Updike’s final two Henry Bech novels

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John Updike, Bech Is Back (1982); Bech at Bay (1998). Books 2 and 3 of The Complete Henry Bech, Everyman’s Library 264, hb, Alfred A. Knopf 2001, pp. 153-509

I posted recently on the first book in this trilogy of linked short stories by John Updike featuring the grumpily priapic Jewish author Henry Bech – an alter ego very different from everyman Rabbit Angstrom.

In my second post I indicated that I wasn’t sure whether to carry on with books 2 and 3, but was attracted by the flashes of brilliance that just about made up for the unsavoury elements, especially in the depiction of women as ‘dolls’ (as Bech ruefully reveals is what one critic said was a feature of his fiction). Ok, so it’s satiric, but also looks very like a convenient way of displaying a misogynistic, salacious attitude.

I persevered, but found the going increasingly unattractive. In Bech Is Back the middle-aged author is still blocked, struggling to finish his next novel: he has ‘all but ceased to write’, but his books ‘cast shuddering shadows toward the center of his life, where that thing called his reputation cowered.’

That convoluted, super-smart style pervades these stories (each Book consists of loosely linked short stories, originally published separately in periodicals like The New Yorker). It grates as often as it gratifies.

He marries, but is clearly not cut out for the suburban life that goes with it. He’s libidinous, but far from monogamous. That’s where Updike’s rather off-colour portrayal of Bech’s rampant sex life strays into what looks like male fantasy.

The stories in Bech at Bay were written a decade later, and they become increasingly bizarre and surreal – and for me, tedious. He continues to accept lucrative lecturing gigs abroad, and produces very little new literary work (though the novel he finally managed to finish in the previous Book has become a best-seller – bringing with its success some snide critical comments about his selling out).

This leads to his becoming ever more vindictive and vengeful towards those critics who have upset him with their negative reviews. This is where I really started to dislike what I was reading – but refused to give up.

It didn’t get any better, I’m afraid. There’s a silly story about Bech in court, defending himself against a libel charge. Another is an unedifying account of his going to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize for literature (yes, his reputation had grown larger than his achievement). But his sexual promiscuity (usually accompanied by a refusal to commit emotionally) is tediously celebrated.

He redeems himself a little towards the end, but I’ll finish with the revealing final words of the novel, where Bech’s tortured self-doubt is tempered by hostility:

Those women who showed up at his readings did it, it seemed clear, to mock his books – clever, twisted, false books, empty of almost everything that mattered, these women he had slept with were saying. We, we are your masterpieces.

John Updike’s prose

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Some thoughts about John Updike’s style…

I recently posted on the first of American author John Updike (1932-2009)’s trilogy of novels about his fictitious, fractious Jewish author Henry Bech. I was uncertain whether to continue with the next one. Some aspects of the narrative jarred with me: Bech’s unreconstructed attitude towards women, his accompanying solipsism (often manifested in malicious sarcasm and spiky wordplay), and the mannered, verbose prose style with echoes of Nabokov and maybe Henry James. But there were also passages where the satire on the mid-20C American literary world, and the grumpy protagonist’s abrasive contacts with it and that of other countries, sparkled with brilliant wit and flair. An odd mix.

I decided to go on with book 2: Bech Is Back (1982). Once again it’s structured as a sequence of linked short stories, reflecting the publication of many of them originally as stand-alone pieces in The New Yorker. I haven’t finished it yet, and again I’m finding it frustratingly tacky in places, but there’s always something special about the novel that keeps me going on. Maybe I’m just not in tune with Updike’s tone and satiric purpose.

Before I post on the novel as a whole, I thought I’d discuss something about the prose style that I’ve brought up previously. The sentences are meticulously crafted; there’s often more going on beneath the level of the words that causes the reader to pause and reflect, ‘What else is going on here, apart from the surface meaning?’

Updike’s style is eclectic, featuring a heady range of registers, from patrician, poised and highbrow, with a dazzlingly broad vocabulary and syntactical virtuosity, to the harsh, direct and often vulgar language of the streets. I intend to illustrate this when I post on the novel as a whole.

