. And so she sallies forth again and tells Diva who is gossip on legs and soon the two men’s arrant cowardice is universally known.

By eleven o’clock that morning, the two duellists were universally known as ‘the cowards’, the Padre alone demurring, and being swampingly outvoted. (p.181)

With the result that when they arrive back from their morning golf they find themselves greeted by everyone with fake smiles and ironic references to early morning trains. So that it doesn’t take long for the pair to realise they’re secret is out and for them, in their turn, to consider how to win back Tilling opinion.

Anthropology

And so it rolls on: an endless list of incidents and events which each trigger intense scrutiny from, in particular, Miss Mapp and her frenemy Diva Plaistow, which give rise to feverish speculation and whispered gossip, generally leading to heroic misconceptions or campaigns, which result in the protagonist (generally Miss Mapp’s) very public humiliation; before everyone gets up the next morning and prepares for another day of warfare.

There’s serious articles to be written about the Mapp and Lucia novels viewed through the prism of anthropology, a Darwinian take on status and hierarchy in primate groups, a small clan riven by unending competition and minute analysis of everyone else’s actions and possible motives, an over-attention which converts everyone – in Benson’s comically hyperbolic style – into an analyst, strategist, campaigner and diplomat.

My quick view would be that Benson’s novels demonstrate how immensely overpowered our brains are for most of the situations we find ourselves in. I find myself using the modern phrase ‘over-thinking’ quite a lot at work but, in a sense, don’t all humans over-think everything? Life is pretty simple and yet you only need two people (in a relationship, say) and already you have a world of misunderstandings and confusions; add in one more, then another, then another, and you quickly have a chaos of misunderstandings, misconceptions, mixed messages and so on, and you are in Bensonworld.

Benson has put his finger on something very profound about human nature and created these big (the novels are all quite long and pretty dense) comic edifices out of human beings’ fatal tendency to over-think more or less everything.

And so on…

This takes us up to about page 200 of this 270-page long book. There’s more, as the season moves from high summer into the autumn, on to rainy winter, through an eventful Christmas and on into the new year, namely:

– A reprise of the dress war, wherein Miss Mapp and Diva yet again humiliatingly appear at social events with matching outfits:

Over the background of each mind was spread a hatred of the other, red as their tea-gowns, and shot with black despair as to what on earth they should do now with those ill-fated pieces of pride.

– The arrival of Mr Wyse’s sister, the grand Contessa, from Italy, on page 215, and all the ripples that causes. Mostly because she is completely uninhibited, speaks her mind about everything and is generally free of the terribly English curtain-twitching restraints all the ladies have imposed upon themselves:

Miss Mapp’s head was in a whirl. The Contessa said in the loudest possible voice all that everybody else only whispered. (p.232)

– And Mrs Poppit and Mr Wyse falling in love! with the vast scope for gossip and anticipation and misunderstanding which this entails.

– And, right at the end, a tragic and unexpected loss.

All embroidered at every stage, with the wild speculations, detailed analyses, cunning plans and clever strategising of Miss Mapp and various other Tillingites. But I’ll stop my summary here. There’s plenty more in the same vein, and you can read it online (link below).

Prose style

P.G. Wodehouse achieves his comic effects with a prose style which is as light and airy as his brainless characters. Benson is the exact opposite. His style is heavy and clotted and dense in order to reflect his characters’ never-ending scheming and plotting. His paragraphs can sometimes take up a whole page and his sentences can be very long, made up of numerous sub-clauses. Here’s just one sentence from early in the text:

General manœuvres in Tilling, the gradual burstings of fluttering life from the chrysalis of the night, the emergence of the ladies of the town with their wicker-baskets in their hands for housekeeping purchases, the exodus of men to catch the 11.20 a.m. steam-tram out to the golf links, and other first steps in the duties and diversions of the day, did not get into full swing till half-past ten, and Miss Mapp had ample time to skim the headlines of her paper and indulge in chaste meditations about the occupants of these two houses, before she need really make herself alert to miss nothing.

Much information has to be fitted in, and in a way which reflects the cluttered, busy, even hectic physical activities of the town and mental activities of its key inhabitants. Here’s a description of all Mrs Poppit’s guests maliciously wanting her to carry on talking about receiving her MBE so that she reveals herself as not understanding Tilling’s values of discretion and understatement

One reason for this, of course, as already indicated, was that they all longed for her to expose herself as much as she possibly could, for if there was a quality – and, indeed, there were many – on which Tilling prided itself, it was on its immunity from snobbishness: there were, no doubt, in the great world with which Tilling concerned itself so little kings and queens and dukes and Members of the Order of the British Empire; but every Tillingite knew that he or she (particularly she) was just as good as any of them, and indeed better, being more fortunate than they in living in Tilling…

Benson’s cluttered prose bespeaks an older, Victorian cast of mind, heavy and heavily decorated, ornate and over-furnished – except that instead of earnest Victorian moralising, Benson deploys it for comic purposes, each qualifying clause adding to the exquisite precision with which he itemises the micro-snobberies and mini aggressions of his venomous ladies.

Camp

Benson was gay. A lot of the famous fans who signed a petition to his publishers to republish the Mapp and Lucia novels after his death (in 1940) were themselves gay writers who loved the deeply camp, exaggerated bitchiness of all the characters.

