Annals of the Shabby Genteel

It’s a bit much to say that Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows is another bankruptcy novel, but as a sketch of shabby-genteel Edwardian economic desperation, it is hard to beat.

In an afterword, West recalls St. Augustine: he says “that human beings are disguised by their bodies and that only God can look through ‘the lattice of our flesh’ and see what we are really like.” The characters in this marvellous account are indeed each disguised behind the lattice of the flesh, but they—some of them, at least-- try desperately to understand, or at least to cope with, one another. Father is charming but feckless. Mother gave up a substantial career as a concert pianist to care for him and to raise their family.

Two—perhaps three—of the children show promise of real musical talent. Sadly, one who does not is Cordelia, the oldest, and it is she who is deluded by a well-meaning teacher into believing that she does. The teacher encourages Cordelia to take professional engagements. Mother interferes to stop it. Cordelia, having learned the (to her) dreadful news, arrives home in a fury.

[The children were reading the Arabian Nights] when Cordelia came in and banged the door and threw her satchel down on the sofa and stood and looked at Mama and stamped.

She said, ‘I have seen Miss Beevor and she has told me what you have done. Why do you hate me so? Why are you so cruel to me?’

Mama said, ‘Go and take off your school dress and we will talk of this quietly.’ She put down her cup because her hand was trembling.

Cordelia screamed, ‘How can I talk quietly about this? You are ruining my life.’

Mama said, ‘You mean because I have told Miss Beevor that you must not take professional engagements? That is not ruining your life. It is making sure that it will not be ruined. There is nothing worse for a musician, any sort of musician, than to perform in public too soon. It fixes a player at the stage she is at the time of her first appearance, and it is very hard to struggle on to the next stage.’ …

Cordelia was still screaming when she answered, ‘Why do I want to play at these concerts? Because I want the money.’

‘But they will pay you very little,’ said Mamma.

‘Have we so much money that I can afford to refuse any?’ asked Cordelia bitterly. She spoke so like a grown-up that we stared at her; she had the bitterness of grown-ups, the sort of shrewdness which never gets them anywhere. ‘Mamma,’ she said more gently but desperately, ‘what is to happen to us all? We haven’t any money. We children know that, we know there isn’t the money to pay the gas and school fees, and even if you get the money from somewhere this time there will come a time when you won’t. …

‘We have nothing, nothing,’ she said, ‘and now that I have a chance to make something you will not let me take it because you love the others best. I want to make money and save it so that I can get a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music or the Guildhall and have something to live on--. …. –then I will make some money and study at Prague and then I will really make a lot of money and if I hurry up before the others get to old I will be able to help them. If I don’t,’ she cried, ‘who will?’

--Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows 146-7
(NYRB Paperback ed. 2003)