It’s that vocabulary I wanted to highlight here. Updike keeps you on your linguistic toes (his stretching of language’s semantic limits is catching) much of the time, but here’s one word that I had to go and look up: ANFRACTUOUS. Here’s the passage it appears in; Bech is now married to his former mistress’s sister, Bea, both of whom we met in Bech: A Book, and living in the suburban town of Ossining in upstate New York, in the huge ‘mock-Tudor’ house where Bea lived with her first husband, describing his installation in this ‘mansion’ as being ‘like a hermit crab tossed into a birdhouse’. He feels uneasy immersed in this Wasp community with its complacent bourgeois domesticity (shades of Cheever here, too, perhaps – he lived there for the last two decades of his life) and whitewashed history (Ossining changed its earlier name of Sing Sing because of its associations with the infamous prison there). First a bit more context is needed, and an example of that supple, playful Updike style:

The folks downtown looked merry to Bech, and the whole burg like a play-set; he had the true New Yorker’s secret belief that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding. On that sloping stage between Peekskill and Tarrytown he enjoyed being enrolled in the minor-city minstrelsy; he often volunteered to run Bea’s errands for household oddments [ofen in the drugstore] and marveling at the copious cosmetic aids of vain, anxious America. His light-headedness on these away-from-home afternoons strengthened him to burrow on, through that ANFRACTUOUS [my capitals] fantasy he was tracing among the lost towers of New York.

See what I mean? This is very much Updike’s cunning way of showing Bech’s sardonic reactions to this environment with its ‘sunstruck somnolence’ – Washington Irving’s fairytale country, the antithesis of edgy NYC. If he felt like a hermit crab in Bea’s mansion, here in downtown he’s like a mole, grubbing its way through thick, unyielding earth. And maybe there’s an anticlimactic allusion there to Fitzgerald’s famous last lines in The Great Gatsby, ‘so we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly to the past’.

Back to ‘anfractuous’. Here’s the OED definition:

having many twists and turns; winding or sinous (first recorded in 15C)

From the 1920s it started to be used more figuratively to denote ‘humorous and ironic. Unruly, peevish’ – all resonances Updike surely intended to be felt.

At the level of the sentence, then, Updike rewards attentive reading. That extended theatrical metaphor collides with then reinforces what follows about Bech’s ‘fantasy’. I need to overcome my aversion to what can be seen as Updike’s flashiness and enjoy his craftsmanship and sleight of hand.

Vigdis Hjorth, Will & Testament

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Vigdis Hjorth, Will & Testament. Verso pb, 2019, first published in Norwegian 2016, 330 pp. Translated by Charlotte Barslund. Library copy.

I’d never read a Norwegian-authored novel before, and so when I came across a reference to one of Hjorth’s more recent novels, I checked my local library catalogue: Will & Testament was the only title of hers in stock, so I borrowed and read it.

I’d like to say I enjoyed it, but I didn’t. I skipped quite a bit, which was quite easy, because it’s written in an annoyingly repetitive, reflexive style: sentences and clauses are repeated or rephrased over and over, holding up the flow of the narrative, and making the first-person narrator sound self-absorbed.

I acknowledge that this is a bit unfair, as she’s trying constantly to come to terms with a traumatic sequence of events in her early childhood, and the subsequent painful rifts caused in the family by her finally telling her parents and siblings about it. They refuse to believe her, causing the trauma to be redoubled: it kind of metastasises in her. She self-medicates with alcohol, and messes up several relationships with men.

There’s an awful lot, too, about the constant stream of emails and phone conversations that result from her ending the 23-year period of estrangement from the rest of the family. Now in her fifties and with children and grandchildren of her own, it seems some kind of resolution and repair might be about to happen.

This is scuppered by that most destructive of events in so many families: news of a ‘last will and testament’ (hence the title in English) and the ways in which the parents have announced the distribution of their assets is to be accomplished. In particular the two holiday cabins in which all of the family have enjoyed spending summers are to go to the two younger sisters, while the narrator and her elder brother are left feeling cast aside by a humiliatingly small bequest of cash.