My wife read the books when at school and tells me she never believed they were about women, bearing no relation to the women she knew in her household or extended family, at school or anywhere else. To her, it all read as gay male camp bitchiness. I’m no expert, so I’ll go along with her view. For me the comic bitchiness and endless rivalry is adequately embedded in the women characters, if that makes sense. It’s only very rarely that Benson applies even the minutest hint of campness to any of the male characters who are, by and large, solidly heterosexual e.g. the blustering major and quarrelsome captain and well-meaning vicar. Algernon Wyse is the exception that proves the general rule.

Without being in the least effeminate, Mr. Wyse this morning looked rather like a modern Troubadour. He had a velveteen coat on, a soft, fluffy, mushy tie which looked as if made of Shirley poppies, very neat knickerbockers, brown stockings with blobs, like the fruit of plane trees, dependent from elaborate ‘tops’, and shoes with a cascade of leather frilling covering the laces.

Why mention effeminacy at all unless, unconsciously, to draw attention to it?

Curiosity

The books can be seen as a reflection on the very human failing of curiosity, raised to a kind of pathological intensity, whipped up into a pathological and damaging obsession, and all the funnier for it.

[Miss Mapp’s] face was of high vivid colour and was corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity.

In spite of her malignant curiosity and her cancerous suspicions about all her friends…

Miss Mapp was seething with excitement, curiosity and rage…

The Padre was bursting with curiosity, but since his delicacy forbade him to ask any of the questions which effervesced like sherbet round his tongue, he propounded another plan.

Until she arrived at some sort of information, the excruciating pangs of curiosity that must be endured could be likened only to some acute toothache of the mind with no dentist to stop or remove the source of the trouble…

Curiosity rushed like a devastating tornado across Miss Mapp’s mind, rooting up all other growths, buffeting her with the necessity of knowing what the two whom she had been forced to leave in the garden were doing now…

Sometimes she took him into a shop in case there might be someone there who had not seen him yet on her leash; sometimes she left him on the pavement in a prominent position, marking, all the time, just as if she had been a clinical thermometer, the feverish curiosity that was burning in Tilling’s veins.

1920s slang

‘Ho! That’s how you got the idea then,’ said Diva. ‘I knew you had cribbed it from me.’
‘Cribbed?’ asked Miss Mapp, in ironical ignorance of what so vulgar and slangy an expression meant.
‘Cribbed means taking what isn’t yours,’ said Diva.

After the duel that never was, the gossips of Tilling hope:

that the whole affair was not, in the delicious new slang phrase of the Padre’s, which was spreading like wildfire through Tilling, a ‘wash-out‘. (p.126)

Used later:

Puffin said, ‘But I don’t see what you’re in such a taking about. We’re no worse off than we were before we got a reputation for being such fire-eaters. Being fire-eaters is a wash-out, that’s all. Pleasant while it lasted, and now we’re as we were.’ (p.184)

American slang:

Was there not some sort of corn called pop-corn, which Americans ate? (p.128)

And our old friend ‘cat’, meaning bitchy gossipy woman, which I first came across widespread in the works of Noel Coward.

Puffin yawned. ‘Mapp’s a cat,’ he said. ‘Stroke a cat and you’ll get scratched. Shy a brick at a cat, and she’ll spit at you and skedaddle.’

Lolz

In the church at Christmastime, Miss Mapp:

sat in her usual seat close below the pulpit, and the sun streaming in through a stained glass window opposite made her face of all colours, like Joseph’s coat. Not knowing how it looked from outside, she pictured to herself a sort of celestial radiance coming from within, though Diva, sitting opposite, was reminded of the iridescent hues observable on cold boiled beef. (p.241)

Credit

‘Miss Mapp’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1922. Page references are to the 1984 Black Swan paperback edition.

Mapp and Lucia reviews

Queen Lucia (1920)
Miss Mapp (1922)
Lucia in London (1927)
The Male Impersonator (1929: short story)
Mapp and Lucia (1931)
Lucia’s Progress (1935)
Trouble for Lucia (1939)

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by Simon on November 10, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Novel

Tagged 1920s, Algernon Wyse, Amelia, anthropology, Archaeology, Ardingly Park, Athene, Bath Oliver biscuits, Beaks, Benjamin Flint, Bensonworld, Boon, Bovril, Brian Masters, Bridge, Buckingham Palace, Camp, Capri, Captain Puffin, comic novel, Contessa, Contessa di Faraglione, Cribbed, Diva, Diva Plaistow, duel, E.F. Benson, Elizabeth Mapp, Emmeline Lucas, Evie Bartlett, Figgis, gay, Gladstone bag, Godiva Plaistow, golf, Google AI, gossip, H.G. Wells, Henry James, Hippopotamus, Irene, irony, Isabel Poppit, Janet, Joseph Conrad, Kenneth Bartlett, Kent, Lucia, Major Benjamin Flint, Major Benjy, Major Flint, MBE, Member of the Order of the British Empire, Miss Coles, Miss Greele, Miss Irene Coles, Miss Mapp, mock heroic, Mr Algernon Wyse, Mr Dabnet, Mr Hopkins, Mr Twemlow, Mr Wootten, Mrs Brace, Mrs Dominic, Mrs Evie Bartlett, Mrs Gashly, Mrs Godiva Plaistow, Mrs Poppit, Mrs Susan Poppit, narrative, Noel Coward, novel, old Mappy, P.G. Wodehouse, Prince of Wales, Queen Lucia, queer, Riseholme, Roman roads, Rye, small town life, snobbery, social comedy, the Royce, Tilling, Tilling Working Club, Tillingham, Victorian prose, warfare, whiskey, Withers, Zeus

Posted by Simon on November 10, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/10/miss-mapp-e-f-benson/

Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley (1925)

‘I don’t see that it would be possible to live in a more exciting age,’ said Calamy. ‘The sense that everything’s perfectly provisional and temporary – everything, from social institutions to what we’ve hitherto regarded as the most sacred scientific truths – the feeling that nothing, from the Treaty of Versailles to the rationally explicable universe, is really safe, the intimate conviction that anything may happen, anything may be discovered – another war, the artificial creation of life, the proof of continued existence after death – why, it’s all infinitely exhilarating.’
‘And the possibility that everything may be destroyed?’ questioned Mr. Cardan.
‘That’s exhilarating too,’ Calamy answered, smiling. (Chapter 3)

Huxley’s third novel is twice as long as his first. His early novels got steadily longer and more chewy. The characters’ speeches get longer and Huxley’s descriptions of his characters go from pencil-thin paragraphs to page-long analyses.

