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)

Meanwhile, On Another Planet...

The Alabama bureau leads a much different life than we here at Underbelly Central:

I sent three big calves to the sale yesterday so I'm hearing a lot of mooing today from sad mama cows...

Sometimes it can be a problem separating the calves going to the sale from the rest of the herd -- bull, other calves and their mamas, but it worked out real well. The main thing is to keep them calm. I pen them up in the area where i feed them. Then, I man a gate while Billy, who hauls them to the sale for me, and my ex brother in law, Jim, try to send the bull, mama cows, and calves not going to the sale, toward the gate. At the same time, they try to keep the calves going to the sale away from the gate. when that's done, We run the ones headed to the sale through the barn, which
opens from the feeding pen, into Billy's cattle trailer. if things dont work out right, they can all go through or over fences or through that gate.

Mama cows whose calves went to the sale yesterday will bawl for three days or so. ...

What made it especially interesting is while all that was going on yesterday morning, the bull was trying to breed one of the cows. That is something you don't want to interfere with or get in the way of. He was on her while I was still manning the gate as the other cows and the little calves not going to the sale were coming out.

Maybe this is what Rebecca West had in mind when she said that "Ladies are more accustomed to not being amused than gentlemen seem to realize."

Indeed

Mrs. Aubrey’s husband has written a pamphlet. Mr. Langham is scandalized.

“Mrs. Aubrey, I hope you will forgive me, and Miss Rose here, if I tell you that it’s the most terrible stuff.’

‘Do tell us what he says.’

‘Well, it’s hardly stuff to amuse the ladies.’

‘Ladies are more accustomed to not being amused than gentlemen seem to realize,’ said Mamma.

--Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows 326
(NYRB Paperback ed. 2003)

Duke of Wellington: One for the Kiddies

Talking of the Duke of Wellington yesterday (link) made remember another favorite Wellington anecdote—this from Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows, one of the truly great neglected classics of British fiction:

Rosamund…went back to the drawings Richard Quin was showing her. These were quite good, especially the ones of the ghost of Napoleon laughing at the Duke of Wellington, when the mob broke the windows on the anniversary of Waterloo, because he wanted them not to have votes. It was funny, Richard Quin was old enough to hve understood most of what Papa told us about the Duke of Wellington, but he was so excited about gasometers that he had drawn one in the window of the room in which Napoleon’s ghost was appearing.

“It must have happened,” said Richard Quin. “It was so natural for it to happen. Napoleon’s ghost must have felt like that, it must have happened, I wonder if anybody else knows about it.”

--Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows 176 (NYRB Classic 2003)

From other evidence, I gather that Richard Quin is, oh, maybe seven years old. Query, did other British seven-year-olds draw pictures of Wellington on his deathbed? Do they now? Do American children draw pictures of, oh, maybe the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention, with Barry Goldwater’s shadow chuckling in the background?

[It’s a wonderful novel, though, of which I hope to say more later. Not too long on plot but some of the best characterization anywhere. Including Richard Quin.]