I’m afraid I just couldn’t care too much about any of this. I’ve read a few reviews in the online media and by fellow bloggers, most of whom speak in glowing terms about this novel. Maybe it’s a deficiency in me; but I felt relief when I’d rushed through the final pages – in which nothing is really resolved, and it’s never entirely clear if the childhood trauma did actually take place. Her mother is no comfort: she’s a drama queen with several performative suicide attempts to her name, and a tendency towards hysteria and submissive acceptance of her husband’s (the narrator’s father’s) domineering ways.

Or maybe her father, portrayed as a cold-hearted tyrant, was right in telling her that she only needed to look in a mirror to see the face of a psychopath. I prefer to think he’s the dodgy one.

There’s some quite interesting stuff about philosophy and politics – Hjorth makes some valid comparisons with the futile efforts of this dysfunctional family to make up its differences and repair itself with the truth and reconciliation initiatives of countries like S. Africa after apartheid. There can be no forgiveness without an acknowledgement of the grievances that caused the fissures and conflict.

That repetitive, looping style and confessional tone made the novel seem cold and clinical – which is strange considering the powerful emotional nature of the content. There’s very little dialogue or scene-setting; most of the attention is on what’s going on in the narrator’s (often confused, denying, angry) head. I’ve nothing against this mannered kind of writing, but it just didn’t work for me.

John Updike, Bech: A Book

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John Updike, Bech: A Book. Pt 1 of The Complete Henry Bech: Twenty Stories. Everyman’s Library 264 hb, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001; pp. 1-152 of 509.

This novel is very different in subject and style from Updike’s (1932-2009) four Rabbit novels, which I devoured some years ago. As with that tetralogy, he added a new Bech novel (three of them) at roughly ten-year intervals.

Unlike Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, a WASP like Updike, a working-class everyman who would no doubt be a Trump/MAGA supporter today, Henry Bech is Jewish (but with anti-Semitic tendencies), cerebral and educated, and author of several novels that had been published to varying degrees of acclaim. He’s considered, in Bech: A Book, where he’s middle-aged, a celebrity.

But he’s blocked (though he jokes that he’s just a ‘slow typist’). He has ideas for a new novel, but can’t bring it to life. So he takes on various government-sponsored cultural/lecturing visits to Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia and S. America. There he talks on highbrow topics to do with modern American literature (though his favourite authors include Melville and Hawthorne):

His reputation had grown while his powers declined.

Like Rabbit, he’s angst-ridden and lost, ‘displaced’. Here’s a revealing passage, quoted satirically by Updike from an article by a fictitious British journalist (who’d claimed to be an ardent fan), where the writer comments on Bech’s ‘oeuvre’:

…Queried concerning the flowery, not to say fruity, style of The Chosen [Bech’s third and most recent novel, published in 1963, seven years earlier].

With self-referential wit, Updike writes this novel in a similarly baroque, ‘fruity’ style, with arresting turns of phrase, puns and epigrams. Take this extract, where Bech is about to deliver one of his lectures to students at a girls’ school in ‘rural Virginia’. His habitual existential angst kicks in as he contemplates the expectant young audience:

…those seriously sparkling eyes, those earnestly flushed cheeks, those demurely displayed calves and knees – appalled him with the abyss of their innocence…The essence of matter, he saw, is dread. Death hangs behind everything.

He goes on:

He saw himself, in this nest of delicate limbs, limbs still ripening toward the wicked seductiveness Nature intended, as a seed among too many eggs, a gross thrilling intruder, a genuine male intellectual Jew…[and so on for five more lines].

Women are often depicted in this novel, from Bech’s lubricious perspective, in this ‘male gaze’ kind of way: they tend to be seen in terms of how sexually attractive he finds them. If this is meant satirically, it still strikes an unsavoury note for me, and I struggled at times to carry on reading. Admittedly, Updike has chosen a flawed character whose attitudes and behaviour (especially towards women), like Rabbit’s, aren’t always admirable – but these factors, along with the tortuous, self-consciously literary style, make for a troubling, only intermittently satisfying read.

What kept me going was the appearance every now and then of an image, a sentence or passage of breathtaking elegance, wit and technical brilliance: these more than made up for the otherwise laboured Jamesian complexity and tone that came across to me as borderline smug. Here’s one passage I marked as pleasing – not his best, but fairly typical; Bech is an a lecturing trip to Bulgaria:

There was a mosque, and an assortment of trolley cars salvaged from the remotest corner of Bech’s childhood, and a tree that talked – that is, it was so full of birds that it swayed under their weight and emitted volumes of chirping sound like a great leafy loudspeaker.