Number of pages in Aldous Huxley’s first four novels

Those Barren Leaves

We are in Italy, the perfect unspoilt aristocratic Italy of the English bourgeois imagination, from the Florence of E.M. Foster to the Tuscan villas rented by David Cameron and his class, the land of classical ruins, Chianti and English snobbery. That Italy.

Dominating the town of Vezza from its hilltop location is the enormous palace built by the Cybo Malaspina, some kind of eminent renaissance family. The palace has been bought by an Englishwoman, Mrs (Lilian) Aldwinkle, at least 48, statuesque and Junoesque. She is immensely proud of ‘her’ palace, loves to show off its history and paintings, dreams of it becoming once again a salon for the great artists of the age.

Currently staying with her are:

the 30-year-old novelist Miss (Mary) Thriplow, who has elbowed her way into the literary world from the lowly position of governess
Mrs Aldwinkle’s niece, Irene
Mr Cardan the 60-something bon viveur
and Mr Falx, a white haired notable in the Labour movement

The story opens with the arrival of young, handsome Mr Calamy – ‘ Brown, blue-eyed, soldierly and tall. Frightfully upper class and having all the glorious self-confidence that comes of having been born rich and in a secure and privileged position’ – who sets hearts and ovaries a-flutter.

We are in the land of the unworking classes – not the super-rich, maybe, but the very comfortably off, and of the artists and writers who hang around them because they have such lovely houses and host such interesting parties. Huxley’s world – which he loves analysing, anatomising, and satirising.

Mrs. Aldwinkle impatiently cut short the conversation. ‘I want you to look at this ceiling,’ she said to Calamy. Like hens drinking they stared up at the rape of Europa. Mrs. Aldwinkle lowered her gaze. ‘And the rustic work with the group of marine deities.’ In a pair of large niches, lined with shell-work and sponge-stone, two fishy groups furiously writhed. ‘So delightfully seicento,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle.

Cast

Mrs. Lilian Aldwinkle, 48 or so, has wealth from unnamed sources, has bought this old palazzo in Italy and tends to think she has also bought all Italian art and culture and history along with it. She is obsessed with the idea of art:

‘Art’s the great thing,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying earnestly, ‘the thing that really makes life worth living and justifies one’s existence.’

She, of course, believes herself to be especially sensitive and noble:

‘Sometimes,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying, as she walked with Chelifer on the second of the three terraces, ‘sometimes I wish I were less sensitive. I feel everything so acutely – every slightest thing. It’s like being… like being…’ she fumbled in the air with groping fingers, feeling for the right word… I have an intuition about people. It’s because I’m so sensitive. I feel their character. I’m never wrong.’

But in fact Mrs Aldwinkle doesn’t have an artistic bone in her body, doesn’t understand the visual arts, can’t make out different chords in music. And of course, she is a rentier (defined as: ‘a person living on income from property or investments’), a parasite, her finer (and generally inchoate) feelings enabled by the sweat of thousands of actual workers – as the Labour leader, at one point, reflects:

And at this very moment, Mr. Falx was meditating, at this very moment, on tram-cars in the Argentine, among Peruvian guano-beds, in humming power-stations at the foot of African waterfalls, in Australian refrigerators packed with slaughtered mutton, in the heat and darkness of Yorkshire coal-mines, in tea-plantations on the slopes of the Himalaya, in Japanese banks, at the mouth of Mexican oil-wells, in steamers walloping along across the China Sea – at this very moment, men and women of every race and colour were doing their bit to supply Mrs. Aldwinkle with her income. On the two hundred and seventy thousand pounds of Mrs. Aldwinkle’s capital the sun never set. People worked; Mrs. Aldwinkle led the higher life. She for art only, they – albeit unconscious of the privilege – for art in her.

Irene, Mrs Aldwinkle’s niece, a young 18 who Mrs Aldwinkle bullies into feeling more artistic and sensitive and passionate than she really wants to. She has a doll-like little face peering out a window formed by a copper bell of hair.

Miss Mary Thriplow, a serious young lady novelist very concerned about her feelings, and who considers herself an expert on Life:

‘I can never understand,’ Miss Thriplow went on, meditatively pursuing her Special Subject, ‘I can never understand how it is that everybody isn’t happy – I mean fundamentally happy, underneath; for of course there’s suffering, there’s pain, there are a thousand reasons why one can’t always be consciously happy, on the top, if you see what I mean. But fundamentally happy, underneath – how can anyone help being that? Life’s so extraordinary, so rich and beautiful – there’s no excuse for not loving it always…’

Mr Calamy, 33, tall, young and handsome.

Mr Cardan, 65, an elderly bon viveur.

Lord Hovenden, barely 21, can’t yet pronounce his ‘th’s, ‘immensely rich’, has recently discovered the existence of ‘the poor’ and has become a devotee of –

Mr Falx a Labour Party leader, ‘with his white beard, his long and curly white hair, his large dark liquid eyes, his smooth broad forehead and aquiline nose, he had the air of a minor prophet’.

Noble and grand

‘I won’t let you tease her, Cardan,’ [Mrs Aldwinkle] said. ‘She’s the only one of you all who has a real feeling for what is noble and fine and grand.’

The characters talk a great deal and at great length. But it’s noticeable, and then becomes a little tiresome, how limited their conversational subjects actually are.

Nothing about contemporary science, technology, nothing about the economy or politics, all the things which would have been of enduring interest to the historically-minded reader. (In fact on several occasions the characters do apparently talk about politics – Mr Falx delivers a speech about the Italian Fascist Trade Unions [p.46] and, later, delivers a speech about the working classes [p.170] but both times the narrator cuts sharply away and we don’t hear a word.

The most tiresome subject is love. All the characters talk at great length about ‘love’. Becomes very tedious as they endlessly discuss the precise state of their finer feelings.

And next to ‘love’, art. Again these conversations are consistently disappointing because, for all their self-conscious cynicism and ‘liberation’ from Victorian values, the characters all still think of art in the most clichéd Victorian terms, as something to do with all that is fine and ‘noble’ and ‘pure’ and ‘uplifting’ in the ‘human spirit’. None of them seem to be aware of the new spirit of Modernism which had, after all, been around since the German Expressionists and the french Fauves nearly twenty years earlier.

As a test I cut & pasted all the references to ‘Art’ (50 mentions) and ‘passion’ (87). Here’s a selection:

[he was] intelligent, fundamentally serious, interested in the arts and so on.
[she spoke] with that awed and simple reverence for the mysteries of art
[one of the mansion’s former owners] had come to be credited by the present owner with an unbounded enthusiasm for the arts and, what in Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes was almost more splendid, an unbounded enthusiasm for love.
‘Such a wonderful…!’ exclaimed Mrs. Aldwinkle, with that large and indistinct enthusiasm evoked in her by every masterpiece of art.
‘Art’s the great thing,’ Mrs. Aldwinkle was saying earnestly, ‘the thing that really makes life worth living and justifies one’s existence.’
‘Through art man comes nearest to being a god… a god….’
I have practised the art of literature so long that it comes natural to me to take the pains I have always taken.’
And then those camp-followers of the arts, those delicious Bohemians who regard their ability to appreciate the paintings of the cubists and the music of Stravinsky as a sufficient justification for helping themselves freely to one another’s wives…
‘My poor friend Calamy would call them more real, would say that they belong to the realm of Absolute Art…’

They talk continually about art and yet have so little to say of any interest at all. All they can manage is endless variations on the same old idea that it is ‘fine’ and ‘uplifting’ and ‘beautiful’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘soulful’ and connected with passion and life.

One of the frustration of the books is that these characters were living through what we, looking back, think of as the great revolution of Modernism, in which poetry, prose novels, the art of photography, painting, sculpture, theatre and design, all underwent amazing and revolutionary changes and yet…none of the characters seem to realise it. They all still talk about art and passion as if they were friends of Tennyson.

You can see why Wyndham Lewis was driven to distraction by the legions of oh-so-sensitive women in their arts and crafts dresses with their pre-Raphaelite hair drifting oh-so-sensitively from room to room in their exquisitely decorated mansions talking endlessly about art and passion. You can see why T.S. Eliot satirised them:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

You can see why D.H. Lawrence, trying to forge a new aesthetic, ran as far away as he could, to New Mexico or Australia, to try and escape from this kind of tinkling, gluey, third-rate lucubrations.

And then ‘love’: flocks of the same kind of privileged, shallow people sharing their trite thoughts about Love.

Love – it was the only thing. Even Art, compared with it, hardly existed [thinks Mrs Aldwinkle]
‘It’s easy to talk like that,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, when [Mr Cardan] had finished. ‘But it doesn’t make any difference to the grandeur of passion, to its purity and beauty and…’ She faded out breathlessly.

And ‘passion’ – mewling on about their weedy, English, virginal idea of ‘passion’:

‘Wasn’t it Bossuet who said that there was something of the Infinite in passion?’ (Irene)

It’s as if the characters are taking part in a Darwinian competition to show off who has the finer nerves, and the most sensitive perceptions – a politely jostling rivalry to be the experiencer of a finer type of love, of a more refined and pure and delicate emotion:

Miss Thriplow meanwhile would have liked to say something showing that she too believed in passion – but in a passion of a rather different brand from Mrs. Aldwinkle’s; in a natural, spontaneous and almost childish kind of passion, not the hot-house growth that flourishes in drawing-rooms. Cardan was right in not thinking very seriously of that. But he could hardly be expected to know much about the simple and dewy loves that she had in mind. Nor Mrs. Aldwinkle, for that matter. She herself understood them perfectly. On second thoughts, however, Miss Thriplow decided that they were too tenuous and delicate – these gossamer passions of hers – to be talked of here, in the midst of unsympathetic listeners.

Too delicate, oh too too delicate! There is an unstated competition to not only have the finest feelings but, because the world is such a cruel place, to be hurt, oh so terribly hurt by this hard, cruel world; to suffer so much because of one’s exquisite sensitivity!

Nobody knew how much she suffered, underneath. How could people guess what lay behind her gaiety? ‘The more sensitive one is,’ she used to tell herself, ‘the more timid and spiritually chaste, the more necessary it is for one to wear a mask.’ (thinks Miss Thripley)

A bit more solidly – and satirically – in Mrs Aldwinkle’s hands this admiration for ‘art’ or ‘passion’ is the opposite of disinterested; it is a naked attempt at self-aggrandisement and egotism.