Ten years ago I quoted from and analysed two passages from Rabbit Redux (1971) HERE and HERE.

International Women’s Day 2026

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International Women’s Day #IWD2026

This is from the header to the home page of the International Women’s Day homepage:

Imagine a gender equal world. A world free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination. A world that’s diverse, equitable, and inclusive. A world where difference is valued and celebrated. Together we can forge gender equality. Get ready for #IWD2026.

(Link to that website HERE. Lots of material, resources and suggestions on this site.)

Tomorrow is IWD, so I thought I’d post something relevant.

I was about to walk to the supermarket this morning and looked for something to listen to on the way that wasn’t about the war and mayhem in today’s world (thank you Nobel Peace Prize seeker DJT). I came across an episode of a podcast I subscribe to: Arts & Ideas (search for it on your usual podcast platform). It’s a spinoff of BBC Radio 4 material. In this episode the presenter Shahidha Bari looks at ‘how women express themselves in language, argument, poetry and art’ (from the episode descriptor).

Her guests are Sara Ahmed, an Australian writer and scholar (has interesting things to say about complaints and the language of complaining); Lauren Elkin, who needs no introduction – I’ve posted briefly HERE on her book Flâneuse; Karen McCarthy Woolf, whose latest poetry collection is called Unsafe; Mary Wellesley, a historian with a special interest in women in the medieval period; Ash Percival-Borley, a military historian and former soldier.

They all offer fascinating comments and insights in their discussion of women’s voices and language and how they resonate in a world that tends to dismiss, marginalise or trivialise them. I’d highly recommend a listen to this episode. I found it inspiring and informative. I must look out for an anthology of World War I poetry by women that was mentioned – I hadn’t realised that there was such a body of work (which kind of illustrates the ways in which women’s voices are often displaced by men’s in our culture.)

What else can I suggest from this blog that you might find of interest in connection with IWD? I’d begin with some of my most recent posts about a woman writer whose sequence of five linked novels is among the finest, most moving and engaging fiction I’ve read in a long time: Elizabeth Jane Howard’s the Cazalet Chronicles. She focuses on a group of women of varying degrees of independence and agency in the context of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family.

Some of my other favourite writers are women (just put their names in the search box to find my numerous posts about them):

Barbara Pym

Barbara Comyns

Elizabeth Taylor

Anita Brookner

Rose Tremain

Elizabeth Bowen

Virginia Woolf

Vita Sackville-West

There are many more I could have mentioned, but those are the ones who come to my mind most immediately.

This is my contribution to what the IWD website describes in one of its aims as setting out to elevate and celebrate women’s voices and achievements.

Elizabeth Jane Howard, Getting It Right

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Elizabeth Jane Howard, Getting It Right. Picador pb 2015 (19821) 410 pp.

What a contrast to the Cazalet Chronicles (I posted on them here last month). Most of the characters in Getting It Right come from a much lower social stratum than the Cazalet family. Gavin is 31, a hairdresser in a West End salon, and still a reluctant virgin.

He’s too timid and diffident to make any important decisions – such as moving out of his stifling parents’ house, where he has no agency, privacy or independence. Whenever he encounters conflict or unpleasantness, he bottles up his feelings and adopts avoidance strategies. Inside his head, however, he indulges powerful unexpressed thoughts and reactions – like standing up to his boorish, lazy and demanding boss.

The same applies when it comes to sex (he’s fairly sure he’s not gay). He has erotic (but always unconsummated) fantasies, but shies away from any meaningful contact with women in real life – or any social contacts outside of his comfort zone. He’s far too self-judging/critical to believe that anyone could find him attractive, and languishes in the frustration and loneliness that are the natural consequence of these traits.

During the course of the novel this changes. He encounters several women who challenge his default aversion to relationships, and discovers that he does have the capacity to take emotional risks – to ‘get it right’ emotionally and romantically.

There’s some sharp observation, insight and humour in EJH’s depiction of these characters, but ultimately I found it a far less rewarding reading experience than the Cazalets, or even the other works of her fiction that I’ve read. Gavin is just too drippy and irritating in his Prufrockian timidity to find sufficiently sympathetic, and many of the secondary characters just don’t ring true.