She liked to think that every one she knew was tremendously complicated; had strange and improbable motives for his simplest actions, was moved by huge, dark passions; cultivated secret vices; in a word, was larger than life and a good deal more interesting.

Mrs Aldwinkle wants to host a salon like the Grand Ladies of the past, in Italy and France, surrounded by the greatest artists, writers, musicians and thinkers of the day, and ruling over them without, herself, contributing anything except – her finer feelings and her delicate insights and her passion.

Beautiful women should swim through the great saloons and the gardens, glowing with love for the men of genius.

Snobbery about Italy

‘Even Nature, in Italy, is like a work of art,’ she added. (Miss Thriplow, chapter 4)

From the Grand Tour of the 18th century to the modern British bourgeoisie renting its Tuscan villas, there is a long tradition of English snobbery about Italy – the notion that simply by going to Italy or being in Italy, one becomes more primal, passionate, nobler of spirit, more artistic.

It runs through Henry James and E.M Foster, reminds me of Mrs Craddock, the 1902 novel by Somerset Maugham in which unhappy Bertha is taken under the wing of Aunt Mary and they set off across the continent, staying at the finest hotels, enjoying the finest art, Venice, Florence, the glory that was Rome!! and so on.

This Italophilia is satirised in Mrs Aldwinkle, who has bought a palace in Italy in order to be more passionate and artistic and – Huxley satirically emphasises – likes to think she has also bought the Italian climate, Italian history, Italian music and even Italian stars!

‘Nights like this,’ said Mrs. Aldwinkle, halting and addressing herself with intensity to Calamy, ‘make one understand the passion of the South.’
‘In this horrible bourgeois age’ – Mrs. Aldwinkle’s vocabulary… contained no word of bitterer disparagement than ‘bourgeois’ – ‘it’s only Southern people who still understand or even, I believe, feel passion.’ Mrs. Aldwinkle believed in passion, passionately.
No serious-minded, hard-working man has the time, the spare energy or the inclination to abandon himself to passion. Passion can only flourish among the well-fed unemployed. Consequently, except among women and men of the leisured class, passion in all its luxuriant intricacy hardly exists in the hard-working North. It is only among those whose desires and whose native idleness are fostered by the cherishing Southern heat that it has flourished and continues to flourish…

At bottom all of these wishes – the wish to be artistic, to be sensitive, to have a delicate soul, to understand passion and love and the soul of Italy – they are all symptoms of the human wish to feel special, to feel authentic or loved or precious, a subjective wish common to all of us, which is entirely understandable but is, alas, rather contradicted by the facts. None of us are special. All of us will die. The waters will close over our heads as if we had never existed.

Huxley’s aim

The satirist disappears so completely into his characters that it is sometimes hard to know when they are, and when they aren’t, being ridiculed. The novel is so long and wordy that at one point he has the opportunity to give Miss Thriplow a little speech which appears to describe Huxley’s own approach to his fiction.

‘I’m trying to do something new – a chemical compound of all the categories. Lightness and tragedy and loveliness and wit and fantasy and realism and irony and sentiment all combined. People seem to find it merely amusing, that’s all.’ She threw out her hands despairingly.

Or does it?

The plot

Whereas the slender satire Antic Hay was divided into 20 beautifully slim and elegant chapters, the much more bloated text of Those Barren Leaves is divided into five whole parts, to wit:

Part 1. An Evening at Mrs. Aldwinkle’s (pages 7 to 77)
Part 2. Fragments from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer (pages 78 to 157)
Part 3. The Loves of the Parallels (pages 158 to 241)
Part 4. The Journey (pages 242 to 299)
Part 5. Conclusions (pages 300 to 335)

Part 1. An evening at Mrs Aldwinkle’s

I have described the participants in the first afternoon, dinner and evening at Mrs Aldwinkles, along with their endless chat about love and passion and art.

Part 2. Fragments from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer

Part two is an interesting experiment – it’s the first bit of first-person narrative in the early novels, a nearly hundred-page-long text done in the voice of this chap, Francis Chelifer, who thinks and writes with a hilariously florid, self-congratulatorily, over-literary style. I liked him for his ludicrousness.

It opens with his wildly over-written description of floating in the warm Mediterranean sea, off a packed tourist beach, as a pedalo approaches and goes by and we can tell, from Francis’s description, that aboard it are Mrs Aldwinkle, Miss Thriplow, Mr Calamy and Lord Hovenden. Aha. So it is to be tied into the characters in part one.

The ludicrousness of his over-written, over-thought content is rammed home when we discover that this would-be litterateur and prose stylist has a job back in London as editor of…The Rabbit Fanciers’ Gazette, with which, as every schoolboy knows, is incorporated ‘The Mouse Breeders’ Record’! He took up the job after seeing an advert in The Times and at a period when rabbit breeding was suffering, after the war. He is personally pleased with the way he revived the magazine’s fortunes by cleverly incorporating a new section about goats! Ha! Nothing unentrepreneurial about Mr Chelifer.

He lives at Miss Carruthers’s boarding house in Chelsea, along with half a dozen other boarders, a tawdry, down-at-heel and annoying crew. Over dinner of roast beef we are treated to snippets of their conversation, about the Wembley Empire exhibition, the merits of Charlie Chaplin, and ‘flappers’.

In a sad chapter he goes home to see his mother in her rundown house in North Oxford. His father was a don. He remembers being a child and witnessing the grown-ups morris dancing in the garden (led by Mr Toft, Miss Dewball and Miss Higlett). Now she is a widow, protrectress of mangy dogs and cats, donator to charitable causes, and vegetarian. He remembers his enormous strong father with a face like a Greek philosophers, who almost never spoke, and about the time he took him walking to the top of Mount Snowden, where he quoted from Wordsworth’s Prelude.

Francis is writing a series of poems on the first six Caesars (which may remind the alert reader of Mr Scogan in Crome Yellow who has a hobby of comparing everyone he meets to one of the six first Caesars [Crome Yellow chapter 16]). Despite these poetic attempts, he has come to believe it is all a waste of time, everything is. He is the Compleat Cynic. It meant a lot when his father recited those Wordsworth lines on Snowden. Later… well, he came to disbelieve in all of it.

‘A sense of something far more deeply interfused.’ Ever since that day those words, pronounced in my father’s cavernous voice, have rumbled through my mind. It took me a long time to discover that they were as meaningless as so many hiccoughs.

We follow his disillusioning love affair with Barbara Waters. As a teenager he glimpsed her among many others on an outing up the River Cherwell in Oxford and she struck him as being an image of Perfect Beauty. Years later, during the war, he bumps into her working as a secretary in the big war office where he’s working (after being injured and invalided out of the army). They start dating, him utterly bewitched to be wining and dining the woman he had dreamed of for so many years (in the interval she had gone to live in South Africa for a bit, then come back). Only slowly and painfully does he realise she’s just a normal human being. In fact she’s self-centred, likes to have worshippers who she can then treat cruelly. She bores him, then disgusts him. Then she migrates towards another lover, a flabby Syrian, and that’s it, the affair is over, leaving Francis heart-broken.

He is floating in the Mediterranean remembering all this when he is hit by a sailing boat going by fast and sinks, can feel himself drowning. Some time later he comes to on the beach being cared for by a doctor and a bronzed man who is massaging his back to empty his lungs of water. Huxley gives a long detailed description of what it’s like to come round form near death, the sense of light-headed euphoria.

Then Mrs Aldwinkle steps forward and offers this stricken Englishman the hospitality of her palazzo. He accepts and is drawn into her world. He is helped into the Rolls Royce and driven up to her palazzo, where she insists on giving him a complete tour of the quadrangles and colonnades and the art work in every room until he faints with exhaustion.

Part 3. The loves of the parallels (pages 158 to 241)

The notion of the convenience of parallel lives had been mentioned in Antic Hay.

‘Poor Casimir!’ [Mrs Viveash] said. Why was it that people always got involved in one’s life? If only one could manage things on the principle of the railways! Parallel tracks—that was the thing. For a few miles you’d be running at the same speed. There’d be delightful conversation out of the windows; you’d exchange the omelette in your restaurant car for the vol-au-vent in theirs. And when you’d said all there was to say, you’d put on a little more steam, wave your hand, blow a kiss and away you’d go, forging ahead along the smooth, polished rails. But instead of that, there were these dreadful accidents; the points were wrongly set, the trains came crashing together; or people jumped on as you were passing through the stations and made a nuisance of themselves and wouldn’t allow themselves to be turned off.

This part continues with the same characters we met in part one – we are still at Mrs Aldwinkle’s vast Italian palazzo, with her hen-pecked niece Irene, the earnest lady novelist Miss Thriplow, old Mr Falx the Labour leader, worldly wise Mr Cardan, credulous young Lord Hovenden, and dashing but bored Mr Calamy. Except that now weary and disillusioned Francis Chelifer has been added to the mix.

The loves of the parallels are:

1. In his autobiographical fragments we certainly learned that Chelifer wrote poetry but what didn’t come over so much is that he is quite a well-known poet. As such, Mrs Aldwinkle suddenly realises she is in love with him and sets her cap at him. In her eyes she becomes The Most Important Poet in England and she becomes his Muse and Protector (p.163). Chelifer tunes out while she burbles on about art, and then takes to sneaking off to avoid her.

2. Lord Hovenden pursues Irene, but Irene is conflicted. On that first evening her aunt had made a sniping comment that Irene is cold and frigid; so, on the one hand, Irene wants to prove her aunt wrong, and so she makes an effort to be with Lord Hovenden as often as possible. On the other hand, she discovers that Chelifer is sneaking off to the top of the medieval tower to avoid everyone, and Irene becomes earnestly worried about the impact this sneaking away might have on her beloved aunt if she were to learn this. When Hovenden pushes things so far as to kiss Irene, she bursts into tears and asks how he could be so beastly (p.180).

3. Similarly Mr Calamar, much against his better judgement and out of boredom, finds himself half-heartedly wooing the ‘serious lady novelist’ Miss Thriplow. Frustrated by her stand-offishness, he one day decides to show her his passionate, manly side during a walk on the terrace, seizes her and passionately kisses her. Like Irene, she protests but, secretly, is pleased (p.177).