There are several aspects to the novel that resonate interestingly now that I’ve read EJH’s memoir Slipstream (discussed in my previous post); much of Gavin’s lack of self-confidence, his sensitivity and diffidence look very like the author’s own, and like him she made some disastrous choices and decisions. His being exploited and patronised by other people resembles much of what she describes in Slipstream and in fictional form in the Cazalet sequence. It’s not enough, though, to make Getting It Right anything like as good as her superb late quintet of novels.

Elizabeth Jane Howard, Slipstream

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Elizabeth Jane Howard, Slipstream: a memoir. Pan paperback, 2003; first published 2002. 493 pp.

As I said in my previous post, I enjoyed Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles enormously. To fill the void that followed I decided to read her autobiography, Slipstream. She explains the title in the Preface:

Speaking as a very slow learner, I feel as though I have lived most of my life in the slipstream of experience. Often I have had to repeat the same disastrous situation several times before I got the message. That is still happening. I do not write this book as a wise, mature, finished person who has learned all the answers, but rather as someone who even at this late stage of seventy-nine years is still trying to change, find things out and do a bit better with them.

The self-deprecating, candidly vulnerable tone is set there, and the lucid, unadorned style that was a strong feature of the Cazalet novels. She’s not being overly modest there either; what follows is an account of her adult life (from teenage years onwards) of a person whose craving for the affection and endorsement never provided by her parents led her into affairs with a succession of unsuitable, usually older married men whose poise she mistook for maturity and sympathy, but who were almost all selfish and controlling.

Many of the details concerning these ill-judged liaisons resemble those in the Cazalet novels. Most notable, perhaps, is the gruesome sexual advances made by Edward towards his teenage daughter Louise, which happened to Jane (the name she was usually known by) with her father. In fact her life parallels that of Louise in many other ways: the disastrous romantic choices, the modelling for fashionable magazines, the failed acting career. Clary’s is the other character into whom she clearly poured much of her own experience.

This shows most glaringly in the affair Clary has with her monstrously self-centred lover and employer, who gets her pregnant then dumps her ignominiously. Jane’s affair with the writer of supernatural stories, Robert Aickman, has many similarities.

Peter Scott, the artist and naturalist she married at the age of 19 is clearly the model for Louise’s Michael (who lacks Peter’s interest in nature). Both have awful overbearing mothers with whom they have cloyingly close relationships.

It’s clear from numerous passages where this ingenuousness and lack of confidence and judgement came from. Jane’s parents brought her up to believe that ‘anything to do with the body was disgusting and that sex in any explicit form was horrible.’ Furthermore:

There was an ethos then that parents didn’t openly admire or extol their children’s behaviour and talent, and my mother certainly subscribed to that.

Later, when she told her mother that she was going to leave Peter Scott because she couldn’t be a writer while married to him, her mother retorted: ‘” What on earth makes you think that anyone would ever publish anything that you wrote?”’

Or there’s this family dictum:

Modesty was uniform: you must at all costs never get above yourself.

Jane took many years to discover that sexual pleasure could be mutual. Because of her inhibitions and hang-ups, she felt she was to blame for the serial failure of her relationships with men, and castigated herself: she was needy and hopeless, she felt: ‘Could I only see myself in the reflection of other people’s lives?’ Because of her ‘ignorance’ in such matters, she felt that she wasn’t learning from her mistakes:

…the less I understood my experiences the more I repeated them, each time becoming less aware of what I was doing.

Her affair with the polymath Arthur Koestler, another self-centred, ‘irascible, obsessive’ man with a ‘high voltage personality’, ended in the usual dismal fashion, her judgement once again letting her down: ‘I was too raw, too inexperienced, and too stupid to understand much of this…I was a small incident in his life.’

Her second marriage was to the author Kingsley Amis. At first this seemed an idyllic situation, then he started to show himself as another of those coercive, belittling monsters: he became a bullying drunk who openly disliked her. It took her years to pluck up the courage to leave him.