The Elvers

There’s a peculiar interlude which reminds me of something out of Dickens where Mr Elver a) sets off with Miss Thriplow to find a grocer who claims his cousin has a rare and precious piece of antique statuary. This is the ground for some comedy with the grocer where Mr Cardan impersonates various classical poses in an effort to find out what it looks like. But mostly b) he refuses to take the car home, insists on walking, gets lost in a maze of marshes and canals, and at dusk is surprised by two figures a tall, gloomy man and a dumpy little woman. They take him back to their squalid rented house, after a scrappy meal served by a wizened old woman, the young lady goes to bed and Cardan stays up with tall cadaverous Mr Elver. Turns out he is an embittered impoverished man, brought up poor but with high ambitions who, when his father dropped dead, was forced into the humiliating job of travelling salesman. His imbecile sister (the dumpy one) was taken in by a rich relation who, when she died, left the imbecile a huge fortune of £25,000. As he’s spoken Mr Cardan has plied him with drink until Elver is really drunk and finally admits that he brought his sister here to the muddy marshland so that she’ll get malaria and die and he’ll inherit the money. Mr Cardan laughs loud and long, the punchline of this weird drunken story is so incongruous and ineffectual and Elver stumbles off to bed humiliated. Mr Cardan stays the night in their wretched rented hovel and the next day rescues the ‘simple’ sister, Grace.

Actually it’s the day after next. Next day he has breakfast with wicked old Elver and ponders his moves. He will marry simple-minded Grace and inherit her £25,000. There! He’ll never have to work again. He strolls back to the wretched hovel and tells wicked Elver he’s staying the night again and bluffs his way through the evening. Next morning he persuades simple Grace to walk with him round the lake to the town, where he hires a horse & cart to take him to the Palazzo. She follows him like a dog.

His arrival at the palazzo makes hardly any impression. He had thought he’d have a bit of explaining to do but it coincides with the arrival of Francis Chelifer’s mother, who he has persuaded to give up her damp, draughty house and the stray dogs and cats and local children of Oxford, and come to him so they can go on to Rome together. This throws Mrs Aldwinkle into such a tizzy, which she projects onto all the other guests, that people barely notice Mr Cardan has brought home a tame idiot.

In the last couple of short chapters of this part it is strongly hinted that Calamy and Miss Thriplow have started a physical relationship. Seems unlikely, this is the suggestive passage:

The image of Mary Thriplow presented itself again to his mind’s eye. Limply she lay in the crook of his arm, trembling as though after torment.

Part 4. The Journey (pages 242 to 299)

They drive to Rome. To be precise Mrs Aldwinkle, Chelifer, Mrs Chelifer and Mrs Cardan are squeezed into the back of Mrs Aldwinkle’s Rolls Royce, with simple-minded Grace sitting up front next to the chauffeur, Ernest (p.244). Following behind, Lord Hovenden drives his Vauxhall Velox, accompanied by Irene.

There follows a very funny chapter where lisping Lord Hovendon, transformed into a demon by driving his car, drives round and round and round the same lake asking Irene to marry him, until she at last gives in and says she’ll consider it.

But overall, I was disappointed by this part. Huxley’s narrating voice goes to very great lengths to show off his knowledge of the scenery, landscape and all the little towns, and their churches, and their works of art, between Viarreggio and Rome in an unironic way.

I.e. the book stops being satirical and begins to show off. This disappointing lapse into earnestness continues in Rome where Huxley disapproves of the vulgarity of ‘the worst sort of international and Italian public’. He disapproves of loud bars. He disapproves of jazz, in one scene comparing the monotonous thump-thump of gramophone jazz to a live version of Wagner being played by a band elsewhere. There is a long passage set in a Tuscan tomb whose sole purpose appears to be to allow Huxley to show off his knowledge of that dead language. There is a page-long ridiculing of Freud and psychoanalysis, which he blames for reducing the subtlety of Fra Lippo Lippi’s paintings to examples of anal erotism.

Up to now the satire had been buried in its subject, subtle and very funny. When he comes out into the open like this, Huxley’s own views appear crude and snobbish. The rapier-like satire turns into blundering sarcasm. Very disappointing.

The characters had all gone to Rome to accompany Lord Hovenden who was himself accompanying Mr Falx who was attending an International Labour Conference there. True to form Huxley gives us nothing at all about this conference, merely the fact that after a few days of being bored to tears, Hovenden skives off and rejoins the rest of the crew who’ve begun to make their way back to Vezza and Mrs Aldwinkle’s palazzo.

Miss Elver is now one of the party, completely accepted in her simplicity. At the restaurant she insists on eating fish despite Mr Cardan’s words of caution. Later that night, in the hotel, she has food poisoning and stomach cramps. Her moans wake up Irene who goes to fetch Mrs Aldwinkle, but she’s not in her bed. After a moment’s pause Irene goes and knocks on Mr Cardan’s bedroom door.

There is a reprise of Francis Chelifer’s diary, from which we learn that Mrs Aldwinkle had gone to his bedroom that evening, thrown herself on his mercy, declared that she loved loved loved him and would be his slave and do anything for him. Chelifer is mortally embarrassed. Love bores him. People bore him. Mrs Aldwinkle appals him.

Simple-minded, innocent Miss Grace Elver falls ill with food poisoning! Hovenden and Chelifer drive to Rome to fetch a doctor, but it takes them a whole morning (some of the scenery on the drive to Rome is beautifully described, dawn rising through milky white mist) and by the time they get back, Grace has died!!

Mr Cardan attends the funeral which is performed with indecent haste by a bunch of local peasants and even the priest, who have been out all day picking this year’s grape harvest. Mr Cardan reflects how death is not ennobling to the dying or beholders. There is only one fact, the body and its predestined decay, collapse and death.

Part 5. Conclusions (pages 300 to 335)

Calamy and Miss Thriplow are in bed together (so they have had sex – golly!). He is meditating on his hand and the multiple levels of reality i.e. the quantum, the atomic, the molecular, the cellular, nervous system, sensation and feeling and consciousness and will and soul. He can’t hide from Miss Thriplow that he wants to break free. This long conversation in a darkened bedroom marks the end of their affair.

Irene tells Mrs Aldwinkle she is going to marry Lord Hovenden and is astonished at the vehemence of her aunt’s anger and raving recriminations. She doesn’t understand how lonely Mrs Aldwinkle feels, and how, now summer is ending and all her guests are leaving, she feels abandoned, she feels time’s clock ticking, she feels old.

Calamy has rented a cottage up the mountain to live the simple life in. Of course it’s easy to lead the simple philosophical life when you don’t have to work for a living. At all. Chelifer and Mr Cardan come to visit and the last ten pages of the book are quite a serious and thorough dialogue about the nature of reality and of mysticism, and of the layers of reality inside us, inside our minds. I understood all of it, specially Huxley’s bang up to date stuff about quantum theory, the indeterminacy of matter, the arbitrariness with which the human mind creates a world of three spatial dimensions and time because it has to, because it has evolved that way.

But I didn’t warm to Calamy’s determination to spend months and months trying to think it all through. I preferred Chelifer’s point of view, which is flawed (the others call him an ‘inverted sentimentalist’ in the sense that a sentimentalist thinks reality is rosier than it is, whereas an inverted sentimentalist thinks reality is more horrifying than it is) but I liked his idea that you must immerse yourself in the destructive element i.e. society as it is actually constituted, among human beings 99% of whom accept the world at face value.

Calamy’s mysticism is more attractive; but I find Chelifer’s point of view more vibrant and alive (and his character a lot more funny).

Anticipations of Brave New World

Right from the start Huxley’s books contained references to breeding, to eugenics, to perfecting the race, to designing and controlling the process of human birth, which all anticipate Brave New World. And the same theme crops up here, too.

‘And then, Mr. Chelifer,’ he said, ‘we don’t very much like, my fellow directors and I, we don’t much like what you say in your article on ‘Rabbit Fancying and its Lesson to Humanity.” It may be true that breeders have succeeded in producing domesticated rabbits that are four times the weight of wild rabbits and possess only half the quantity of brains–it may be true. Indeed, it is true. And a very remarkable achievement it is, Mr. Chelifer, very remarkable indeed. But that is no reason for upholding, as you do, Mr. Chelifer, that the ideal working man, at whose production the eugenist should aim, is a man eight times as strong as the present-day workman, with only a sixteenth of his mental capacity.

And part of Mr Cardan’s extended conversation with wicked Mr Elver is about vivisection i.e. do animals have rights, any rights? which he slyly brings round to the idea of defective humans, do they have rights? This isn’t the precise subject of Brave New World but it’s in the same ballpark.

Later Chelifer ironically predicts that in the perfect future people will be so bored they’ll kill themselves.

‘The more material progress, the more wealth and leisure, the more standardized amusements – the more boredom. It’s inevitable, it’s the law of Nature. The people who have always suffered from spleen and who are still the principal victims, are the prosperous, leisured and educated. At present they form a relatively small minority; but in the Utopian state where everybody is well off, educated and leisured, everybody will be bored; unless for some obscure reason the same causes fail to produce the same effects. Only two or three hundred people out of every million could survive a lifetime in a really efficient Utopian state. The rest would simply die of spleen. In this way, it may be, natural selection will work towards the evolution of the super-man. Only the intelligent will be able to bear the almost intolerable burden of leisure and prosperity. The rest will simply wither away, or cut their throats – or, perhaps more probably, return in desperation to the delights of barbarism and cut one another’s throats, not to mention the throats of the intelligent.’

He’s turning over ideas of ‘ideal futures’ and its unexpected costs and risks.

More work for the undertaker

At one point Mr Cardan finds himself lost in the plain far away from the palazzo as night falls, becomes worried, and then finds his thoughts taking a morbid turn, and the verse of this macabre little song rattling through his mind (pages 194 to 195).

Credit

Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley was published by Chatto & Windus in 1925. Page references are to the 1982 Panther paperback edition.

Aldous Huxley reviews

Crome Yellow (1921)
Antic Hay (1923)
Those Barren Leaves (1925)
Point Counter Point (1928)
Brave New World (1932)
Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
After Many a Summer (1939)
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
Ape and Essence (1948)
Doors of Perception (1954)
The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Heaven and Hell (1956)
Brave New World Revisited (1958)
Island (1962)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Irene

Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley (1925)

Those Barren Leaves

Cast

Noble and grand

Snobbery about Italy

Huxley’s aim

The plot

Part 1. An evening at Mrs Aldwinkle’s

Part 2. Fragments from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer

Part 3. The loves of the parallels (pages 158 to 241)

The Elvers

Part 4. The Journey (pages 242 to 299)

Part 5. Conclusions (pages 300 to 335)

Anticipations of Brave New World

More work for the undertaker

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Miss Mapp by E.F. Benson (1922)

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The failed attempt to sabotage Mrs Poppit’s bridge

The abortive visit of the Prince of Wales

The humiliating battle of the decorated dresses

Miss Mapp’s hoarding revealed

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The duel that never was

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Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley (1925)

Those Barren Leaves

Cast

Noble and grand

Snobbery about Italy

Huxley’s aim

The plot

Part 1. An evening at Mrs Aldwinkle’s

Part 2. Fragments from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer

Part 3. The loves of the parallels (pages 158 to 241)

The Elvers

Part 4. The Journey (pages 242 to 299)

Part 5. Conclusions (pages 300 to 335)

Anticipations of Brave New World

More work for the undertaker

Credit

Related links

Aldous Huxley reviews

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