In the final few pages, however, she reflects:

I’ve made a good many mistakes, some rather expensive, but I think I’ve more or less paid for them. I’ve slowly learned some significant things – perhaps most of all the virtue, the supreme importance of truth, which, it seems to me now, should be continually searched for and treasured when any piece of it is found. This book has been in search of some of that.

Such disarming honesty and hard-won insight is refreshing and, I feel, touching.

Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Cazalet Chronicles

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Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014), The Cazalet Chronicles

This superb sequence of novels chronicles the lives of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family between 1937, as war is imminent, and 1947, when postwar rationing and austerity were still in place. The first novel was published in 1990, and the fourth in 1995. Then eight years later, in 2013, when Howard was 90, a fifth was added, set in the years 1956-58 (see the list at the end of this post).

I wanted to post about the sequence in its entirety, rather than about each volume individually. I recommend these novels as a hugely rewarding reading experience.

There’s not much traditional plot to speak of, despite the fact that most of these books are well over 500 pp long. Instead, Howard traces with sympathy, wit, tremendous humanity and quietly penetrating perception the intertwining lives of this extended family: their loves and losses, infidelities and jealousies, problems and joys.

At the top of the family are William (known as the Brig – as EJH’s grandfather was; much of the content of the novels is autobiographical) and his wife Kitty (aka the Duchy). Both were born in the 1860s, and they inculcate their children and grandchildren with the Victorian practices and values with which they were raised. This involves self-denial, reticence and emotional stiffness – though the Duchy is genuinely loving and kind to all.

The role of women is particularly prominent. This quotation from All Change about the self-denying Aunt Rachel is typical:

Her role in life was to look after other people, never to consider her appearance, to understand that men were more important than women, to attend to her parents, to organise meals [not cook them, of course] and deal with servants…

She even prioritises caring for her aging parents over being with her lover, Sid – much to Sid’s despair.

Much of the narrative tells of the three girl cousins, Polly, Clary and Louise, as they grow up into mature women, all of whose characters bear some resemblance to EJH herself. Alternating sections from vol. 2 onwards deal with each of them in turn, and extracts from their journals allow us to see their private thoughts and aspirations. They’re a fascinating mix of sophisticated and deeply ignorant – about politics, society and, fatefully, sex and relationships. Other sections focus on the other main adult characters, so the narrative propels the reader on and provides stimulating variety and contrast.

The Brig’s timber empire flourishes during the war years, when its products are much in demand. But as he ages and his three sons take over running the business, their lack of commercial acumen causes it to flounder, and the fates of their families in the later volumes become ever bleaker.

The two older brothers, Hugh and Edward, served in WWI; their experience of the horrors of the trenches have scarred them deeply – in Hugh’s case, physically, too: he lost a hand, and suffers from terrible headaches. Their younger sibling Rupert is a devoted father and husband, but hopelessly indecisive; even having to choose between struggling on as an artist – he loves painting, but it doesn’t pay the bills or keep his beautiful, needy young wife Zoe in the manner she expects – or joining the family business, for which he is palpably unsuited.

We follow the lives of the children of these three from their earliest years in the nursery, with governesses for the girls (education is wasted on them, the parents have been taught) and posh, soul-destroying boarding schools for the boys (because that’s what their fathers had to endure, so they do, too), to their own marriages and children.

Howard is particularly good at the depiction of young children. She makes them funny and a mixture of innocent and wise. I won’t try and quote examples, because out of context they probably fail to convey how subtle, warm and humane she is in portraying these youngsters. They form fierce attachments and equally fierce animosities, are by turns monstrously selfish and deeply loving. It’s fascinating to see how Howard deftly shows them maturing and developing into adults, sometimes changing for the better, but in some cases their flaws get the better of them and they cause damage to themselves and others.

What’s driving all this is the author’s anatomising of a class and generation that underwent huge change with the experience of WWII and its aftermath. EJH is on record as saying that she wanted, among other things, to write novels about the war that showed the lives of those who stayed at home.

It’s not just the children whose characters change over time: the adults, too, go through all kinds of cathartic experiences that in some cases harden and embitter them, while in others they transform for the better. Young bride Zoe, for example, causes her husband Rupert, whose first wife died in childbirth, all kinds of despair and heartache in the first years of their marriage with her shallow egotism. She’d been raised to value only her own stunning appearance; she has no sense of empathy. This leads her into serial flirtations, one of which ends so disastrously that she undergoes an epiphany and becomes a much better person.

One central feature is that many of the characters, especially married couples and parents with their children, fail to reveal their true feelings, or else they conceal what’s really on their minds. An example at random from vol. 5: when the Duchy is seriously ill, her daughter Rachel (mentioned above) tells the rest of the family that she’s ‘doing well’, is ‘on the mend’ – when she clearly wasn’t. Rachel ‘hadn’t wanted to worry them’. This causes her niece Clary to think:

Aunt Rachel would say those things. It was odd how, when people didn’t want to worry each other, they worried them more than ever.

Situations like this recur, especially when a partner or parent is ill, or undergoing a crisis. It’s difficult to convey here without sounding cliched how delicately and sensitively Howard demonstrates the way we make difficult situations worse by trying to protect those we love from painful truths.

There are perhaps more details about the domestic arrangements of a large household than necessary, and the servants’ personal lives aren’t always entirely convincingly done. Because of course none of the adults is capable of cooking a meal, maintaining the house and gardens, or looking after small children – that’s what the servants, nannies and governesses are for. The tough war years cause some changes – for the womenfolk, anyway, because the men wouldn’t be expected to do anything domestic. But much of this detail is pertinent, because it demonstrates the shortages that had to be coped with, and the measures that had to be taken to continue to feed, clothe and care for a large contingent of residents.

The final volume is perhaps the weakest: some of the dialogue, characterisation and set pieces have become a bit too familiar, perhaps – but it still has some of the heartbreaking and poignant moments that punctuate the first four that caused me after a particularly affecting scene to put the book down and take a breath.

I urge anyone who hasn’t read the Cazalet chronicles to do so. Mrs TD is on volume 4 now and is as hooked and enthusiastic as I was. It’s an enriching experience.

The Light Years (1990, Picador pb 2024, 554 pp.)

Marking Time (1991, Pan pb 2021, 592 pp.)

Confusion (1993, Pan pb 2021, 490 pp.)

Casting Off (1995, Picador pb 2024, 626 pp.)

All Change (2013, Pan pb 2021, 573 pp.)

Previous posts on EJH’s fiction (about which I had some reservations):

After Julius (1965)

Mr Wrong: short stories (1975 – but originally published before then)

Brief notes on Odd Girl Out (1972) and Something in Disguise (1969) HERE.

Some long words

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No posts here lately while I’ve been reading my way through Elizabeth Jane Howard’s brilliant 5-novel sequence The Cazalet Chronicles. I’m halfway through the final volume, and will post about them shortly. I didn’t want to comment on each one individually: thought it best to do so as a whole.

In the meantime here’s a short piece about words I’ve noted lately. Haven’t written about this kind of thing for a while, so it’ll make a change.

Polysyllablic words seem to appeal to some people when there are plainer, clearer and simpler alternatives available. Maybe they think it adds gravity or something to their message. I’ve mentioned George Orwell’s complaint about this kind of verbosity in the past.

The first one popped up in a novel I wrote about here recently: Full Fadom Five, by D. C. Bourgeois. It’s a word I had to look up:

ANADROMOUS

It refers to those fish, like salmon, that live in the sea but swim up rivers to spawn in fresh water. The derivation is from Greek ana- (up) and drom- (run – as in hippodrome, I suppose). Those creatures that are CATADROMOUS are similar, but the other way round. There’s no other way of saying this without a lengthy phrase as an alternative, so it’s a good one to know.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in my car, waiting for lights to change, when I noticed the truck in front of me was one of those with the big rotating drums on the back that mix and deliver cement. A notice on its rear end read:

Warning: CEMENTITIOUS MATERIAL BURNS

What a bloated word. What’s wrong with ‘cement’? To be fair, these trucks maybe transport other cement-like materials that aren’t in fact cement…

In a similar vein was a notice in the hospital I visited just before Christmas to have knee surgery. It told me that I was in the AMBULATORY CARE UNIT.

Am I alone in finding this a tad pretentious? Hairdressers and other places are happy to have notices that say ‘walk-ins welcome’. I suppose the people who commission such notices in hospitals want to seem serious and grand – and perhaps it’s not strictly accurate to say ‘walk-ins’ in this kind of clinical setting. And on reflection I’m finding it hard to think of a clearer, simpler alternative.

Now back to the marvellous E J Howard.

Samuel Johnson’s favouritest superlatives

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It’s been the longest time since I posted here about language rather than literature. There’s a selection of some of my linguistic and lexicographical efforts in the link HERE.

During my period of recuperation since knee surgery I’ve dipped back into an ebook edition (from Project Gutenberg) of Samuel Johnson’s most famous (famousest – see below) lexicographical work: Dictionary of the English Language. First published in 1755, this version is ‘abstracted from the folio edition’ and dated 1812.

What some people may be unaware of is that there’s a supplement to this (supposedly) etymological dictionary: a ‘Grammar of the English Tongue’. Here’s his definition of ‘grammar’ right at the start: ‘…the art of using words properly’ – contentious. He divides this work into four parts: Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody (note the Oxford comma, and the 18C predilection for capitalising nouns – I’ll revert to modern practice from now on).

As I browsed through the section on adjectives, my attention was drawn to the notes on comparison of adjectives. As he says, and this still applies, comparatives ‘are formed by adding er, the superlative by adding est, to the positive; as, fair, fairer, fairest.’

He concedes: ‘The comparison of adjectives is very uncertain; and being much regulated by commodiousness of utterance, or agreeableness of sound, is not easily reduced to rules’. He does like his polysyllabic vocabulary – ‘agreeableness’ and ‘commodiousness’ shows his fondness for ness suffixes. The fact that this aspect of grammar is resistant to ‘rules’ (whoever imposed them is not explained) must have caused him to despair. Those Augustans did like orderliness.

Here’s his attempt to provide some order. He explains that monosyllables are ‘commonly compared’ (ie they can take a suffix), but polysyllables ‘are seldom compared’, and these adjectives are generally preceded by more or most, as in more deplorable, most deplorable.

It was the next bit that really made me sit up. As is his practice in the main dictionary section, he illustrates each main point with quotations from his favourite authors. So he begins with an example of a standard superlative from Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘She in shadiest covert hid’. Ok so far.

Next he tackles virtuous. Here’s his quotation from the same poem:

What she wills to say or do, /Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetist, best.

It’s as if Milton was anticipating Johnson’s need to find good examples of this grammatical feature. And who’d have thought he’d endorse ‘virtuousest’. Yet he seems quite happy with ‘discreetist’; am I right in thinking nowadays we’d prefer ‘most discreet’?

Also from Milton, this time Samson Agonistes, is this:

I shall be nam’d among the famousest / Of women, sung at solemn festivals.

Both of these examples sound strange to my modern ear. But Johnson’s usual method is that if one of his literary idols used it, it’s ok as standard English. Fair enough. It’s the nearest he can get, I suppose, to a ‘rule’ in our unruliest of languages.

Other examples follow:

‘inventivest heads’ (from what Johnson cites as Ascham’s Schoolmaster)

‘mortalest poisons’ (this from what he cites as just Bacon)

‘naturalest considerations’ (Wotton’s Architecture)

I’d also recommend the site Johnson’s Dictionary Online, which can be searched/browsed by printed pages, front matter, letter, quoted authors or random word. It’s well worth visiting the Preface, with its famous, deprecatory description of the lexicographer as, among other things, a ‘humble drudge’ (repeated in paraphrase in his dictionary entry for that word). In true Augustan fashion he deplores the way the Engish language has been ‘neglected’ and spread into:

wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.

So his attempts to introduce some sober, logical, incorrupt, and learned system to counteract these new-fangled ‘caprices’ are illustrated by the examples quoted above. And there’s more. When he started this (doomed?) enterprise, he found our language:

copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity; and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority.

He really didn’t like the way our language had gone, as he saw it, to the dogs. It’s a prescriptive attitude that was taken up by the Victorians, and still persists today. I prefer to think that language is resistant to the imposition of such prescriptions and rules – although there’s obviously an underpinning tendency to regularity. When I was studying linguistics the tendency was to favour a descriptive approach, one which acknowledged that ours is probably the amorphousest (if I can be permitted a bit of unruliness) in the western world.